Brief Biography

Carol Friedman, PhD is a Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University. Dr. Friedman received her M.A. and PhD in Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematics at New York University.

Dr. Friedman's work has focussed on both basic and applied research in the area of natural language processing, specializing in the medical domain and more recently the biomolecular domain. She developed a general natural language extraction and encoding system for the clinical domain called MedLEE that is in daily use at New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH). In collaboration with Andrey Rzhetsky, she also developed a natural language system called GENIES, which is based on an adaptation of MedLEE. GENIES extracts biomolecular relations from journals and is part of the GeneWays system. Dr. Friedman is currently working on the development of BioMedLEE in collaboration with Dr. Yves Lussier. BioMedLEE extracts a broad range of genotypic-phenotypic relations from the literature, and maps the extracted information to an appropriate biological ontology. One of Dr. Friedman's goals is to demonstrate the value of natural language processing for a broad range of clinical and biomedical applications that include decision support, automated encoding, vocabulary development, clinical research, outcomes analysis, error detection, and genomics research.
MedLEE was used in a clinical application that was based on radiological reports of the chest to detect patients suspicious for tuberculosis, and it was shown to have a positive impact on actual patient care. MedLEE has been extended to all of radiology, and also to echocardiology, pathology, discharge summaries, and electrocardiography.
Dr. Friedman developed an algorithm that tolerates the misspelling of patient names during validation that has been in use at NYPH since 1994. She also helped design the Clinical Patient Database at NYPH. Dr. Friedman's other interests involve the evaluation of natural language systems and the modeling of medical language.

Dr. Friedman is a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Lister Hill Center of the National Library of Medicine. She is also a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.