Hello guys, I have a question concerning a project I'm aiming to do, in order to help a hospital of my country that still doesn't have top technology at all.
First of all, let me present myself. My name is Manuel and I work as a Java Developer. I'm finishing my master's degree in University right now too. My goal, using cTAKES, is to retrieve clinical data concerning medications, diseases and surgeries, in an automated and structured way, from the patients Electronical Medical Records of the said hospital. This hospital still makes all of this analysis by hand, by manual review, what is error-prone and not efficient at all. I aim to extend cTAKES in order to do this with the best performance possible for the *portuguese language*. I noticed while testing cTAKES, that it doesn't work with a good performance when the information is in portuguese, despite of having support for that language. I pretend improve that performance. Now, the questions I have are actually two. I hope some of you can help me deciding if this project I'm aiming for is too ambitious for one person only or not: 1) Is it too hard to adapt cTAKES to work with a good performance for a language different from English? In this case Portuguese? 2) What should be my approach in terms of development, in order to accomplish what I'm aiming for? (Retrieval of clinical data from EMRs in a different language than english). This project is integrated in an academic environment and the hospital has already confirmed that will give me anonymous EMRs in order to test my final product. I'm feeling a little... lost in terms of where to start. Like which modules of cTAKES should I change or which approach should I use to start. Hopefully you guys can shed some lights and give your opinion and advice about my plan. I already have cTAKES version 4.0.0 in Intellij configurated and ready to start the development. Thanks in advance for your attention! Best regards, Manuel
