Basic Artificial Intelligence Techniques: Natural Language Processing of Radiology Reports

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and linguistics that can be applied to extract meaningful information from radiology reports. Symbolic NLP is rule based and well suited to problems that can be explicitly defined by a set of rules. Statistical NLP is better situated to problems that cannot be well defined and requires annotated or labeled examples from which machine learning algorithms can infer the rules. Both symbolic and statistical NLP have found success in a variety of radiology use cases. More recently, deep learning approaches, including transformers, have gained traction and demonstrated good performance.