Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) at the service of healthcare: this is what is proposed by the “CareGenius” research project launched by Exprivia, which aims to transform the huge bulk of data on individual patients (reports, records, analyses, ultrasounds, x-rays etc.), into a single display that encompasses the whole medical history of the person in treatment, making the information instantly accessible both to the Healthcare System as well as the GP.

The Exprivia project involves the development of a new information suite that uses tools such as NLP and Artificial Intelligence to overcome the “cognitive burden” represented by the numerous data to be managed for each single patient, an obstacle that prevents healthcare operators from gaining rapid access to a brief overview of the patient.

“The main goal of the research project – explains Francesco Bellifemine, Digital Factory E-Health & Smart City Manager at Exprivia – is the use of NLP algorithms to extract structured information that can be used by algorithms from diagnostic and treatment records”.

The second step involves the creation of a large database which, in terms of business intelligence, allows for example to correlate medical and therapy information based on area, to make the bulk of information about patients’ medical history brief and easy to navigate. A new tool is thus launched to make the healthcare system more efficient both from a management viewpoint as well as an epidemiologic, scientific and therapeutic one.

Exprivia’s research project will be first applied in the area of Trento, where an agreement with the autonomous province involves making the results of the research available to the healthcare service. The project also sees the collaboration of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the University of Trento and the Bruno Kessler Foundation for the areas of technological research.

“The Care Genius project – underlines Francesco Bellifemine - is one of the first in Italy that uses the most advanced ICT and Artificial Intelligence tools to make healthcare data easy to use for the purposes of therapy as well as management of the healthcare system. Its applications will help make doctors’ activities in healthcare facilities more efficient, and also the job of GPs when they take on new patients previously treated by other doctors, which is what is believed will happen in a few years when many in the category retire”.