A university is lending its expertise to a project to turn medical records into a computerised database.
The Information Technology Research Institute (ITRI)
at the University of Brighton is contributing to the £1.6 million clinical e-science framework (CLEF) project.
CLEF will help to speed-up cancer research trials, tailor care for individual patients and reduce the workload of medical staff.
At present, information that could prove invaluable to clinical researchers is locked into written and typed records which cannot be searched by computer.
They include clinical histories, radiological and pathology reports, annotations on genomic and image databases, technical literature and internet-based resources.
Often they are dictated and then typed or, alternatively, laboriously coded or annotated manually, usually in incompatible formats that are difficult to join together or scale-up.
Using CLEF, a doctor who suspects a patient's reaction to a treatment may be linked to certain genetic markers will be able to automatically access all relevant medical records and then set up a fast-track clinical study.
Capturing and presenting descriptive information is a major barrier to making the framework useful and, initially, ITRI's contribution to the framework will be to help ensure the medical records have been correctly encoded in the database.
Using ITRI's technology, engineers and clinicians responsible for maintaining the database will be able to check and edit the encoded information.
ITRI's programme can also be used to generate other reports and documents from the encoded information.
Professor Donia Scott, the head of ITRI, said: "CLEF is the first major cross-disciplinary effort between the health and language technology sectors.
"It is a huge undertaking.
Clinical information contains hundreds of thousands of interlinked concepts and most scientific communities have to cope with only a fraction of that."
The three-year project is a collaboration between ITRI, the Royal Marsden Hospital, Sheffield and Manchester Universities, University College London and the Judge Institute for Management Studies at Cambridge.
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