What is it about?

Over the years, hospitals have collected a lot of medical data, but it's often not organized for research purposes. In the field of Orthopedics, which deals with bones and muscles, there haven't been many publicly available datasets for researchers to use. Our project introduces OEHR, a new dataset created from real hospital records. This dataset includes patient information, treatments, diagnoses, and medical images. By using advanced techniques to extract and organize this data, we've made it easier for researchers to study and improve orthopedic care. This dataset can help with tasks like recommending medications and predicting diseases, ultimately supporting better healthcare research and education.

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Why is it important?

Our work on OEHR introduces the first multilingual, comprehensive dataset for Orthopedic research, pulled directly from real hospital electronic health records (EHRs), including both textual data and medical images. The uniqueness and timeliness of our work lie in these specific areas: 1. Fills a Crucial Gap: There is a significant lack of available datasets in the field of Orthopedics, which is a branch of medicine vital for addressing injuries and conditions of the musculoskeletal system. OEHR provides an unprecedented resource for researchers that can lead to new insights and advances in patient care. 2. Multimodal and Multilingual Data: Unlike existing datasets, often confined to intensive care units or single-language data, OEHR contains diverse types of data in both English and Chinese. This widens its utility across different linguistic and cultural contexts. 3. Supports Advanced Healthcare Research: By providing data that includes medical images alongside textual data, OEHR empowers researchers to conduct more comprehensive studies, ranging from medication recommendations to disease predictions, treatment outcomes, and potentially, artificial intelligence applications in diagnostics. 4. Quality and Accessibility: We meticulously annotated medical images and organized the dataset to ensure high quality and user-friendliness. This dataset opens up the possibility for more health professionals and researchers, including those with limited resources, to engage in orthopedic research. 5. Bridges the Real-World Clinical Practice and Research: Through this dataset and the automated tools we've developed for data extraction and structuring, OEHR narrows the divide between day-to-day medical care and clinical research, allowing for real-world applications and improvements in healthcare. By introducing OEHR, we're offering a powerful tool for the global research community. The implications of this are broad and significant – from improving patient outcomes and optimizing treatments to fueling education and training for future healthcare professionals. Our dataset has the potential to bolster research that can translate into tangible benefits for patients suffering from bone and muscle-related conditions anywhere in the world.

Perspectives

Writing this article has been an incredibly rewarding experience. Collaborating with experts from various fields to create the OEHR dataset was both challenging and enlightening. The need for high-quality, publicly available orthopedic datasets became apparent to me during my research. This project stands out because it addresses a significant gap in the availability of comprehensive orthopedic data for research purposes. From my perspective, the most exciting aspect of this work is its potential to democratize access to valuable clinical data. By providing a well-structured, multilingual dataset, we are enabling researchers from diverse backgrounds and regions to conduct meaningful studies that could lead to breakthroughs in orthopedic care. Furthermore, the integration of advanced OCR tools to process unstructured data and the meticulous manual annotation of medical images underscore the quality and usability of OEHR. I hope that this dataset will not only support current research efforts but also inspire new studies and innovations in orthopedic medicine. The process of developing OEHR has deepened my appreciation for the complexities and nuances of clinical data management and reinforced the importance of collaboration in advancing medical science. Ultimately, my goal is for OEHR to serve as a valuable resource that contributes to improving patient outcomes and advancing the field of orthopedics on a global scale.

Yibo Xie
Xiamen University

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This page is a summary of: OEHR: An Orthopedic Electronic Health Record Dataset, July 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3626772.3657885.
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