Natural Language Processing in medicine and ophthalmology: A review for the 21st-century clinician

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that focuses on the interaction between computers and human language, enabling computers to understand, generate, and derive meaning from human language. NLP's potential applications in the medical field are extensive and vary from extracting data from Electronic Health Records –one of its most well-known and frequently exploited uses– to investigating relationships among genetics, biomarkers, drugs, and diseases for the proposal of new medications. NLP can be useful for clinical decision support, patient monitoring, or medical image analysis. Despite its vast potential, the real-world application of NLP is still limited due to various challenges and constraints, meaning that its evolution predominantly continues within the research domain. However, with the increasingly widespread use of NLP, particularly with the availability of large language models, such as ChatGPT, it is crucial for medical professionals to be aware of the status, uses, and limitations of these technologies.