IBM, Mayo form open source health IT consortium

Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic have launched a new open source consortium focused on natural language processing (NLP), in an effort to help doctors share diagnosis and treatment information. The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium, announced Thursday, will focus on technology to allow for large-scale data aggregation, allowing doctors to mine medical records in their specialties to find similar cases to study before making difficult diagnoses or before determining treatment.