Publications by authors named "Angus Roberts"

Manual decisions regarding the timing of surveillance endoscopy for premalignant Barrett's oesophagus (BO) is error-prone. This leads to inefficient resource usage and safety risks. To automate decision-making, we fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models to categorize BO length (EndoBERT) and worst histopathological grade (PathBERT) on 4,831 endoscopy and 4,581 pathology reports from Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital (GSTT).

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Introduction: Experiences of violence are important risk factors for worse outcome in people with mental health conditions; however, they are not routinely collected be mental health services, so their ascertainment depends on extraction from text fields with natural language processing (NLP) algorithms.

Methods: Applying previously developed neural network algorithms to routine mental healthcare records, we sought to describe the distribution of recorded violence victimisation by demographic and diagnostic characteristics. We ascertained recorded violence victimisation from the records of 60,021 patients receiving care from a large south London NHS mental healthcare provider during 2019.

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There is a lack of data on mental health service utilisation and outcomes for people with experience of forced migration living in the UK. Details about migration experiences documented in free-text fields in electronic health records might be harnessed using novel data science methods; however, there are potential limitations and ethical concerns.

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Article Synopsis
  • Social media platforms like Twitter and Weibo can promote both positive and negative interactions, including an increase in cyberbullying during public crises, and the study examines how users' gender and account verification impact these behaviors.
  • Utilizing various theoretical frameworks, the study analyzed posts on Weibo to distinguish between pro- and anti-cyberbullying content, focusing on the emotional expressions related to anger.
  • Results indicated that pro-cyberbullying posts were richer in emotional content, with verified female users showing higher instances of anger-related expressions compared to others, providing insights for future research on cyberbullying dynamics.
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Objective: The objective of this study is to determine demographic and diagnostic distributions of physical pain recorded in clinical notes of a mental health electronic health records database by using natural language processing and examine the overlap in recorded physical pain between primary and secondary care.

Design, Setting And Participants: The data were extracted from an anonymised version of the electronic health records of a large secondary mental healthcare provider serving a catchment of 1.3 million residents in south London.

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Background: Severe mental illnesses (SMIs), including schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, and major depressive disorder, are associated with an increased risk of physical health comorbidities and premature mortality from conditions including cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Digital technologies such as electronic clinical decision support systems (eCDSSs) could play a crucial role in improving the clinician-led management of conditions such as dysglycemia (deranged blood sugar levels) and associated conditions such as diabetes in people with a diagnosis of SMI in mental health settings.

Objective: We have developed a real-time eCDSS using CogStack, an information retrieval and extraction platform, to automatically alert clinicians with National Health Service Trust-approved, guideline-based recommendations for dysglycemia monitoring and management in secondary mental health care.

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Objectives: Question answering (QA) systems have the potential to improve the quality of clinical care by providing health professionals with the latest and most relevant evidence. However, QA systems have not been widely adopted. This systematic review aims to characterize current medical QA systems, assess their suitability for healthcare, and identify areas of improvement.

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Pain is a common reason for accessing healthcare resources and is a growing area of research, especially in its overlap with mental health. Mental health electronic health records are a good data source to study this overlap. However, much information on pain is held in the free text of these records, where mentions of pain present a unique natural language processing problem due to its ambiguous nature.

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Pain is a complex concept that can interconnect with other concepts such as a disorder that might cause pain, a medication that might relieve pain, and so on. To fully understand the context of pain experienced by either an individual or across a population, we may need to examine all concepts related to pain and the relationships between them. This is especially useful when modeling pain that has been recorded in electronic health records.

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Background: Previous studies have shown mixed evidence on ethnic disparities in antipsychotic prescribing among patients with psychosis in the UK, partly due to small sample sizes. This study aimed to examine the current state of antipsychotic prescription with respect to patient ethnicity among the entire population known to a large UK mental health trust with non-affective psychosis, adjusting for multiple potential risk factors.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study included all patients (N = 19,291) who were aged 18 years or over at their first diagnoses of non-affective psychosis (identified with the ICD-10 codes of F20-F29) recorded in electronic health records (EHRs) at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust until March 2021.

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Depression is a common mental health condition that often occurs in association with other chronic illnesses, and varies considerably in severity. Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain rich information about a patient's medical history and can be used to train, test and maintain predictive models to support and improve patient care. This work evaluated the feasibility of implementing an environment for predicting mental health crisis among people living with depression based on both structured and unstructured EHRs.

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Objectives: An association between type 2 diabetes (T2DM) and schizophrenia has long been observed, and recent research revealed presence of shared genetic factors. However, epidemiological evidence was inconsistent, some reported insignificant contribution of genetic factors to T2DM-schizophrenia comorbidity. Prior works studied people with schizophrenia, particularly, antipsychotic-naive patients, or those during the first psychotic experience to limit schizophrenia-related environmental factors.

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Background: Pain is a widespread issue, with 20% of adults (1 in 5) experiencing it globally. A strong association has been demonstrated between pain and mental health conditions, and this association is known to exacerbate disability and impairment. Pain is also known to be strongly related to emotions, which can lead to damaging consequences.

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Background: Information stored within electronic health records is often recorded as unstructured text. Special computerized natural language processing (NLP) tools are needed to process this text; however, complex governance arrangements make such data in the National Health Service hard to access, and therefore, it is difficult to use for research in improving NLP methods. The creation of a donated databank of clinical free text could provide an important opportunity for researchers to develop NLP methods and tools and may circumvent delays in accessing the data needed to train the models.

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Concerns have been raised over the experiences of violence such as domestic violence (DV) and intimate partner violence (IPV) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media such as Reddit represent an alternative outlet for reporting experiences of violence where healthcare access has been limited. This study analyzed seven violence-related subreddits to investigate the trends of different violence patterns from January 2018 to February 2022 to enhance the health-service providers' existing service or provide some new perspective for existing violence research.

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Background And Aims: Prevalence of type two diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in people with severe mental illness (SMI) is 2-3 times higher than in general population. Predictive modelling has advanced greatly in the past decade, and it is important to apply cutting-edge methods to vulnerable groups. However, few T2DM prediction models account for the presence of mental illness, and none seemed to have been developed specifically for people with SMI.

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Background: Encephalopathy is a severe co-morbid condition in critically ill patients that includes different clinical constellation of neurological symptoms. However, even for the most recognised form, delirium, this medical condition is rarely recorded in structured fields of electronic health records precluding large and unbiased retrospective studies. We aimed to identify patients with encephalopathy using a machine learning-based approach over clinical notes in electronic health records.

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Article Synopsis
  • Much of the valuable information for clinical research is found in free-text format, and natural language processing (NLP) has been used for years to extract this information.
  • This paper reviews the evolution and methodologies of clinical NLP in the UK over the past 15 years, analyzing 94 funded projects and 431 research publications.
  • Despite significant funding increases, challenges remain such as limited access to hospital data, insufficient computational resources, and difficulties in sharing pre-trained models, indicating a need for stronger collaboration between academia and industry.
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Objectives: Understanding the potential impact of physical characteristics of the urban environment on clinical outcomes on several mental illnesses.

Materials And Methods: Physical features of the urban environment were examined as predictors for affective and non-affective several mental illnesses (SMI), the number and length of psychiatric hospital admissions, and the number of short and long-acting injectable antipsychotic prescriptions. In addition, the urban features with the greatest weight in the predicted model were determined.

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Background: Improvements to the primary prevention of physical health illnesses like diabetes in the general population have not been mirrored to the same extent in people with serious mental illness (SMI). This work evaluates the technical feasibility of implementing an electronic clinical decision support system (eCDSS) for supporting the management of dysglycaemia and diabetes in patients with serious mental illness in a secondary mental healthcare setting.

Methods: A stepwise approach was taken as an overarching and guiding framework for this work.

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A major hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD) is the fatal destruction of dopaminergic neurons within the . This event is preceded by the formation of Lewy bodies, which are cytoplasmic inclusions composed of α-synuclein protein aggregates. A triad contribution of α-synuclein aggregation, iron accumulation, and mitochondrial dysfunction plague nigral neurons, yet the events underlying iron accumulation are poorly understood.

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Objective: This paper evaluates the application of a natural language processing (NLP) model for extracting clinical text referring to interpersonal violence using electronic health records (EHRs) from a large mental healthcare provider.

Design: A multidisciplinary team iteratively developed guidelines for annotating clinical text referring to violence. Keywords were used to generate a dataset which was annotated (ie, classified as affirmed, negated or irrelevant) for: presence of violence, patient status (ie, as perpetrator, witness and/or victim of violence) and violence type (domestic, physical and/or sexual).

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Multimorbidity is a major factor contributing to increased mortality among people with severe mental illnesses (SMI). Previous studies either focus on estimating prevalence of a disease in a population without considering relationships between diseases or ignore heterogeneity of individual patients in examining disease progression by looking merely at aggregates across a whole cohort. Here, we present a temporal bipartite network model to jointly represent detailed information on both individual patients and diseases, which allows us to systematically characterize disease trajectories from both patient and disease centric perspectives.

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