Apache cTAKES natural-language-processing (NLP) system

...on April 9, ASF officials announced that Apache cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System) has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a top-level project (TLP). Apache cTAKES is an open-source natural-language-processing (NLP) system for information extraction from electronic medical record clinical free-text. Widely used in production by numerous organizations across the health care sector, cTAKES was started in 2006 by a team of physicians, computer scientists and software engineers at Mayo Clinic, and was submitted to the Apache Incubator in June 2012.

Apache cTAKES was built using the Apache UIMA framework and the Apache OpenNLP natural-language-processing toolkit. Its components are specifically designed for the clinical domain out of diverse manually annotated data sets, and create rich linguistic and semantic annotations that can be used by clinical decision support systems and clinical research.

"As a well-developed NLP tool with a mature code base, cTAKES is the cornerstone of a variety of use cases in the domain of biomedicine such as phenotype discovery, translational science, pharmacogenomics and pharmacogenetics," said Pei Chen, vice president of Apache cTAKES, in a statement. "We are pleased to have proven our adoption of the 'Apache Way,' and welcome additional contributors to our growing community."