Overview
John Pestian, PhD, is an associate professor of pediatrics and biomedical informatics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati. He is the director of the Computational Medicine Center, a collaborative medical research initiative between Cincinnati Children's and the University of Cincinnati Medical Center that uses data and computational systems to make disease more preventable, illness more predictive and treatment more personalized. He also holds an adjunct appointment as an associate professor of biomedical informatics at The Ohio State University.
Dr. Pestian's research lab focuses on clinical linguistics. Clinical linguistics concentrates on using computational tools, like natural language processing, to analyze clinical free-text, with the goal of enhancing and supporting clinical decisions.
Clinical linguistics requires diverse expertise. This includes computer science, linguistics, text mining and clinical specialties. The members of our collaboratory are listed on the right.
Currently the lab is conducting clinical linguistics research in the areas of neurology (epilepsy), psychiatry (adolescent suicide), and emergency medicine. These efforts have led to developments in neurocognitive computing, a priori knowledge classification, information extraction, anonymizing clinical free-text, corpora development, and visual language development.
Open Position
We are accepting applications for a visiting research scientist/post-doctoral fellow. Research efforts will focus on the development, application and evaluation of novel linguistic methods in both the clinical and administrative settings. For more information, download the position description.
Resources
Following are some resources developed by the lab. Note that open-source resources can be downloaded from the Computational Medicine Center's catalog.
- Encryption Broker - a tool that anonymizes and disambiguates clinical text without corrupting its meaning
- Pediatric Corpus - a collection of 600,000 words of HIPAA-anonymized clinical data approved for release by the Institutional Review Board of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center
- Christine for Personalized Medicine Drug Selection
- Christine's Expert Opinion System - for gathering expert opinion about personalized medicine drug selection
- Graphs of Consistent Concepts - a spreading activation graph system
- Radiology Negation System - NLP system for getting consensus on radiology negation data
Contact Us
For more information about NLP research at Cincinnati Children's, contact John Pestian, PhD.
