Jose Walter Hernández Pérez


2026

TNM cancer staging is a critical process for characterizing tumor burden and guiding clinical decisions. Nevertheless, its automated extraction remains challenging due to the unstructured and heterogeneous nature of free-text pathology reports. This paper describes the participation of the URJC-Team in Task 6 of the Social Media Mining for Health/Health Real-World Data (#SMM4H-HeaRD) 2026 Shared Tasks. It focuses on predicting TNM staging from pathology reports. The proposed workflow combines hand-crafted regular expressions with a Large Language Model (LLM). First, explicit TNM mentions are extracted using rule-based patterns. Then, any stage not recovered by these rules is inferred by an LLM. Overall, the proposal provides competitive results across all official shared-task phases.