Application of text mining tools for the use of pathology data in epidemiological surveillance and early detection of animal diseases
Contakt person: Susanne Küker
Duration: 2014 - 2017
As recognized in the Swiss Animal Health Strategy 2010+, methods for early detection, based on the increasing abundance of data on animal health stored in national databases, can contribute to valuable and highly efficient surveillance activities. Post-mortem data, available from pathology services, are often under-exploited although they provide valuable information on the causes of death and additional health indicators for various animal species. In addition to their value for veterinarians and farmers (with regard to treatment and prevention options for the affected herd), systematic evaluation of post-mortem data could be of great value for nation-wide and international animal health and zoonotic disease early warning systems.
The academic pathology institutes of the Vetsuisse Faculty currently provide most of the veterinary pathology service offered to the food production sector in Switzerland. The overall goal of this project is to make post-mortem data, recorded at a veterinary pathology institute readily available for epidemiological surveillance and the early detection of emerging animal diseases. In particular, this project will focus on the evaluation of an automated text-mining and syndrome-classifying tool to 1) extract relevant information from pathology reports (written in free text) with minimal expert intervention; 2) classify pathology findings into syndromic groups to enhance the efficiency of health event detection.
In a second step these tools will be applied to existing pathology data to test the feasibility for syndromic surveillance using automated evaluations of necropsy data. Additionally, conclusions and recommendations for the setup of pathology data recording systems, which allow automated text mining and data evaluation, can be given.
