Tumor information extraction in radiology reports for hepatocellular carcinoma patients.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a deadly disease affecting the liver for which there are many available therapies. Targeting treatments towards specific patient groups necessitates defining patients by stage of disease. Criteria for such stagings include information on tumor number, size, and anatomic location, typically only found in narrative clinical text in the electronic medical record (EMR). Natural language processing (NLP) offers an automatic and scale-able means to extract this information, which can further evidence-based research. In this paper, we created a corpus of 101 radiology reports annotated for tumor information. Afterwards we applied machine learning algorithms to extract tumor information. Our inter-annotator partial match agreement scored at 0.93 and 0.90 F1 for entities and relations, respectively. Based on the annotated corpus, our sequential labeling entity extraction achieved 0.87 F1 partial match, and our maximum entropy classification relation extraction achieved scores 0.89 and 0. 74 F1 with gold and system entities, respectively.

Large-scale and highly efficient synthesis of micro- and nano-fibers with controlled fiber morphology by centrifugal jet spinning for tissue regeneration.

PLLA fibrous tissue scaffolds with controlled fiber nanoscale surface roughness are fabricated with a novel centrifugal jet spinning process. The centrifugal jet spinning technique is a highly efficient synthesis method for micron- to nano-sized fibers with a production rate up to 0.5 g min(-1). During the centrifugal jet spinning process, a polymer solution jet is stretched by the centrifugal force of a rotating chamber. By engineering the rheological properties of the polymer solution, solvent evaporation rate and centrifugal force that are applied on the solution jet, polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) and poly(l-lactic acid) (PLLA) composite fibers with various diameters are fabricated. Viscosity measurements of polymer solutions allowed us to determine critical polymer chain entanglement limits that allow the generation of continuous fiber as opposed to beads or beaded fibers. Above a critical concentration at which polymer chains are partially or fully entangled, lower polymer concentrations and higher centrifugal forces resulted in thinner fibers. Etching of PVP from the PLLA-PVP composite fibers doped with increasing PVP concentrations yielded PLLA fibers with increasing nano-scale surface roughness and porosity, which increased the fiber hydrophilicity dramatically. Scanning electron micrographs of the etched composite fibers suggest that PVP and PLLA were co-contiguously phase separated within the composite fibers during spinning and nano-scale roughness features were created after the partial etching of PVP. To study the tissue regeneration efficacy of the engineered PLLA fiber matrix, human dermal fibroblasts are used to simulate partial skin graft. Fibers with increased PLLA surface roughness and porosity demonstrated a trend towards higher cell attachment and proliferation.