bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Computational study of the self-assembly of two different cell populations in contact with a biomaterial
Authors: Robu Andreea  , Stoicu-Tivadar Lacramioara  , Robu Nicolae  , Neagu Adrian
Published: February 2025

The organisation of a heterotypic multicellular system is intensely studied in developmental biology, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.To address this problem, we have created a computational model of a biological system made of two cell populations of various cohesivities, and simulated its evolution on the surface of biomaterials of different adhesivities. To this end, it was necessary to extend our SIMMMC application with algorithms that treat two cell types. We have observed, in accordance with experiments that, depending on the strength of cell-substrate adhesion, different structures emerge by the self-assembly of the two cell populations. The agreement with experimental results validates the extended version of the SIMMMC application, suggesting that this tool might offer useful insights for tissue engineers.
A mobile application supporting outpatient treatment and follow-up
Authors: Buzzacchino Serena  , Lanzola Giordano  , Bossi Paolo  , Licitra Lisa  , Quaglini Silvana
Published: February 2025

An increasing prevalence of chronic diseases is observed, among which cancer is now included because of its survival rates. That trend requires new ways of supporting outpatients and improving their compliance to treatments. This paper introduces HeNeA, a mobile application designed to support patients affected by Head and Neck cancer during their treatments. The application leverages on the mHealth features described in the literature and has been reviewed by a small set of patients during its development. Further evaluation is expected to occur when it will be offered to every eligible patient discharged from the Head and Neck division of a major Italian cancer centre.
Encapsulation for Smart Textile Electronics – Humidity and Temperature Sensor
Authors: Larsson Andreas  , Tran Thanh-Nam  , Aasmundtveit Knut E.  , Seeberg Trine M.
Published: February 2025

A combined humidity and temperature sensor was packaged by vacuum casting onto three different types of textiles; cotton, nylon and a waterproof fabric. This was done in order to integrate the sensor in a jacket in a soft and reliable way without changing the sensor performance. A membrane was custom made and integrated into the device to protect the sensor from the environment. The packaged sensors performance was characterized in a climate chamber were the relative humidity and temperature ranged from 25 % to 95 % and −10 °C to 75 °C respectively. The packaged sensors showed insignificant to limited performance degradation.
Opportunities and Limitations in Using Google Glass to Assist Drug Dispensing
Authors: Ehrler Frederic  , Diener Raphael  , Lovis Christian
Published: February 2025

The administration of intravenous drugs is a significant source of medical errors. Protocol based care are have been demonstrated to be an efficient way to favor best practices and to avoid simple errors such as those related to expiration date, hygiene regulation among other. The recent availability of the Google Glass, a hands free wearable device offers new opportunities to access care protocols at patients' bedside. In this article, we present a prototype application for displaying care protocols developed through a user centered design. The software enables the navigation through the different steps of care protocols and their validation using barcodes. Three interactions paradigms, tactile, vocal and by eye blink are proposed in order to provide hands free manipulation when necessary. The realization of a concrete project revealed some limitations that should be taken in account in order to ensure the proper behavior of the tool. If no formal evaluation has been performed, the first feedbacks are very positive and encourage us to go forward and test the tool in real care situations.
Personalized Decision Support System Based on Clinical Practice Guidelines
Authors: Douali Nassim  , De Roo Jos  , Sweetman Pauline  , Papageorgiou Elpiniki I.  , Dollon Jullien  , Jaulent Marie-Christine
Published: February 2025

Personalized medicine is a broad and rapidly advancing field of health care that is informed by each person's unique clinical, genetic, genomic, and environmental information. Health care that embraces personalized medicine is an integrated, coordinated, evidence based approach to individualizing patient care across the continuum. It is very important to make the right treatment decision but before that to obtain a good diagnosis. There are several clinical forms of disease whose symptoms vary depending on the age and etiology. In this study, we investigated and evaluated a model framework, for personalized diagnostic decisions, based on Case Based Fuzzy Cognitive Map (CBFCM, a cognitive process applying the main features of fuzzy logic and neural processors to situations involving imprecision and uncertain descriptions, in a similar way to intuitive human reasoning. We explored the use of this method for modelling clinical practice guidelines.
The Emergency Data Set for the German Electronic Health Card – Which Benefits Can Be Expected?
Authors: Born Judith  , Albert Jürgen  , Butz Norbert  , Loos Stefan  , Schenkel Johannes  , Gipp Christoph  , Juhra Christian
Published: February 2025

Background: In order to improve access to pre-existing patient information in case of emergency, the German Electronic Health Card (EHC) is supposed to hold emergency data. As a basis, the German Medical Association developed an emergency data set, which provides the possibility to store information on prior diagnoses, medications, allergies and other emergency-relevant information.
An Approach for Software-Driven and Standard-Based Support of Cross-Enterprise Tumor Boards
Authors: Mangesius Patrick  , Fischer Bernd  , Schabetsberger Thomas
Published: February 2025

Introduction: For tumor boards, the networking of different medical disciplines' expertise continues to gain importance. However, interdisciplinary tumor boards spread across several institutions are rarely supported by information technology tools today. The aim of this paper is to point out an approach for a tumor board management system prototype.
Towards Lifetime Electronic Health Record Implementation
Authors: Gand Kai  , Richter Peggy  , Esswein Werner
Published: February 2025

Integrated care concepts can help to diminish demographic challenges. Hereof, the use of eHealth, esp. overarching electronic health records, is recognized as an efficient approach. The article aims at rigorously defining the concept of lifetime electronic health records (LEHRs) and the identification of core factors that need to be fulfilled in order to implement such. A literature review was conducted. Existing definitions were identified and relevant factors were categorized. The derived assessment categories are demonstrated by a case study on Germany. Seven dimensions to differentiate types of electronic health records were found. The analysis revealed, that culture, regulation, informational self-determination, incentives, compliance, ICT infrastructure and standards are important preconditions to successfully implement LEHRs. The article paves the way for LEHR implementation and therewith for integrated care. Besides the expected benefits of LEHRs, there are a number of ethical, legal and social concerns, which need to be balanced.
Semi-Automated Evaluation of Biomedical Ontologies for the Biobanking Domain Based on Competency Questions
Authors: Hofer Philipp  , Neururer Sabrina  , Hauffe Helga  , Insam Thomas  , Zeilner Anette  , Göbel Georg
Published: February 2025

Background: Biosample collections and biobank information systems have become a key enabler for medical research. Therefore it is important to identify potentially relevant ontologies to semantically enrich information related to the biobanking domain.
Assessing Greek Public Hospitals' Websites
Authors: Tsirintani Maria  , Binioris Spyros
Published: February 2025

Following a previous (2011) survey, this study assesses the web pages of Greek public hospitals according to specific criteria, which are included in the same web page evaluation model. Our purpose is to demonstrate the evolution of hospitals' web pages and document e-health applications trends. Using descriptive methods we found that public hospitals have made significant steps towards establishing and improving their web presence but there is still a lot of work that needs to be carried out in order to take advantage of the benefits of new technologies in the e-health ecosystem.
Proactive Support of Internet Browsing when Searching for Relevant Health Information
Authors: Rurik Clas  , Zowalla Richard  , Wiesner Martin  , Pfeifer Daniel
Published: February 2025

Many people use the Internet as one of the primary sources of health information. This is due to the high volume and easy access of freely available information regarding diseases, diagnoses and treatments. However, users may find it difficult to retrieve information which is easily understandable and does not require a deep medical background. In this paper, we present a new kind of Web browser add-on, in order to proactively support users when searching for relevant health information. Our add-on not only visualizes the understandability of displayed medical text but also provides further recommendations of Web pages which hold similar content but are potentially easier to comprehend.
HL7 Middleware Framework for Laboratory Notifications for Notifiable Diseases
Authors: Adnan Mehnaz  , Peterkin Donald  , McLaughlin Aaron  , Hill Nicholas
Published: February 2025

LabSurv is an electronic notification system developed to support laboratories to directly notify the results of notifiable disease testing to public health services in New Zealand. A direct laboratory notification middleware framework was developed to manage the information flow between laboratories and public health services. The framework uses an HL7 messaging standard to receive the laboratory results and windows services to integrate the results with the cases of notifiable diseases within a national electronic surveillance system. This paper presents the system design and implementation details of direct laboratory notification system in LabSurv. It presents the HL7 messages structure implemented in the system. Finally, the performance of the system based on implemented framework is analysed and presented to evaluate the efficiency of our design.
The Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) for Adults with Severe Communication Impairments: Findings of Pilot Research
Authors: Hemsley Bronwyn  , Georgiou Andrew  , Balandin Susan  , Carter Rob  , Hill Sophie  , Higgins Isabel  , Van Vliet Paulette  , McCarthy Shaun
Published: February 2025

To date, there is little information in the literature to guide the provision of supports for using the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record (PCEHR) in populations with severe communication impairments associated with a range of disabilities. In this paper we will (a) outline the rationale for use of PCEHR in these populations by providing an overview of relevant research to date, and (b) present results of three integrated pilot studies aiming to investigate the barriers to and facilitators for PCEHR use by people with severe communication impairments and their service providers. Finally, we will present directions for future research on use of PCEHR by people with severe communication impairments.
An Improved Patient-Specific Mortality Risk Prediction in ICU in a Random Forest Classification Framework
Authors: Ghose Soumya  , Mitra Jhimli  , Khanna Sankalp  , Dowling Jason
Published: February 2025

Dynamic and automatic patient specific prediction of the risk associated with ICU mortality may facilitate timely and appropriate intervention of health professionals in hospitals. In this work, patient information and time series measurements of vital signs and laboratory results from the first 48 hours of ICU stays of 4000 adult patients from a publicly available dataset are used to design and validate a mortality prediction system. An ensemble of decision trees are used to simultaneously predict and associate a risk score against each patient in a k-fold validation framework. Risk assessment prediction accuracy of 87% is achieved with our model and the results show significant improvement over a baseline algorithm of SAPS-I that is commonly used for mortality prediction in ICU. The performance of our model is further compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms evaluated on the same dataset.
Automatic Detection of Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue Infections from Primary Care Electronic Medical Records
Authors: Gu Yulong  , Kennelly John  , Warren Jim  , Nathani Pritesh  , Boyce Tai
Published: February 2025

Introduction: Skin and subcutaneous tissue infections (SSTI) are common conditions that cause avoidable hospitalisation in New Zealand. As part of a program to improve the management of SSTI in primary care, electronic medical records (EMR) of four Auckland general practices were analysed to identify SSTI occurrences in the last three years.
Techno-Anthropologists as Change Agents: A case in health informatics
Authors: Petersen Lone Stub
Published: February 2025

Studying technology will often involve studying change – or in the perspective of this chapter should involve not just studying but also actively being involved with change. Your presence and the questions you ask shape the way people think and act and on the other hand their responses and your study of practice change the researchers perspective. For Techno-Anthropologist, this means that asking in specific ways about technology and having a focus on technology in the data collection and fieldwork will (should) influence what they see, the data they collect and their analysis – and also the way the informants think and the way people talk about practice and technology. The Techno-Anthropological researcher should be aware and actively use the potential for change in the empirical study of technology. In this chapter I exemplify and examine how and why change can be embraced and seen as an integral part of Techno-Anthropological studies in Health Informatics and beyond. This statement is supported through reflections on empirical examples, qualitative methods, and ethical and philosophical considerations on research and change. The chapter concludes that Techno-Anthropologists should actively consider and engage in the potential for change of the empirical studies of technology.
Uncovering Everyday Rhythms and Patterns: Food tracking and new forms of visibility and temporality in health care
Authors: Ruckenstein Minna
Published: February 2025

This chapter demonstrates how ethnographically-oriented research on emergent technologies, in this case self-tracking technologies, adds to Techno-Anthropology's aims of understanding techno-engagements and solving problems that deal with human-technology relations within and beyond health informatics. Everyday techno-relations have been a long-standing research interest in anthropology, underlining the necessity of empirical engagement with the ways in which people and technologies co-construct their daily conditions. By focusing on the uses of a food tracking application, MealLogger, designed for photographing meals and visualizing eating rhythms to share with health care professionals, the chapter details how personal data streams support and challenge health care practices. The interviewed professionals, from doctors to nutritionists, have used food tracking for treating patients with eating disorders, weight problems, and mental health issues. In general terms, self-tracking advances the practices of visually and temporally documenting, retrieving, communicating, and understanding physical and mental processes and, by doing so, it offers a new kind of visual mediation. The professionals point out how a visual food journal opens a window onto everyday life, bypassing customary ways of seeing and treating patients, thereby highlighting how self-tracking practices can aid in escaping the clinical gaze by promoting a new kind of communication through visualization and narration. Health care professionals are also, however, acutely aware of the barriers to adopting self-tracking practices as part of existing patient care. The health care system is neither used to, nor comfortable with, personal data that originates outside the system; it is not seen as evidence and its institutional position remains insecure.
A Novel Approach to Teach Medical Informatics
Authors: Holm Jürgen  , Bürkle Thomas  , Gasenzer Rolf  , von Kaenel François  , Nüssli Stephan  , Bignens Serge  , Kim Sang Il  , Lehmann Michael
Published: February 2025

The Bern University of Applied Sciences established the first Swiss Bachelor of Science in Medical Informatics. We demonstrate the specifics of the new curriculum that was based on requirements analysis and includes seminars and live case studies to enable problem-solving abilities.
Education, Technology and Health Literacy
Authors: Lindgren Kurt  , Koldkjær Sølling Ina  , Carøe Per  , Siggaard Mathiesen Kirsten
Published: February 2025

The purpose of this study is to develop an interdisciplinary learning environment between education in technology, business, and nursing. This collaboration creates natural interest and motivation for welfare technology. The aim of establishing an interaction between these three areas of expertise is to create an understanding of skills and cultural differences in each area. Futhermore, the aim is to enable future talents to gain knowledge and skills to improve health literacy among senior citizens. Based on a holistic view of welfare technology, a Student Academy was created as a theoretically- and practically-oriented learning center. The mission of the Student Academy is to support and facilitate education in order to maintain and upgrade knowledge and skills in information technology and information management related to e-health and health literacy. The Student Academy inspires students, stakeholders, politicians, DanAge Association members, companies, and professionals to participate in training, projects, workshops, and company visits.
Comparision and analysis of top 10 exercise android Apps in mainland China
Authors: Wang Yanling  , Sun Liu  , Xu Yahong  , Xiao Qian  , Chang Polun  , Wu Ying
Published: February 2025

Medical guidelines highly recommend physical activity and aerobic exercise in the prevention of primary and secondary cardiovascular disease. The use of exercise-promoting application software may improve clinical outcomes for cardiovascular disease (CVD) patients. The study aimed to compare and analyze the functions of the top 10 exercise Android Apps which had more than 1,000,000 downloads from the main four Android App stores in mainland China. The results showed that most of these popular apps had pedometer, exercise plan preset, user data presentation, user encouragement and community sharing functions while a few of them had exercise video clips or animation support and wearable devices. Given these data, the conclusion is that these popular apps fulfill some of the functions recommended by medical guidelines, however, lack of some functions such as pre-exercise risk assessment, the exercise intensity recording, specific instructions by professionals, and monitoring functions for CVD patients.
Extraction of Vital Signs from Clinical Notes
Authors: Patterson Olga V.  , Jones Makoto  , Yao Yiwen  , Viernes Benjamin  , Alba Patrick R.  , Iwashyna Theodore J.  , DuVall Scott L.
Published: February 2025

Assessment of vital signs is an essential part of surveillance of critically ill patients to detect condition changes and clinical deterioration. While most modern electronic medical records allow for vitals to be recorded in a structured format, the frequency and quality of what is electronically stored may differ from how often these measures are actually recorded. We created a tool that extracts blood pressure, heart rate, temperature, respiratory rate, blood oxygen saturation, and pain level from nursing and other clinical notes recorded in the course of inpatient care to supplement structured vital sign data.
Methods for Sonic Representation of ST Depression During Exercise
Authors: Andor Minodora  , Tudor Anca  , Paralescu Sorin  , Mihalas George I.
Published: February 2025

Sonic display of ST depression during exercise helps both the patient and the investigator to better identify the transition from normal values to “attention” region and reaching the “alert” threshold. Two types of sonic display were tested, based on combinations of saccadic sounds and different pitch.
Integrating data from multiple sources for data completeness in a web-based registry for pediatric renal transplantation – the CERTAIN Registry
Authors: Köster Lennart  , Krupka Kai  , Höcker Britta  , Rahmel Axel  , Samuel Undine  , Zanen Wouter  , Opelz Gerhard  , Süsal Caner  , Döhler Bernd  , Plotnicki Lukasz  , Kohl Christian D.  , Knaup Petra  , Tönshoff Burkhard
Published: February 2025

Patient registries are a useful tool to measure outcomes and compare the effectiveness of therapies in a specific patient population. High data quality and completeness are therefore advantageous for registry analysis. Data integration from multiple sources may increase completeness of the data. The pediatric renal transplantation registry CERTAIN identified Eurotransplant (ET) and the Collaborative Transplant Study (CTS) as possible partners for data exchange. Import and export interfaces with CTS and ET were implemented. All parties reached their projected goals and benefit from the exchange.
Proof of Concept HTML5 Webapp: Type 2 Diabetes risk stratification
Authors: Lebech Cichosz Simon  , Dencker Johansen Mette  , Hejlesen Ole
Published: February 2025

Proof of concept HTML5 webapp for use in a diabetes screening context is presented.
Cohort Discovery Query Optimization via Computable Controlled Vocabulary Versioning
Authors: Ferris Todd A.  , Podchiyska Tanya
Published: February 2025

Self-service cohort discovery tools strive to provide intuitive interfaces to large Clinical Data Warehouses that contain extensive historic information. In those tools, controlled vocabulary (e.g., ICD-9-CM, CPT) coded clinical information is often the main search criteria used because of its ubiquity in billing processes. These tools generally require a researcher to pick specific terms from the controlled vocabulary. However, controlled vocabularies evolve over time as medical knowledge changes and can even be replaced with new versions (e.g., ICD-9 to ICD-10). These tools generally only display the current version of the controlled vocabulary. Researchers should not be expected to understand the underlying controlled vocabulary versioning issues. We propose a computable controlled vocabulary versioning system that allows cohort discovery tools to automatically expand queries to account for terminology changes.
A Novel Approach to Create a Machine Readable Concept Model for Validating SNOMED CT Concept Post-coordination
Authors: Lopetegui Marcelo  , Mauro Alejandro
Published: February 2025

Post-coordination provides the means to achieve an appropriate content coverage, which is critical in successfully adopting clinical reference terminologies, and thus represent clinical information consistently. However, one of the major problems of post-coordination corresponds with ensuring only clinically sensible concepts can be constructed. In this poster, we present the development of a novel approach to generate a MRCM computationally, in order to facilitate the adherence to the existing guidelines and improve the quality of post-coordination in SNOMED CT.
Consumer Health Vocabulary: A Proposal for a Brazilian Portuguese Language
Authors: Tenório Josceli Maria  , Torres Pisa Ivan
Published: February 2025

Studies show a gap between the expressions commonly used by health consumers and health professionals. To bridge this gap, consumer health vocabularies are presented as a solution. The aim of this paper is to describe an on-going project to create a consumer health vocabulary (CHV) in the Brazilian Portuguese language. This project will be developed in three phases: terms extraction and connection to compose a CHV graph structure, human validation, and computacional application development. We expect to make a CHV beta version (including approximately 5,000 valid consumer terms stored in a database graph) available. This project can contribute to the improvement of CHVs.
Constructing a Graph Database for Semantic Literature-Based Discovery
Authors: Hristovski Dimitar  , Kastrin Andrej  , Dinevski Dejan  , Rindflesch Thomas C.
Published: February 2025

Literature-based discovery (LBD) generates discoveries, or hypotheses, by combining what is already known in the literature. Potential discoveries have the form of relations between biomedical concepts; for example, a drug may be determined to treat a disease other than the one for which it was intended. LBD views the knowledge in a domain as a network; a set of concepts along with the relations between them. As a starting point, we used SemMedDB, a database of semantic relations between biomedical concepts extracted with SemRep from Medline. SemMedDB is distributed as a MySQL relational database, which has some problems when dealing with network data. We transformed and uploaded SemMedDB into the Neo4j graph database, and implemented the basic LBD discovery algorithms with the Cypher query language. We conclude that storing the data needed for semantic LBD is more natural in a graph database. Also, implementing LBD discovery algorithms is conceptually simpler with a graph query language when compared with standard SQL.
A Comparison between LMS tools to support e-health educational activities
Authors: de Araújo Novaes Magdala  , Soares de Vasconcelos Gabriel  , Florencio da Silva Jackson Raniel
Published: February 2025

The objective of this study is to understand how a Learning Management System (LMS) plataform is used in a telehealth center to support two virtual learning enviroments focused on the education of the healthcare professionals and the students of a medical schoool. The study outcome is expected to provide indications towards choosing a better LSM for the telehelath center to support their educacional activities.
A Mobile and Intelligent Patient Diary for Chronic Disease Self-Management
Authors: Van Woensel William  , Roy Patrice C.  , Abidi Samina R.  , Abidi Syed S.R.
Published: February 2025

By involving patients in their own long-term care, patient self-management approaches aim to increase self-sufficiency and reduce healthcare costs. For example, electronic patient diaries enable patients to collect health data autonomously, increasing self-reliance and reducing strain on health professionals. By deploying patient diaries on mobile platforms, health data collection can occur at any time and place, increasing the mobility of chronic patients who typically need to enter health data frequently. Importantly, an opportunity also arises for mobile clinical decision support, where health feedback is directly issued to patients without relying on connectivity or remote servers. Regardless of the specific self-management strategy, patient and healthcare provider adoption are crucial. Tailoring the system towards the particular patient and toward institution-specific clinical pathways is essential to increasing acceptance. In this paper we discuss a mobile patient diary realizing both the opportunities and challenges of mobile deployment.
Experiences of Healthcare Professionals to the Introduction in Sweden of a Public eHealth Service: Patients' Online Access to their Electronic Health Records
Authors: Ålander Ture  , Scandurra Isabella
Published: February 2025

Patients' increasing demands for medical information, the digitization of health records and the fast spread of Internet access form a basis of introducing new eHealth services. An international trend is to provide access for patients to health information of various kind. In Sweden, access by patients to their proper electronic health record (EHR) has been provided in a pilot county since November 2012. This eHealth service is controversial and criticism has arised from the clinical professions, mainly physicians. Two web surveys were conducted to discover whether the opinions of healthcare professionals differ; between staff that have had experience with patients accessing their own EHR and those who have no such expericence. Experienced nurses found the EHR more important for the patients and a better reform, compared to unexperienced nurses in the rest of the country. Similarly, physicians with their own experience had a more positive attitude compared to non-experienced physicians. The conclusion of this study is that healthcare professionals must be involved in the implementation of public eHealth services such as EHRs and that real experiences of the professionals should be better disseminated to their inexperienced peers.
Electronic Dental Records System Adoption
Authors: Abramovicz-Finkelsztain Renata  , Barsottini Claudia G. N.  , Fatima Marin Heimar
Published: February 2025

The use of Electronic Dental Records (EDRs) and management software has become more frequent, following the increase in prevelance of new technologies and computers in dental offices. The purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate the use of EDRs by the dental community in the São Paulo city area. A quantitative case study was performed using a survey on the phone. A total of 54 offices were contacted and only one declinedparticipation in this study. Only one office did not have a computer. EDRs were used in 28 offices and only four were paperless. The lack of studies in this area suggests the need for more usability and implementation studies on EDRs so that we can improve EDR adoption by the dental community.
Patient Safety in Critical Care Unit: Development of a Nursing Quality Indicator System
Authors: Lima Camila S.P.  , Barbosa Sayonara F.F.
Published: February 2025

This is a methodological study and technological production that aims to describe the development of a computerized system of nursing care quality indicators for the Intensive Care Unit. The study population consisted of a systems analyst and fifteen critical care nurses. For the development of the system we adopted some of the best practices of the Unified Process methodology using the Unified Modeling Language and the programming language Java Enterprise Edition 7. The system consists of an access menu with the following functions: Home (presents general information), New Record (records the indicator), Record (record search), Census (add information and indicators of the patient), Report (generates report of the indicators) and Annex (accesses the Braden Scale). This information system allows for measurement of the quality of nursing care and to evaluate patient safety in intensive care unit by monitoring quality indicators in nursing.
An eHealth Approach to Reporting Allergic Reactions to Food and Closing the Knowledge Gap
Authors: Munro Christopher  , Semic-Jusufagic Aida  , Pyrz Katarzyna  , Couch Philip  , Dunn-Galvin Audrey  , Peek Niels  , Themis Marina  , Mills Clare  , Buchan Iain  , Hourihane Jonathan  , Simpson Angela
Published: February 2025

There is an important knowledge gap in food allergy management in understanding the factors that determine allergic reactions to food, in gathering objective reports of reactions in real time, and in accessing patients' reaction-histories during consultations. We investigate how eHealth methods can close this knowledge gap. We report experiences with an online tool for reporting allergic reactions that we have developed as a web application. This application has been successfully validated by participants from Ireland and the UK, and is currently being used in a pilot where participants report allergic reactions in near-real time.
Barriers and facilitators to the introduction of digital pathology for diagnostic work
Authors: Randell Rebecca  , Ruddle Roy A.  , Treanor Darren
Published: February 2025

Cellular pathologists are doctors who diagnose disease by using a microscope to examine glass slides containing thin sections of human tissue. These slides can be digitised and viewed on a computer, promising benefits in both efficiency and safety. Despite this, uptake of digital pathology for diagnostic work has been slow, with use largely restricted to second opinions, education, and external quality assessment schemes. To understand the barriers and facilitators to the introduction of digital pathology, we have undertaken an interview study with nine consultant pathologists. Interviewees were able to identify a range of potential benefits of digital pathology, with a particular emphasis on easier access to slides. Amongst the barriers to use, a key concern was lack of familiarity, not only in terms of becoming familiar with the technology but learning how to adjust their diagnostic skills to this new medium. The findings emphasise the need to ensure adequate training and support and the potential benefit of allowing parallel use of glass slides and digital while pathologists are on the learning curve.
Assessing the Need of Discourse-Level Analysis in Identifying Evidence of Drug-Disease Relations in Scientific Literature
Authors: Rastegar-Mojarad Majid  , Komandur Elayavilli Ravikumar  , Li Dingcheng  , Liu Hongfang
Published: February 2025

Relation extraction typically involves the extraction of relations between two or more entities occurring within a single or multiple sentences. In this study, we investigated the significance of extracting information from multiple sentences specifically in the context of drug-disease relation discovery. We used multiple resources such as Semantic Medline, a literature based resource, and Medline search (for filtering spurious results) and inferred 8,772 potential drug-disease pairs. Our analysis revealed that 6,450 (73.5%) of the 8,772 potential drug-disease relations did not occur in a single sentence. Moreover, only 537 of the drug-disease pairs matched the curated gold standard in Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD), a trusted resource for drug-disease relations. Among the 537, nearly 75% (407) of the drug-disease pairs occur in multiple sentences. Our analysis revealed that the drug-disease pairs inferred from Semantic Medline or retrieved from CTD could be extracted from multiple sentences in the literature. This highlights the significance of the need of discourse-level analysis in extracting the relations from biomedical literature.
Normalization of Phenotypic Data from a Clinical Data Warehouse: Case Study of Heterogeneous Blood Type Data with Surprising Results
Authors: Cimino James J.
Published: February 2025

Clinical data warehouses often contain analogous data from disparate sources, resulting in heterogeneous formats and semantics. We have developed an approach that attempts to represent such phenotypic data in its most atomic form to facilitate aggregation. We illustrate this approach with human blood antigen typing (ABO-Rh) data drawn from the National Institutes of Health's Biomedical Translational Research Information System (BTRIS). In applying the method to actual patient data, we discovered a 2% incidence of changed blood types. We believe our approach can be applied to any institution's data to obtain comparable patient phenotypes. The actual discrepant blood type data will form the basis for a future study of the reasons for blood typing variation.
Thermal Signal Analysis for Breast Cancer Risk Verification
Authors: Silva Lincoln F.  , Sequeiros Giomar O.  , Santos Maria Lúcia O.  , Fontes Cristina A.P.  , Muchaluat-Saadea Débora C.  , Conci Aura
Published: February 2025

Breast cancer is the second most common cancer in the world. Currently, there are no effective methods to prevent this disease. However, early diagnosis increases chances of remission. Breast thermography is an option to be considered in screening strategies. This paper proposes a new dynamic breast thermography analysis technique in order to identify patients at risk for breast cancer. Thermal signals from patients of the Antonio Pedro University Hospital (HUAP), available at the Mastology Database for Research with Infrared Image - DMR-IR were used to validate the study. First, each patient's images are registered. Then, the breast region is divided into subregions of 3x3 pixels and the average temperature from each of these regions is observed in all images of the same patient. Features of the thermal signals of such subregions are calculated. Then, the k-means algorithm is applied over feature vectors building two clusters. Silhouette index, Davies-Bouldin index and Calinski-Harabasz index are applied to evaluate the clustering. The test results showed that the methodology presented in this paper is able to identify patients with breast cancer. Classification techniques have been applied on the index values and 90.90% hit rate has been achieved.
Fingerprinting Biomedical Terminologies – Automatic Classification and Visualization of Biomedical Vocabularies through UMLS Semantic Group Profiles
Authors: Rance Bastien  , Le Thai  , Bodenreider Olivier
Published: February 2025

Objectives: To explore automatic methods for the classification of biomedical vocabularies based on their content.
Evaluation of Herbal and Dietary Supplement Resource Term Coverage
Authors: Manohar Nivedha  , Adam Terrance J.  , Pakhomov Serguei V.  , Melton Genevieve B.  , Zhang Rui
Published: February 2025

The use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is increasingly popular in places like North America and Europe where western medicine is primarily practiced. People are consuming herbal and dietary supplements along with western medications simultaneously. Sometimes, supplements and drugs react with one another via antagonistic or potentiation actions of the drug or supplement resulting in an adverse event. Unfortunately, it is not easy to study drug-supplement interactions without a standard terminology to describe herbal and dietary supplements. This pilot study investigated coverage of supplement databases to one another as well as coverage by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and RxNorm for supplement terms. We found that none of the supplement databases completely covers supplement terms. UMLS, MeSH, SNOMED CT, RxNorm and NDF-RT cover 54%, 40%, 32%, 22% and 14% of supplement concepts, respectively. NDF-RT provides some value for grouping supplements into drug classes. Enhancing our understanding of the gap between the traditional biomedical terminology systems and supplement terms could lead to the development of a comprehensive terminology resources for supplements, and other secondary uses such as better detection and extraction of drug-supplement interactions.
Exploring the Challenges and Opportunities of eHealth Tools for Patients with Sickle Cell Disease
Authors: Issom David-Zacharie  , Zosso Alexandra  , Ehrler Frederic  , Wipfli Rolf  , Lovis Christian  , Koch Sabine
Published: February 2025

Sickle cell disease (SCD) is the most prevalent inherited blood disorder in the world. The symptoms decrease the quality of life of patients and can cause premature death. Self-help solutions for chronic patients are rising and increase the quality of life of patients. We are interested to identify the usefulness of eHealth tools for patients with SCD. We did a literature review to identify the main problems faced by patients and the existing eHealth solutions. The results show a low number of studies in the field but a multi-disciplinary interest. Positive health benefits for patients are reported as well as the need for more research. Patients and caregivers lack of education about the disease, healthy behaviors are unknown and clinical best practices underused. E-health tools can offer an appropriate support for the self-management of SCD by improving the quality of life of patients, by enhancing patient health literacy and by allowing clinicians to make better decisions.
Viability of a Bioelectrical Signal Acquisition System Energized by Cellphone with NFC
Authors: Kay Marcel Seiji  , Iaione Fábio
Published: February 2025

Currently, smartphones are used in various systems in the medical field due to the presence of various features, notably Near Field Communication (NFC). NFC utilizes communication technology and an energy supply based on electromagnetic induction. One of the most common medical tests is the electrocardiogram (ECG), through which various heart diseases can be diagnosed. The objective of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of providing power to a bioelectrical signal acquisition module using a mobile phone with NFC. After testing it was indicated that it is possible to construct a passive module to acquire ECG signals using NFC mobile phone.
Open Source Software For Patient Data Management In Critical Care
Authors: Massaut Jacques  , Charretk Nicolas  , Gayraud Olivia  , Van Den Bergh Rafael  , Charles Adelin  , Edema Nathalie
Published: February 2025

We have previously developed a Patient Data Management System for Intensive Care based on Open Source Software. The aim of this work was to adapt this software to use in Emergency Departments in low resource environments. The new software includes facilities for utilization of the South African Triage Scale and prediction of mortality based on independent predictive factors derived from data from the Tabarre Emergency Trauma Center in Port au Prince, Haiti.
An Electronic Nursing Patient Care Plan Helps in Clinical Decision Support
Authors: Wong C.M.  , Wu S.Y.  , Ting W.H.  , Ho K.H.  , Tong L.H.  , Cheung N.T.
Published: February 2025

Information technology can help to improve health care delivery. The utilisation of informatics principle enhances the quality of nursing practices through improved communication, documentation and efficiency. The Nursing Profession constitutes 34% of the total workforce in the Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HA) and includes 21,000 nurses in 2012. To enhance the quality of care and patient safety in both hospitals and community care setting, it is essential that an integrated electronic decision support system for nurses is designed to track documentation and support care or service including observations, decisions, actions and outcomes throughout the care process at each point-of-care. The Patient Care Plan project was set up to achieve these objectives. The Project adheres to strict documentation information architecture to ensure data sharing is freely available. Preliminary results showed very promising improvement in clinical care.
Computationally Comparing and Analyzing All Published Scoring Systems for Diagnosis of Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation
Authors: Kury Fabrício S. P.  , Cimino James J.
Published: February 2025

The clinical literature presents four different scoring systems (SS) for the diagnosis of disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) by four institutions: ISTH, JMHLW, JAAM and KSTH. In this study a Java program was written to retrieve medical records from the MIMIC-II database and apply the criteria of all four. The program then quantified the agreement of each DIC SS with each other and demonstrated notorious dissent. Furthermore, the average internal composition of each score was also quantified. All source code produced is available for download at https://github.com/fabkury/hedicim.
Type 1 Diabetes in Twitter: Who All Listen To?
Authors: Gabarron Elia  , Makhlysheva Alexandra  , Marco Luis
Published: February 2025

Knowing what the conversation on Twitter regarding type 1 diabetes (T1D) is about can help in understanding the kind of information relevant to the individuals affected by the disease. The profile of Twitter users posting on T1D was collected and classified. The number of re-tweets was also registered. The tweets posted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), communication media, and individuals affected by T1D had higher number of potential readers. More than a half of the tweets were posted by individuals affected by T1D, and their tweets were the most re-tweeted. The next most active users were NGOs and healthcare professionals. However, while tweets soliciting for research funds posted by the NGOs were the next most re-tweeted messages, tweets posted by healthcare professionals were the least re-tweeted. Twitter could be used more actively by healthcare professionals to disseminate correct information about T1D.
Clinical Quality Control of a Large-Scale Teleconsultation Service
Authors: Alkmim Maria Beatriz M.  , Marcolino Milena Soriano  , Maia Junia Xavier  , Pessoa Cristiane G.  , Machado Elaine  , Sousa Lidiane
Published: February 2025

The Telehealth Network of Minas Gerais (TNMG) is a public telehealth service in Brazil that assists 722 municipalities in the state of Minas Gerais. As a large-scale teleconsultation service, it was important to implement clinical quality control to guarantee the quality of the service. Our aim is to describe the audit of the teleconsultation responses performed by TNMG. A random sample was selected from teleconsultations performed by the specialists from the TNMG between January and February 2014. The responses were evaluated regarding size, objectivity, quality, ethics, courtesy and grammar. A total of 640 teleconsultation responses were assessed, and the mean scores were ≥2.45. Objectivity and quality had the lowest scores in the different specialities. The methodology was useful for evaluating the teleconsultation service and for identifying the areas to improve.
Development of the SORRI-BAURU Posterior Walker
Authors: Nicholl Anthony R.J.  , Busnardo Renato G.  , da Silva Luciana M.  , Rodrigues Ana Cláudia T.  , Luz Fernanda R.C.  , Bentim Claudia C.G.  , Medola Fausto O.  , Paschoarelli Luis C.
Published: February 2025

This study aimed to report on the design and development of a low cost Reverse Walker through a participative development cycle with people undergoing rehabilitation. The creation and fundamentals of the concept are described, as well as the development of prototypes and their provision to subjects with mobility problems. The Reverse Walker benefits the user by promoting a more upright posture and favoring the development of postural balance. Enhancing the mobility of people with disabilities may benefit their independence, social participation and quality of life.
Level Of Knowledge Use Survey (LOKUS): A validated instrument for tracking knowledge uptake and use
Authors: Lane Joseph P.  , Stone Vathsala I.  , Nobrega Amanda  , Tomita Machiko
Published: February 2025

Researchers working in fields intending to generate beneficial socio-economic impacts are increasingly challenged to demonstrate evidence that the findings from their studies have value to audiences beyond the peer academic community. These diverse and diffuse target audiences may include clinicians, consumers, manufacturers and information brokers. This paper summarizes a project that designed, constructed and validated a web-based instrument for collecting and analyzing self-reported data on knowledge use. The Level Of Knowledge Use Survey instrument is valid and reliable for measuring uptake of new knowledge and for tracking changes in level of knowledge use over time.
Better Questions, Better Answers: Structured Web Accessibility Evaluations for Non-Experts
Authors: Bühler Christian  , Heck Helmut  , Nietzio Annika  , Berker Frank  , Snaprud Mikael
Published: February 2025

Large scale benchmarking of web accessibility can benefit from human input to complement results produced by automatic evaluation tools. This paper presents a novel method that enables non-experts to provide input on web accessibility. The semi-automatic approach guides the evaluators through a structured process with clear instructions. We present a template to describe different types of user input and an outline of the empirical validation.