Agile AI solution is speeding up research and making treatment more efficient and patient centric than before

AI-based solutions are becoming essential for health care

Finland has plenty of expertise in research on brain tumours and other neurological disorders. However, the collaboration between researchers could be more efficient, as it has been challenging to gather sufficiently large amounts of research material within a small population. Neurocenter Finland strives to solve this problem by bringing researchers together and facilitating larger national research projects. 

Until now, another problem in conducting research has been that the needed information is often embedded in medical reports that cannot be used in analytics without first extracting the relevant information from free-text into a structured format. Manual data structuring is time consuming, and therefore, Neurocenter Finland identified the clear need for an automated data structuring and analytics process.

Better and faster results through modern data tools

Approximately 800 brain tumours are diagnosed in Finland annually. Significant impacts on treatment pathways of patients can be achieved when health care professionals have better access to results and tools for more efficient research. To achieve this goal, Neurocenter Finland partnered with Tieto to develop an AI solution for extracting patient data automatically from medical records. One key reason for this partnership was the strong experience Tieto has with the information systems of the Health Care District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS) and in building data lakes for its needs.

Tieto’s team of data scientists created an AI solution that uses natural language processing. The tool recognizes phrases and words from medical records based on what it has been taught. It then structures the gathered data according to set labels. Finally, the data is transferred to a data lake, where researchers can access it in real time.

This speeds up research and makes treatment more efficient and patient-centric. 

Towards improved and personalized patient care

The developed AI solution aims to make a major impact on the efficiency of brain tumour research. By shifting away from manual data collection, research results are available faster, thus improving research quality. This method also gradually brings research and patient care closer together, as treatment and medication plans can be made more personal – resulting in improved quality of treatment. 

AI-based solutions are becoming a very significant part of health care. Health care organizations are moving towards using centralized data repositories that integrate multimodal patient data and AI solutions like the one developed in this project. This enables organizations to utilize data assets by better structuring patient data to use it more efficiently in research and care.