Text mining for disease surveillance in veterinary clinical data: part two, training computers to identify features in clinical text.

In part two of this mini-series, we evaluate the range of machine-learning tools now available for application to veterinary clinical text-mining. These tools will be vital to automate extraction of information from large datasets of veterinary clinical narratives curated by projects such as the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) and VetCompass, where volumes of millions of records preclude reading records and the complexities of clinical notes limit usefulness of more "traditional" text-mining approaches. We discuss the application of various machine learning techniques ranging from simple models for identifying words and phrases with similar meanings to expand lexicons for keyword searching, to the use of more complex language models. Specifically, we describe the use of language models for record annotation, unsupervised approaches for identifying topics within large datasets, and discuss more recent developments in the area of generative models (such as ChatGPT). As these models become increasingly complex it is pertinent that researchers and clinicians work together to ensure that the outputs of these models are explainable in order to instill confidence in any conclusions drawn from them.

Temporal trends and factors associated with vaccination uptake in dogs and cats from 2016 to 2022 in the United Kingdom.

BACKGROUND: Vaccination of dogs and cats is considered a mainstay of preventive health, providing benefit to individual animals and the population. This study aimed to assess temporal trends in vaccination and factors associated with vaccination uptake in a large veterinary visiting population of UK cats and dogs. METHODS: The electronic health records (EHRs) of 712,266 dogs and 306,888 cats (voluntarily contributed by 201 veterinary practices) were used to determine the proportion that had record of any type of veterinary vaccination either within one-year or within three-years of attending a participating veterinary practice. Socioeconomic and animal factors were also assessed for association with vaccination uptake using multivariable mixed effects logistic regression models. RESULTS: The percentage of animals vaccinated within one-year of consultation declined across the years 2016 to 2022, from 76.58% (95% CI 74.82-78.33) to 69.04% (95% CI 68.02-70.07) in dogs, and 69.54% (95% CI 67.89-71.19) to 66.12% (95% CI 64.83-67.41) in cats. The proportion of animals that had a vaccination recorded within a three-year window of a consultation for dogs ranged from 81.36% (95% CI 79.74-82.99)to 84.42% (95% CI 83.31-85.54) in the period from 2016 to 2022; for cats, this measure increased from 73.90% (95% CI 72.24-75.56) in 2016 to 77.85% (95% CI 76.46-79.25) in 2022. Aging was associated with reduced odds of animals having a vaccination recorded within one-year and three-years. In both species the odds of vaccination reduced as the level of socioeconomic deprivation assigned to the animal's area of residence increased. CONCLUSION: The results provide a baseline that can be used as a reference to continue to track vaccination uptake in the cat and dog population. Temporal trends suggest time between vaccinations has increased in recent years. Strategies to encourage owners to vaccinate their animals should consider targeting areas of high deprivation.

Emerging Variants of Canine Enteric Coronavirus Associated with Outbreaks of Gastroenteric Disease.

A 2022 canine gastroenteritis outbreak in the United Kingdom was associated with circulation of a new canine enteric coronavirus closely related to a 2020 variant with an additional spike gene recombination. The variants are unrelated to canine enteric coronavirus-like viruses associated with human disease but represent a model for coronavirus population adaptation.

Cross-sectional United Kingdom surveys demonstrate that owners and veterinary professionals differ in their perceptions of preventive and treatment healthcare needs in ageing dogs.

Perceptions of dog owners and veterinary professionals (surgeons/nurses) can influence the preventive healthcare and treatment provided to dogs, especially at the senior life-stage, when chronic diseases become more common. This study compared perceptions of healthcare of dogs as they age between dog owners and veterinary professionals. Data from two online surveys (owners: N = 633, veterinary professionals: N = 305) examined perceived need for veterinary visits and vaccinations. In addition, 48 clinical signs were rated on perceived prevalence (whether owners' dogs had experienced them) and how urgently they should seek veterinary advice. Groups were compared using descriptive statistics and chi-square. Owners most often believed a 'healthy' senior dog (>7 years) should go to the vet once a year (47% owners vs. 25% veterinary professionals, p < 0.001), compared with veterinary professionals every 6 months (39 vs. 73%). A minority (14%) of owners would just take the dog 'if they got sick' but only 2% of veterinary professionals advised this, and 16% of owners of dogs of all ages had not had any contact with their veterinary practise in the previous year. Nearly all veterinary professionals (92%) believed that senior/geriatric dogs should receive yearly vaccinations. However, 28% of owners' dogs of all ages were not vaccinated in the previous year and, of these, 33% did not believe that older dogs need vaccinations. Only 10% of dogs considered 'old' by their owners had attended a senior wellness clinic or examination, despite 14% of practises offering them. The three most common clinical signs reported by owners were slowing down on walks (57%), dental tartar (53%) and being stiff on rising (50%). Owners perceived urgency to seek veterinary care was lower if they had experienced the clinical sign before. In the current study, dog owners and veterinary professionals differed in their opinions about the need for veterinary care, suggesting new educational initiatives, and more effective communication is required.

Setting clinically relevant thresholds for the notification of canine disease outbreaks to veterinary practitioners: an exploratory qualitative interview study.

Introduction: The Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) has developed mathematical models to analyse the veterinary practice and diagnostic laboratory data to detect genuine outbreaks of canine disease in the United Kingdom. There are, however, no validated methods available to establish the clinical relevance of these genuine statistical outbreaks before their formal investigation is conducted. This study aimed to gain an actionable understanding of a veterinary practitioner's preferences regarding which outbreak scenarios have a substantial impact on veterinary practice for six priority canine diseases in the United Kingdom. Methodology: An intensity sampling approach was followed to recruit veterinary practitioners according to their years of experience and the size of their practice. In-depth semi-structured and structured interviews were conducted to describe an outbreak notification and outbreak response thresholds for six canine endemic diseases, exotic diseases, and syndromes. These thresholds reflected participants' preferred balance between the levels of excess case incidence and predictive certainty of the detection system. Interviews were transcribed, and a thematic analysis was performed using NVivo 12. Results: Seven interviews were completed. The findings indicate higher preferred levels of predictive certainty for endemic diseases than for exotic diseases, ranging from 95 to 99% and 80 to 90%, respectively. The levels of excess case incidence were considered clinically relevant at values representing an increase of two to four times in the normal case incidence expectancy for endemic agents, such as parvovirus, and where they indicated a single case in the practice's catchment area for exotic diseases such as leishmaniosis and babesiosis. Conclusion: This study's innovative methodology uses veterinary practitioners' opinions to inform the selection of a notification threshold value in real-world applications of stochastic canine outbreak detection models. The clinically relevant thresholds derived from participants' needs will be used by SAVSNET to inform its outbreak detection system and to improve its response to canine disease outbreaks in the United Kingdom.

Text mining for disease surveillance in veterinary clinical data: part one, the language of veterinary clinical records and searching for words.

The development of natural language processing techniques for deriving useful information from unstructured clinical narratives is a fast-paced and rapidly evolving area of machine learning research. Large volumes of veterinary clinical narratives now exist curated by projects such as the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) and VetCompass, and the application of such techniques to these datasets is already (and will continue to) improve our understanding of disease and disease patterns within veterinary medicine. In part one of this two part article series, we discuss the importance of understanding the lexical structure of clinical records and discuss the use of basic tools for filtering records based on key words and more complex rule based pattern matching approaches. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches highlighting the on-going potential value in using these "traditional" approaches but ultimately recognizing that these approaches constrain how effectively information retrieval can be automated. This sets the scene for the introduction of machine-learning methodologies and the plethora of opportunities for automation of information extraction these present which is discussed in part two of the series.

Risk factors for tick attachment in companion animals in Great Britain: a spatiotemporal analysis covering 2014-2021.

BACKGROUND: Ticks are an important driver of veterinary health care, causing irritation and sometimes infection to their hosts. We explored epidemiological and geo-referenced data from > 7 million electronic health records (EHRs) from cats and dogs collected by the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) in Great Britain (GB) between 2014 and 2021 to assess the factors affecting tick attachment in an individual and at a spatiotemporal level. METHODS: EHRs in which ticks were mentioned were identified by text mining; domain experts confirmed those with ticks on the animal. Tick presence/absence records were overlaid with a spatiotemporal series of climate, environment, anthropogenic and host distribution factors to produce a spatiotemporal regression matrix. An ensemble machine learning spatiotemporal model was used to fine-tune hyperparameters for Random Forest, Gradient-boosted Trees and Generalized Linear Model regression algorithms, which were then used to produce a final ensemble meta-learner to predict the probability of tick attachment across GB at a monthly interval and averaged long-term through 2014-2021 at a spatial resolution of 1 km. Individual host factors associated with tick attachment were also assessed by conditional logistic regression on a matched case-control dataset. RESULTS: In total, 11,741 consultations were identified in which a tick was recorded. The frequency of tick records was low (0.16% EHRs), suggesting an underestimation of risk. That said, increased odds for tick attachment in cats and dogs were associated with younger adult ages, longer coat length, crossbreeds and unclassified breeds. In cats, males and entire animals had significantly increased odds of recorded tick attachment. The key variables controlling the spatiotemporal risk for tick attachment were climatic (precipitation and temperature) and vegetation type (Enhanced Vegetation Index). Suitable areas for tick attachment were predicted across GB, especially in forests and grassland areas, mainly during summer, particularly in June. CONCLUSIONS: Our results can inform targeted health messages to owners and veterinary practitioners, identifying those animals, seasons and areas of higher risk for tick attachment and allowing for more tailored prophylaxis to reduce tick burden, inappropriate parasiticide treatment and potentially TBDs in companion animals and humans. Sentinel networks like SAVSNET represent a novel complementary data source to improve our understanding of tick attachment risk for companion animals and as a proxy of risk to humans.

Evaluating ChatGPT text mining of clinical records for companion animal obesity monitoring.

BACKGROUND: Veterinary clinical narratives remain a largely untapped resource for addressing complex diseases. Here we compare the ability of a large language model (ChatGPT) and a previously developed regular expression (RegexT) to identify overweight body condition scores (BCS) in veterinary narratives pertaining to companion animals. METHODS: BCS values were extracted from 4415 anonymised clinical narratives using either RegexT or by appending the narrative to a prompt sent to ChatGPT, prompting the model to return the BCS information. Data were manually reviewed for comparison. RESULTS: The precision of RegexT was higher (100%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 94.81%-100%) than that of ChatGPT (89.3%, 95% CI 82.75%-93.64%). However, the recall of ChatGPT (100%, 95% CI 96.18%-100%) was considerably higher than that of RegexT (72.6%, 95% CI 63.92%-79.94%). LIMITATIONS: Prior anonymisation and subtle prompt engineering are needed to improve ChatGPT output. CONCLUSIONS: Large language models create diverse opportunities and, while complex, present an intuitive interface to information. However, they require careful implementation to avoid unpredictable errors.

A mixed-methods approach utilising electronic health records to examine antimicrobial prescription surrounding gastrointestinal clinical presentations in dogs and cats.

Introduction: Systemically-administered antimicrobials are often prescribed in canine and feline gastrointestinal clinical presentations. Responsible use of antimicrobials, particularly those considered Highest Priority Critically Important Antimicrobials (HPCIAs) is vital to tackle antimicrobial resistance. Although practice-level prescription guidance is available, further strategies based on a greater understanding of antimicrobial prescription at the population-level are needed. Here, we used a mixed-methods approach, harnessing veterinary electronic health records (EHRs) to characterise the use of antimicrobials in canine and feline gastrointestinal presentations, and to explore justification and reasoning around antimicrobial prescribing, particularly of HPCIAs. Methods: This observational study used 23,337 EHRs complemented with veterinary practitioner-completed questionnaires, from canine and feline gastrointestinal consultations from 225 volunteer UK veterinary practices between April 2014 and September 2018. Results: A total of 83.4% (95% confidence interval (CI) 82.6-84.3) gastrointestinal presentations were reported as mild, with non-haemorrhagic diarrhoea and vomiting the most frequently reported clinical signs. Systemically-administered antimicrobials occurred in 28.6% of canine (95% CI 26.9-30.3) and 22.4% of feline (95% CI 20.4-24.4) gastrointestinal consultations, with HPCIA prescription occurring more frequently in cats. Results of multivariable analysis showed the presence of non-haemorrhagic diarrhoea (canine Odds Ratio (OR) 2.1, 95% CI 1.9-2.3; feline OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.5-2.1), haemorrhagic diarrhoea (canine OR 4.2, 95% CI 3.8-4.7; feline OR 3.1, 95% CI 2.4-3.8), and moderate/severe presentations (canine OR 1.9, 95% CI 1.7-2.8; feline OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.7-2.5) were positively associated with receiving a systemically-administered antimicrobial. Thematic analysis of clinical narrative content of 516 gastrointestinal consultations where HPCIAs were prescribed allowed the identification of ten factors underpinning reasoning or decision-making for HPCIA prescription: perceived animal/owner compliance; owner's expectations; perceived risk of infection; clinical signs; recent clinical history; perceived positive previous response to antimicrobial therapy; geriatric patients and euthanasia; concomitant conditions; diagnostic testing and the behavioral trend to trial antimicrobial therapy empirically in gastrointestinal cases. No explicit justification for HPCIA prescription was recorded in 77% of cases. Discussion: Improving recorded justification represents a clear target for stewardship programmes. By utilising a complementary mixed-methods approach to EHRs, this study unlocks previously untapped data recorded within EHRs. These results can help inform targeted interventions, contributing towards enhanced antimicrobial stewardship.

Stakeholder opinion-led study to identify canine priority diseases for surveillance and control in the UK.

BACKGROUND: Many pathogens cause disease in dogs; however, meaningful surveillance in small companion animals is often only possible for the most impactful diseases. We describe the first stakeholder opinion-led approach to identify which canine infectious diseases should be prioritised for inclusion in surveillance and control strategies in the UK. METHODS: Participants were identified through a stakeholder analysis. A multicriteria decision analysis was undertaken to establish and weight epidemiological criteria for evaluating diseases, and a Delphi technique was employed to achieve a consensus among participants on the top-priority canine diseases. RESULTS: Nineteen stakeholders from multiple backgrounds participated in this study. Leptospirosis and parvovirus were identified as the top two endemic diseases of concern, while leishmaniosis and babesiosis were the top two exotic diseases. Respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases were identified as the top two syndromes of concern. LIMITATIONS: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of participants was reduced. Despite this, a representative multidisciplinary sample of relevant stakeholders contributed to the present study. CONCLUSIONS: Findings from this study are being used to inform the development of a future UK-wide epidemic response strategy. This methodology could provide a blueprint for other countries.

Dogs with cropped ears in the UK: A population-based study using electronic health records.

BACKGROUND: Ear cropping for cosmetic purposes was made illegal in the UK in 2006. Despite this, a lack of import regulations and celebrity and media influences mean cropped dogs are increasingly reported. METHODS: The demographics, temporal trends and patient-level associated factors for dogs with cropped ears were evaluated in a large sentinel population of dogs visiting UK veterinary practices. RESULTS: A total of 132 dogs with cropped ears were identified, with rates peaking in 2021. In 84 cases (63.6%), there was evidence of importation, most commonly from countries where cropping is also illegal, including Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, Spain, Poland and Ireland. American Bulldogs, Dobermanns, Italian Mastiffs (Cane Corso), Bulldogs and Mastiffs were all significantly overrepresented. Affected dogs were more likely to be unneutered (odds ratio 11.04, 95% confidence interval 5.84-20.90). LIMITATIONS: The study likely underestimates true levels of ear cropping. Identified cases are from a sentinel network of veterinary practices, and as such may not be representative of the wider UK population. CONCLUSION: These data suggest a need to educate owners and veterinary surgeons about the welfare and legal implications of ear cropping. The data presented can inform future targeted policies in veterinary practices and at a governmental level.

Seasonality and other risk factors for fleas infestations in domestic dogs and cats.

Fleas in the genus Ctenocephalides are the most clinically important parasitic arthropods of dogs and cats worldwide yet risk factors that might increase the risk of infestation in small animals remains unclear. Here we developed a supervised text mining approach analysing key aspects of flea epidemiology using electronic health records from domestic cats and dogs seen at a sentinel network of 191 voluntary veterinary practices across Great Britain between March 2014 and July 2020. Our methods identified fleas as likely to have been present during 22,276 of 1,902,016 cat consultations (1.17%) and 12,168 of 4,844,850 dog consultations (0.25%). Multivariable logistic regression modelling found that animals originating from areas of least deprivation were associated with 50% reductions in odds of veterinary-recorded flea infestation compared to the most deprived regions in England. Age of the animal was significantly associated with flea presentation in both cats and dogs, with cases peaking before animals reached 12 months. Cases were recorded through each study years, peaking between July and October, with fluctuations between each year. Our findings can be used towards healthcare messaging for veterinary practitioners and owners.

Calicivirus Infection in Cats.

Feline calicivirus (FCV) is a common pathogen in domestic cats that is highly contagious, resistant to many disinfectants and demonstrates a high genetic variability. FCV infection can lead to serious or even fatal diseases. In this review, the European Advisory Board on Cat Diseases (ABCD), a scientifically independent board of experts in feline medicine from 11 European countries, presents the current knowledge of FCV infection and fills gaps with expert opinions. FCV infections are particularly problematic in multicat environments. FCV-infected cats often show painful erosions in the mouth and mild upper respiratory disease and, particularly in kittens, even fatal pneumonia. However, infection can be associated with chronic gingivostomatitis. Rarely, highly virulent FCV variants can induce severe systemic disease with epizootic spread and high mortality. FCV can best be detected by reverse-transcriptase PCR. However, a negative result does not rule out FCV infection and healthy cats can test positive. All cats should be vaccinated against FCV (core vaccine); however, vaccination protects cats from disease but not from infection. Considering the high variability of FCV, changing to different vaccine strain(s) may be of benefit if disease occurs in fully vaccinated cats. Infection-induced immunity is not life-long and does not protect against all strains; therefore, vaccination of cats that have recovered from caliciviral disease is recommended.

Surveillance of heat-related illness in small animals presenting to veterinary practices in the UK between 2013 and 2018.

Background: Heat-related illness (HRI) can affect all companion animals and is likely to become more common as global temperatures rise. The misconception that HRI is primarily a result of dogs being trapped in hot cars, highlights a lack of awareness of HRI risk factors within the UK companion animal population. Aim: This project aimed to review all species of small animal presentations of HRI to UK veterinary practices participating in the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET), describe the inciting triggers and seasonality of HRI events, and review the clinical grade of canine patients presenting with HRI. Methods: Electronic consultation records were submitted by volunteer veterinary practices across the UK to SAVSNET. Cases were defined as animals presented for consultation with strong evidence of current, or recent heat induced illness during the study period (2013-2018). Results: The HRI cases included 146 dogs, 16 cats, 8 guinea pigs, 3 rabbits and 1 ferret. Of the 118 HRI cases with a recorded trigger, exercise was the primary trigger for dogs presenting (73.5%); 7 (6.9%) canine HRI events followed vehicular confinement. Environmental HRI was recorded as a trigger for the remaining dogs (19.6%), and for all cats, guinea pigs, rabbits and the ferret. Brachycephalic breeds comprised 21.2% of canine HRI cases, and all rabbits were brachycephalic breeds. Dogs with HRI were presented between April and October, with 42.5% during July, typically the UK's hottest month of the year. Cats with HRI were presented between May and September, with 75.0% during June and July. The smaller companion species-ferrets, rabbits and guinea pigs-were presented during the UK's summer months June to August. Conclusion: This study highlights the risk of HRI to all pet animals during the UK's warmer summer months (June to August). The findings support previous claims that exercise is the most common trigger of HRI in dogs, while environmental HRI (a hot ambient temperature) accounted for all HRI events in cats, rabbits, guinea pigs, and ferrets. Both brachycephalic dogs and rabbits were overrepresented, adding further evidence that owners of these animals should be particularly vigilant for HRI during hot weather.

Using electronic health records to explore negotiations around euthanasia decision making for dogs and cats in the UK.

BACKGROUND: End-of-life decision making for animals happens daily in veterinary practice. However, access to such discussions as they happen is difficult, in view of the highly emotional circumstances of end-of-life consultations. Despite the expanding literature on euthanasia, few studies have explored the circumstances of euthanasia disagreement or delay. METHODS: To explore euthanasia discussions in veterinary practice, consultations recorded in electronic health records in a UK veterinary surveillance database (SAVSNET) were examined. From a sample of 2000 identified consultations, 69 canine and 76 feline consultations were purposively sampled for detailed thematic analysis. Specifically, consultations were selected if they involved a decision to delay euthanasia, including disagreement about the timing of euthanasia. RESULTS: Reasons identified for euthanasia refusal or delay included client-related factors (e.g., allowing other family members to say goodbye, differing opinions on the quality of life) and veterinary surgeon-related factors (eg, the wish to carry out further investigations or to try a new treatment). In the instance of refusal or delay, palliative treatment was commonly provided to preserve animal welfare. CONCLUSION: This study illustrates some of the processes used to negotiate end-of-life decision making in dogs and cats. Its findings shed light on the importance of palliative care in providing owners with time to decide.

Do socioeconomic factors impact management of suspected canine multicentric lymphoma in UK first opinion practice?

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to describe the management of cases of suspected and confirmed canine multicentric lymphoma (ML) in first opinion practice (FOP) and investigate whether socioeconomic factors are associated with initial management. METHODS: Clinical narratives from electronic health records collected by the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) were searched to identify dogs with peripheral lymphadenomegaly in which ML was the major differential. Cases were grouped as either ML confirmed (ML-C) or ML suspected but not confirmed (ML-S). Associations between initial management and socioeconomic factors were assessed via multivariable logistic regression. RESULTS: Two hundred and sixty-four cases with ML-C and 410 with ML-S were identified. There was an increased probability that owners of ML-C cases resided in less deprived areas. Moreover, a diagnosis was made more commonly in insured dogs. Only insured pets were more likely to be treated with chemotherapy following diagnosis. The majority of dogs in both groups were treated with corticosteroids alone (ML-S, n = 256/410; ML-C, n = 123/264). A small minority were referred (n = 30/674). CONCLUSION: Socioeconomic inequalities appear to be associated with the diagnosis and management of dogs with suspected or confirmed ML in FOP. Most dogs with suspected multicentric lymphoma (in the UK) are managed in FOP (n = 644/674). Consequently, expanding the knowledge base relevant to this setting offers an opportunity to improve the management of canine lymphoma.

Using topic modelling for unsupervised annotation of electronic health records to identify an outbreak of disease in UK dogs.

A key goal of disease surveillance is to identify outbreaks of known or novel diseases in a timely manner. Such an outbreak occurred in the UK associated with acute vomiting in dogs between December 2019 and March 2020. We tracked this outbreak using the clinical free text component of anonymised electronic health records (EHRs) collected from a sentinel network of participating veterinary practices. We sourced the free text (narrative) component of each EHR supplemented with one of 10 practitioner-derived main presenting complaints (MPCs), with the 'gastroenteric' MPC identifying cases involved in the disease outbreak. Such clinician-derived annotation systems can suffer from poor compliance requiring retrospective, often manual, coding, thereby limiting real-time usability, especially where an outbreak of a novel disease might not present clinically as a currently recognised syndrome or MPC. Here, we investigate the use of an unsupervised method of EHR annotation using latent Dirichlet allocation topic-modelling to identify topics inherent within the clinical narrative component of EHRs. The model comprised 30 topics which were used to annotate EHRs spanning the natural disease outbreak and investigate whether any given topic might mirror the outbreak time-course. Narratives were annotated using the Gensim Library LdaModel module for the topic best representing the text within them. Counts for narratives labelled with one of the topics significantly matched the disease outbreak based on the practitioner-derived 'gastroenteric' MPC (Spearman correlation 0.978); no other topics showed a similar time course. Using artificially injected outbreaks, it was possible to see other topics that would match other MPCs including respiratory disease. The underlying topics were readily evaluated using simple word-cloud representations and using a freely available package (LDAVis) providing rapid insight into the clinical basis of each topic. This work clearly shows that unsupervised record annotation using topic modelling linked to simple text visualisations can provide an easily interrogable method to identify and characterise outbreaks and other anomalies of known and previously un-characterised diseases based on changes in clinical narratives.

Temporospatial distribution and country of origin of canine transmissible venereal tumours in the UK.

BACKGROUND: Transmissable venereal tumour (TVT) is a tumour transplanted by physical contact between dogs. Lesions typically affect the genitalia. TVT is not considered enzootic in the United Kingdom (UK), with cases seen in imported dogs. We sought to determine the patient characteristics, temporal and spatial distribution and country of origin of affected dogs in the UK. METHODS: Electronic pathology records (EPRs) from four UK veterinary diagnostic laboratories collected between 2010 and 2019 were searched for the terms 'venereal' or 'TVT'. Reports were reviewed for statements confirming a TVT and descriptive statistics collated. RESULTS: Of 182 EPRs matching the search terms, a diagnosis of TVT was confirmed in 71. Country of origin was noted in 36 cases (50.7%) with Romania being the most common (n = 29). Cases were reported in each UK constituent country, with the majority being in England (64, 90.1%). The incidence of TVT diagnosis increased over the last decade (z = 2.78, p = 0.005). CONCLUSION: The incidence of TVT diagnosed in the UK is increasing. The majority of cases were known to have been imported. Autochthonous transmission cannot be excluded due to study design. Vets are encouraged to carefully examine the genitalia of dogs imported to the UK from countries with enzootic TVT.

A text-mining based analysis of 100,000 tumours affecting dogs and cats in the United Kingdom.

Cancer is a major reason for veterinary consultation, especially in companion animals. Cancer surveillance plays a key role in prevention but opportunities for such surveillance in companion animals are limited by the lack of suitable veterinary population health infrastructures. In this paper we describe a pathology-based animal tumour registry (PTR) developed within the Small Animal Veterinary Surveillance Network (SAVSNET) built from electronic pathology records (EPR) submitted to this network. From an original collection of 180232 free text (non-structured) EPRs reported between April 2018 and June 2019, we used specific text-mining methodologies to identify 109895 neoplasias. These data were normalized to describe both the tumour (type and location) and the animal (breed, neutering status and veterinary practice postcode). The resulting PTR, the largest of its kind for companion animals to date, is an important research resource being able to facilitate a wide array of research in areas including surveillance, clinical decision making and comparative cancer biology.