Hitachi has announced that they have developed a new technology to extract precisely designated information from electronic medical records in collaboration with International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H). This new technology makes it possible to analyze electronic medical records including various mixed-forms such as free-form texts written by doctors or laboratory data written in given formats.

Hitachi India, Hitachi, and IIIT-H won the first prize with an extraction precision of 86.8 percent in CLEF(1) e-Health 2014 Task2(2), a technical competition on medical information extraction, which was held by a European Research Forum CLEF for developing this technology. This will be presented at the CLEF Conference 2014 in UK.

To predict the incidence rates of a disease, it is necessary to analyze medical record texts such as doctors' remarks as well as the input information in the given format such as blood test results.

Mr Ichiro Iino, managing director, Hitachi India said, "We are proud that we won the first prize in this competition. Hitachi India, Hitachi and IIIT-H have collectively worked as a strong team to come up with this technological innovation. We firmly believe that it would help build a sustainable society with reduced health risk. We are honoured to achieve this mark, which will act as a catalyst."

"We are delighted to achieve this breakthrough in association with Hitachi in the field of technology and healthcare. This technology will help a great deal in prevention or reduction of disease risks. It was a learning experience to work with Hitachi, which shares the same passion for producing futuristic technology as we do. We hope to create such fruitful alliances in future too," said Prof. PJ Narayanan, director, IIIT-H.

Hitachi India and Hitachi will continue to improve this extraction technology, and develop new technologies leading to the creation of advanced medical services.