Barts Life Sciences CAP-AI diabetic foot project research information for patients

In this project we are interested in preventing diabetic foot disease. 1 in 10 patients with diabetes will get a foot ulcer but some of these will not-fully heal, recur, or become infected and may eventually require a lower limb amputation.

We know some factors that increase risk of developing diabetic foot – such as smoking, poor blood circulation and nerve damage in the foot. We want to find things in patients’ medical records- be it symptoms, other medical conditions, medical drug prescriptions, or other lifestyle information- which come up more (or less) often in patients diagnosed with diabetes, who go on to develop diabetic foot and complications from this. We can automatically extract clinical words from free-text patient notes to gather this data, but need access to some confidential notes to check the accuracy of this process.

*Patients can opt out of their data being used for research on the national NHS opt out page:

https://www.nhs.uk/your-nhs-data-matters/