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 # Clinical Annotation Platform
+
+A web platform to extract clinical entities from text.
+
+## Usage
+
+## Installation
+
+The platform requires **python3.7**, **node.js**, and several other python and javascript packages. Specific installation instructions for each follow!
+
+### Backend requirements
+
+#### 1) First check if python3 is installed.
+
+You can check to see if it is installed:
+```
+$ python3 --version
+```
+If it is installed, you should see *Python 3.7.x*
+
+If you need to install it, you can easily do that with a package manager like Homebrew:
+```
+$ brew install python3
+```
+
+#### 2) With python3 installed, install necessary python packages.
+
+You can install packages with the python package installer pip:
+```
+$ pip3 install flask flask_script flask_migrate flask_bcrypt nltk editdistance requests lxml
+```
+
+### Frontend requirements
+
+#### 3) Check to see if npm and node.js are installed:
+
+```
+$ npm -v
+$ node -v
+```
+
+If they are, you can skip to Step 4.
+If not, to install node, first install nvm:
+```
+curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.1/install.sh | bash
+```
+Source: https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm
+
+Re-start your terminal and confirm nvm installation with:
+```
+command -v nvm
+```
+Which will return ```nvm``` if successful
+
+Then install node version 10.15.1:
+```
+$ nvm install 10.15.1
+```
+
+#### 4) Install the node dependencies:
+
+```
+$ cd static
+$ npm install --save
+```
+
+For remote server applications, permissions errors may be triggered.\
+If so, try adding ```--user``` to install commands.
+
+## Run program
+
+### Run the backend
+
+Open one terminal tab to run the backend server:
+```sh
+$ python3 manage.py runserver
+```
+If all goes well, you should see `* Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)` followed by a few more lines in the terminal.
+
+### Run the frontend
+
+Open a second terminal tab to run the frontend:
+```sh
+$ cd static
+$ npm start
+```
+
+After this, open your browser to http://localhost:3000 and you should see the homepage!
+
+## Contact
+
+If you have any questions, please email Monica Agrawal [magrawal@mit.edu].
+
+Based on [React-Redux-Flask boilerplate.](https://github.com/dternyak/React-Redux-Flask)