Cognitive computing for the digital management of clinical data of the aged cochlear implant patient

Cognitive computing is applied for the meaningful use of unstructured and non-formatted clinical data generated during the visits of aged cochlear implants (CI) patients. The proposed system automatically 'understands' the meaning of narrative medical text in the medical reports of the patient folder and transforms unstructured information into a structured one that can be further used in a repository of diseases and can be processed by computers for clinical decision support. The results obtained using the proposed system on the real medical records longitudinally collected during the clinical practice will be discussed. The processed documents were derived from 52 CI patients, from the first enrollment visit to the last available follow-up. The system allowed to extract and organize into a structured format the patient's medical history and risk factors, the test results from medical examinations, the patient's communicative performances before and after CI implantation, and CI settings.