Natural Language Processing in Healthcare

Dear Colleagues,

Innovations in Natural Language Processing (NLP), as a sub-domain of artificial intelligence (AI), offer new opportunities and solutions to leverage vast amounts of health data captured as text in electronic health records (EHRs), patient-generated emails or other platforms, such as social media and biomedical literature. Hence, recently, the implementation of NLP in healthcare is increasing because of its potential to effectively explore, evaluate and interpret a large amount of unstructured health data. While holding tremendous promise, NLP solutions introduce unique challenges, such as access to high-quality data for model development, reproducibility, generalizability and lack of model interpretability. This Special Issue aims at addressing these challenges in real-world NLP applications in healthcare by inviting scholarly contributions covering novel methods, best practices and evaluation frameworks.

We invite high-quality original submissions that responsibly develop and use NLP methods in healthcare. We are interested in studies that specifically focuses on addressing the above challenges to NLP, rather than merely applying existing NLP methods to downstream clinical problems (such as outcome prediction or clinical cohort selection).  

We invite:

• Real-world applications of NLP in healthcare
• NLP for capturing patient-reported outcomes
• Healthcare decision support based on text analytics
• Health Information Retrieval and Extraction
• Health-related social media analytics
• Question-answering technologies for health applications
• Medical terminologies and ontologies
• Trends and challenges in Health and medical NLP
• Evaluation techniques for NLP methods in the clinical domain

Dr. Selen Bozkurt
Dr. Suzanne Tamang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Applied Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.