Review of Natural Language Processing in Radiology

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary field, combining linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence to enable machines to read and understand human language for meaningful purposes. Recent advancements in deep learning have begun to offer significant improvements in NLP task performance. These techniques have the potential to create new automated tools that could improve clinical workflows and unlock unstructured textual information contained in radiology and clinical reports for the development of radiology and clinical artificial intelligence applications. These applications will combine the appropriate application of classic linguistic and NLP preprocessing techniques, modern NLP techniques, and modern deep learning techniques.