ABSTRACT
Electronic health records (EHR) of patients are major sources of clinical information that are
critical to improvement of health care processes. Automated approach for retrieving information
from these records is highly challenging due to the complexity involved in converting clinical text
that is available in free-text to a structured format. Natural language processing (NLP) and data
mining techniques are capable of processing a large volume of clinical text (textual patient reports)
to automatically encode clinical information in a timely manner. This chapter focuses on these
techniques that map clinical information available in the clinical text to a structured form.
