Abstract

In multilingual societies such as India, effective communication in healthcare is often obstructed by language barriers, especially in clinical interactions between patient and their healthcare providers, in documents provided by the hospitals for the patient’s use (patient-facing documents like consent to treatment/research participation, information sheets, discharge summaries etc).

This workshop will explore the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create effective mediums of language translation systems that can be tailored for healthcare use cases. We will identify use cases that medical professionals and patients find challenging, explore available systems that can help translating medical information into patient-friendly language, various Indian languages, implementing multilingual speech recognition for clinical documentation, and automating content contextualization through AI. The primary goal is to unite researchers and professionals from linguistics, healthcare, and AI to collaboratively develop solutions that facilitate better communication in multilingual and fast-paced healthcare environments.

Communication is key between patients and their healthcare providers. However, this process can be challenging due to the vulnerable state of patients and the busy environment in which many Indian clinicians function, given the large volume of patients seen each day. In a linguistically diverse country like India, these challenges are often magnified. Patients often struggle to communicate with their clinicians, read the information provided to them due to limited language literacy. Clinicians often struggle to input data into structured Electronic Health Records (EHRs) due to varied reasons, but this also takes away their time in having meaningful conversations with their patients. As a result, the electronic capture of data in Indian hospitals is alarmingly low.

This workshop aims to discuss some of these issues by leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics (CL), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create language-agnostic tools for patient-facing documents and better tools that can capture speech-to-text to facilitate clinical data capture.

The workshop has the following objectives:

1. Identify key challenges in patient-doctor interactions and where clinicians might benefit from the use of language technology.
2. Explore language technology-oriented solutions for contextual and culturally appropriate communication
3. Are there language tools and technology that could help patient interactions and clinical notes efficiently?
4. Discuss real-world use cases in patient care, such as consent forms, information sheets, and discharge summaries
5. Promote interdisciplinary collaboration between Language Technology experts, Linguistics, Healthcare Professionals, and AI researchers.

Organizers and their Expertise

Dr Hannah Thomas

Imaging scientist from Christian Medical College Vellore has experience with use of multimodal data for AI in Health. She has extensive experience in bridging the gap between academia and clinical practice, focussing on solving real-world healthcare problems using technology based solutions.

Mr Arun Zechariah

Arun is a systems manager involved in Education, Research and Healthcare Technology with a broad range of experience in crafting technology solutions for complex and disparate problems. He has a keen interest in the usage of emerging technologies particularly AI. Presently working at CMC Vellore in developing cost effective solutions to create and disseminate learning content in self-learning format; support clinical and health research, and provide administrative and reporting solutions.

Ms Anupama Nambiar

Research Administrator, Centre for Stem Cell Research CMC Vellore with extensive experience in coordinating large clinicians and scientists run trials, securing ethical, administrative and ethical approvals for large national and international research.

Dr. Parameswari Krishnamurthy

Assistant Professor at the Language Technology Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad, has extensive research experience in Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Language analysis, and Corpus Linguistics. She is one of the project investigators for Indian Language to Indian Language Machine Translation Consortium under Bhashini, MEITY, Government of India.

Mr. Vandan Mujadia

Senior research associate, Language Technology Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad

This team has extensive experience in developing patient-facing healthcare content and in implementing NLP and Machine translated Indian Language solutions in medical settings. We have worked on multiple collaborative projects to create automated translation and have deployed on of the solutions for various healthcare use cases at CMC Vellore.

Speakers

Dr Hannah Thomas

Imaging scientist from Christian Medical College Vellore has experience with use of multimodal data for AI in Health. She has extensive experience in bridging the gap between academia and clinical practice, focussing on solving real-world healthcare problems using technology based solutions.

Dr. Balu Krishna S

He is a Professor of Radiation Oncology and a Clinician Scientist whose primary focus is on treating Head and neck cancers, Thoracic malignancies, Male Urogenital malignancies. His research focuses on integrating AI in health for Quantitative imaging and improving patient access and continuum of care, Prehabilitation model of care to improve quality of survival; Shared decision-making in Oncology through pragmatic patient-driven clinical trials. He is the Clinical lead of the Quantitative Imaging Research and Artificial Intelligence Lab of Radiation Oncology. https://qirail.cmcvellore.edu.in/

Dr. Parivalavan Rajavelu

Dr. Parivalavan Rajavelu MS, DNB, FRCSEd, is a consultant surgeon and specialist in laparoscopic surgery at Sundaram Medical Foundation (SMF), Chennai. He set up the first Emergency Department in the private sector in India at SMF and nurtured it to become one the best-known academic EM centers in South India. He has done pioneering research with IIT Madras in diabetic foot and has invented an equipment called “PedoPowerGraph” to measure foot pressures. He mentors and teaches clinicians and quality professionals on healthcare quality and patient safety. He is the founder of SkillsForMED, Chennai, an organization that shares best practices with health care professionals, to equip them with expertise to provide safe patient care.

Prof Vasudev Varma

Dr Parameswari Krishnamurthy

She is linguistic expert specialising in Indian language NLP with experience in working on machine translations for multiple domains including healthcare.

Dr. Asif Ekbal

Asif Ekbal is an Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India. His research interests are in the broad areas of Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Currently, his research focuses on Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, Emotion Analysis, Dialogues, Text mining and Clinical Chatbots

Dr Praveen Shastry

They both have experience in implementing AI and NLP in routine clinical workflows.

Mr Piyush Arya

Piyush Arya is the Chief Growth Officer at Augnito. He is responsible for Augnito’s global business and strategy and is a passionate business leader driving Augnito’s growth. He brings a rich experience in healthcare technology and leadership development across global markets including the Middle East, US, UK and APAC. He has held several Client Executive and GM roles in the past across organizations like Gallup, Harvard Business School Publishing, MphRx (now Agilon Health) and NIIT Limited. During his early career, Piyush has spent considerable time as a software developer and business consultant with Infosys and Sapient Consulting (now Publicis Sapient).

Prof. Hema A. Murthy

Experts in developing TTS and ASR models for Indian languages.

Prof. Umesh S

Experts in developing TTS and ASR models for Indian languages.

Prakash Yalla

IIIT Hyderabad

Dr Anuradha C

Professor and Lead of Abdominal Imaging
Christian Medical College, Vellore
Dr. Anuradha Chandramohan is a distinguished expert in onco-imaging of the abdomen and pelvis, specializing in colorectal cancer, peritoneal malignancy, gynecologic oncology, and uro-oncology. She has an impressive academic portfolio with 114 publications and book chapters. She is a member of the Rectal Cancer Disease Focused Panel (DFP) of the Society of Abdominal Radiology (SAR), USA, and the National Cancer Grid (NCG), India. Additionally, she serves as Associate Editor of the Indian Journal of Radiology and Imaging (IJRI) and is on the editorial boards of the Clinical Radiology Journal and Journal of Gastrointestinal and Abdominal Radiology (JGAR). She is also the ECM TN-PY IRIA 2024 and ISGAR.

Mr Arun Zechariah

Technology specialist from Christian Medical College Vellore with vast experience in implementation of IT solutions across various domains including Healthcare, Digital Health and Education.

Mr. Vandan Mujadia

Senior research associate, Language Technology Research Centre, IIIT-Hyderabad

Dr Joy Mammen

Joy Mammen MD is a pathologist & Professor at the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore, India. Areas of expertise include Pathology Informatics, image management systems and Hospital Information Systems (HIS). He heads the Biomedical Informatics Unit (BMIU), a multidisciplinary team that supports research and exploration of emerging computational technologies in healthcare.

Prof Pushpak Bhattacharyya

IIT Bombay

Dr Sneha Mithun

She holds a Master’s degree in Chemistry and Nuclear Medicine. She is a certified radiation safety officer in diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine. She has 17 years of experience as a Medical Physicist and Radiation Safety Officer in Nuclear medicine. She has been working as Scientific Officer at Tata Memorial Hospital, Mumbai, India for the last sixteen years. She completed her PhD at Maastricht University at the GROW - School for Oncology and Reproduction, under the supervision of Prof. Andre Dekker. She has authored several publications in the field of medical imaging and clinical data science in peer-reviewed international journals. She has presented her research at several national and international conferences. She has also contributed immensely in scientific societies. Sneha envisions that AI and NLP will transform the field of medicine and benefit humankind with better survival as well as improved quality of life.

Prof Hema Murthy

IIT Madras

Ms Anisha Koshy

Anisha Koshy serves as the AI & Medical Ethics Specialist at CMC Vellore. Prior to this, she was at the Data Security Council of India ( NASSCOM) as the Technology Policy Specialist. Anisha has a background in Public Policy, Technology, and Philosophy. Her work focuses on the safe and responsible use of AI infrastructure and digital tools for public good.

Expected Outcomes

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a deeper understanding of the current challenges and opportunities in deploying language technologies in healthcare.

We expect that the workshop will help create a community of inter-disciplinary experts who can then engage together to find meaningful solutions to existing challenges in healthcare communications with the use of NLP, AI and other language technologies.

The workshop will provide potential directions for future research and collaboration.