Faster Study Start-Up: How NLP Is A Game Changer In Clinical Research

What is NLP?

Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers. It sits at the intersection of computer science, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. (Wikipedia). In other words, NLP allows computers to read, analyze and interpret human language.

The concept of NLP is not new, it actually has been around since the 1950s with Alan Turing’s publication of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which proposed what is now called the Turing test as a criterion of intelligence. We see the healthcare industry, namely hospitals, adopt NLP technology to improve the accuracy of electronic healthcare records (EHRs). What we haven’t seen, until now, is its application to clinical research to accelerate study start-up.