Medical language processing applied to extract clinical information from Dutch medical documents

In this paper, we want to show how an existing morpho-syntactic analyser for Dutch (Dutch Medical Language Processor--DMLP) has been extended in order to produce output that is compatible with the language independent modules of the LSP-MLP system (Linguistic String Project--Medical Language Processor) of the New York University. The former can focus on idiosyncrasies for Dutch and take advantage of the language independent developments of the latter. This general strategy will be illustrated by a practical application, namely the extraction of clinical information from Dutch patient discharge summaries. Such an application can be of use for education, research and quality control purposes in a hospital environment.