Since in health care systems the amount of data is continuously growing, data mining techniques can be applied to analyse these large collections and gain interesting insights. However, some critical issues should be properly addressed. For example, data collections on patient treatments are usually characterized by an inherent sparseness and variable distribution, due to the large variety of p...

Detecting and extracting treatments, treatment groups and outcomes is a key step in generating summaries of medical research papers. We describe initial results in applying namedentity recognition methods to the task of extracting such entities from BMJ abstracts. Results are promising, showing that a conditional random field approach using word and semantic features appears to be more useful f...

Data Synthesis: High-level evidence suggests that medical, laser, and surgical treatments decrease intraocular pressure and that medical treatment and trabeculectomy reduce the risk for optic nerve damage and visual field loss compared with no treatment. The direct effect of treatments on visual impairment and the comparative efficacy of different treatments are not clear. Harms of medical trea...