Hongfang Liu, Ph.D.

Hongfang Liu, Ph.D., is leading Mayo Clinic's clinical natural language processing (NLP) program with the mission of providing support to access clinical information stored in unstructured text for research and practice.

Focus areas

Mayo's NLP program has been developing a suite of open-source NLP systems for accessing clinical information, such as medications or findings from clinical notes. Dr. Liu's primary research interest is in clinical/biomedical NLP and terminology/ontology.

Additionally, she has been conducting collaborative research in the past 10 years in utilizing existing knowledge bases for high-throughput "omics" profiling data analysis and functional interpretation.

Significance to patient care

Dr. Liu's work in clinical informatics has resulted in informatics systems that unlock clinical information stored in clinical narratives. Her work accelerates the pace of knowledge discovery, implementation and delivery for improved health care.