Text mining for disease surveillance in veterinary clinical data: part one, the language of veterinary clinical records and searching for words

Davies, Heather ORCID: 0000-0001-6905-4718, Nenadic, Goran, Alfattni, Ghada, Arguello Casteleiro, Mercedes, Al Moubayed, Noura, Farrell, Sean O, Radford, Alan D ORCID: 0000-0002-4590-1334 and Noble, Peter-John M ORCID: 0000-0002-2275-2014 (2024) Text mining for disease surveillance in veterinary clinical data: part one, the language of veterinary clinical records and searching for words Frontiers in Veterinary Science, 11. 1352239-. ISSN 2297-1769, 2297-1769

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Abstract

The development of natural language processing techniques for deriving useful information from unstructured clinical narratives is a fast-paced and rapidly evolving area of machine learning research. Large volumes of veterinary clinical narratives now exist curated by projects such as the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) and VetCompass, and the application of such techniques to these datasets is already (and will continue to) improve our understanding of disease and disease patterns within veterinary medicine. In part one of this two part article series, we discuss the importance of understanding the lexical structure of clinical records and discuss the use of basic tools for filtering records based on key words and more complex rule based pattern matching approaches. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches highlighting the on-going potential value in using these “traditional” approaches but ultimately recognizing that these approaches constrain how effectively information retrieval can be automated. This sets the scene for the introduction of machine-learning methodologies and the plethora of opportunities for automation of information extraction these present which is discussed in part two of the series.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	big data, text mining, machine learning, neural language modeling, clinical records, companion animals
Divisions:	Faculty of Health & Life Sciences Faculty of Health & Life Sciences > Inst. Infection, Vet & Ecological Sciences
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	25 Jan 2024 09:10
Last Modified:	28 Feb 2026 20:46
DOI:	10.3389/fvets.2024.1352239
Open Access URL:	https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2024.1352239
Related Websites:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3178002
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