NLP for Precision Medicine

We will introduce precision medicine and showcase the vast opportunities for NLP in this burgeoning field with great societal impact. We will review pressing NLP problems, state-of-the art methods, and important applications, as well as datasets, medical resources, and practical issues. The tutorial will provide an accessible overview of biomedicine, and does not presume knowledge in biology or healthcare. The ultimate goal is to reduce the entry barrier for NLP researchers to contribute to this exciting domain. Our motivation stems from the shocking inefficiency of medicine today. For the top 20 prescription drugs in the US, 80% of patients are non-responders. The result is ineffective care delivery, which leads to missed opportunities for treatment and constitutes a large part of the estimated trillion-billion waste in the US health system each year. Recent technological disruptions such as $1000 human genome have enabled more personalized and effective treatments, with great potential to improve patient health and save lives. A major bottleneck to advancing precision medicine is access to structured information encoded in free text. In cancer, for example, it takes hours for a molecular tumor board of many specialists to review one patient’s genomics data and make treatment decisions. With 1.7 million new cancer patients in the US alone each year, this is clearly not scalable. Most relevant knowledge resides in published literature, whereas rich patient information is scattered in clinical notes in electronic medical records (EMRs). NLP holds the key to unlock such structured information for supporting predictive analytics and medical decision making. Compared to the newswire and web domains, healthcare also exhibits important differences and offers a fertile ground of novel research challenges. In this tutorial, we will first present an overview of precision medicine, and highlight key research challenges and opportunities for NLP. We will then dive into main research areas and review problem formulations and cutting-edge methods. To illustrate the potential impact of NLP, we will present several real-world applications with promising results. To facilitate new entry to the filed, we will provide a systematic review of relevant resources and conclude with a list of exciting open problems.