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Our impact

The Department of Biostatistics & Health Informatics has been a major force in the development of quantitative methodology as applied to mental health research. 

Working with our national and international collaborators, we have had growing impact on all areas of medicine, particularly through expertise in trials and software development. From pioneering statistical methodologies to leveraging cutting-edge health informatics tools, our research initiatives are at the forefront of driving positive change in the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses.

Utilising clinical data with Cogstack

CogStack is a healthcare application framework which implements new data mining techniques within NHS Trusts – specifically, the ability to search any clinical data source (unstructured and structured), and natural language processing (NLP) applications developed to automate information extraction of medical concepts. So far, over twelve million free text documents and over 250 million diagnostic results and reports have been processed within CogStack. The speed at which queries can be developed and results returned and refined is very powerful, for example allowing clinical trials to find and recruit patients who would otherwise have been difficult to locate.

Cogstack

Using smartphones and wearables to understand depression, MS and epilepsy

RADAR-CNS: Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Central Nervous System is a major research programme involving 22 organisations from across Europe and the US. The results of the six-year long RADAR-CNS programme have provided landmark insights into how technology in the form of wearables and smartphones could transform how we monitor and manage depression, multiple sclerosis (MS) and epilepsy.