Soto Montalvo Herranz, awarded for her research on HIV

Alba Junquera

The award-winning research aims to avoid what in the medical field is called 'lost opportunities', that is, patients who have HIV but neither they nor the hospital know it. The aim is to detect it early to prevent it from spreading and apply treatment as soon as possible.

The article is titled “Early diagnosis of HIV cases by means of text mining and machine learning models on clinical notes.” It is worth noting that María Velasco, associate professor at the URJC and also a doctor at HUFA, and UNED researchers Rodrigo Morales and Raquel Martínez participated in this work.

Soto Montalvo is proud to be able to help improve people's lives and apply her knowledge in the field of health, which she believes is sorely needed. "It is a reward for all the work done and a satisfaction to be recognized as a quality publication," she says about the award.

The development of the alert system created by the researchers involves several phases of study and research. “At the beginning of the research, we met with the hospital doctors and they gave us a list of indicators and information related to the disease,” explains Soto. From this data provided, we work with real clinical notes, which must be previously anonymized, that is, the personal data must be eliminated or modified. For this, it was necessary to create an “anonymizer” that was later executed and validated by the doctors when they verified that it anonymized correctly. After several months of research, studying the typology of the data, acquiring knowledge of the disease and testing different techniques of Natural Language ProcessingA prototype of the alert system was developed. The hospital is currently verifying the effectiveness of this new system by testing it with real clinical notes from new patients.

Researchers are currently working to improve the system while awaiting validation from the hospital's specialist doctors.

Collaboration with other entities

Soto Montalvo collaborates with researchers from the UNED School of Computer Engineering on other projects related to applied research in the health field. Together with the La Paz University Hospital, he works in the field of mental health to prevent and detect people who are likely to develop suicidal behaviour. He is also researching with the Fundación Alcorcón University Hospital to develop a system for detecting drug allergies, as they are numerous and difficult to identify.

About his career

María del Soto Montalvo Herranz is a technical engineer in Management Informatics from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), a computer engineer from the Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) and a PhD within the Computer Science and Mathematical Modelling Program from the URJC in 2013. In relation to her research, she is co-author of dozens of publications, both in journals and in national and international conferences and has participated in numerous research projects, in some of them as principal investigator. In her teaching activity, she has taught subjects in most of the degrees of the ETSII of the URJC, also in the Master of Data Science of the URJC, as well as in the University Master in Language Technologies of the UNED. She has worked on different projects with companies, mainly in consulting and software development. She has held various management positions at the ETSII of the URJC and is currently Deputy Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs at the URJC.