An incremental approach for discovering medical knowledge from texts

Vast amounts of medical knowledge reside within text documents, so that the automatic extraction of such knowledge would certainly be beneficial for clinical activities. A user-centred approach for the incremental extraction of knowledge from text, which is based on both knowledge technologies and natural language processing techniques, is presented in this work. In such approach, ontologies are used to provide a formal, structured, reusable and shared knowledge representation. The system has been used to extract clinical knowledge from texts concerning Oncology.