Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents

Welcome to the Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents, Louhi 2010, in Los Angeles, California, USA. We aim to bring together researchers and practitioners in a multidisciplinary conference on new uses of computer systems for data mining in the health care area. The very first Louhi Conference 2008 in Turku, Finland, showed the diversity and complexity of these issues. The increasing access to clinical data from health care systems and the progress of new methods and approaches in text and data mining results in a growing attention from the perspective of patient care as well as biomedical research and education. Improving performance in medical information retrieval is a challenge of complex nature requiring several approaches. Automatic indexing of clinical findings, observations, diseases and treatments is of high relevance for clinical work and research in general. Implementing decision support and guidelines to reach evidence-based practice is a specific area of interest (Fiszman et al. 2000). Detecting adverse event is another field that needs a high-quality system to detect findings and events in clinical documents (Griffin and Resar 2009). In several other areas indexing and mining in clinical text are of utmost importance --- from everyday clinical work to translational biomedical research (Meystre et al. 2008). Health care consumer web sites as well as news web sites contain important information worthwhile monitoring to extract both information on specific diseases directed to the layman as well as epidemiological information. The papers presented in this workshop aim at exploring computational methods and tools to improve and support the work in these different fields. The Second Louhi workshop will continue to focus and reflect on computer use in every-day clinical work in hospitals and clinics such as electronic record systems, computer aided summaries, clinical coding, computerized clinical guidelines, computer decision systems, as well as related ethical concerns and security. Much of this work concerns itself by necessity with computer aided language use, and as such Louhi aims at providing an arena for report on development in a diversity of languages. In the papers presented at Louhi 2010 we can read about many of the challenges identified above.