Why the study?
Reliable clinical research in heart failure hinges on high-quality data, requiring tailored data quality assessment frameworks for retrospective datasets.
A novel data quality assessment framework adapted for heart failure datasets successfully improved data completeness, accuracy, and consistency, though demographic imbalances remained.
Improves HF dataset quality metrics; leaves open whether fairness gaps limit clinical or trial use.
Heart failure (HF) affects over 64 million people globally and poses complex diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. Reliable clinical research in HF hinges on high-quality data. This study presents a novel data quality assessment (DQA) framework tailored to retrospective HF datasets. It adapts the IEEE standard 2801-2022 criteria—originally for general medical data—to HF's clinical and multimodal structure and introduces a fairness-aware dimension to assess demographic representativeness. Applied to a real-world dataset of 6,039 patients and over 110,000 records across 11 clinical domains, the framework evaluates six dimensions: Completeness, Accuracy, Consistency, Compliance, Timeliness, and Fairness. Initial completeness was low <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(48.82 %)$</tex>, but improved to 61.04% after cleaning via outlier correction, imputation, and schema normalization. Accuracy and compliance reached 100%, and consistency improved to 99.61%. Fairness, measured via JensenShannon Similarity across age, sex, and BMI, remained at 87.35%, highlighting demographic imbalance remained unresolved by technical cleaning. This is the first standards-aligned, domain-adapted, and fairness-extended DQA pipeline for HF, producing a robust dataset suitable for machine learning and clinical decision support.
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Georgoula et al. (2025) studied this question.
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