Emtelligent Medical NLP Expands Team by Adding Renowned NLP Scholar Jinho Choi, Ph.D.

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Feb 14, 2018, 09:00 ET

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 14, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Emtelligent Software Ltd., one of the world's first companies to apply deep learning to medical natural language processing, today announces the addition of Jinho Choi, Ph.D., to its team of NLP experts. Dr. Choi has over 15 years experience in NLP, has published over 50 articles and previously contributed to the field of medical linguistics.

Dr. Choi will work directly with Emtelligent CTO Anoop Sarkar, Ph.D., and CEO Tim O'Connell, M.Eng., M.D., to further enhance the capabilities of Emtelligent's "EmtelliPro" medical record processing engine. Dr. Sarkar, a professor of computer science and expert in NLP, and his team of over a half-dozen master's and Ph.D.-level team members have already applied deep learning models to many medical NLP specific tasks, including assertion detection, where they have achieved never-before-seen accuracy results on challenging examples, beating state-of-the-art methods.

"We believe we have a path to near-perfect accuracy - and Jinho's involvement will help us expedite that process," says Dr. O'Connell. "He will help us further refine the EmtelliPro engine's accuracy and add new features, expanding our customers' ability to use the output to create the next generation of applications needed to fix healthcare."

Dr. Choi is an assistant professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is the director of the NLP research group. He has been actively involved in research on both low-level and high-level NLP such as dependency parsing and machine comprehension and developed several NLP toolkits such as NLP4J and ELIT. "It is my belief that by leveraging techniques in machine learning and natural language processing, we will be able to make the latest medical advances available to everyone, anywhere at anytime. Working with the team at Emtelligent is such a great opportunity to combine our skills to accomplish this goal," says Dr. Choi.

Dr. Sarkar adds: "Having known Jinho for many years through my research, it is an honour for Emtelligent to have the benefit of his knowledge." Dr. Sarkar explains: "Medical reports are not all alike: they vary in their structure, the types of information contained in each report are diverse and the language used by medical professionals to state the same information varies dramatically. Already, the models in the NLP toolkit developed by the team use a combination of global information at the sentence and document level and local character-level information for each word to achieve an unparalleled level of performance. Jinho will work with us to refine our models and algorithms so we can push even further ahead."

Emtelligent Software Ltd. is a Vancouver, Canada-based medical NLP company. Emtelligent's EmtelliPro processing engine was designed from the ground up for enterprise use, and can accurately process millions of medical reports a day. The company's goal is to unlock the data trapped in electronic medical records at the highest-possible accuracy, rapidly bringing medicine into the 21st century and enabling user-friendly AI-based applications for care-providers, researchers, administrators, insurers and patients.

Learn more at www.emtelligent.ai or call 1-877-GO-EMTEL (1-877-463-6835).

Contact:

Jeff O'Connell, COO, Emtelligent
[email protected]

SOURCE Emtelligent Software Ltd.