The National Library of Medicine provides over 300 databases, services and tools for research, development, and training in biomedical informatics and health information technology. The first part of the talk will provide an overview of several widely-used resources: PubMed/Medline, PubMedCentral, E-utilities, MedlinePlus, ClinicalTrials.gov, UMLS, MetaMap, MTI and Open-i. The second part of the talk will present a research and development problem of automatically triaging and answering over 100,000 customers' requests sent to NLM yearly; focusing in-depth on the NLP challenges of understanding and answering over 10,000 consumer health questions that are submitted among the other requests.
Dr. Dina Demner-Fushman is a Staff Scientist for the Communications Engineering Branch at the National Library of Medicine. She conducts research in clinical decision support, clinical question answering, use of natural language processing in information retrieval, and information retrieval in biomedical domain. Her interest in biomedical language processing stems from years of clinical practice. Dr. Demner-Fushman is a lead investigator in several NLM projects in the areas of Information Extraction for Clinical Decision Support, EMR Database Research and Development, and Image and Text Indexing for Clinical Decision Support and Education. The outgrowths of these projects are the evidence-based decision support system in use at the NIH Clinical Center since 2009, an image retrieval engine, OpenI, launched in 2012, and an automatic customers' requests answering service that supports NLM customer services since May 2014.