Bring Out Your Data

Recent healthcare legislation, financial pressures, and regulatory oversight have increased the need to create improved mechanisms for performance measurement, quality management tracking, and outcomes-based research. The Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) has established the National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) to support these requirements for a wide-range of customers including individual anesthesiologists, anesthesia practices, hospitals, and credentialing agencies. Concurrently, the availability of increased digital sources of healthcare data make it possible to capture massive quantities of data in a more efficient and cost-effective manner than ever before. With NACOR, AQI has established a user-friendly, automated process to effectively and efficiently collect a wide-range of anesthesia-related data directly from anesthesia practices. This review will examine the issues guiding the evolution of NACOR as well as some potential pitfalls in its growth and usage.

Similarity Searching of Medical Image Data in Distributed Systems

In this paper, the authors propose a method for medical image retrieval in distributed systems to facilitate telemedicine. The proposed framework can be used by a network of healthcare centers, where some can be remotely located, assisting in diagnosis without the necessary transfer of patients. Security and confidentiality issues of medical data are expected, which are handled at the local site following the procedures and protocols of each institution. To make the search more effective, the authors introduce a distributed index based on features that are extracted from each image. Considering network bandwidth limitations and other restrictions that are associated with handling medical data, the images are processed locally and a pointer is distributed in the network. For the distribution of this pointer, the authors propose a function that maps the pointer of each image to a node with similar contents.

Identifying Temporal Changes and Topics that Promote Growth Within Online Communities

In this paper the authors have extended the methodology for temporal analysis of online forums and applied the methodology to six online cancer forums (melanoma, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer). The goal was to develop, apply and improve methods that quantify the responsiveness of the interactions in online forums in order to identify the users and topics that promote use and usefulness of these online medical communities. The evolutional stages that gauge when a forum is expanding, contracting, or in a state of equilibrium were considered. The response function was thought to be an approximation of a discussion group’s utility to its members. By applying the evolutionary phase algorithm, it was determined that two out of six of the forums are in contracting phases, while four are in their largest growth phase. By analyzing the topics of the influential threads, the authors conclude that cancer treatment discussions as well as stage IV cancer discussions promote growth in the forums. It is observed that the discussion of treatment rather than diagnosis is important to help a cancer forum thrive.

A Framework for Multidimensional Real-Time Data Analysis

In this paper, the authors present a framework to support multidimensional analysis of real-time physiological data streams and clinical data. The clinical context for the case study demonstration is neonatal intensive care, focusing specifically on the detection of episodes of central apnoea, a clinically significant problem. The model accounts for the multidimensional and real-time nature of apnoea of prematurity and the associated clinical rules. The framework demonstration includes: 1) defining rules that quantify concurrent behaviours between multiple synchronous data streams and asynchronous data values; 2) designing UML models to define present practice event processing for episodes of apnoea; 3) translating the model in SPADE to enable the deployment within the real-time processing layer of the Artemis platform, which utilizes IBM’s InfoSphere Streams; 4) demonstrating knowledge discovery with simple and complex temporal abstractions of the data streams; and 5) presenting results for early detection of episodes of apnoea across multiple physiological data streams.

An Early Robot Architecture for Cancer Healing

Treating cancer tumors is a main goal of cancer research. The author of this paper identifies a new manner to treat cancer tumors more effectively using a recommended architecture of a nanorobot called CANBOT. It contains a number of nano-components: an actuator, temperature sensor, chemical sensor, and microcontroller. CANBOT starts its role by moving toward the tumor cells using the actuator. It senses the tumor cell by capturing its image and sensing its chemicals by the chemical sensor. When CANBOT distinguishes the tumor, it verifies the survival of the tumor cells by its temperature sensor. CANBOT increases the temperature of the tumor cell through the warmer. Sensing of the cancer chemicals starts over to detect the remaining existence of cancer cells. The suggested nanorobot injects the cell with the drug from a tiny tank throughout a nano pump with a small pine needle. A nano-microcontroller controls the mechanism of CANBOT formative the role of each one and the appropriate sequences. The position of the proposed nanorobot is simulated with reference to the position of the tumor using an analytical model. The conclusion is drawn that destroying the tumor requires instilling the robot into the cancer tumor directly for effective treatment.

Scalability of Piecewise Synonym Identification in Integration of SNOMED into the UMLS

Synonym identification during source terminology integration into the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a labor-intensive task needed for every new release of the source. The piecewise synonym (PWS) methodology was previously used for the integration of a small source. The goal of this paper is to determine whether the piecewise synonym methodology with two control parameters scales to a much larger terminology (a subset of SNOMED CT), the control parameters are necessary to make the methodology viable, and the control parameters lead to any loss of matching results. Additional methods for limiting the size of the dictionary used in the PWS generation methodology are used. The authors’ methodology discovered 41% of concepts not found by string matching. The necessity and effectiveness of the control parameters were confirmed. Furthermore, when comparing the results of experiments with and without control parameters, no matches were lost.

Information Therapy (Ix) Service and Patients’ Preference

To establish, encourage and support a successful Information Therapy service in a developing country, it is essential to identify the preferences of patients, their information needs and attitudes toward CHI and Ix. In this paper, the author examines the attitudes of patients receiving health information and information prescription in Iran. An exploratory survey with an open interview and structured questionnaire was conducted to gather data from patients of educational hospitals and clinics in Tabriz, Iran. Tabriz’s diverse dialects and literacy levels mimic a developing nation, ensuring that the findings are transferable to other developing countries. The study reveals that patients’ information needs are generally related to basic issues of health. The level of literacy impacts neither the demand for health information nor the patients’ preferred channel to receive CHI and information prescription. A localized approach, considering the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of a developing country like Iran and its limitation in using applications of information and communication technology, would make the Information Therapy and Consumer Health Information Services successful.

The Role of Information and Computer Technology for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Facial Expression Wonderland (FEW)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is one of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDDs). Significant deficits in the children with ASD include lack of social communication skills and cognitive dysfunction. This paper reviews and evaluates the influence of different kinds of Information and Computer Technology (ICT) applications that facilitate intervention and training for children with ASD. This paper also presents a novel design prototype, Facial Expression Wonderland (FEW), to train the children with ASD based on the progressive levels of training under a given background context. This prototype is designed to improve the ability of the ASD children in facial expression recognition.

Subspace Discovery for Disease Management

This paper identifies key subspaces for better disease management. Disease affects individuals differently based on features such as age, race, and gender. The authors use data mining methods to discover which key factors of a disease are more relevant for particular strata of the population using bin wise clustering. The authors use a case study on Metabolic Syndrome (MetS). MetS is a combination of abnormalities that occur in the body during the processing of food and nutrients. A number of definitions have been studied to classify MetS. No clear criterion exists that can generally fit into a single satisfactory protocol. This domain encompasses a variety of demographics in society, leading to an implication that different criteria may be appropriate for different demographic strata. The authors address this issue and identify the cross section of demographic strata and the disease characteristics that are critical for understanding the disease in that subset of the population. Findings in real world NHANESIII data support this hypothesis, thus the approach can be used by clinical scientists to narrow down specific demographic pools to further study impacts of key MetS characteristics.

Relevance of Mesh Dimension Optimization, Geometry Simplification and Discretization Accuracy in the Study of Mechanical Behaviour of Bare Metal Stents

In this paper, the authors propose a set of analyses on the deployment of coronary stents by using a nonlinear finite element method. The goal is to propose a convergence test able to select the appropriate mesh dimension and a methodology to perform the simplification of structures composed of cyclically repeated units to reduce the number of degrees of freedom and the analysis run time. A systematic study, based on the analysis of seven meshes for each model, was performed, gradually reducing the element dimension. In addition, geometric models were simplified considering symmetries; adequate boundary conditions were applied and verified based on the results obtained from the analysis of the whole model.