OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi India Pvt. Ltd. and Hitachi, Ltd. announced that they have developed a technology to extract precisely designated information from electronic medical records with International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad ("IIIT-H"). To apply the technology makes it possible to analyze electronic medical records including various mixed-forms such as free-form texts written by doctors or laboratory data written in given formats. It is expected that more advanced medical services will be realized by that, such as prediction of the incidence rates of disease in the future.

Hitachi India, Hitachi and IIIT-H won 1st prize with an extraction precision of 86.8% in CLEF e-Health 2014 Task2, a technical competition on medical information extraction, which was held by a European research forum CLEF from Jan. to May 2014. The technology will be presented at CLEF Conference 2014 in UK from 15th to 18th Sep. 2014.

To predict the incidence rates of disease, it is necessary to analyze medical record texts such as doctors' remarks as well as the input information in the given format such as blood test results. Many research institutes have been developing the technology to extract necessary information because the medical record texts are written in different ways by doctors.

This competition has been held since 2013 aiming at enabling patients to easily read medical records containing many medical terms, and it is divided into 3 tasks based on the technical objectives. Ten research organizations including a team of Hitachi India, Hitachi and IIIT-H, participated in Task2, which competes in the precision to extract information such as body location, severity, etc. of disease, from electronic medical records. The team won 1st prize with the precision of 86.8% in the competition. Features of the technology developed are as follows.