Now seems like as good a time as any for an introduction. It is great to hear about other organizations working to install cTAKES.
I'm a radiologist at UC Davis in Sacramento, and came across cTAKES back in July. I have it up and running on a personal Windows laptop where I've used it for some small scale projects, and am working with a few other people at UC Davis to install it in a server environment where we can apply it to NLP tasks on larger clinical document libraries. My IRB for access to 10+ years worth of radiology, pathology, and operative notes should be approved any day now! I haven't quite figured out the final work flow. I'm debating between coming up with a default analysis pipeline, processing all of the documents, storing the CASes that result, and pulling subsets of them for information extraction on a project-by-project basis (storing information as needed in ad hoc MYSQL database schema) vs. custom processing pipelines for each specific project and using the built-in YTEX database as the main repository. Thanks to you all for your work so far in developing and sharing cTAKES. I am not very facile with Git, Maven, or formal software engineering concepts. I am willing to learn though, and willing to help out wherever I can contribute. Regards, Thomas Loehfelm, MD, PhD Assistant Professor, Radiology Abdominal Imaging University of California, Davis
