With the growing number of electronic health record data, clinical NLP tasks have become increasingly relevant to unlock valuable information from unstructured clinical text. Although the performance of downstream NLP tasks, such as named-entity recognition (NER), in English corpus has recently improved by contextualised language models, less research is available for clinical texts in low resource languages. Our goal is to assess a deep contextual embedding model for Portuguese, so called BioBERTpt, to support clinical and biomedical NER. We transfer learned information encoded in a multilingual-BERT model to a corpora of clinical narratives and biomedical-scientific papers in Brazilian Portuguese. To evaluate the performance of BioBERTpt, we ran NER experiments on two annotated corpora containing clinical narratives and compared the results with existing BERT models. Our in-domain model outperformed the baseline model in F1-score by 2.72%, achieving higher performance in 11 out of 13 assessed entities. We demonstrate that enriching contextual embedding models with domain literature can play an important role in improving performance for specific NLP tasks. The transfer learning process enhanced the Portuguese biomedical NER model by reducing the necessity of labeled data and the demand for retraining a whole new model.

This theoretical and reflective study aimed to assess the contribution of the ISO/TR 12300:2016 document for the mapping of nursing terminology. The referred document and related articles were used as an empirical framework. The study analyzed the content of the document, highlighting cardinality and equivalence principles. The standard presents conceptual and operational basis for mapping, with cardinality and equivalence as the support for the categorization of cross-terminology mapping in the area of nursing. Cardinality verifies candidate target terms to represent the source term, while the equivalence degree scale checks semantic correspondence. Among the principles included in the ISO/TR 12300:2016, cardinality and equivalence contribute to the accurate representation of the results of the cross-terminology mapping process and its use should decrease inconsistencies.

Process flexibility plays a key role in high variability environments, such as healthcare. In this type of environment, the process model needs to change some elements to adjust to specific sets of requirements. Thus, this paper proposes a process model customizing method based on ontology and process mining. The method proposed is applied in customizing process models for acute ischemic stroke treatment. During process model customization, the method provides decision-making support for users, thereby ensuring a structurally correct process customization and enabling improves patient treatment by means of recommendations.

Automatic detection of negated content is often a prerequisite in information extraction systems in various domains. In the biomedical domain especially, this task is important because negation plays an important role. In this work, two main contributions are proposed. First, we work with languages which have been poorly addressed up to now: Brazilian Portuguese and French. Thus, we developed new corpora for these two languages which have been manually annotated for marking up the negation cues and their scope. Second, we propose automatic methods based on supervised machine learning approaches for the automatic detection of negation marks and of their scopes. The methods show to be robust in both languages (Brazilian Portuguese and French) and in cross-domain (general and biomedical languages) contexts. The approach is also validated on English data from the state of the art: it yields very good results and outperforms other existing approaches. Besides, the application is accessible and usable online. We assume that, through these issues (new annotated corpora, application accessible online, and cross-domain robustness), the reproducibility of the results and the robustness of the NLP applications will be augmented.

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