Annotation of epilepsy clinic letters for natural language processing.

Background: Natural language processing (NLP) is increasingly being used to extract structured information from unstructured text to assist clinical decision-making and aid healthcare research. The availability of expert-annotated documents for the development and validation of NLP applications is limited. We created synthetic clinical documents to address this, and to validate the Extraction of Epilepsy Clinical Text version 2 (ExECTv2) NLP pipeline.

Validating epilepsy diagnoses in routinely collected data.

Purpose: Anonymised, routinely-collected healthcare data is increasingly being used for epilepsy research. We validated algorithms using general practitioner (GP) primary healthcare records to identify people with epilepsy from anonymised healthcare data within the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank in Wales, UK.

Method: A reference population of 150 people with definite epilepsy and 150 people without epilepsy was ascertained from hospital records and linked to records contained within SAIL (containing GP records for 2.

Pseudotumor cerebri syndrome in childhood: incidence, clinical profile and risk factors in a national prospective population-based cohort study.

Aim: To investigate the epidemiology, clinical profile and risk factors of pseudotumor cerebri syndrome (PTCS) in children aged 1-16 years.

Methods: A national prospective population-based cohort study over 25 months. Newly diagnosed PTCS cases notified via British Paediatric Surveillance Unit were ascertained using classical diagnostic criteria and categorised according to 2013 revised diagnostic criteria.