Development of Clinical NLP Systems

The primary objective of this chapter is to offer an extensive overview of the development of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. We will commence by examining several existing clinical NLP systems and delving into their underlying architectures. Subsequently, we will provide in-depth insights into the step-by-step processes involved in developing rule-based and machine learning-based clinical NLP systems, supplementing these explanations with real-world examples. Moreover, we will address the unique considerations that arise when building practical NLP systems within clinical settings, as well as explore future directions with the recent advances in large language models. In addition to this, we will furnish readers with valuable resources, including software packages, knowledge bases, and annotation tools, to support their exploration of this field.