Approach Based on Text Processing and Ontology Applied to the Health Domain of Palliative Care in Panama

Natural language processing (NLP) is a discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational linguistics. NLP facilitates the user’s work and communicating with the computer, as well as to analyze unstructured data such as textual documents. In Panama, doctors in palliative care units write their diagnoses, observations and medications in textual documents, which represents a problem to properly handle the information. The development of an expert system to support clinicians in decision-making for palliative care patients is presented. It uses NLP techniques to extract information from plain textual documents. The information extracted from the textual documents was organized in an ontological domain that can be accessed to feed an efficient information system that manages the information of palliative care patients. The evaluation of the platform was carried out through a case study in a hospital in Panama. The results are favorable, since the data extracted from the created ontology produces responses similar to those of the experts. Therefore, this platform can help clinicians make better decisions regarding the treatment of patients in palliative care.