Earlier detection of dementia with Lewy bodies using natural language processing

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is possibly the second or third most common cause of dementia, but is often not detected early enough in clinical services. Using ‘natural language processing’ (text-mining) techniques, we will look for words and phrases around the time dementia is being investigated to see whether there might be ways to detect DLB at an earlier stage – if successful, this might be developed into a mechanism to prompt clinical staff to think about screening for this disorder.