Welcome to Clinical Natural Language Processing. My name is Laura Wiley, and I am an assistant professor of Biomedical Informatics and personalized medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Along with our industry partner, Google Cloud, we are delighted to have you in this course. Clinical natural language processing is the fourth course in the clinical data science specialization. A series of six courses that provides practical hands-on training in using electronic medical record data. The first week of this course will introduce you to the foundational principles of natural language processing. Then, in week two, you will learn all about regular expressions, and how to do text processing in the R programming language. Week three, we'll teach you the different types and structure of clinical notes, and you will also learn to apply practical approaches on how to use this note structure to answer clinical data science questions. Then in Week 4, you will learn another text processing technique called Window Searching to identify and extract information from clinical notes. Finally, in week five, you will be given a real natural language processing challenge. Where you will apply the tools and techniques you have learned. At the end of these five weeks, you will have the practical skills needed to use clinical notes to solve data science problems. And the foundational knowledge needed to understand advance natural language processing toolkits. Now it's time to get to work and start unlocking the data found in clinical text.