Geneva University Hospitals – Service of Medical Informatics, HUG

The Service of Medical Informatics (SIM, http://www.sim.hcuge.ch/ [1]) is a group of 50 collaborators responsible for designing, deploying and evaluating computer-based tools for care providers. A fraction of these collaborators (one full-time faculty member and four senior research fellows) are conducting researches in Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval applied to biomedical contents, with strong relations with the Electronic Patient Records group of the Division.

SIM is currently involved in different research projects, both at internal, national and
international levels. Because the need for advanced tools has been always considered of strategic importance for the University Hospital of Geneva, the SIM has vocation to balance research and production purposes. For more than two decades, this joint position led to a set of successful cutting edge yet operational developments. Thus, information extraction’s services such as named-entity recognition (used for removing confidential items in patient files) have been running for production purposes for more than 3 years.

Recent achievements in NLP:

Last year, a team, led by the Medical Informatics Service of the University Hospital of Geneva (HUG), has participated in the first edition of the two major events in text mining for molecular biology: the TREC genomics track and the BioCreative challenge. Results submitted by this team were ranked in position 3 out of 15 participants at TREC and in position 2/3 out of 9 participants at BioCreative (results are not official yet).