Search results for "Health Informatics"
showing 10 items of 481 documents
Reframing health care through social media
2015
This teaching case presents the story of the Hospital Campus (HC) project and its effort to reframe health-care services for the elderly through the adoption of social media. In a world of global ageing, in which an increased number of elderly patients will be cared for by a shrinking number of workers, a primary challenge is how to use technology to provide better and more efficient services for the elderly. The HC campus project focuses on how to involve information technology-illiterate elderly patients and their social networks in the design and use of social media services to improve their quality of life. In describing the development of the project, we focus on the elderly patients’…
A practical framework for data management processes and their evaluation in population-based medical registries.
2013
We present a framework for data management processes in population-based medical registries. Existing guidelines lack the concreteness we deem necessary for them to be of practical use, especially concerning the establishment of new registries. Therefore, we propose adjustments and concretisations with regard to data quality, data privacy, data security and registry purposes.First, we separately elaborate on the issues to be included into the framework and present proposals for their improvements. Thereafter, we provide a framework for medical registries based on quasi-standard-operation procedures.The main result is a concise and scientifically based framework that tries to be both broad a…
Automated Creation of Expert Systems with the InteKRator Toolbox
2021
Expert systems have a long tradition in both medical informatics and artificial intelligence research. Traditionally, such systems are created by implementing knowledge provided by experts in a system that can be queried for answers. To automatically generate such knowledge directly from data, the lightweight InteKRator toolbox will be introduced here, which combines knowledge representation and machine learning approaches. The learned knowledge is represented in the form of rules with exceptions that can be inspected and that are easily comprehensible. An inference module allows for the efficient answering of queries, while at the same time offering the possibility of providing explanation…
Improving Efficacy of PubMed Clinical Queries for Retrieving Scientifically Strong Studies on Treatment
2006
The authors evaluated the retrieval power of PubMed "Clinical Queries," narrow search string, about therapy in comparison with a modified search string to avoid possible retrieval bias. PubMed search strategy was compared to a slightly modified string that included the Britannic English term "randomised." The authors tested the two strings joined onto each of four terms concerning topics of broad interest: hypertension, hepatitis, diabetes, and heart failure. In particular, precision was computed for not-indexed citations. The added word "randomised" improved total citation retrieval in any case. Total retrieval gain for not-indexed citations ranged from 11.1% to 21.4%. A significant number…
Causal brain-heart information transfer during visual emotional elicitation in healthy subjects: Preliminary evaluations and future perspectives
2017
Complex heartbeat dynamics is known to reflect subject's emotional state, thanks to numerous links to brain cortical and subcortical regions. Likewise, specific brain regions are deeply involved in vagally-mediated emotional processing and regulation. Nevertheless, although the brain-heart interplay has been studied during visual emotion elicitation, directional interactions have not been investigated so far. To fill this gap, in this study we investigate brain-heart dynamics during emotional elicitation in healthy subjects through measures of Granger causality (GC) between the two physiological systems. Data were gathered from 22 healthy volunteers who underwent pleasant/ unpleasant affect…
Compensating for instantaneous signal mixing in transfer entropy analysis of neurobiological time series
2013
The transfer entropy (TE) has recently emerged as a nonlinear model-free tool, framed in information theory, to detect directed interactions in coupled processes. Unfortunately, when applied to neurobiological time series TE is biased by signal cross-talk due to volume conduction. To compensate for this bias, in this study we introduce a modified TE measure which accounts for possible instantaneous effects between the analyzed time series. The new measure, denoted as compensated TE (cTE), is tested on simulated time series reproducing conditions typical of neuroscience applications, and on real magnetoencephalographic (MEG) multi-trial data measured during a visuo-tactile cognitive experime…
eHealth-Extended Care Coordination: Development of a Collaborative System for Inter-municipal Dementia Teams: A Research Project with a User-Centered…
2015
- In Norway, a health reform was recently adopted to improve continuity of care. Services that were carried out in hospitals were transferred to municipalities. Small and medium size municipalities have established inter-municipal cooperation to provide specialized services across borders. The research project eHealth-extended Care Coordination studied the inter-municipal cooperation for assessment of dementia, identifying a need for improved communication and coordination. This paper presents the development process of a collaborative information system for dementia assessment using a user-centered design approach. Mixed methods, such as observations, semi-structured interviews and questio…
Mental health service users' and professionals' relationship with games and gaming
2017
Background Games and elements of gamification can be utilized in mental healthcare to provide customized interventions for the service users. However, very little evidence exists as to what kind of experiences service users and professionals have towards games and gaming, and what their perceptions of the phenomenon are. This sort of information is needed to help professionals put game-based interventions actively into practice in mental health services. Research objectives The objective is to describe the experiences and perceptions of digital games and gaming from the perspectives of mental health service users and mental health professionals. Methods In this qualitative study, data consi…
Reliability Generalization Meta-Analysis of Internet Gaming Disorder Scale
2022
The objective of this study was to carry out a reliability generalization meta-analysis of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale (IGDS) to find out if it presents adequate values that justify its application in its four versions: original and abbreviated with dichotomous or ordinal response. A systematic review including 26 studies that apply this instrument from 2015 to June 2022 was conducted. For each version, a reliability generalization meta-analysis was performed with the random coefficients (RC) and varying coefficients (VC) model. Results showed reliability levels > 0.80 in the ordinal versions (IGDS9P and IGDS27P) and in the dichotomous 27-item version (IGDS27D), while the dichotom…
A non-parametric segmentation methodology for oral videocapillaroscopic images
2014
We aim to describe a new non-parametric methodology to support the clinician during the diagnostic process of oral videocapillaroscopy to evaluate peripheral microcirculation. Our methodology, mainly based on wavelet analysis and mathematical morphology to preprocess the images, segments them by minimizing the within-class luminosity variance of both capillaries and background. Experiments were carried out on a set of real microphotographs to validate this approach versus handmade segmentations provided by physicians. By using a leave-one-patient-out approach, we pointed out that our methodology is robust, according to precision-recall criteria (average precision and recall are equal to 0.9…