The Easier-Cohort project
The EASIER-COHORT project aims to automatically create patient cohorts for epidemiological studies. It focuses on extracting information from patients’ electronic health records to identify populations requiring influenza screening, using natural language processing techniques.
The project will use the policy of routine influenza testing during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL) to compare the characteristics of patients who tested positive for influenza before and during the pandemic. This will help to identify populations at risk of influenza infection who have not previously been tested.
This project aims to reduce the costs and time involved in manually annotating medical records and to facilitate the creation of future cohorts, particularly with the implementation of the HCL health data warehouse. When applied to case detection, the project’s findings could help predict future pandemics.
Project leaders:
Angela BONIFATI
Angela Bonifati is Professor Emerita of Computer Science at the Lyon 1 Université and at the CNRS Liris research laboratory, where she heads the database group. She is also an Associate Professor at the Université de Waterloo in Canada and a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). Her current research interests focus on several aspects of data management, including graph databases, knowledge graphs, data integration and data science, as well as their multidisciplinary applications.
Philippe VANHEMS
Philippe Vanhems qualified as a doctor at the Faculty of Medicine in Nancy in 1992. He was appointed Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health in 2003 at Lyon 1 Université. He is currently Head of the Department of Epidemiology and Infection Control at the Lyon University Hospitals. He leads a research group on the epidemiology of infectious diseases, including vaccine projects, at the Centre international de recherche en infectiologie (équipe PHE3ID/CIRI). His main areas of research are the prevention and epidemiology of infectious diseases, including vaccine studies.
Marta NUNES
Marta Nunes has been Director of the Centre d’Excellence sur les Pathogènes Respiratoires (UCBL, HCL et CIRI) since September 2022. She is a professor at Lyon 1 Université and a visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. She completed her PhD at Weill Medical College, Cornell University. She undertook her postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Parasitology at the Pasteur Institute. In 2009, she moved to South Africa, where her research has focused on reducing morbidity and mortality among children under five, including the evaluation of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines in settings with a high burden of HIV, and on characterising the clinical and molecular epidemiology of viral respiratory pneumonia.
Andrea MAURI
Andrea Mauri is a Junior Professor (Junior Professorship) at Lyon 1 Université, affiliated with the LIRIS research laboratory. His research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Data Management. He is interested in investigating how to integrate the human perspective and computational methods into the design, development and deployment of data-intensive applications – with a particular focus on the healthcare sector – with the aim of making them efficient, high-performing and sensitive to people’s characteristics, needs and values.
Cécile CHAUVEL
Cécile Chauvel is a researcher in biostatistics and data science at the Centre d’Excellence sur les Pathogènes Respiratoires (UCBL, HCL et CIRI), established in 2022. Having trained in theoretical statistics and holding a PhD in biostatistics from Pierre and Marie Curie Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Sorbonne University), her professional career has spanned various organisations in both the private and public sectors. Her current work focuses on modelling epidemiological data in the field of acute respiratory infections, particularly to identify risk factors associated with these infections and to model epidemic dynamics.