HealTac 2023

Hear from researcher Imane Guellil about her attendance at HealTac 2023.

I had the opportunity to attend the Healthcare Text Analytics Conference 2023, HealTac, which took place in Manchester from 14th-16th June this year. This is a national conference, mainly about the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text analytics on clinical data. The latest challenges and approaches were presented. I had the opportunity to participate in a panel on 'Annotation guidelines: from clinical needs to textual annotations'. During this panel discussion, I had the opportunity to present our work at the ACRC and AIM-CISC regarding annotation. I presented the first insights and challenges that we are facing related to the annotation guideline. Also, I highlighted our aim and objectives regarding the ACRC and AIM-CISC annotation. Finally, I also participated in an open discussion where we interacted with the audience regarding the drawbacks of annotation in general.

I was not the only ACRC/AIM-CISC member to participate in this conference. Dr Beatrice Alex and Dr Arlene Casey presented papers at this conference (respectively titled: 'Understanding Performance and Reliability of NLP Tools: A Comparison of Four NLP tools predicting stroke phenotypes in radiology reports' and 'The epidemiological characteristics of stroke phenotypes defined with ICD-10 and free-text: a cohort study linked to electronic health records'). They both received much positive feedback from the audience. Dr Honghan Wu also presented (with Abul Kalam Hasan) and chaired the session. Finally, two of the CDT PhD students (Matus Falis and Aryo Gema) were also present where Matus Falis also presented his work at the PhD forum.