Overcoming challenges in extracting prescribing habits from veterinary clinics using big data and deep learning

Abstract

Understanding antimicrobial usage patterns and encouraging appropriate antimicrobial usage is a critical component of antimicrobial stewardship. Studies using VetCompass Australia and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have demonstrated antimicrobial usage patterns in companion animal practices across Australia. Doing so has highlighted the many obstacles and barriers to the task of converting raw clinical notes into a format that can be readily queried and analysed. We developed NLP systems using rules-based algorithms and machine learning to automate the extraction of data describing the key elements to assess appropriate antimicrobial use. These included the clinical indication, antimicrob..