bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Smart Learning through Pervasive Computing Devices
Authors: Balasundaram S. R. , John Roshy M. , Ramadoss B.
Published: May 2011

An increasing number of educators are calling for high standards and challenging learning activities for students. Learning blended with technology can especially provide all possible sources of education. The technologies are not only going to act as technical add-ons to the system but also they can try their best to improve the quality of education. New technologies can provide meaningful learning experiences for all learners, especially those who are in the developing countries. Educational centers that capitalize on the technological and educational reforms will help students to develop higher order skills and to function effectively in the world beyond the classroom. Achieving such fundamental change, however, requires a transformation of not only the underlying pedagogy but also the kinds of technology applications typically used in classrooms serving at-risk students. The vision of classrooms structured around student involvement in challenging, long-term projects and focused on meaningful, engaged learning is important for all students. Yet such a change in practice would be especially dramatic for those students who have been characterized as economically disadvantaged or at risk. Traditionally, schools have had lower expectations for such students. Teachers have emphasized the acquisition of basic skills for at-risk students, often in special pullout programs or in lower level tracks.
Staying Up to Date with Changes in IT
Authors: McGill Tanya
Published: May 2011

Information and communications technology (ICT) has been changing rapidly over a long period and this rate of change is likely to continue or increase (Benamati & Lederer, 2001a; Lee & Xia, 2005). This rapid rate of change has produced many opportunities for organizations, but has also brought with it many challenges (Benamati & Lederer, 2001b). Among these challenges is the struggle for organizations to obtain personnel with the appropriate information technology (IT) knowledge and skills in order to meet their ICT needs (Byrd & Turner, 2001; Doke, 1999; Standbridge & Autrey, 2001). This is mirrored by the continual requirement for IT professionals to keep up to date with the skills required by organizations (Benamati et al., 2001a; Klobas & McGill, 1993; Moore, 2000). Previous research has investigated the importance employers place on various skills and perceived deficiencies in these skills (e.g., Doke, 1999; Leitheiser, 1992; Nelson, 1991; Prabhakar, Litecky, & Arnett, 2005). While the call for improved communication and social skills has been consistent, the technical skills in demand have varied dramatically over time (Prabhakar et al., 2005; Van Slyke, Kittner, & Cheney, 1998). Less has been written about students’ perceptions of the importance of various ICT skills, though this was addressed in a study that compared Australian and American students’ perceptions of ICT job skills (von Hellens, Van Slyke, & Kittner, 2000). This article provides an overview of a project that investigated the channels of information that ICT students use to keep up to date with employers’ needs.
Testing Graphical User Interfaces
Authors: Strecker Jaymie , Memon Atif M.
Published: May 2011

This chapter describes the state of the art in testing GUI-based software. Traditionally, GUI testing has been performed manually or semimanually, with the aid of capture- replay tools. Since this process may be too slow and ineffective to meet the demands of today’s developers and users, recent research in GUI testing has pushed toward automation. Model-based approaches are being used to generate and execute test cases, implement test oracles, and perform regression testing of GUIs automatically. This chapter shows how research to date has addressed the difficulties of testing GUIs in today’s rapidly evolving technological world, and it points to the many challenges that lie ahead.
T-Learning Technologies
Authors: Vrochidis Stefanos , Bellotti Francesco , Bo Giancarlo , Napoletano Linda , Kompatsiaris Ioannis
Published: May 2011

Following the rapidly growing technology, TV started to switch-off from the analogue world to the modern digital technologies of broadcasting. Digital technology has the potential to offer the audience a variety of services apart from the common audiovisual stream. Many of the new services are inherited from the Personal Computers (PC) world, including on-demand features, games, transactions, and other interactive options. Television has had a long history of performing an educational function for the mass audience, typically by broadcasting culturally-relevant movies, documentaries and news, as well as educational programmes. The idea of Distance Learning through a TV blossomed extensively in particular as a complementary educational option besides PC-based e-learning and traditional analogue TV educational programs. In particular, TV-based interactive education promises a huge potential due to its ability to support interactivity while compensating for the low penetration of Internet-enabled computers in comparison with the penetration of a TV in a household.
The Trends and Problems of Virtual Schools
Authors: Russell Glenn
Published: May 2011

Until recent times, schools have been characterized by the physical presence of teachers and students together. Usually, a building is used for instruction, and teaching materials such as books or blackboards are often in evidence. In the 20th century, alternatives to what may be called “bricks-and-mortar” schools emerged. These were forms of distance education, where children could learn without attending classes on a regular basis. The technologies used included mail, for correspondence schools, and the 20th century technologies of radio and television. Virtual schools can be seen as a variant of distance education. Russell (2004) argued that they emerged in the closing years of the 20th century and can be understood as a form of schooling that uses online computers to provide some or all of a student’s education. Typically, spatial and temporal distancing is employed, and this results in students being able to use their computers at convenient times in their homes or elsewhere, rather than being subject to meeting at an agreed upon time in a school building.
Usability Engineering of User-Centered Web Sites
Authors: O’Connell Theresa A. , Murphy Elizabeth D.
Published: May 2011

For Web sites to succeed, they must be user-centered. A user-centered focus throughout Web site development life cycles promotes Web site usability. This is accomplished through usability engineering carried out within the context of software engineering.
Virtual Organization
Authors: Lee James J. , Kim Ben B.
Published: May 2011

Virtual organization has been well documented as both a tool for organizations to seek further profitability through the removal of traditional barriers, as well as a method to extend the provision of services to clientele in a manner previously achievable by only large, multinational corporations (Markus 2000). The widespread implementation of information technology and its many applications in modern business has moved the act of management towards a virtual focus, where managers are able to complete tasks through the use of teams in varying physical locations, with members that may or may not be employees of that firm, sharing a wide variety of data and information. With so many companies now employing virtual organization techniques, referring to a company as “virtual” or to its components as possessing “virtuality” lacks the clarity and specificity needed when using these firms as examples for others. The variety of methods through which a firm can achieve virtuality represents a span nearly as wide as the business community itself.
A Virtual Reality System for Learning Science in a Science Center
Authors: Anthony Sharlene , Hin Leo Tan Wee , Subramaniam R.
Published: May 2011

Current trends in informal science learning tend to place more emphasis on science centers as tools to bridge the technological gap for their visitors (Salmi, 2003; Sandifer, 2003). In line with compelling evidence in the multimedia literature, which shows that technology-based environments do provide good instructional support for meeting learning needs (Kim, 2006; Lim, Nonis, & Hedberg, 2006), it would be useful to investigate the potential of technology-based exhibits at science centers to create new multisensory experiences for learning science topics in a way that is different from traditional methods of teaching. This can provide pointers for schools to see how such attractions can be used to assist or complement the formal science learning in schools. The principal objective of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of technology-based exhibits in promoting affective learning outcomes among students of mixed ability visiting a science centre. The chosen exhibit is the CAVE (cave automated virtual environment), a supercomputerbased multimedia system.
Web Portal Research Issues
Authors: Tatnall Arthur
Published: May 2011

In general terms, a portal can be seen as “a door, gate or entrance” (Macquarie Library, 1981), and in its simplest form the word just means a gateway; however, it is often a gateway to somewhere other than just to the next room or street. The Oxford Reference Dictionary defines a portal as “a doorway or gate etc, especially a large and elaborate one” (Pearsall & Trumble, 1996). In the context of this article, a Web portal is considered to be a special Internet (or intranet) site designed to act as a gateway to give access to other specific sites. A Web portal can be said to aggregate information from multiple sources and make this information available to various users (Tatnall, 2005c). It consists of a Web site that can be used to find and gain access to other sites, but also to provide the services of a guide that can help to protect the user from the chaos of the Internet and direct him or her toward a specific goal. More generally, however, a portal should be seen as providing a gateway not just to sites on the Web, but to all network-accessible resources, whether involving intranets, extranets, or the Internet. In other words, a portal offers centralised access to all relevant content and applications.
Evaluation of Health Information Systems
Authors: Ammenwerth Elske , Graeber Stefan , Buerkle Thomas , Iller Carola
Published: May 2011

This chapter summarizes the problems and challenges that occur when health information systems are evaluated. The main problem areas presented are the complexity of the evaluation object, the complexity of an evaluation project, and the motivation for evaluation. Based on the analysis of those problem areas, the chapter then presents recommendations of how to address them. In particular, it discusses in more detail what benefits can be obtained from applying triangulation in evaluation studies. Based on the example of the evaluation of a nursing documentation system, it shows how both the validation of results and the completeness of results can be supported by triangulation. The authors hope to contribute to a better understanding of the peculiarities of evaluation in healthcare, and to provide information how to overcome them.
Knowledge Management Implementation in a Consultancy Firm
Authors: Yew Wong Kuan , Peng Wong Wai
Published: May 2011

KM has become an important strategy for improving organisational competitiveness and performance. Organisations can certainly benefit from the lessons learnt and insights gained from those that have adopted it. This chapter presents the results of a case study conducted in a consultancy firm, and the major aim is to identify how KM has been developed and implemented. Specifically, the elements investigated in the case study include the following KM aspects: strategies and activities, leadership and coordination, systems and tools, training, culture and motivation, outcomes and measurement, and implementation approach. Hopefully, the information extracted from this study will be beneficial to other organisations that are embarking on the KM journey.
Financial News Analysis Using a Semantic Web Approach
Authors: Micu Alex , Mast Laurens , Milea Viorel , Frasincar Flavius , Kaymak Uzay
Published: May 2011

In this chapter we present StockWatcher, an OWL-based web application that enables the extraction of relevant news items from RSS feeds concerning the NASDAQ-100 listed companies. The application’s goal is to present a customized, aggregated view of the news categorized by different topics. We distinguish between four relevant news categories: i) news regarding the company itself; ii) news regarding direct competitors of the company; iii) news regarding important people of the company; and iv) news regarding the industry in which the company is active. At the same time, the system presented in this chapter is able to rate these news items based on their relevance. We identify three possible effects that a news message can have on the company, and thus on the stock price of that company: i) positive; ii) negative; and iii) neutral. Currently, StockWatcher provides support for the NASDAQ-100 companies. The selection of the relevant news items is based on a customizable user portfolio that may consist of one or more of these companies.
Personalized Information Retrieval in a Semantic-Based Learning Environment
Authors: Carbonaro Antonella , Ferrini Rodolfo
Published: May 2011

Active learning is the ability of learners to carry out learning activities in such a way that they will be able to effectively and efficiently construct knowledge from information sources. Personalized and customizable access on digital materials collected from the Web according to one’s own personal requirements and interests is an example of active learning. Moreover, it is also necessary to provide techniques to locate suitable materials. In this chapter, we introduce a personalized learning environment providing intelligent support to achieve the expectations of active learning. The system exploits collaborative and semantic approaches to extract concepts from documents, and maintaining user and resources profiles based on domain ontologies. In such a way, the retrieval phase takes advantage of the common knowledge base used to extract useful knowledge and produces personalized views of the learning system.
An Adaptive Threat-Vulnerability Model and the Economics of Protection
Authors: Axelrod C. Warren
Published: May 2011

Traditionally, the views of security professionals regarding responses to threats and the management of vulnerabilities have been biased towards technology and operational risks. The purpose of this chapter is to extend the legacy threat-vulnerability model to incorporate human and social factors. This is achieved by presenting the dynamics of threats and vulnerabilities in the human and social context. We examine costs and benefits as they relate to threats, exploits, vulnerabilities, defense measures, incidents, and recovery and restoration. We also compare the technical and human/social aspects of each of these areas. We then look at future work and how trends are pushing against prior formulations and forcing new thinking on the technical, operational risk, and human/social aspects. The reader will gain a broader view of threats, vulnerabilities and responses to them through incorporating human and social elements into their security models.
Understanding Ontology and Epistemology in Information Systems Research
Authors: Chia Cua Francis , Garrett Tony C.
Published: May 2011

This chapter introduces ontological and epistemological elements in information systems research. It argues that ontology, epistemology, and methodology intertwine in a dynamic way. Ontology, as well as epistemology, is both an antecedent and a consequence of methodology. This complex relationship has an impact on the methodology which will affect the outcome later on. Understanding how these three elements can be related to each other can help researchers develop better methodologies for information systems research.
Subjective and Objective Trustworthiness of Acquaintance Peers
Authors: Nakajima Yoshio , Goudarzi Nemati Alireza , Enokido Tomoya , Takizawa Makoto
Published: May 2011

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay network, a peer process (peer) communicates with other peers and manipulates objects like databases in the peers. Service of each peer is characterized in terms of types of methods and quality of objects supported by the peer. It is critical to obtain service information on what peers support what service. In a fully distributed, unstructured P2P network, there is no centralized coordinator like index and super peer. Each peer has to communicate with its acquaintance peers and obtain service information of other peers. It is critical for a peer to identify which acquaintance is trustworthy since acquaintances may support obsolete service information and may be faulty. There are subjective and objective types of the trustworthiness, of each acquaintance peer. In the subjective approach, a peer obtains the trustworthiness of an acquaintance peer by itself through communicating with an acquaintance. On the other hand, a peer takes trustworthiness opinions on an acquaintance from other peers, that is, how other peers trust the acquaintance peer in the objective approach. In this chapter, a peer only takes opinions of trustworthy peers by excluding faulty peers differently from the traditional reputation concepts. The types of trustworthiness on an acquaintance peer are not always similar. A peer has to decide on which trustworthiness type is taken. In this chapter, we postulate the more confident of its trustworthiness opinion the peer is, the more significantly the subjective trustworthiness is taken into account. If the peer is less confident, the subjective and objective types of trustworthiness are taken respectively. We also discuss how to define the confidence.
Attention Facilitation via Multimedia Stimulation
Authors: Liberati Diego
Published: May 2011

This chapter is about the effects on perception of joint sensory stimulation. It shows that by combining various simultaneous stimuli, it is possible to elicit a psychophysiological effect that is different from the sum of the responses of each stimulus alone; in particular, a new cortical response is elicited besides the ones pertaining to each stimulation modality. This is believed to be particularly useful when designing mobile interfaces because of their needs to be maximally informative while minimally intrusive. Moreover, no technologic additional requirements are necessarily needed, besides proper synchronization protocols, with respect to standard technology, once more showing that often improving is a question of properly combining existing knowledge.
Concepts and Architectures for Mobile Context-Aware Applications
Authors: Costa Patrícia Dockhorn , Pires Luís Ferreira , van Sinderen Marten
Published: May 2011

Context-awareness has been investigated for almost a decade and is considered as a convenient and desirable feature in distributed mobile systems since it allows these systems to benefit from the changes in their users’ context to dynamically tailor services to their users’ current situation and needs. This chapter addresses the research results and challenges of designing a flexible infrastructure to support the development of mobile context-aware applications. We discuss relevant context-awareness concepts, define architectural patterns on context-awareness, present the design of a target infrastructure, and discuss some related research and research trends. The context-aware infrastructure described in this chapter follows the principles of service-oriented architectures in which the dynamic customization of context-aware mobile services is specified by means of application behavior rules that are interpreted and applied by the infrastructure at runtime.
The Telehealth Divide
Authors: Schmeida Mary , McNeal Ramona
Published: May 2011

In the United States, the public is accessing the Internet to provide information and deliver services, and to interact with citizens, business, and other government agencies (Bimber, 1999; Pardo, 2000; West, 2003, 2004). As with any change between citizen-government interactions, e-government is accompanied by speculation on its impact to both citizen and government. E-government capability of continual service delivery can make government efficient and transparent to the public (Norris, 1999; West, 2003), and more responsive to public needs through fast and convenient communication options (Thomas & Streib, 2003). It permits quicker material update than traditional distribution methods (Pardo, 2000). However, other literature suggests e-government will not live up to these prospects. A separation exists among citizens that use and do not use the Internet. This separation is based on a number of factors, including inequalities in Internet access “digital divide” and technological skills, along with psychological and cultural barriers. Literature extensively shows the differences in United States Internet use to fall along important socioeconomic and demographic factors, such as age, race, education, and income (Mossberger, Tolbert, & Stansbury, 2003; Neu, Anderson, & Bikson, 1999; Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2003c; U.S. Department of Commerce, 2002; Wilheim, 2000). E-government may create inequalities in the delivery of government information and services. Telehealth is a specific form of e-government aimed at improving the accessibility and quality of healthcare, and reducing service costs (Schmeida, 2004a). It relies on electronic information and telecommunication technology innovation (H.R. 2157, 2001). As nations contend with expensive healthcare, the promise of better healthcare service delivery at a reduced cost has made teleheath an increasingly attractive policy option in the United States and internationally.
The PsyGrid Experience
Authors: Ainsworth John
Published: May 2011

The key aim of the PsyGrid project was the creation of an information system to ascertain and characterise a large, representative cohort of schizophrenics, beginning from their first episode of psychosis. The cohort was to be drawn from eight geographically dispersed regions of England, covering in total one-sixth of the entire population. In order to meet the current and future requirements we needed to build a secure distributed system, which not only could support remote data collection, but could also be integrated with other data sets, applications, and workflows for statistical analysis. We concluded that a service-oriented architecture was required and that the implementation technology should be Web services. In this article we present the design, deployment and operation of the PsyGrid data collection system as a case study in applying Web services to health informatics. The major problems we faced were related to the deployment of Web services into an existing network infrastructure, but overall found Web services to be the most suitable middleware technology.
On The Development of Secure Service-Oriented Architectures to Support Medical Research
Authors: Simpson Andrew
Published: May 2011

In this article we report upon our experiences of developing Web-services based infrastructures within two e-health projects. The first—a small demonstrator project funded by the UK’s National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)—is concerned with facilitating the aggregation of different types of data (specifically, MRI scans and histopathology slides) to aid the treatment of colorectal cancer; the second—a rather larger project funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC)—is concerned with the development of a virtual research environment to support neuro-imaging research. In both cases, the underlying infrastructures are being developed by a team that is based in Oxford; it is the experiences of this team that we report upon in this article. We also report upon how we have considered the future potential for our systems interoperating with other systems which are deployed within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
A Cross-Cultural Framework for Evaluation
Authors: Turunen Pekka
Published: May 2011

The evaluation of information systems (ISs), especially in the healthcare field, is a complex task. Evidently, there is a need for better understanding of the different aspects evaluation. While in the general IS science field there have been several attempts to build frameworks and models to better understand the evaluation of ISs, in healthcare similar frameworks have been almost nonexistent. Unfortunately, general frameworks cannot be exactly applied for the cross-cultural evaluation of healthcare ISs, because they do not recognise the specific nature of the medicine. Based on works in different areas, this chapter represents an attempt at to combine them to conceptual frameworks for the evaluation of healthcare ISs.
Mobile Medical Image Viewing Using 3G Wireless Network
Authors: Tong Carrison K.S. , Wong Eric T.T.
Published: May 2011

Teleradiology is a routine practice for radiologists to make urgent diagnosis by remote viewing radiological images such as computed tomographic (CT), magnetic resonance (MR), computed radiographic (CR), and digital radiographic (DR) images outside their hospitals. Traditionally, due to limited network bandwidth and huge image file sizes, this technique was limited to fixed-point communication using an integrated services digital network (ISDN) and broadband network. Without any prior information, most radiologists would invariably require high-quality display units and lossless compressed images for their clinical diagnosis. Besides the technical issues involved in the uninterrupted provision of a 24- hour teleradiology service, most hospital administrators have to consider a series of management issues on the quality of this service such as data confidentiality, integrity, and accessibility. This article presents the implementation process of a high-quality teleradiology service using the third-generation (3G) wireless network. In the provision of this service, several high-quality notebook computers with a 15-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen of resolution 1,024 x 768 pixels and 32-bit color have been configured to view medical images in the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) format using a Web browser. These notebook computers are connected with 3G mobile phones so that users could access the Internet using Web browsers through the 3G network at a speed of at least 384 kbps. The users could also use the Web browser for logging into the hospital network through an application tunneling technique in a virtual private network (VPN). When logging into the VPN, for security purposes the network authentication is enhanced by a one-time and two-factor authentication (OTTFA) mechanism. In OTTFA, the user password contains two parts: a personal password and a randomly generated password. After successfully logging into the hospital network, the user has to log into the image server using another account name and password. The above are all important to ensure the high standard of confidentiality of the system.
Picture Archiving and Communication System in Healthcare
Authors: Tong Carrison K.S. , Wong Eric T.T.
Published: May 2011

Radiology is the branch of medicine that deals with the diagnostic and therapeutic applications of radiation. It is often used in X-rays in the diagnosis and treatment of a disease. Filmless radiology is a method of digitizing traditional films into electronic files that can be viewed and saved on a computer. This technology generates clearer and easier-to-read images, allowing the patient the chance of a faster evaluation and diagnosis. The time saved may prove to be a crucial element in the patient’s treatment process. With filmless radiology, images taken from various medical sources can be manipulated to enhance resolution, increasing the clarity of the image. Images can also be transferred internally within departments and externally to other locations such as the office of the patient’s doctor. This is made possible through the picture-archiving and communication system (PACS; Dreyer, Mehta, & Thrall, 2001), which electrsonically captures, transmits, displays, and saves images into digital archives for use at any given time. The PACS functions as a state-of-theart repository for long-term archiving of digital images, and includes the backup and bandwidth to safeguard uninterrupted network availability. The objective of the picture-archiving and scommunications system is to improve the speed and quality of clinical care by streamlining radiological service and consultation. With instant access to images from virtually anywhere, hospital doctors and clinicians can improve their work processes and speed up the delivery of patient care. Besides making film a thing of the past, the likely benefits would include reduced waiting times for images and reports, and the augmented ability of clinicians since they can get patient information and act upon it much more quickly. The creation of a permanent, nondegradable archive will eliminate the loss of film and so forth. Today, the growing importance of PACS on the fight against highly infectious disease is also identified.
Imaging Technologies and Their Applications in Biomedicine and Bioengineering
Authors: Giannakakis Nikolaos
Published: May 2011

New developments are making the technology faster, more powerful, less invasive, and less expensive. While the technology evolves, new devices are developed, in purpose to be used in the hospitals. Many new imaging methods are used in biomedical applications today and can predict the growth of a tumor or detect a disease. The advantages are numerous, but the problems, during the acquisition and use by the staff, are also remarkable.
A Software Tool for Reading DICOM Directory Files
Authors: Villegas Ricardo
Published: May 2011

DICOMDIR directory files are useful in medical software applications because they allow organized access to images and information sets that come from radiological studies that are stored in conformance with the digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) standard. During the medical application software development, specialized programming libraries are commonly used in order to solve the requirements of computation and scientific visualization. However, these libraries do not provide suitable tools for reading DICOMDIR files, making necessary the implementation of a flexible tool for reading these files, which can be also easily integrated into applications under development. To solve this problem, this work introduces an object-oriented design and an open-source implementation for such reading tool. It produces an output data tree containing the information of the DICOM images and their related radiological studies, which can be browsed easily in a structured way through navigation interfaces coupled to it.
ePortfolios in Graduate Medical Education
Authors: Ruiz Jorge G. , van Zuilen Maria H. , Katz Alan , Milanez Marcos , Tiberius Richard G.
Published: May 2011

Residency education is the period of clinical education that follows graduation from medical school, and prepares physicians for the independent practice of medicine. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is an organization responsible for accrediting residency education programs. The ACGME is increasingly emphasizing educational outcomes in the accreditation process. The authors will discuss the experience of GME programs using ePortfolios for both formative and summative evaluation of residents and the integration of ePortfolios as part of institutions’ learning management systems. ePortfolios can be especially useful for evaluating and documenting mastery of educational outcomes such as practice-based improvement, use of scientific evidence in patient care, and professional and ethical behaviors that are difficult to evaluate using traditional assessment instruments. The authors also review the literature describing the use of ePortfolios as a tool that is both powerful and reflective, for the assessment of program outcomes by administrators and faculty.
Multimedia Computing Environment for Telemedical Applications
Authors: Murthy V.K. , Krishnamurthy E.V.
Published: May 2011

This chapter describes the system design for a multimedia telediagnostic computing environment (MMTE) for telemedical applications. Such an environment requires the design of: (i) a wired-in or wireless computing facility based on currently available technology with a high bandwidth for fast, reliable, and efficient communication of data, voice, and image; (ii) a database query system to access data, voice, and medical images from a fixed server to the mobile or fixed hosts; and (iii) suitable audiovisual software communication tools among the cooperating fixed and mobile hosts to help visualize pointer movements remotely (telepointers) and for teleconferencing. Appropriate software and hardware tools for the design of the cooperative environment are described. We also provide an up-to-date bibliography.
Enhancing Cognitive Screening in Geriatric Care
Authors: Schafer Johnson Amanda , Kaushik Tanya , Imam Khaled , Webbe Frank M. , Lichtenberg Peter A. , Erlanger David M. , Maddens Michael E.
Published: May 2011

Cognitive screening measures for age-related cognitive impairment have been found to have only fair validity, and the risks of harm even may outweigh the benefits at this time (U.S. Preventative Service Task Force, 2003). A large-scale project designed to assess elder care in Primary Care Physician offices noted that dementia evaluation and treatment was one of the most overlooked aspects of care. Taken together, these studies cited the lack of time and technical expertise in test administration as the most prominent barriers to the accurate detection of dementia in Primary Care Physician offices. It was for these reasons that the Cognitive Screening Test (CST) was created. The CST requires no physician time or training to administer or interpret it. The current study investigated the clinical utility of this cognitive screening system by comparing the results of 102 patients to those of expert geriatricians, using consensus conference methods for diagnosis. Overall clinical utility demonstrated scores at .80 or above for sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive power. In contrast, the MMSE had only a .38 sensitivity. A Receiver Operating Curve (ROC) analysis indicated a .863 accuracy rating for the predetermined cut score on the CST.
E-Learning in Healthcare and Social Care
Authors: Kalogeropoulou Maria
Published: May 2011

E-learning has the potential to transform learning for healthcare and social care, supporting the aims of the NHS Plan and raising standards of care for patients and service users across health and social care. This chapter sets out a vision of healthcare and social care services in the 21st century, and a strategy for making it a reality. The authors present and discuss here the basic principles and benefits of e-learning for healthcare professionals, medical students, and patient education.
Information Security Management in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems for the Healthcare Industry
Authors: Tong Carrison K.S. , Wong Eric T.T.
Published: May 2011

Like other information systems in banking and commercial companies, information security is also an important issue in the healthcare industry. It is a common problem to have security incidences in an information system. Such security incidences include physical attacks, viruses, intrusions, and hacking. For instance, in the U.S.A., more than 10 million security incidences occurred in the year of 2003. The total loss was over $2 billion. In the healthcare industry, damages caused by security incidences could not be measured only by monetary cost. The trouble with inaccurate information in healthcare systems is that it is possible that someone might believe it and do something that might damage the patient. In a security event in which an unauthorized modification to the drug regime system at Arrowe Park Hospital proved to be a deliberate modification, the perpetrator received a jail sentence under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990. In another security event (The Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, 2003), six patients received severe overdoses of radiation while being treated for cancer on a computerized medical linear accelerator between June 1985 and January 1987. Owing to the misuse of untested software in the control, the patients received radiation doses of about 25,000 rads while the normal therapeutic dose is 200 rads. Some of the patients reported immediate symptoms of burning and electric shock. Two died shortly afterward and others suffered scarring and permanent disability. BS7799 is an information-security-management standard developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI) for an information-securitymanagement system (ISMS). The first part of BS7799, which is the code of practice for information security, was later adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO17799. The second part of BS7799 states the specification for ISMS. The picture-archiving and -communication system (PACS; Huang, 2004) is a clinical information system tailored for the management of radiological and other medical images for patient care in hospitals and clinics. It was the first time in the world to implement both standards to a clinical information system for the improvement of data security.
M-Health
Authors: Wickramasinghe Nilmini , Goldberg Steve
Published: May 2011

Medical science has made revolutionary changes in the past decades. Contemporaneously, however, healthcare has made incremental changes at best. The growing discrepancy between the revolutionary changes in medicine and the minimal changes in healthcare processes is leading to inefficient and ineffective healthcare delivery and one if not the significant contributor to the exponentially increasing costs plaguing healthcare globally. Healthcare organizations can respond to these challenges by focusing on three key solution strategies, namely, (1) access – caring for anyone, anytime, anywhere; (2) quality – offering worldclass care and establishing integrated information repositories; and (3) value – providing effective and efficient healthcare delivery. These three components are interconnected such that they continually impact the other and all are necessary to meet the key challenges facing healthcare organizations today. The application of mobile commerce to healthcare, namely, m-health, appears to offer a way for healthcare delivery to revolutionize itself. This chapter serves to outline an example of adopting mobile commerce within the healthcare industry, namely, in the area of a wireless medical record. In particular, it discusses an appropriate, feasible mobile solution to enable hospitals operate effectively and efficiently in today’s competitive and costly healthcare environment as well as meet all the necessary regulatory requirements. The lessons learnt from these case study data should be of interest to both practitioners and researchers since they will outline realistic and feasible solutions to enable hospitals to incorporate a wireless/m-commerce solution as well as highlighting key areas for further research in this important area of high-quality, effective, and efficient healthcare management.
The Effects of Confidentiality on Nursing Self-Efficacy with Information Systems
Authors: Lending Diane
Published: May 2011

The objective of this study is to gain an understanding of nurses’ perceptions of the confidentiality of computerized charts and determine if these perceptions influence nursing self-efficacy. A questionnaire was mailed to 600 hospital nursing staff just prior to the implementation of an integrated clinical and administrative hospital-wide information system. One hundred and thirty-nine questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 23%. The measurements consisted of perceived confidentiality, self-efficacy, self-reported technology use, self-assessed computer expertise, and attitude. We found that nurses recognize confidential information and that nurses do not think that computerized records are more or less confidential than paper records. Perceived confidentiality and self-efficacy are related. Because nurses that have lower self-efficacy also think that the data found in a computer is less confidential and that there is less of a need for confidentiality for computerized data, hospitals should take steps to improve self-efficacy by enhancing confidentiality training.
Preparing Clinical Text for Use in Biomedical Research
Authors: Pestian John P. , Itert Lukasz , Andersen Charlotte
Published: May 2011

Approximately 57 different types of clinical annotations construct a patient’s medical record. These annotations include radiology reports, discharge summaries, and surgical and nursing notes. Hospitals typically produce millions of text-based medical records over the course of a year. These records are essential for the delivery of care, but many are underutilized or not utilized at all for clinical research. The textual data found in these annotations is a rich source of insights into aspects of clinical care and the clinical delivery system. Recent regulatory actions, however, require that, in many cases, data not obtained through informed consent or data not related to the delivery of care must be made anonymous (as referred to by regulators as harmless), before they can be used. This article describes a practical approach with which Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), a large pediatric academic medical center with more than 761,000 annual patient encounters, developed open source software for making pediatric clinical text harmless without losing its rich meaning. Development of the software dealt with many of the issues that often arise in natural language processing, such as data collection, disambiguation, and data scrubbing.
Genome-Wide Analysis of Epistasis Using Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction
Authors: Moore Jason H.
Published: May 2011

Human genetics is an evolving discipline that is being driven by rapid advances in technologies that make it possible to measure enormous quantities of genetic information. An important goal of human genetics is to understand the mapping relationship between interindividual variation in DNA sequences (i.e., the genome) and variability in disease susceptibility (i.e., the phenotype). The focus of the present study is the detection and characterization of nonlinear interactions among DNA sequence variations in human populations using data mining and machine learning methods. We first review the concept difficulty and then review a multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) approach that was developed specifically for this domain. We then present some ideas about how to scale the MDR approach to datasets with thousands of attributes (i.e., genome-wide analysis). Finally, we end with some ideas about how nonlinear genetic models might be statistically interpreted to facilitate making biological inferences.
Data Mining Medical Information
Authors: Chesney Thomas , Penny Kay , Oakley Peter , Davies Simon , Chesney David , Maffulli Nicola
Published: May 2011

Trauma audit is intended to develop effective care for injured patients through process and outcome analysis, and dissemination of results. The system records injury details such as the patient’s sex and age, the mechanism of the injury, various measures of the severity of the injury, initial management and subsequent management interventions, and the outcome of the treatment including whether the patient lived or died. Ten years’ worth of trauma audit data from one hospital are modelled as an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in order to compare the results with a more traditional logistic regression analysis. The output was set to be the probability that a patient will die. The ANN models and the logistic regression model achieve roughly the same predictive accuracy, although the ANNs are more difficult to interpret than the logistic regression model, and neither logistic regression nor the ANNs are particularly good at predicting death. For these reasons, ANNs are not seen as an appropriate tool to analyse trauma audit data. Results do suggest, however, the usefulness of using both traditional and non-traditional analysis techniques together and of including as many factors in the analysis as possible.
Medical Document Clustering Using Ontology-Based Term Similarity Measures
Authors: Zhang Xiaodan , Jing Liping , Hu Xiaohua , Ng Michael , Xia Jiali , Zhou Xiaohua
Published: May 2011

Recent research shows that ontology as background knowledge can improve document clustering quality with its concept hierarchy knowledge. Previous studies take term semantic similarity as an important measure to incorporate domain knowledge into clustering process such as clustering initialization and term re-weighting. However, not many studies have been focused on how different types of term similarity measures affect the clustering performance for a certain domain. In this article, we conduct a comparative study on how different term semantic similarity measures including path-based, information-content- based and feature-based similarity measure affect document clustering. Term re-weighting of document vector is an important method to integrate domain ontology to clustering process. In detail, the weight of a term is augmented by the weights of its co-occurred concepts. Spherical k-means are used for evaluate document vector reweighting on two real-world datasets: Disease10 and OHSUMED23. Experimental results on nine different semantic measures have shown that: (1) there is no certain type of similarity measures that significantly outperforms the others; (2) Several similarity measures have rather more stable performance than the others; (3) term re-weighting has positive effects on medical document clustering, but might not be significant when documents are short of terms.
A Proposed Framework for Mobile Services Adoption
Authors: Troshani Indrit , Hill Sally Rao
Published: May 2011

Mobile services are touted to create a significant spectrum of business opportunities. Acceptance of these services by users is, therefore, of paramount importance. Consequently, a deeper insight is required to better understand the underlying motivations leading users to adopting mobile services. Further, enhanced understanding would also help designing service improvements and appropriate adoption strategies. Most of the existing theoretical acceptance models available originate from organisational contexts. As mobile services bring additional functional dimensions, such as hedonic or experiential aspects, using extant models for predicting mobile services acceptance by individuals may be inadequate. The aim of this chapter is to explore and critically assess the use of existing acceptance theories in the light of evolving mobile services. Constructs affecting adoption behaviour are discussed and relevant extensions are made which culminate with a framework for mobile services adoption. Managerial implications are explored and future research directions are also identified.
Mobile Education
Authors: Nösekabel Holger
Published: May 2011

Mobile education, comprising learning, teaching, and education related administrative services delivered via mobile technologies, has incited several projects and discussion in the last years. When reviewing these projects, it becomes apparent that most of them are technology driven, and only a few were formally evaluated at the end. However, certain lessons, chances and obstacles can be identified which may be helpful for further development in this sector. One critical issue is the distribution of costs for mobile services. As both educational institutions and students act on a limited budget, it is necessary to choose an infrastructure which meets the requirements of the users and addresses all relevant obstacles. Consequently, there is no single ideal technological alternative, but each project needs to make a situational choice.