# Facilitate Observational Studies of Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementias Using Ontology and Natural Language Processing

> **NIH NIH RF1** · UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR HOUSTON · 2021 · $1,141,781

## Abstract

Project Summary
As the 6th leading cause of death in the US, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Alzheimer's disease-related
dementias (ADRD) affect about 5.7 million Americans. However, up until now, our understanding of risk factors
of AD/ADRD is still limited and our efforts on developing effective treatments for AD/ADRD have been greatly
disappointing. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new methods to conduct AD/ADRD research
more efficiently. One of the potential approaches is to leverage large, longitudinal, observational clinical data
accumulated in electronic health records (EHRs). Nevertheless, current uses of EHRs for AD/ADRD research
is very limited, often requiring manual data extraction and normalization (i.e., manual chart review), which is
labor-intensive and time-consuming. Therefore, in this study, we plan to develop novel ontology and natural
language processing (NLP) based informatics methods and tools to automatically extract and normalize
AD/ADRD-related clinical data in EHRs, thus facilitating efficient AD/ADRD observational studies using EHRs.
We propose the following three specific aims to achieve this goal: 1) Build an information model for EHR-based
AD/ADRD research using a formal ontology representation approach; and 2) Extract and normalize AD/ADRD
information in clinical documents using NLP technologies; and 3) Evaluate developed informatics methods and
tools through demonstration studies and disseminate them to support observational AD/ADRD research.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10235325
- **Project number:** 1RF1AG072799-01
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HLTH SCI CTR HOUSTON
- **Principal Investigator:** HONGFANG LIU
- **Activity code:** RF1 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $1,141,781
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-05-01 → 2023-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10235325

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10235325, Facilitate Observational Studies of Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementias Using Ontology and Natural Language Processing (1RF1AG072799-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-26 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10235325. Licensed CC0.

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