The BHF CRC Research Development Fund has part funded the development of the National Echocardiographic Database of the United Kingdom (NED-UK). 

The British Society for Echocardiography (BSE) NED-UK project aims to develop a toolkit for the extraction and anonymization of clinical echocardiographic report data, demonstrate its feasibility, and test its functionality through a pilot study to identify associations between echocardiographic parameters and time to valve surgery.  

Prof. David Oxborough, co-chair of the NED-UK working group, remarked that ‘this project is also supported by the BSE and in conjunction with BHF will ultimately allow us to access and utilise the hundreds of thousands of echocardiograms that are performed routinely across the UK. We are extremely excited by this 1st phase of the project and will be seeking further support to take it from a single centre, feasibility to a national multi-centre endeavour’.  

The project’s impact lies in the creation of a large and diverse database that would provide significant insight into the prognostic value of echocardiography and disease progression in a diverse population, and enable multi-disciplinary collaboration. The pilot data obtained by this project will be used to apply for larger funding to deploy the approach across multiple centres across the UK, and the project will used as evidence to support applications to link the echocardiographic data to wider patient data.