Texas researcher to talk about electronic health records

Hua Xu, the Robert Graham Associate Professor at the School of Biomedical Informatics in the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, will present “Natural Language Processing: Methods and Applications in the Medical Domain” at 4 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 25, in Fretwell Building, Room 126.

Electronic health records (EHR) have become resources for clinical research and are used to improve health care delivery. One of the major obstacles in using EHRs for clinical research is that much of the detailed patient information is stored in patient notes, narrative reports produced by nurses and physicians. Xu’s research focuses on recent developments around natural language processing to extract vital information from clinical text in EHRs.

Xu received his Ph.D. in biomedical informatics from Columbia University. He was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Department of Biomedical Informatics prior to joining UTHealth in 2012.