[Corpora-List] seeking corpora of medical records

[Angus Roberts]

Hello John

Your colleague might have heard of the CLEF corpus of medical records,
it is mentioned in a couple of papers [e.g. 1]. CLEF is a UK Medical
Research Council project [2, 3]. The corpus consists of the medical
records of deceased patients from a UK cancer hospital. The corpus was
established under an ethics committee approval. The fact that the
records are from deceased patient made it easier to get the ethics
committee approval. However, the  approval does not allow the corpus to
be used outside of the CLEF project consortium.

There has been some discussion about how the corpus might be made
available to others, in some controlled fashion, once the CLEF project
ends. This would, however, require further ethics committee discussions
and approval, and is likely to take some time.

If you hear of other such corpora, I would be most interested to know of
them. As you say, such corpora are very hard to come by.

thanks
Angus

[1] The CLEF Corpus: Semantic Annotation of Clinical Text. Angus
Roberts, Robert Gaizauskas, Mark Hepple et al. Proceedings of the 2007
American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium (AMIA 2007).
To appear. (let me know if you want a copy)

[2] http://www.clinical-escience.org/

[3] http://www.clef-user.com/

John Aberdeen wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm seeking English-language text corpora of medical records.  
> Typically medical records are unavailable to researchers due to  
> privacy laws. However, medical records of deceased individuals are  
> sometimes available without restriction. One of my colleagues  
> believes she has heard of a corpus originating in the UK consisting  
> of the medical records of deceased persons, but does not know the  
> details. Does anyone know about this corpus, or similar corpora of  
> medical records that are available for research purposes?
> 
> Thanks,
> John
> 
> 
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