Natural language processing in cardiovascular medicine

Natural language processing (NLP) is emerging as an important artificial intelligence (AI) technology in the healthcare sector. Given the rapid advancements in this field and the introduction of new and sophisticated language models, it is an opportune time for those involved in cardiovascular healthcare delivery to review the basic concepts of this important technology and take a closer look at how NLP can be used to augment and transform cardiovascular care. This chapter illustrates the use of NLP to address a major challenge for current healthcare data, highlights use cases for deploying NLP in clinical care delivery, spotlights NLP research published in the past year, and concludes with a call to action for designing optimal solutions with the integration of NLP tools targeted to four important stakeholders in healthcare delivery: physicians, patients, healthcare institutions, and payers.