Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common abnormal heart rhythm that causes the heart to beat irregularly and often too fast. AF increases the risk of stroke and heart failure. AF primarily affects older adults and individuals with chronic conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, or obesity. Additional factors include congenital heart disease, and cardiomyopathy. AF can be treated by ablation or controlled using medication. The risk of stroke can be reduced using anti-coagulants.

This synthetic AF dataset comprises of 24.8k “patients” including demographics, co-morbidities, presenting symptoms and medical events during hospital stays, coded with ICD-10 and SNOMED-CT.

Using the Synthetic Data Vault package with a GAN synthesizer, a synthetic dataset was generated from real clinical data. The dataset includes demographic information and hospital admission details. The real data was pre-processed for correct datetime parsing and metadata was defined to capture schema structure, guiding the synthesizer in learning data distributions and relationships. The resulting synthetic dataset closely mirrors the statistical properties of the original, supporting privacy-preserving analysis and model training.

Geography: The West Midlands has a population of 6 million & includes a diverse ethnic & socio-economic mix. UHB is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England, providing direct acute services & specialist care across four hospital sites, with 2.2 million patient episodes per year, 2750 beds & > 120 ITU bed capacity. UHB runs a fully electronic healthcare record (PICS; Birmingham Systems), a shared primary & secondary care record (Your Care Connected) & a patient portal “My Health”.

Data set availability: Data access is available via the PIONEER Hub for projects which will benefit the public or patients. This can be by developing a new understanding of disease, by providing insights into how to improve care, or by developing new models, tools, treatments, or care processes. Data access can be provided to NHS, academic, commercial, policy and third sector organisations. Applications from SMEs are welcome. There is a single data access process, with public oversight provided by our public review committee, the Data Trust Committee. Contact pioneer@uhb.nhs.uk or visit www.pioneerdatahub.co.uk for more details.

Available supplementary data: Matched controls; ambulance and community data. Unstructured data (images). We can provide the dataset in OMOP and other common data models.

Available supplementary support: Analytics, model build, validation & refinement; A.I. support. Data partner support for ETL (extract, transform & load) processes. Bespoke and “off the shelf” Trusted Research Environment (TRE) build and run. Consultancy with clinical, patient & end-user and purchaser access/ support. Support for regulatory requirements. Cohort discovery. Data-driven trials and “fast screen” services to assess population size.