These datasets have been generated to accurately mirror
symptoms, diagnoses and treatments in genuine patients.
They are based on anonymised primary care data using
innovative methods to produce entirely artificial data
that doesn’t contain any original data from ‘real’
patients, further reducing risks to patient privacy.
Synthetic datasets like these are valuable in the
development and testing of machine learning and
artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms in medical
devices used for diagnosing diseases and monitoring and
improving health conditions.
CPRD Director Janet Valentine comments:
These datasets are designed to help researchers and
companies validate their innovative new AI and
medical devices. This development will support
bringing safe products to market sooner, enabling
patients to benefit from the latest technical
advances.
The datasets were produced by a collaboration between
the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD), MHRA
Medical Devices Division and researchers at Brunel
University.
The synthetic data generation methodology and the
cardiovascular dataset were funded by a grant from the
Regulators’
Pioneer Fund launched by The Department for
Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and
managed by Innovate UK. Creation of the COVID-19
synthetic dataset was funded by NHSX.
Indra Joshi, Director of AI at NHSX, said:
At NHSX we are committed to protecting patient
privacy whilst supporting the development of
cutting-edge technologies that could potentially help
the NHS and our patients. “Creating synthetic
datasets is a novel way to help train machine
learning algorithms on a rich and diverse set of data
whilst maintaining safety and protecting privacy.
The data generation and evaluation framework, as well
as the datasets, are owned by the MHRA. A detailed
technical description of the methodology used to
generate the synthetic datasets is available here.
For access to these datasets, please submit an application
form to enquiries@cprd.com
including ‘Synthetic data access request’ in the email
subject header. Applicants from organisations that are
not existing CPRD clients will also need to submit
a new client request
form.
