Text Mining Applied to Electronic Medical Records: A Literature Review

The analysis of medical records is a major challenge, considering they are generally presented in plain text, have a very specific technical vocabulary and are nearly always unstructured. It is an interdisciplinary work that requires knowledge from several fields. The analysis may have several goals, such as assistance on clinical decision, classification of medical procedures, and to support hospital management decisions. This work presents the concepts involved, the relevant existent related work, and the main open issues for future research within the analysis of electronic medical records, using data and text mining techniques. It provides a comprehensive contextualization to all those who wish to perform an analytical work of medical records, enabling the identification of fruitful research fields. With the digitalization of medical records and the large amount of medical data available, this is an area of wide research potential.