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

> **NIH NIH RF1** · YALE UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $1,230,213

## 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:** 10937605
- **Project number:** 7RF1AG072799-02
- **Recipient organization:** YALE UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** HONGFANG LIU
- **Activity code:** RF1 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $1,230,213
- **Award type:** 7
- **Project period:** 2021-05-01 → 2025-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10937605

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10937605, Facilitate Observational Studies of Alzheimer's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease-Related Dementias Using Ontology and Natural Language Processing (7RF1AG072799-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-08 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10937605. Licensed CC0.

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