2 minute read
For people Piek
Piek Vossen
Text: Fenna van der Grient
It is obvious that COVID-19 causes a great deal of damage to the body. But a lot is still unknown about recovery after the disease, while this knowledge is invaluable in helping patients convalesce properly.
Professor of Computational Lexicology Piek Vossen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and convalescence researcher Marike van der Leeden (Amsterdam UMC, location VUmc) are charting this recovery process.
There is a whole mountain of information available, in the form of notes that doctors, nurses, and other care providers include in patient records. Using text mining, a form of artificial intelligence, Vossen and Van der Leeden are trying to discover patterns in these records.
Vossen: ‘From the notes made by healthcare providers in electronic patient records, we are trying to deduce what the functional status of the patients is at any given moment. We specifically look at four aspects of functioning: physical condition, the ability to walk, mood, and the ability to work or study.’
Van der Leeden: ‘In fact, there is hardly any structured collection of data from COVID-19 patients. But these healthcare notes contain a lot of information. Not only from the hospital, but also in aftercare at, for example, the GP, the convalescence centre, the nursing home or the physiotherapist.’
Vossen: ‘In order to extract that information, we need to interpret the phrases in the healthcare notes. Eight students are now
BRAM BELLONI
Marike van der Leeden
reading and labelling a selection of the texts. From a piece of text, they deduce what it is about (e.g. walking ability or mood) and what the patient’s status is. We then use this labelled data to train an AI classification system. If that is successful, we will feed that system all the COVID-19 data we can get.’
Van der Leeden: ‘In the end, we are specifically interested in the convalescence treatment of COVID-19 patients. We want to know which knobs to turn for optimal recovery. Based on that knowledge, we want to offer much more specific and person-oriented convalescence.’
Vossen: ‘But we’re not there yet. One of the challenges is whether it will work well for each category. For example, the ability to work is much less clearly defined than the ability to walk. Also, it is still uncertain whether we have enough data to make predictions about how recovery will proceed.’
Van der Leeden: ‘We are really still in the proof-of-concept phase. But if it all works out, we can also roll this out for other patient groups that have to deal with recovery, for example after surgery or cancer treatment. It’s hard, because you are dealing with written language. It’s up to us to develop software that can interpret that. But healthcare providers’ notes contain extremely rich data, which has not been used up to now. So, there is enormous potential.’
