cTAKES (tool)

RRID:SCR_006379

An open-source natural language processing system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. This is a system through which one creates one or more pipelines to process clinical notes and to identify clinical named entities. It processes clinical notes, identifying types of clinical named entities, drugs, diseases/disorders, signs/symptoms, anatomical sites and procedures. Each named entity that is found is given attributes for the text span, the ontology mapping code, the context (family history of, current, unrelated to patient), and negated/not negated. cTAKES is built on the UIMA framework. cTAKES 2.5 does not provide a GUI of its own for installation or processing. The cTAKES documentation shows how to use the GUIs provided by the UIMA framework, and how to run cTAKES from a command line. Before using cTAKES you need to know that cTAKES does not provide any mechanisms of its own to handle patient data securely. It is assumed that cTAKES is installed on a system that can process patient data, or that any data being processed by cTAKES has already been through a deidentification step in order to comply with any applicable laws. The tool has been developed and deployed at Mayo Clinic since early 2000.