title: Use of free text clinical records in identifying syndromes and analysing health data.
abstract: The analysis of data in clinical records could be useful to epidemiologists in planning analytical studies and identifying new research initiatives. This paper describes the method used to develop a systematic, replicable technique for compressing many words of text into fewer content categories on the basis of explicit rules of user-defined coding, and systematically sorting a large volume of records accurately and reliably. The method was used to categorise the reasons for retirement from racing in Hong Kong of 3727 thoroughbred racehorses between the 1992/93 and 2003/04 racing seasons into a user-defined dictionary. An automated process successfully categorised 95 per cent of the records. The other 5 per cent were assigned manually to one of the dictionary categories. The whole process from initial screening to the categorisation of all the records took approximately 100 man-hours to complete.
authors.affiliation: Department of Veterinary Regulation and International Liaison, Hong Kong Jockey Club, Sha Tin Racecourse, Sha Tin, NT, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Lam
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Parkin
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Riggs
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Morgan
mesh_terms: D000827:Animal Welfare; D000818:Animals; D001331:Automation; D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000706:statistics & numerical data* / Q000639:trends; D006736:Horses / Q000293:injuries*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D010805:Physical Conditioning, Animal / Q000009:adverse effects; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D013177:Sports