IEEE Rev Biomed Eng. 2024;17:4-18. doi: 10.1109/RBME.2022.3210270. Epub 2024 Jan 12.
Smart healthcare has achieved significant progress in recent years. Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enable various smart applications across various healthcare scenarios. As an essential technology powered by AI, natural language processing (NLP) plays a key role in smart healthcare due to its capability of analysing and understanding human language. In this work, we review existing studies that concern NLP for smart healthcare from the perspectives of technique and application. We first elaborate on different NLP approaches and the NLP pipeline for smart healthcare from the technical point of view. Then, in the context of smart healthcare applications employing NLP techniques, we introduce representative smart healthcare scenarios, including clinical practice, hospital management, personal care, public health, and drug development. We further discuss two specific medical issues, i.e., the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and mental health, in which NLP-driven smart healthcare plays an important role. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current works and identify the directions for future works.
智慧医疗近年来取得了显著进展。新兴人工智能（AI）技术使各种智能应用在各种医疗场景中得以实现。自然语言处理（NLP）作为 AI 的一项关键技术，因其能够分析和理解人类语言，在智慧医疗中发挥着重要作用。在这项工作中，我们从技术和应用的角度回顾了现有的关于智能医疗中 NLP 的研究。我们首先从技术角度详细阐述了不同的 NLP 方法和智能医疗中的 NLP 流程。然后，在使用 NLP 技术的智能医疗应用上下文中，我们介绍了代表性的智能医疗场景，包括临床实践、医院管理、个人护理、公共卫生和药物开发。我们进一步讨论了两个具体的医学问题，即 2019 年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行和心理健康，在这两个问题中，NLP 驱动的智慧医疗发挥了重要作用。最后，我们讨论了当前工作的局限性，并确定了未来工作的方向。
