Why use medcat over ctakes?

I have looked into the medcat paper and I would still like to ask, apart from reported better F-score, what makes medcat a better solution than ctakes?

hi @bkakke - we’re obviously a bit biased here - but MedCAT is superior not only in terms of F-Score also:

  • MedCAT is terminology flexible. UMLS, SNOMED CT, ICD, OPCS, RadLex, HPO and so on. cTakes only supports UMLS.
  • You can build your own custom ontology with MedCAT - you can build from scratch, or you can extend an existing ontology via the MedCATtrainer interface.
  • MedCAT is language agnostic - if you can represent it in unicode - great MedCAT can annotate it. We’ve had users annotate Dutch, french, spanish, korean and chinese, alongside english. This is because MedCAT doesn’t rely on UMLS and american focused ontology.
  • MedCAT is easily installable and integrated into a clinical NLP pipeline via MedCATService, and small lightweight library.
  • self-supervised and supervised training for model fine-tuning. Annotation collection and viewing is possible via the Trainer interface
  • model pipelines are transferable via a couple lines of code and completely self-contained .zip file.
  • configurable meta-annotations (cTakes nomenclature - property)) - its possible to define meta-annotations in the Trainer and collect any annotations for any definable task.
  • its an actively used and maintained project - we have a growing team of developers and users improving the tools on a daily / weekly basis.
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