bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Remote Diagnosis of Children Dental Problems Based on Non-Invasive Photographs – A Valid Proceeding?
Authors: Amável Rui  , Cruz-Correia Ricardo  , Frias-Bulhosa José
Published: February 2025

Telemedicine models using commercially available technology have enabled high-quality illness care in paediatric primary care settings and markedly improved access. This fact should be explored in Pediatric Dentistry, considering that dental problems are very common in children at pre-school age and it becomes important to screen them as early as possible in order to promote the appropriate treatment. In this sense, we aim to know how telemedicine, or more specifically, teledentistry, could help on this process, evaluating the validity of children dental problems remote diagnosis based on non-invasive photographs, using accessible and low-cost technologies. Three photographs were taken for each of 66 children to be remotely analyzed by four dentists. Each dentist filled a web-based questionnaire for each child. The same children had a traditional in-person dental consultation that is used as a gold standard in this study. The results show sensitivity between 94% and 100% and specificity between 52% and 100%. The positive predictive value was between 67% and 100% and the negative predictive value between 94% and 100%. These results suggest that remote diagnosis of children dental problems based on non-invasive photographs constitute a valid resource when we pretend to exclude referred children to a dentist for treatment of dental problems, but further studies should be carried out to increase the validity of this proceeding to referring children for the same treatment.
KARDIONET: Telecardiology Based on GRID Technology
Authors: Sierdzinski Janusz  , Bala Piotr  , Rudowski Robert  , Grabowski Marcin  , Karpinski Grzegorz  , Kaczynski Bartosz
Published: February 2025

The telecardiological system Kardionet is being developed to support interventional cardiology. The main aim of the system is to collect specific and systemized patient data from the distant medical centers and to organize it in the best possible way to diagnose quickly and choose the medical treatment. It is the distributed GRID type system operating in shortest achievable time. Computational GRID solutions together with distributed archive data GRID support creation, implementation and operations of software using considerable computational power. Kardionet system devoted to cardiology purposes includes specially developed data bases for the multimodal data and metadata, including information on a patient and his/her medical examination results. As Kardionet uses modern technology and methods we expect it could have a considerable impact on telemedicine development in Poland. The presented telecardiological system can provide a number of important gains for the national health care system if it is implemented nationwide.
Ontological Representation of Adverse Drug Reactions Using the Fundational Model of Anatomy
Authors: Bousquet Cédric  , Gasperina Philippe  , Trombert Béatrice  , Clavel Lucienne  , Kumar Anand  , Rodrigues Jean Marie
Published: February 2025

In a previous work we proposed a categorial structure for the representation of adverse drug reactions consisting of 16 semantic categories and 20 relations. We present an implementation of this categorial structure in Protégé based on four WHO-ART system organ classes: Gastro-intestinal system disorders, Liver and biliary system disorders, Central & peripheric nervous system disorders, and Psychiatric disorders. We compared classification according to anatomy using SNOMED CT within the PharmARTS tool and the FMA with the Pellet reasoner. This ontology contains 210 concepts for Gastroenterology, 66 concepts for Psychiatry and 85 concepts for Neurology. Classification of disorders located in the upper gastro intestinal tract was similar using both SNOMED CT and the FMA. This work is a first step towards the comparison of two models of anatomy within a common ontology of adverse drug reactions.
Evaluation of an Ontological Resource for Pharmacovigilance
Authors: Jaulent Marie-Christine  , Alecu Iulian
Published: February 2025

In this work, we present a methodology for evaluating an ontology designed in a previous study to describe adverse drug reactions. We evaluate it in term of its fitness for grouping cases in pharmacovigilance. We define as gold standard the Standardized MedDRA Queries (SMQs) developed manually to group terms representing similar medical conditions. We perform an automatic search in the ontology in order to retrieve concepts related to the medical conditions. An optimal query is built for each medical condition. The evaluation relies on the comparison between the terms in the SMQ and the terms subsumed by the query. The result is quantified by sensitivity and specificity. We applied this methodology for 24 SMQs and we obtain a mean sensitivity of 0.82. This work allows validating the semantic resource and provides, in perspective, tools to maintain the ontology while the knowledge is evolving.
Automatic Medical Knowledge Acquisition Using Question-Answering
Authors: Pasche Emilie  , Teodoro Douglas  , Gobeill Julien  , Ruch Patrick  , Lovis Christian
Published: February 2025

We aim at proposing a rule generation approach to automatically acquire structured rules that can be used in decision support systems for drug prescription. We apply a question-answering engine to answer specific information requests. The rule generation is seen as an equation problem, where the factors are known items of the rule (e.g., an infectious disease, caused by a given bacteria) and solutions are answered by the engine (e.g., some antibiotics). A top precision of 0.64 is reported, which means, for about two third of the knowledge rules of the benchmark, one of the recommended antibiotic was automatically acquired by the rule generation method. These results suggest that a significant fraction of the medical knowledge can be obtained by such an automatic text mining approach.
Using Artificial Neural Networks to Predict Potential Complications during Trauma Patients' Hospitalization Period
Authors: Pearl Adrian  , Bar-Or David
Published: February 2025

Complications during treatment of seriously injured trauma patients cause an increase in mortality rates, and increased treatment costs, including bed occupancy. Current methods treat those at risk, and include numbers of false positives. By finding a method to predict those at risk of the three most common recorded Trauma Registry complications, considerable savings in mortality and treatment costs could arise. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) work well with classification problems using feed-forward/back propagation methodology. Using the National Trauma Data Bank (V6.2) data files, Tiberius Software created the ANN models. Best models were identified by their Gini co-efficient, ability to predict the complication outcome selected, and their Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) scores. The model ensemble for the three major complications recorded in the registry were determined, variables ranked and model accuracy recorded. The basic ANN is fairly accurate for those likely to contract Acute Respiratory Disease Syndrome (ARDS) though with a high rate of false positives. The ANN ability to predict Ventilator Associated Pneumonia (VAP) is less effective, though better at producing fewer false positives. Predicting Urinary Tract Infections (UTI) cases is not good enough using these input variables. Both VAP and UTI relate to those aged over 55 years, while ARDS related more to those under 16 years. The models need improving.
Clinician Reports of the Impact of Electronic Ordering on an Emergency Department
Authors: Georgiou Andrew  , Westbrook Johanna I.
Published: February 2025

The importance of health informatics evaluations adopting a pluralist approach which considers the technical as well as the organizational and social aspects of system implementation has been espoused by many researchers. Kaplan's 4Cs evaluation framework presents a lens through which evaluations of clinical systems can be assessed, with a focus on communication, care, control and context. Our aim was to investigate the effects of Computerized Provider Order Entry (CPOE) on Emergency Department (ED) work, communication practices and patient care using this framework as a means to orient the study. A qualitative study using interviews and focus groups was undertaken in an Australian 640-bed ED after the introduction of CPOE. Systematic concurrent analysis revealed five themes: i) Expectations; ii) Changes in responsibility; iii) Monitoring of the test order process; iv) System usability; and v) System requirements. CPOE systems in EDs present specific challenges which differ from other hospital departments. Due to the critical nature of clinical work in this setting a poor fit between CPOE and ED work may result in serious incidents.
Threats to Information Security of Real-Time Disease Surveillance Systems
Authors: Henriksen Eva  , Johansen Monika A.  , Baardsgaard Anders  , Bellika Johan G.
Published: February 2025

This paper presents the main results from a qualitative risk assessment of information security aspects for a new real-time disease surveillance approach in general, and for the Snow surveillance system in particular. All possible security threats and acceptable solutions, and the implications these solutions had to the design of the system, were discussed. Approximately 30 threats were identified. None of these got an unacceptable high risk level originally, but two got medium risk level, of which one was concluded to be unacceptable after further investigation. Of the remaining low risk threats, some have severe consequence, thus requiring particular assessment. Since it is very important to identify and solve all security threats before real-time solutions can be used in a wide scale, additional investigations are needed.
Requirements for Radio Frequency Identification in Healthcare
Authors: Lahtela Antti  , Hassinen Marko
Published: February 2025

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a growing technology among different industries. As a technology, it has been used since the Second World War, but just in the last decade, the information technology (IT) community and healthcare have been taking more action on studying and developing the technology. In this paper, we represent the general requirements that healthcare sets for the RFID technology. The paper is a part of the research project MaISSI (Managing IT Services and Service Implementation) where our aim is to implement an automated identification system (AIMC) for our case hospital's medication care. The AIMC uses the RFID technology for patient identification and the bar code technology for medication identification. The system will automate the identification processes during medication administration, reduce medication errors and increase the patient safety.
The Importance of Timely Information in National Cancer Screening Programmes
Authors: Droljc Anže  , Grbec Tomaž  , Orel Andrej
Published: February 2025

The Ministry of Health of Slovenia decided to support the introduction of two new organised screening programmes for cancer, one for breast and the other for colon cancer in 2005. This was an addition to the first, already running, programme for cervical cancer. Two of them are entrusted to the Institute of Oncology while the National CINDI programme takes care of the third one. Besides connection to some external public databases, cancer screening programmes require national Cancer Registry data. High quality and user friendly information support for citizens and medical professionals following doctrinal requirements and possible changes is a must.
An Approach to Calculate and Visualize Intraoperative Scattered Radiation Exposure
Authors: Wagner Markus  , Duwenkamp Christopher  , Dresing Klaus  , Bott Oliver J.
Published: February 2025

During the intraoperative radiograph generation process with mobile image intensifier systems (C-arm) most of the radiation exposure for patient, surgeon and operation room personal is caused by scattered radiation. The intensity and propagation of scattered radiation depend on different parameters, e.g. the intensity of the primary radiation, and the positioning of the mobile image intensifier. Exposure through scattered radiation can be minimized when all these parameters are adjusted correctly. Because radiation is potentially dangerous and could not be perceived by any human sense the current education on correct adjustment of a C-arm is designed very theoretical. This paper presents an approach of scattered radiation calculation and visualization embedded in a computer based training system for mobile image intensifier systems called virtX. With the help of this extension the virtX training system should enrich the current radiation protection training with visual and practical training aspects.
Visual Assessment of Endemic Nephropathy Markers Relationship
Authors: Sonicki Zdenko  , Cvitković Ante  , Edwards Karen L.  , Miletić-Medved Marica  , ČvorišČec Dubravka  , BabuŠ Vladimir  , Jelaković Bojan
Published: February 2025

The aim of this paper was to assess relationship between possible endemic nephropathy (EN) markers visually by the CoPlot methodology, and to illustrate this promising data analysis approach. From 912 screened persons in 3 Croatian endemic villages, 25 persons were diagnosed as confirmed EN patients, 371 as non-EN, and the remainder were classified as suspected of having EN, or at risk. Data on 25 confirmed EN patients were matched with appropriate non-EN examinees. All records with missing data were excluded, resulting in 35 subjects with complete data on the 13 key EN variables for CoPlot mapping. CoPlot solution met the accepted goodness of fit measure thresholds. Result showed relationship between EN markers, identifying some nearly duplicated variables, and possible outliers needing some subsequent analysis.
Reversible Anonymization of DICOM Images Using Automatically Generated Policies
Authors: Onken Michael  , Riesmeier Jörg  , Engel Marcel  , Yabanci Adem  , Zabel Bernhard  , Després Stefan
Published: February 2025

Many real-world applications in the area of medical imaging like case study databases require separation of identifying (IDATA) and non-identifying (MDATA) data, specifically those offering Internet-based data access. These kinds of projects also must provide a role-based access system, controlling, how patient data must be organized and how it can be accessed. On DICOM image level, different image types support different kind of information, intermixing IDATA and MDATA in a single object. To separate them, it is possible to reversibly anonymize DICOM objects by substituting IDATA by a unique anonymous token. In case that later an authenticated user needs full access to an image, this token can be used for re-linking formerly separated IDATA and MDATA, thus resulting in a dynamically generated, exact copy of the original image. The approach described in this paper is based on the automatic generation of anonymization policies from the DICOM standard text, providing specific support for all kinds of DICOM images. The policies are executed by a newly developed framework based on the DICOM toolkit DCMTK and offer a reliable approach to reversible anonymization. The implementation is evaluated in a German BMBF-supported expert network in the area of skeletal dysplasias, SKELNET, but may generally be applicable to related projects, enormously improving quality and integrity of diagnostics in a field focused on images. It performs effectively and efficiently on real-world test images from the project and other kind of DICOM images.
Quality Assessment of Medical Education and Use of Information Technology
Authors: Masic Izet  , Ciric Damir  , Pulja Artan  , Kulasin Igor  , Pandza Haris
Published: February 2025

Extensive and fast advancements in biomedical sciences created a significant delay in receiving relevant and updated information in medical practice – physicians use old techniques and treat patients incorrectly. Bosnia and Herzegovina signed the Bologna Declaration on 18 September 2003, and in the light of this new approach to university education, and the process of joining The European Union, the authors set the following aims: to determine the current level of knowledge among medical students at the Medical Faculty of the University of Sarajevo, to determine the level of knowledge among medical students before their enrolment at the faculty, and to find out students opinion on their needs for further education. Students also left their suggestions on what should be changed in the curriculum. 203 students were included in the survey and results show that they demand more practical work, direct contact with patients and presentation of interesting clinical cases. Many of them use the internet as professional education means. Professional papers are rarely used. At present, the availability of learning material is insufficient at the faculty library.
Challenges and Opportunities of Using Recommender Systems for Personalized Health Education
Authors: Fernandez-Luque Luis  , Karlsen Randi  , Vognild Lars K.
Published: February 2025

The use of computers in health education started more than a decade ago, mainly for tailoring health educational resources. Nowadays, many of the computer-tailoring health education systems are using the Internet for delivering different types of health education. Traditionally, these systems are designed for a specific health problem, with a predefined library of educational resources. These systems do not take advantage of the increasing amount of educational resources available on the Internet. One of the reasons is that the high availability of content is making it more difficult to find the relevant one. The problem of information overload has been addressed for many years in the field of recommender systems. This paper is focused on the challenges and opportunities of merging recommender systems with personalized health education. It also discusses the usage of social networks and semantic technologies within this approach.
Behavioral Model Composition: a Non Functional Requirements Driven Approach
Authors: Mizouni Rabeb  , Salah Aziz
Published: February 2025

Complete and precise software requirements description is critical in successful development of software systems. This description specifies both functional requirements that define the different functionalities the system should perform, and non-functional requirements that define how the system should perform these functional requirements. Valuable software should meet both its functional (FRs) and non-functional requirements (NFRs). In this paper, we show the possibility of associating NFRs to behavioral models. We propose a framework where NFRs are defined as a set of non functional attribute goals which derive the composition of behavioral models towards the construction of a behavioral model of the overall system.
Of Mice and Men
Authors: Warwick Kevin
Published: February 2025

In this chapter we consider a distinct example of the link between biology and technology, with particular reference to the brain. We look at the example of a brain cultured in the laboratory which is then linked to a physical robot body. The overall entity therefore consists of a physical robot body controlled by a purely biological brain. The entire system provides a wonderful base for the study of the fundamental features of diseases such as strokes and Alzheimer's disease, as well as allowing for a basic investigation into the mechanisms for neural signal transfer.
Future Approaches to Organ Regeneration: Microscale Environments, Stem Cell Engineering, and Self-assembly of Living Tissues
Authors: Hacking S. Adam  , Kachouie Nezamoddin N.  , Lee Won Gu  , Khademhosseini Ali
Published: February 2025

A promising means to address the limited supply of donor tissue is through the generation of artificial organs consisting of cells and materials. Progress towards this goal is limited by three main obstacles namely the generation of a sufficient number of cells specific to the organ, the arrangement of these cells in a functional tissue architecture and the delivery of nutrients and removal of waste from the tissue mass. This chapter describes the emerging approaches that may be achieved by the control of stem cell differentiation, control of the local tissue environment on the microscale, and the generation of complex structures containing multiple cell types.
Haptic Medicine
Authors: Mason Cindy  , Mason Earl
Published: February 2025

The paper introduces haptic medicine – healthcare based on loving touch for healing and preventing disease. We describe the effects of loving touch (a square inch of our skin has over 1000 nerves) on the body, brain and mind. We describe two web-based health education and media projects. The first, HYPERLINK “http://www.21stcenturymed.org” www.21stcenturymed.org is a place for health practitioners to start learning about touch and resources. The second project, Humans Without Borders, is a multi-lingual self help education website for everyday people. Teaching materials for these projects are based on our previous work with a form of haptic medicine known as psychophysiophilosophy with patients at Stanford Hospital, Kaiser Permanente and Lucille Packard Children's Hospital. We describe psychophysiophilosophy, relate motherly love to recent discoveries in neurosciences and give hints on ways to increase motherly love in each of us. We present a plan for moving into the future by re-introducing haptic medicine into our daily lives through self-help and as an adjunct for current physician practice. There is an exercise in self-help for the reader and an appendix of recent clinical research with profound benefits on the use of human touch for over 40 conditions.
Semantic interoperability for collaborative spatial design
Authors: Hofman Wout
Published: February 2025

Mobile devices offer integrated functionality to browse, phone, play music, and watch video. Moreover, these devices have sufficient memory and processing power to run (small) applications based on for instance Google Android and the iPhone/iPod OS. As such, they support for instance Google Earth to visualize your (urban) environment with all functionality offered by Google. User interaction for spatial design can thus become one of the functionalities. It allows a user to view a design with a mobile device on the location where that design is going to be realized, and communicate with other users utilizing various technologies (speech, Twitter, blogs, mail). Spatial design, especially in existing Urban Areas is complex and involves many stakeholders, each with their own interests and view on spatial design. In densely populated areas, many different aspects play a role, such as mobility, noise, air quality, safety and esthetics. The modeled response of (future) inhabitants to the quality of the (future) urban environment is becoming more and more important in the planning process. Interoperability between various devices and applications is a prerequisite for all users and all devices. Semantic is one aspect of interoperability that allows all applications to automatically process and visualize data. Semantic interoperability is also required for integration of computational algorithms to produce for instance noise maps, air quality maps as well as indicators on accessibility and transparency to stakeholders via various devices needs to be supported. The same semantics can not only be used to visualize the future, but also the past and changes in the past (timeline). It allows tourists to see a city in the past using mobile devices. This paper presents a way forward for development of integrated, device independent, collaborative spatial design systems.
On in-vitro and in-vivo IVUS data fusion
Authors: Ciompi Francesco  , Pujol Oriol  , Rodríguez-Leor Oriol  , Serrano-Vida Angel  , Mauri Josepa  , Radeva Petia
Published: February 2025

The design and the validation of an automatic plaque characterization technique based on Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) usually requires a data ground-truth. The histological analysis of post-mortem coronary arteries is commonly assumed as the state-of-the-art process for the extraction of a reliable data-set of atherosclerotic plaques. Unfortunately, the amount of data provided by this technique is usually few, due to the difficulties in collecting post-mortem cases and phenomena of tissue spoiling during histological analysis. In this paper we tackle the process of fusing in-vivo and in-vitro IVUS data starting with the analysis of recently proposed approaches for the creation of an enhanced IVUS data-set; furthermore, we propose a new approach, named pLDS, based on semi-supervised learning with a data selection criterion. The enhanced data-set obtained by each one of the analyzed approaches is used to train a classifier for tissue characterization purposes. Finally, the discriminative power of each classifier is quantitatively assessed and compared by classifying a data-set of validated in-vitro IVUS data.
Terrain Classification for outdoor mobile robots using PCA
Authors: Caballero Parga Daniel  , Figueras Albert  , Esteva Santi  , Hesse Rafael
Published: February 2025

Safe mobility in rough terrain is important for high-risk missions. In order to achieve stability and mobility precision it is necessary to have a good knowledge of the terrain properties. This work treats the problem of outdoor classification terrain analyzing proprioceptives sensor data, current measure, wheel speeds and slippage. The use of principal component analysis (PCA) reduces the space dimension of acquired data to a lower dimension to classificate in which terrain the robot is moving. This paper presents experimental results to validate the proposed methodology.
Approaches to Hospital Process Management
Authors: Lopez-Sanchez Maite  , Campos Jordi  , Musavi Ashkan
Published: February 2025

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) health care systems worldwide are faced with the challenge of responding to the needs of people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart failure and mental illness. Chronic disease management (CDM) is a systematic approach to improve health care for people with chronic disease. This paper studies two different approaches to the management of two of the various processes involved. In particular, we specify chronic disease management and purchasing processes both with Electronic Institutions and Metastorm.
An Intelligent Agent to Support City Policies Decisions
Authors: Augello Agnese  , Pilato Giovanni  , Gaglio Salvatore
Published: February 2025

In last year there has been a growing interest in computational intelligence techniques applied to economics, providing support for financial decisions. In this paper we propose an intelligent decision support system, aimed at suggesting the best managing strategies for a game-based model of a virtual city. Two knowledge representation areas characterize the intelligent agent. The first one is a “deterministic” area, which deals with descriptions and deterministic events. The second one is a “decisional” area, which deals with decisions taken under conditions of uncertainty. The agent is capable of reasoning in order to prospect the future evolutions of particular choices taken by the user. The interaction is conducted through a natural language interface built as an Alice-based conversational agent.
Comparing early and late data fusion methods for gene function prediction
Authors: Re Matteo  , Valentini Giorgio
Published: February 2025

High-throughput biotechnologies are playing an increasingly important role in biomolecular research. Their ability to provide genome wide views of molecular mechanisms occurring in living cells could play a crucial role in the elucidation of biomolecular processes at system level but dataset produced using these techniques are often high-dimensional and very noisy making their analysis challenging because the need to extract relevant information froma sea of noise.
Rule-based versus Principle-based Regulatory Compliance
Authors: Burgemeestre Brigitte  , Hulstijn Joris  , Tan Yao-Hua
Published: February 2025

There is an ongoing debate in law and accounting about the relative merits of principle-based versus rule-based regulatory systems. In this paper we characterize what kind of reasoning underlies the two styles of regulation. We adapt an original account of Verheij et al. (1998) to take aspects of the implementation context into account, such as the process of adoption of a new norm and the roles of the participants. The model is validated by a comparison between EU and US customs regulations intended to enhance safety and security in international trade. The EU regulations (AEO self-assessment) are essentially principle-based, whereas the American system (C-TPAT) is rule-based.
The Legal Precedent in Online Dispute Resolution
Authors: Carneiro Davide  , Novais Paulo  , Andrade Francisco  , Zeleznikow John  , Neves José
Published: February 2025

The advances observed in the last years in telecommunication technologies rapidly brought along new ways of doing business. This new reality, however, has not been so rapidly followed by the entities responsible for dealing with the conflicts that arise from these interactions, now undertaken in an electronic format. Traditional paper-based courts, designed for the industrial era, are now outdated. The answer to this problem may rely on the new tools that can be built using new artifacts from fields such as Artificial Intelligence. Using these tools the parties can simulate outcomes, thus having a better notion of the possible consequences of a legal dispute, namely in terms of the Best and Worst Alternative to Negotiated Agreements. In this paper, we present our agent-based architecture for such a tool, UMCourt, placing special emphasis on a particular agent that, based on the concept of legal precedent, gives its users a set of possible outcomes of a case, based on the observation of past similar cases and learns new cases in order to enrich its knowledge base about the Portuguese labor law.
Health Information Systems: Requirements and Characteristics
Authors: Schlotzer Angelika  , Madsen Maria
Published: February 2025

This chapter gives an educational overview of:
Telehealth and Remote Access
Authors: Maeder Anthony
Published: February 2025

This chapter gives an educational overview of:
An Image Search System with Analytical Functions for 3D Color Vector Quantization and Cluster-based Shape and Structure Features
Authors: Barakbah Ali Ridho  , Kiyoki Yasushi
Published: February 2025

The application area of image retrieval systems has widely spread to the WWW and multimedia database environments. This paper presents an image search system with analytical functions for combining shape, structure, and color features. The system pre-processes an image segmentation from hybrid color systems of HSL and CIELAB. This segmentation process includes a new mechanism for clustering the elements of high-resolution images in order to improve precision and reduce computation time. The system extracts three features of an image which are color, shape and structure. We apply the 3D Color Vector Quantization for the color feature extraction. The shape properties of an image which include eccentricity, area, equivalent diameter, and convex area, are analyzed for extracting the shape feature. The image structure is identified by applying 2D Forward Mirror-Extended Curvelet Transform. Another distinctive idea introduced in this paper is a new distance metric which represents a semantic similarity. This paper has evaluations of the system using 1000 JPEG images from COREL image collections. The experimental results clarify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system to improve accuracy for image retrieval.
Investigating Urban Sprawl Using Remote Sensing and GIS Technology
Authors: Kupidura Adrianna  , Kupidura Przemysław
Published: February 2025

The paper concerns the analysis of urban sprawl. The presented example of Lomianki – the municipality situated in the neighbourhood of Warsaw – capital city of Poland, shows dynamic changes of rural-urban fringe, called sub-urbanization. This kind of process is characterized by incoherence of spatial structure, disproportions between development of built-up areas and transport network, underdevelopment of service built-up areas and public spaces and mixing of urban and rural structures. Such a dynamic development leads also to an increasing of area of sealed (impermeable) zones, what is very important due to water economics. The multi-temporal dataset of aerial and satellite images from 1977 to 2007 has been used for the extraction of zones of different land use classes and for determining of sealed areas. The dynamics of these processes: increase of built-up areas and sealed areas has been showed using remote sensing and GIS technology.
Derivation of a finite time expected cost model for a condition-based maintenance program
Authors: Pandey Mahesh D.  , Cheng Tianjin
Published: February 2025

The gamma process is a stochastic cumulative process that can be used to model a time-variant uncertain process. Professor van Noortwijk's research work played a key role in modeling degradation by gamma process and making it popular in engineering community. The maintenance optimization models mostly use the renewal theorem to evaluate the asymptotic expected cost rate and optimize the maintenance policy. However, many engineering projects have relative short and finite time horizon in which the application of the asymptotic formula becomes questionable. This paper presents a finite time model for computing the expected maintenance cost and investigates the suitability of the asymptotic cost rate formula.
Data Structures, Coding and Classification
Authors: Zheng Huiru  , Wang Haiying  , Black Norman D.  , Winder John
Published: February 2025

Medical interventions produce a broad range of data types: text-based data, for example a physician's notes describing the patient encounter; physiological signals such as the well known electrocardiogram (ECG), but also recordings from brain (electroencephalogram, EEG) and muscle activity (electromyogram, EMG); and images such as Compute Tomography (CT) scans, Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) or ultrasound images. In addition, recent progress in medical science and technology has led to the accumulation of a tremendous amount of genomic data in support of individualised healthcare and personalised therapies. In this section, the characteristics of typical clinical data are introduced, followed by a brief introduction to genomic data. Coding of data is important for summarising data in computer systems. Well known examples are Read Codes and SNOMED-CT. These assist in promoting a shared understanding for the healthcare professionals and facilitate the use of software tools for medical audit, classification and research. Interoperability, which allows computer systems to communicate, is an important concept. Unambiguous description and standards are important. Web standards based on XML, facilitate WEB2.0 participation, with a view to producing a semantic web. For health, we provide an example based on a markup language to describe the electrocardiogram (ecgML).
Mining, Knowledge and Decision Support
Authors: Finlay Dewar D.  , Nugent Chris D.  , Wang Haiying  , Donnelly Mark P.  , McCullagh Paul J.
Published: February 2025

Decision support systems (DSS) are software entities that assist the physician in the decision making process. They have found application in medicine due to the large amounts of data (e.g. laboratory measurements such as blood pressure, heart rate, body-mass index) and information (e.g. patient history, population statistics based on age and sex) that must be considered before diagnosing any disease or recommending a therapy. A well known example is the embedded software in defibrillators which allows a ‘shock’ to be delivered, by analyzing the electrocardiogram for known conditions (heart attack). The shock can restart the heart and timely delivery can resuscitate the patient. As well as assisting in primary diagnosis, a DSS can reduce medical error, assist compliance with clinical guidelines, improve efficiency of care delivery and improve quality of care. Decision support still has significant acceptance issues in clinical routine, but can achieve more prominence, as systems are demonstrated to provide effective knowledge based support. Data mining is often used to provide some insight to a data set and update our accepted knowledge. In this section, we discuss a study which examines where electrocardiographic information should be recorded from a patient's torso in order to increase diagnostic yield.
Engineering responses to pandemics
Authors: Larson Richard C.  , Nigmatulina Karima R.
Published: February 2025

Focusing on pandemic influenza, this chapter approaches the planning for and response to such a major worldwide health event as a complex engineering systems problem. Action-oriented analysis of pandemics requires a broad inclusion of academic disciplines since no one domain can cover a significant fraction of the problem. Numerous research papers and action plans have treated pandemics as purely medical happenings, focusing on hospitals, health care professionals, creation and distribution of vaccines and anti-virals, etc. But human behavior with regard to hygiene and social distancing constitutes a first-order partial brake or control of the spread and intensity of infection. Such behavioral options are “non-pharmaceutical interventions.” (NPIs) The chapter employs simple mathematical models to study alternative controls of infection, addressing a well-known parameter in epidemiology, R0, the “reproductive number,” defined as the mean number of new infections generated by an index case. Values of R0greater than 1.0 usually indicate that the infection begins with exponential growth, the generation-to-generation growth rate being R0. R0is broken down into constituent parts related to the frequency and intensity of human contacts, both partially under our control. It is suggested that any numerical value for R0has little meaning outside the social context to which it pertains. Difference equation models are then employed to study the effects of heterogeneity of population social contact rates, the analysis showing that the disease tends to be driven by high frequency individuals. Related analyses show the futility of trying geographically to isolate the disease. Finally, the models are operated under a variety of assumptions related to social distancing and changes in hygienic behavior. The results are promising in terms of potentially reducing the total impact of the pandemic.
Understanding and enhancing the dental delivery system
Authors: Griffin Paul M.
Published: February 2025

Dental decay is the most prevalent chronic disease among both children and adults in the U.S. The Surgeon General's Report on Oral Health found that there had been marked improvement in oral health in many Americans over the last 50 years and that good oral health could be achieved by all Americans largely due to the presence of safe and effective interventions to prevent and control oral disease However, recent national data suggest that several disparities in dental care exist. In this chapter, we present a model of the dental health system as well as key differences with the general medical health system. We further discuss the major issues that the dental care delivery system will have to address in order to ensure that all Americans have access to effective interventions to prevent and control disease in an environment of decreasing supply of dentists per capita and potentially increasing demand. We then discuss strategies and policies to address these emerging issues in the context of this model. Finally, we conclude with suggestions on how engineering techniques could be used to improve the system.
Characterizing Functions based on Ontological Models from an Engineering Point of View
Authors: Kitamura Yoshinobu  , Mizoguchi Riichiro
Published: February 2025

The purpose of this paper is to characterize some definitions of function in engineering and philosophy from an engineering point of view. To do this, this paper firstly discusses some fundamental kinds of function based on ontological distinctions. Next, based on them, we characterize our definition with justifications from the engineering view and present an ontological model of artifact function along the product life-cycle. Then, we try to characterize a philosophical definition of biological organs using the model. Next, we discuss function of a non-biological (non-organic) natural thing. Lastly, we characterize functions of an artifact, a biological organ and a non-biological natural thing based on another ontological model along the evolution of creatures.
The Human side of the Future Internet
Authors: Simoes Jose  , Weik Peter  , Magedanz Thomas
Published: February 2025

Despite all the uncertainties regarding the architectures, protocols and technologies to be used in an Internet of the future, it is clear that it will be shaped for humans, carrying with it major social and economical impact. In this sense, aiming at improving the user perceived Quality of Experience in the Internet of the Future, our paper presents common ground work for designing a unified generic human profile structure and correspondent architecture capable of seamless interacting with a myriad of things and services, independently from their associated technologies. Moreover, supported by its reality, social and context awareness conception principles, it will enable human behavior to be leveraged to any entity present in every single next generation ecosystem.
SENSEI traffic impact on mobile wireless networks
Authors: Tomić Igor  , Krčo Srdjan  , Vučković Divna  , Gluhak Alexander  , Navaratnam Pirabakaran
Published: February 2025

With an increasing number of connected devices and the coming wave of Internet of Things services, it is important to understand how the modern communication networks will cope with the additional traffic load. In this paper, an analysis of several Internet of things scenarios as envisioned by the FP7 SENSEI project have been performed to understand how the traffic is being generated in each of the scenarios. Based on the analysis, a traffic model is derived and then used to assess its impact on wireless mobile networks from the networks' dimensioning point of view. The results of this analysis are then presented.
Visual Properties of an Object Affect Time to Target in VR Reaching Tasks
Authors: Powell Vaughan  , Stevens Brett  , Hand Steve  , Simmonds Maureen
Published: February 2025

Virtual Reality is being used increasingly for upper limb rehabilitation. The type of virtual objects used for reaching tasks varies widely, but there has been little work exploring the effect of different characteristics of objects on target acquisition time. This study investigates how target acquisition times vary for virtual objects with different visual cues. Results suggest that the visual properties of an object may have a notable effect on target acquisition times. Simple (low polygon) objects with richer depth cues are acquired more easily than a standard sphere.
A Myoelectric-Controlled Virtual Hand for the Assessment and Treatment of Phantom Limb Pain in Trans-Radial Upper Extremity Amputees: a Research Protocol
Authors: Gaggioli Andrea  , Amoresano Amedeo  , Gruppioni Emanuele  , Verni Gennaro  , Riva Giuseppe
Published: February 2025

At least 90% of individuals of limb amputees experience phantom limb pain (PLP). Recent clinical research suggests that providing patients with the mirror image representation of the amputated limb may alleviate PLP. However, mirror therapy cannot be used with bilateral amputees, as visual feedback is dependent on the movement of the intact limb. To overcome this limitation, we designed a novel myoelectric-controlled virtual reality (VR) system for the treatment of phantom limb pain in trans-radial upper extremity amputees. The proposed system allows the patient to directly control the virtual limb by recognizing stump muscle patterns recorded with EMG sensors. The hypothesis behind this strategy is that the VR image of the amputated limb induces better limb imagery than the reflected image of their intact limb and, therefore, is more effective in reducing PLP. A research protocol to test this hypothesis is described.
eBaViR, Easy Balance Virtual Rehabilitation System: a Study with Patients
Authors: González-Fernández M.  , Gil-Gómez José-Antonio  , Alcañiz M.  , Noé E.  , Colomer C.
Published: February 2025

eBaViR is a virtual rehabilitation system, which has been developed for balance rehabilitation for patients suffering from acquired brain injury. It is a game-based system that uses a low-cost interface, the Nintendo Wii Balance Board. The games have been specifically designed with the help of experts in the rehabilitation of balance disorders and can be adapted to patients according to their needs. We present an experimental study that has been carried out using the system. The aim of the study is to determine whether this setup could be applied as a Virtual Rehabilitation System for balance rehabilitation in Acquired Brain Injury. We randomly divided patients into two groups: a trial group and a control group. The trial group used eBaViR system during the rehabilitation sessions, and the control group followed traditional rehabilitation sessions. We obtained encouraging results.
Design and Implementation of a Health Data Interoperability Mediator
Authors: Kuo Mu-Hsing  , Kushniruk Andre William  , Borycki Elizabeth Marie
Published: February 2025

The objective of this study is to design and implement a common-gateway oriented mediator to solve the health data interoperability problems that exist among heterogeneous health information systems. The proposed mediator has three main components: (1) a Synonym Dictionary (SD) that stores a set of global metadata and terminologies to serve as the mapping intermediary, (2) a Semantic Mapping Engine (SME) that can be used to map metadata and instance semantics, and (3) a DB-to-XML module that translates source health data stored in a database into XML format and back. A routine admission notification data exchange scenario is used to test the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed mediator. The study results show that the proposed mediator can make health information exchange more efficient.
Tele-Assistance for discharged Patients supporting Continuity of Care
Authors: Stoicu-Tivadar Lăcrămioara  , Stoicu-Tivadar Vasile  , Berian Dorin
Published: February 2025

The paper describes a tele-assistance / tele-monitoring system that assist discharged patients at their home. The system consists of units located at the homes of the monitored persons collecting and sending medical and environmental data from sensors and a call centre with a server for recording and monitoring the data. Here, specialized staff will support tele-surveillance and tele-assistance services. The algorithm that describes the alarm processing related to the threshold conditions of the values read from the sensors is presented as one important part of the system functionalities. During the project an important activity was related to the integration of the devices used in the monitoring process. There were different devices and equipments from different companies and the integration was almost impossible. The solution was to create complex software that can make the things work together.