Gaining Process Information from Clinical Practice Guidelines Using Information Extraction

Formalizing Clinical Practice Guidelines for a subsequent computer-supported processing is a cumbersome, challenging, and time-consuming task. But currently available tools and methods do not satisfactorily support this task. We propose a new multi-step approach using Information Extraction and Transformation. This paper addresses the Information Extraction task. We have developed several heuristics, which do not take Natural Language Understanding into account. We implemented our heuristics in a framework to apply them to several guidelines from the specialty of otolaryngology. Our evaluation shows that a heuristic-based approach can achieve good results, especially for guidelines with a major portion of semi-structured text. Chapter