BioASQ Participants Area

BioASQ - Task MedProcNER

Procedures are an essential part of medical practice. They are needed for diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of most conditions. For instance, we might need to draw blood to diagnose a person with anaemia or vitamin D deficiency. Doctors treat cancer with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Finally, CT body scans help oncologists predict the risk of recurrence of a tumour.

Some procedures are considered "manual", for instance, appendectomy or lung auscultation. Other are assisted by different imaging technologies, such as MRI, CT scans, ultrasounds, X-Rays, etc. Treatments can involve pharmacological products, such as antibiotics, human products, such as blood transfusions, irradiation, infiltration and amputation. In the very near future, many other intelligent procedures will be incorporated to improve diagnoses, treatments and prognoses, and to reduce the burden of health professionals.

The MedProcNER task challenges participants to create automatic systems that are able to extract information related to clinical procedures in clinical case reports in Spanish. Using the MedProcNER corpus, a collection of 1,000 documents with around 14,000 clinical procedure annotations linked to SNOMED-CT, participants need to: (a) detect procedures in text, (b) normalize the detected mentions to SNOMED-CT codes, and (c) index entire documents by assigning SNOMED CT codes to them.

More information on the importance of clinical procedures, sub-tasks, corpus examples and schedule on https://temu.bsc.es/medprocner/