This Monday (2021-07-12) marked the official start of the ADAM project, a collaboration between AZ Delta’s RADAR team and our own Internet and Data science Lab (IDLab, joint venture of UGent & imec).

Given I will be lead researcher on the Natural Language Understanding aspect of this project, I wanted to talk about it on my blog as well. Our shared goal in the ADAM project is to enable personalized medicine through deep patient understanding, which requires natural language processing of Dutch clinical notes.

Personalized medicine is a medical model [where] medical decisions [are] being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response (Wikipedia).

Treatment outcome prediction depends greatly upon the para-medical and social parameters of the patient, and most of this information is usually not encoded in a structured way. Indeed, up to 80% of the relevant information in electronic health records can only be found in the unstructured text typed by clinicians (Dan Riskin, MD).

This makes Natural Language Understanding an important aspect of the ADAM project.

The ADAM project team

You can find more details on my role in the project in the slides I presented at the kick-off event:

My slides (link)