Comprehensive Epilepsy Center (CEC)

Patients at the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center  at Cincinnati Children's are evaluated with a variety of diagnostic tests and tools whose results vary in complexity, number, and size. Clinicians and researchers need to access large amounts of structured and unstructured patient data in a variety of locations and formats. Our goal is to create systems that automatically summarize these patient data to facilitate treatment and research.

The Pestian lab has created a CEC database web application built on the CHRISTINE framework. The application pulls data for consented patients from the electronic health record and all other available databases used by the Division of Neurology. When the data are in the form of unstructured free-text data, our natural language processing algorithms identify and extract relevant facts. The system generates structured reports of demographic data, full clinical history, analysis of neuroimaging and other diagnostic reports, diagnoses, interventions, and outcomes. Clinicians and researchers can also build custom queries and generate detailed summary reports to facilitate quality improvement and other research.

The CEC database application has already been used extensively by the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and the epilepsy surgery program. Patient summary reports generated by the system are used to efficiently present cases at the weekly surgery conference. Ongoing collaboration between the Pestian Lab and Comprehensive Epilepsy Center will streamline the patient consent process and add hundreds of additional patients to the database.