Working with routine hospital data
We have worked with a number of other routine datasets recently, including hospital coding data to investigate the incidence of venous stroke, and an exploration of clinical factors associated with brain cancer
Intracranial venous thrombosis (ICVT) accounts for around 0.5% of all stroke cases. There have been no previously published studies of the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Edition (ICD-10) validation for the identification of ICVT admissions in adults. We undertook a study to validate and quantify the performance of the ICD-10 coding system for identifying cases of ICVT in adults and to derive an estimate of incidence. We found that the incidence of ICVT may be higher than previously thought.
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Urgent referral for suspected central nervous system (CNS) cancer is recommended, but little analysis of the referral criteria diagnostic performance has been conducted. The latest 2015 NICE guidance recommends direct brain imaging for patients with symptoms with positive predictive values (PPV) of 3 %, but further guidance is needed. We evaluated a large series of patients referred with suspected CNS cancer, and analysed the symptoms to determine which were most predictive of this final diagnosis. This work has also formed the basis for a regional service improvement project, including a direct to scan suspected CNS cancer pathway.
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