[HN Gopher] Research team digitizes more than 100 years of Canad...
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       Research team digitizes more than 100 years of Canadian infectious
       disease data
        
       Author : XzetaU8
       Score  : 150 points
       Date   : 2025-12-19 06:24 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (news.mcmaster.ca)
 (TXT) w3m dump (news.mcmaster.ca)
        
       | toomuchtodo wrote:
       | https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1...
       | 
       | https://canmod.net/digitization/
        
         | water-your-self wrote:
         | Second link is the database
        
       | akudha wrote:
       | What useful tools can be made from such a dataset?
       | 
       | The other day I came across this pricing dataset https://oria-
       | data.trillianthealth.com/ (this is just for pricing though)
       | 
       | There must be some gem datasets like these - I wish I had the
       | time (and expertise) to explore
        
       | tim-tday wrote:
       | Do you want computer viruses? Because that's how you get computer
       | viruses.
        
       | rumplecat wrote:
       | Interesting that they manually transcribed the data to Excel. It
       | would also be interesting to know how they mapped from the excel
       | files to the final dataset. I wonder if LLMs could do the switch
       | from scans to structured data more efficiently, and how much of a
       | hit to accuracy would be involved.
        
       | arjie wrote:
       | This is very cool. I wonder if in their process they stored raw
       | scans as well or if the transcriptions were from the source
       | material directly. The former would be fantastic if possible
       | since perhaps present or future OCR technology could be used to
       | cross-reference for both improving the dataset for human error
       | but also improving OCR as a labeled dataset.
       | 
       | It also seems like a huge effort to try to come up with a data
       | model here for the normalized dataset. They mentioned it in the
       | article as an aside but it seems like a pretty tough task.
       | 
       | And my last thought is perhaps there is a sadness in our loss of
       | population level insight into health with the advent of modern
       | privacy concerns. A big source for genomics data is the UK
       | Biobank which ties all sorts of information to a genome. I'm sure
       | that someone could come up with dangers that this presents but
       | it's been a gift to so many researchers over time, and to so many
       | people who suffer from genetic disease. I hope that in time
       | people will be willing to volunteer sufficient information to be
       | able to do population-level science, even knowing the dangers
       | inherent.
       | 
       | If you're in the US, All of US accepts participation and I found
       | that doing so was quite easy. They will give you all the scary
       | warnings, which are good to consider but I hope many will find it
       | worthwhile even knowing the risks.
        
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       (page generated 2025-12-25 23:01 UTC)