bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Mapping Information of Operating Theatre Waiting List Process
Authors: Foo Gerhardine , Al-Hakim Latif
Published: May 2010

An operating theatre waiting list (OTWL) is a list that patients are enrolled in once they opt to pursue an elective procedure, assuming they cannot get this procedure performed immediately (Chua 2005). Operating Theatre Waiting Lists are of great concern in society nowadays because of their societal and political priority, their link to the quality of individual patients’ life, relation to the economic management of operating theatres and management of patient flow through the hospital and distribution of scarce medical resources (Al-Hakim & Fitzgerald 2003; Foote, North & Houston 2004; NSW Health 2002). They are used by politicians as measures of success or otherwise of government action on the health services.
Medical Privacy and the National Health Information Network Initiative
Authors: Szewczak Edward J.
Published: May 2010

Traditionally medical data were typically collected and stored as records in physician’s offices and in hospitals. Often the data were recorded manually and retrieved manually. Today collection and retrieval of medical data is increasingly done using information technology (IT). The introduction of IT, especially e-technologies, has changed the handling of medical data in ways that are both promising for improving health care as well as threatening to the individual patient’s medical privacy. This article will examine medical privacy and the National Health Information Network (Kaushal, et al., 2005) initiative. Other technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID), voice over IP (VOIP) and telemedicine, while relevant to the topic of medical privacy and IT, are tangential to the more central issues of electronic health records, medical databases, and the development of a national health information network. Although the focus will be on medical privacy in the United States of America, it is evident that people in other countries are also concerned about their medical privacy. Singaporeans, especially Malays, worry that their medical histories may result in racial discrimination. In the area of medical research, the Chinese and Indians want their medical information confined only to the area of study that was originally agreed to and not disseminated widely (Tan, 2006).
A Mobile Computing Framework for Passive RFID Detection System in Health Care
Authors: Mohammadian Masoud , Jentzsch Ric
Published: May 2010

The cost of health care continues to be a world wide issue. Research continues into ways and how the utilization of evolving technologies can be applied to reduce costs and improve patient care, while maintaining patient’s lives. To achieve these needs requires accurate, near real time data acquisition and analysis. At the same time there exists a need to acquire a profile on a patient and update that profile as fast and as possible. All types of confidentiality need to be addressed no matter which technology and application is used. One possible way to achieve this is to use a passive detection system that employs wireless radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This detection system can integrate wireless networks for fast data acquisition and transmission, while maintaining the privacy issue. Once this data is obtained, then up to date profiling can be integrated into the patient care system. This article discussed the use and need for a passive RFID system for patient data acquisition in health care facilities such as a hospital. The development of profile data is assisted by a profiling intelligent software agent that is responsible for processing the raw data obtained through RFID and database and invoking the creation and update of the patient profile.
A Model to Evaluate the Flow of an Emergency Department
Authors: Schnellen M. C.J.
Published: May 2010

Little is published about generic models that describe the physic and information process of an emergency department. This paper expounds the development of a general model which describes the current physic and information processes of an emergency department and it is based on observations of emergency departments in The Netherlands and the United States. This model can be of great value for the management of an emergency department, since it is useful to first analyze to current situation before improving organizational processes (Daft, 2000). The main purpose of this paper is formulated as ‘The creation of a model which can evaluate the physic and information flow of an emergency department by using literature and emergency department observations.’ In this research is investigated if it is possible to develop this kind of model. And if this is possible, then how can this model be used to compare the physic and information flows for different emergency departments. This research is defined inside one of the projects of the department Organizations, Operations and Human resources of the University of Twente. This is a four-year project on the emergency department of a large hospital in The Netherlands, leaded by ir. R. J. Rosmulder and guided by prof. dr. ir. J.J. Krabbendam. The project includes the improvement of organizational processes at this emergency department by using business theories in order to develop new ways of controlling the organizational processes of the emergency department.
Multidimensional Modeling in the Health Industry
Authors: Belkin Markus , Corbitt Brian , Peszynski Konrad
Published: May 2010

Today’s information rich and knowledge-based business society relies heavily on Information Technology (IT) and Information Systems (IS) design to enable the business to operate effectively and create a competitive advantage. Firms must align their IS design and performance with the core business competencies and business goals of the firm. There are multiple paths towards this end and inefficiencies and conflicts may arise when the firm’s IS strategies diverge from the business goals. This is no different in the health industry where conflicts exist between IS infrastructure and development, and business goals. The existence of inflexible mainframe IS unable to support modern technology such as the Internet, telemedicine, wireless technology and real-time management software has compromised the business goals and business development in the health vertical to the extent that it has now fallen behind other comparable knowledge industries.
Myoelectric Control of Prosthetic Devices for Rehabilitation
Authors: Khushaba Rami N. , Al-Jumaily Adel A.
Published: May 2010

Bio-signals patterns analysis problems have enjoyed a rapid increase in popularity in the past few years. The electromyography (EMG) signal, also referred to as the Myoelectric signal (MES), recorded at the surface of the skin, is one of the biosignals generated by the human body, representing a collection of electrical signals from the muscle fibre, acting as a physical variable of interest since it first appeared in the 1940s (Scott, 1984). It was considered to be the main focus of scientists, and was advanced as a natural approach for the control of prosthesis, since it is utilising the electrical action potential of the residual limb’s muscles remaining in the amputee’s stump (which still has normal innervations, and thus is subject to voluntary control) as a control signal to the prosthesis—in other words, it allows amputees to use the same mental process to control their prosthesis as they had used in controlling their physiological parts; however, the technology in that time was not adequate to make clinical application viable. With the development of semiconductor devices technology, and the associated decrease in device size and power requirements, the clinical applications saw promise, and research and development increased dramatically.
Nanorobotics
Authors: Bansal Sourabh
Published: May 2010

Nanorobotics is a young and a challenging discipline of nanotechnology that is related to the design and simulation of robots or nonbiological machines on the scale of a nanometer (10-9 meter/1billionth of a meter). Nanorobotics is also termed as the science of studying nanomachines, commonly known as Nanorobots (nanobots or nanoids), which are in the range of 0.1-10 micrometres.
Networks of Action for Anti Retroviral Treatment
Authors: Byrne Elaine , Johnson Roy D.
Published: May 2010

In 2005, the clinical director of the Batho Pele clinic1 in the Gauteng province in South Africa requested the assistance of the Department of Informatics at the University of Pretoria in addressing their IS issues. This request fitted the department’s research interests in health information systems (HIS), as well the broader research focus and commitment to provide outreach services to the community. Knowing the problems of commencing projects without having planned for sustainability and scalability, the HIS research group elected to use the “networks of action” concept to partner and collaborate with the various role players, institutions, and other ART entities. This process of developing interconnecting networks of human and nonhuman entities in South Africa and beyond its borders raised a number of opportunities, challenges, and tensions in initiating this project. To provide a background to this process, the next section introduces the concept of “networks of action” and a brief description of the ART clinic. The following section develops the main focus of this chapter, which is the process of developing these networks. The last section suggests the necessity of developing networks of action as a future trend for sustainable IS.
New Perspectives in Rheoencephalography
Authors: Perez Juan J. , Guijarro Enrique , Ortiz Pedro , Pons José M.
Published: May 2010

One of the most important advances in biomedical engineering has been the ability to inspect inside the body without opening it. In this sense, rheoencephalography (REG) is an electromedical technique used to assess the cerebral blood flow (CBF) by noninvasive electrical impedance methods, using electrodes attached to the scalp surface. This technique was first proposed by Polzer and Schuhfried (1950), and emerged as an extrapolation of impedance plethysmography applied to the head. An electric current flowing through a biological tissue causes a potential difference between any pair of electrodes that can be measured. This potential difference depends on the amplitude of the injected current, the shape of the conductor, the arrangement of the electrodes, and the electrical characteristics of the tissue. For instance, the electrical conductivity of the lung tissue is much lower than that of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), since alveolar sacs are nonconductive. Furthermore, the electrical conductivity depends on the frequency of the electric current, the orientation of the tissue fibers relative to the current flow, and the amount of extracellular fluid that surrounds the cells. For example, electrical conductivity is higher in the blood than in most tissues, since plasma acts as a truehighway for ions (Malmivuo & Plonsey, 1995).
A Non-Invasive Approach to the Bionic Eye
Authors: Grossman N. , Nikolic K. , Degenaar P. , Toumazou C. , Yang H. , Drakakis E.
Published: May 2010

According to the World Health Organisation definition for blindness, that is, visual acuity bellow 3/60 for the best eye on the Snellen scale, there are thought to be 38 million blind people worldwide (Delbeke et al., 2004). This figure is expected to double over the next 25 years due to combination of an increasing population and aging worldwide. There are additionally 110 million people who have severely impaired vision and are high risk of becoming blind. The most common causes of blindness are: cataract, trachoma, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, age related macular degeneration (AMD) and retinitis pigmentosa (RP). In the west countries, cataract and glaucoma make up only 11% of the total causes of blindness. In these regions AMD and RP are prevalent eye diseases. AMD increases dramatically with age, so that (with about 2million cases in the USA) it is the leading cause of blindness among Americans of European descent (Friedman et al., 2004). The AMD and RP result in the loss of photosensitivity primarily due to destruction of the rod and cone photoreceptors. Medical intervention to date has been disappointing. There is no known mechanism by which the eye can self-repair. Anti-angiogenesis drugs can significantly slow down the progression of wet type AMD, but in most cases there is very little treatment. Even more significantly, none of the drugs are capable of restoring lost vision. The idea of using stem cells in therapies is still complex and may be many decades away from potential treatment. Prosthetic implants are therefore the only method at present by which we can offer a return of some of the lost vision. Here we present a special type of vision restoration based on the optical stimulation of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), which remain operational.
Parallel Architectures for MEDLINE Search
Authors: Boppana Rajendra V. , Chalasani Suresh , Badgett Bob , Pugh Jacqueline A.
Published: May 2010

In this article, we describe a parallel architecture for MEDLINE database integrated with search refinement tools to facilitate accurate and fast response to search requests by users. The proposed architecture, to be developed by the authors, will use low-cost, high-performance computing clusters consisting of Linux based personal computers and workstations (i) to provide subsecond response times for individual searches and (ii) to support several concurrent queries from search refinement programs such as SUMSearch.
Patients and Physicians Faced to New Healthcare Systems
Authors: Thaize Challier Marie-Christine
Published: May 2010

It is increasingly recognized that, by introducing healthcare information systems, it may be possible to improve healthcare delivery. Yet, insufficient attention has been paid, in the context of the introduction and implementation of new technologies, to examine the issues concerning the reduction of the astonishing variations in medical (and surgical) practices across seemingly similar areas. This article studies the causes of the differences in healthcare practices by examining the agency relationship where the patients delegate decision making to the physicians. To do this, it first presents the consequences of two main informational issues: the asymmetric information, and the imperfect information. Under such informational inadequacies, practitioners could not act in the best interests of their patients, and unnecessary and inappropriate cares could appear. Second, this article derives from such informational problems the necessity of information and coordination systems to ensure a better healthcare delivery.
Planning and Control and the Use of Information Technology in Mental Health Care Organizations
Authors: Baars I. J. , van Merode G. G.
Published: May 2010

This article reports the results of two studies on the use of standard care processes and IT for planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The results give insight in the needed functionalities of IT and planning and control of mental healthcare processes. The first study is a case study in a center for multidisciplinary (mental) youth care. This center implemented care programs and an automated planning tool. We studied the success of this implementation and particularly the fit between the care programs and the planning tool. In the second study we studied the characteristics of ambulant mental healthcare processes and the actual and preferable use of planning and control models and IT.
A Prospective Observational Study of the Determinants of Current Cataract Surgical Selection
Authors: Dhillon B. , Aspinall P. , Aslam T. , Halpin P. , Vani A. , Byrne P. , Hill A. , Van den Berg T.
Published: May 2010

The principal aim of this research proposal was to develop quality of life and relevant visual function criteria to provide a rational decisional framework to be used as a basis for individual and policy decisions on cataract referral and surgery. There are two key objectives within this overall aim. The first is to identify reliable and effective quality of life and visual function criteria to determine the threshold for surgery for each individual patient in which false positive and false negative errors are minimized. The second is to provide a decisional framework in which risk factors may be incorporated to assess the likely outcome benefits from surgery.
Relationship Between Performance Error and Human Information Processing
Authors: Karashima Mitsuhiko
Published: May 2010

Human information processing (HIP) performance using the working memory can be assessed by two types of indicator when an HIP task is carried out. One is error occurrence and the other is HIP time taken when the HIP task is carried out using the working memory. Errors are classified into the error which is caused by the task requirement exceeding some human’s limitation or the error which is caused by carelessness even though all of human’s limitations still allow enough capacity to do the task (Reason, 1990). The former is regarded as an error that is caused by the lack of the HIP ability in order to do the required information processing. The latter is regarded as an error that is caused by the temporary reduction of some HIP ability such as attention. Even though there are many kinds of factors of error generation, from the view point of HIP, error can be considered to be caused by the relationship between the required quantity or quality of the information processing and the HIP ability. The characteristics of HIP can be considered to influence error generation directly. In this chapter the characteristics of HIP related to the error are illustrated with the results of the experiments. (Karashima, Okamura & Saito, 1994, Karashima & Saito, 2001)
Relationship Management Competence and Organizational Performance
Authors: Saito Murako
Published: May 2010

The competence of organizational management is required to cope with complexity of technology and diversity of social demands for maintaining good interpersonal relationship by the support of advanced technology. The competencies, such as self-management, interpersonal relationship management, play a crucial role in improving individual and organizational performance. Experiences of interpersonal relationship at work are multifaceted with value consciousness, mood states at work, members’ work attitudes in addition with technical knowledge and skills which are constituted of explicit cognitive information. Organizational climate or culture is focused in recent studies to improve human performance by avoiding erroneous actions, accidental occurrences, or withdrawal attitudes such as absent, turnover intention. The participants to organization are expected to act as an actor or some of them as a leader to help in developing themselves and coworkers, building bonds to collaborate with team members, for improving organizational performance and for providing high quality of service. This chapter is focused on the effect of mood states at work on workers perceived health and perceived performance, and on the effect of the competence of interpersonal relationship management on organizational performances.
RFID as the Critical Factor for Superior Healthcare Delivery
Authors: Dwivedi A. , Butcher T.
Published: May 2010

Innovations in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have transformed the manner in which healthcare organizations function. Applications of concepts such as data warehousing and data mining have exponentially increased the amount of information that a healthcare organization has access to. Work flow and associated Internet technologies are being seen as instruments to cut administrative expenses. Specifically designed ICT implementations, such as work flow tools, are being used to automate the electronic paper flow in a managed care operation, thereby cutting administrative expenses (Dwivedi, Bali, & Naguib, 2005, p. 44; Latamore, 1999). These recent innovations in the use of ICT applications in a healthcare context have altered the manner in which healthcare institutions exploit clinical and nonclinical data. The pendulum has shifted from the early 1980s, wherein the emphasis of ICT solutions for healthcare was on storage of data in an electronic medium, the prime objective of which was to allow exploitation of this data at a later point in time. As such, most of the early 1980s ICT applications in healthcare were built to provide support for retrospective information retrieval needs and, in some cases, to analyze the decisions undertaken. Clinical data that was traditionally used in a supportive capacity for historical purposes has today become an opportunity that allows healthcare stakeholders to tackle problems before they arise (Dwivedi et al., 2005).
The Role of Government and its Influence on Nursing Systems by Means of the Definition of Nursing Minimum Data Sets (NMDS)
Authors: Staudinger Bettina , Ostermann Herwig , Thöni Magdalena , Staudinger Roland
Published: May 2010

Since the 1980’s, questions have been asked the world over about the efficiency and contribution of nursing in the hospital treatment of patients and nursing performance within the framework of nonhospital health care. The cause for these tendencies has many roots. For one, we can determine a push in professionalism through the increasing importance of nursing sciences on whole. The basic focus is on comparability, standardization (Johnson et al., 2005), and securing quality (ICN, 2003). Also, a significant part of nursing systems internationally are publicly financed and legally determined. This has the consequence that the political decision-makers, particularly in context with the financing and planning of nursing structures, have more of an interest in controlling the nursing systems and disposing of useable nursing data.
Spatial Heart Simulation and Adaptive Wave Propagation
Authors: Szilágyi Sándor Miklós , Szilágyi László , Frigy Attila , Gorog Levente , Benyó Zoltán
Published: May 2010

Sudden cardiac death, caused mostly by ventricular fibrillation, is responsible for at least five million deaths in the world each year. Despite decades of research, the mechanisms responsible for ventricular fibrillation are not well understood. As most computational studies are limited primarily to planar simulations, experiments so far have not elucidated the mechanisms responsible for spatial phenomenon (Janse, Wilms-Schopman, & Coronel, 1995) of ventricular fibrillation. It would be important to understand how the onset of arrhythmias that cause fibrillation depends on details such as heart size (Winfree, 1994), geometry (Vetter & McCulloch, 1998; Panfilov, 1999), mechanical and electrical state, anisotropic fiber structure (Fenton & Karma, 1998), and inhomogeneities (Antzelevitch et al., 1999; Wolk, Cobbe, Hicks, & Kane, 1999). The main difficulty in development of a quantitatively accurate simulation of an entire three-dimensional human heart is that human heart muscle is a strongly excitable medium whose electrical dynamics involve rapidly varying, highly localized fronts (Cherry, Greenside, & Henriquez, 2000).
Spatial Heart Simulation and Analysis Using Unified Neural Network
Authors: Szilágyi Sándor Miklós , Szilágyi László , Benyó Zoltán
Published: May 2010

The most important health problem affecting large groups of people is related to the malfunction of the heart, usually caused by heart attack, rhythm disturbances, and pathological degenerations. One of the main goals of health study is to predict these kinds of tragic events, and by identifying the patients situated in the most dangerous states, to make it possible to apply a preventing therapy. Creating a heart model is important (Thaker & Ferrero, 1998) as the computer, while applying traditional signal processing algorithms recognizes lots of waves, but it does not really “understand” what is happening. To overcome this, the computer needs to know the origin and the evolvement process of the ECG signal (MacLeod & Brooks, 1998). During signal processing, if the traditional algorithm finds an unrecognizable waveform, the model-based approach is activated, which tries to estimate the causes of the encountered phenomenon (e.g., quick recognition of ventricular fibrillation) (Szilágyi, 1998).
Technology Adoption, Expectancy Value and Prediction Models
Authors: Martín Maria Teresa , Román Maria Victoria , Recio Manuel
Published: May 2010

During the last few decades, various theoretical developments have been carried out with a view to describing the characteristic and distinct behavioral process that lies under any adoption of technological services and products. These developments are based mainly on the Social Psychology approach. There are three extensive theories within the field of Social Psychology whose ultimate purpose has been to define the internal psychological factors that explain human behavior: the expectancy-value theory, the cognitive dissonance theory, and the self-perception theory. While the expectancy-value theory has been widely used in the research of adoption and usage of information systems, the other two theories have been less recognized. Of all expectancy-value theory models, we should draw our attention to the reasoned action model (Azjen & Fishbein, 1980), because it underlies many of the studies on usage of technology. The planned behavior model (Azjen, 1985, 1991) represents a reformulation of the reasoned action model, justified by the existence of conducts that, albeit in part, a person cannot voluntarily keep under control. A rough description of both models is presented in this chapter, inasmuch as they served as a basis for the construction of the technology acceptance model (Davis, 1989; Davis, Bagozzi & Warshaw, 1989), known as one of the main models for the technology readiness concept. The technology acceptance model seems to possess a similar or even better explicating power than its predecessors (Davis et al., 1989; Mathieson, 1991; Taylor & Todd, 1995a; Chau & Hu, 2002).
Telemedicine and Information Technology for Disaster Medical Scenarios
Authors: Haynes John D. , Saleem Mehnaz , Kanwal Moona
Published: May 2010

Disasters constitute events which are catastrophic in nature. Such events critically threaten the health, safety, and lives of people and their environment (and even aspects of the global environment), and as a result, overwhelm the affected community’s emergency response capacity. Globally, a major disaster occurs almost daily. Consequently, disaster events are virtually an everyday fact of life. Emergency medical services constitute one important aspect of disaster responses. Those populations affected by disasters require a complete range of health services and the appropriate mechanism of delivery. In this respect, increasingly, information technology is playing a greater role. Disaster medicine has become more than merely a mass-casualty, and affected health response; the affected population’s needs are assessed, which range from medical requirements, to rapidly coordinating and providing casualty, routine, and preventive health services. These kinds of assessments are significantly more effective, given the appropriate deployment of current information technology.
Using Object Oriented Technologies to Build Collaborative Applications in Healthcare and Medical Information Systems
Authors: Dwivedi A. , Bali R.K. , Wickramasinghe Nilmini , Naguib R.N.G.
Published: May 2010

The adoption and diffusion of e-health and the application of IT in healthcare is increasing at a rapid rate. Both European and U.S. governments are making e-health a priority on their agendas. The technical infrastructure required to support initiatives such as community healthcare integrated networks (CHINs) and telemedicine efforts is often dependent upon connecting different types of computer networks, each running on different types of technologies so as to present to the user the image of a single virtual electronic health highway. It is generally agreed that current software development technology cannot deliver this due to limitations of restricted scalability, fragmented management, and inflexibility in providing business support. One of the potential solutions may be the use of Object Oriented (OO) technology. This article explores the feasibility of combining OO technologies with healthcare based workflow management systems (WFMS). We introduce the concept of workflow technologies and discuss the main advantages and limitations of WFMS. We detail the circumstances in which the use of WFMS could be considered and the technological factors necessary for its successful implementation.
VEMH
Authors: Graschew G. , Roelofs T.A. , Rakowsky S. , Schlag P.M.
Published: May 2010

Telemedicine aims at equal access to medical expertise irrespective of the geographical location of the person in need. New developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the transmission of medical images in sufficiently high quality that allows for a reliable diagnosis to be determined by the expert at the receiving site (Pande, 2003; Lacroix, 2002). At the same time, however, these innovative developments in ICT over the last decade bear the risk of creating and amplifying a digital divide in the world, creating a disparity between the northern and the southern Euro-Mediterranean area (Graschew, 2003a; Dario, 2005; Graschew, 2004).
In Vivo Near Infrared Techniques for Protein Drug Development
Authors: Gu Yueqing , Qian Zhiyu , Qian Huimin , Fang Chunsheng , Song Yulin
Published: May 2010

Near infrared (NIR) light (700 ~ 900 nm) possesses the capability of penetrating living tissues several centimeters due to the low absorbance of tissue intrinsic chromophores such as oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin (the main absorber of visible light), melanin, water, and lipid (the principal absorber of infrared light). Featured with the deeper tissue penetration as well as nonionizing and nonradioactive, NIR light attracts extensive attentions on the development of noninvasive techniques for in vivo real time monitoring/tracing of biological signals in living tissues. Hitherto, NIR techniques have permeated to almost all aspects of health care, such as diagnosing disease (Nahum, Skippen, Gagnon, Macnab, & Skarsgard, 2006), designing the targeted molecular or drug carrier (Hsu et al., 2006), monitoring the response to therapeutic treatment (Tachtsidis et al., 2007), evaluating the rehabilitation, and so on. With the rapid development of various NIR techniques and more cooperation with clinic studies, more potential applications in health care will be exploited in the near future.
Weakness of Modern Hospitals
Authors: Setola Roberto
Published: May 2010

Until some decades ago, health care services were primarily supplied inside hospitals. The patient had to move from his or her home to the hospital, where various diagnostic and therapeutic treatments were provided. Moreover, inside the same hospital, the various tools and processes were insulated and autonomous. Patients and doctors had to move from one tool to another, often placed in different areas, to acquire the different resources. Information provided by these tools was generally collected via paper records. These records were then physically moved (generally in a very inefficient way) from one place to another in order to exchange information. In many situations, these records represented the most critical element in the health system due to misunderstanding, errors, and loss of information caused by their use. Nevertheless, its main drawback was the difficulty, or even the impossibility, to retrieve information from paper records when there were needs in the future and/or outside the hospital. This situation was largely inefficient, especially from the patient’s point of view. Indeed, he or she had to spend a lot of time moving to and from the hospital and supporting a great deal of stress to supply time and again the same information (often in an incomplete, vague, or erroneous manner), and eventually suffering for errors and/or unavailability of information previously stored in other records.
Wearable Kinesthetic System for Joint Knee Flexion-Extension Monitoring In Gait Analysis
Authors: Tesconi Mario , Scilingo Enzo Pasquale , Barba Pierluigi , De Rossi Danilo
Published: May 2010

Posture and motion of body segments are the result of a mutual interaction of several physiological systems such as nervous, muscle-skeletal, and sensorial. Patients who suffer from neuromuscular diseases have great difficulties in moving and walking, therefore motion or gait analysis are widely considered matter of investigation by the clinicians for diagnostic purposes. By means of specific performance tests, it could be possible to identify the severity of a neuromuscular pathology and outline possible rehabilitation planes. The main challenge is to quantify a motion anomaly, rather than to identify it during the test. At first, visual inspection of a video showing motion or walking activity is the simplest mode of examining movement ability in the clinical environment. It allows us to collect qualitative and bidimensional data, but it does not provide neither quantitative information about motion performance modalities (for instance about dynamics and muscle activity), nor about its changes. Moreover, the interpretation of recorded motion pattern is demanded to medical personnel who make a diagnosis on the basis of subjective experience and expertise. A considerable improvement in this analysis is given by a technical contribution to quantitatively analyse body posture and gesture. Advanced technologies allow us to investigate on anatomic segments from biomechanics and kinematics point of view, providing a wide set of quantitative variables to be used in multi-factorial motion analysis. A personal computer enables a realtime 3D reconstruction of motion and digitalizes data for storage and off-line elaboration. For this reason, the clinicians have a detailed description of the patient status and they can choose a specific rehabilitation path and verify the subject progress.
Workflow Management Systems for Healthcare Processes
Authors: Combi C. , Pozzi G.
Published: May 2010

Organizations achieve their goals by executing processes, which can be physical processes to produce goods (e.g., assembling components of a PC), information processes to manage information (e.g., to collect information about facts), or business processes (e.g., to produce goods, to provide services, and to manage information). Final goals are achieved by executing atomic work units (tasks), by coordinating them, by assigning them to executors (agents) that can be human or automatic ones. A workflow management system (WfMS) is a software system that supports the execution of such processes inside organizations. A WfMS requires a formal description, known as schema or process model or workflow, for every process it has to manage: many instances (or cases) of a process can be executed at the same time, sharing the same schema, while each case has its specific data, like patient’s name, insurance claim, and so on.
Difficulties in Accepting Telemedicine
Authors: Crisóstomo-Acevedo María José , Aurelio Medina-Garrido José
Published: May 2010

Telemedicine requires a new type of worker: the health care teleworker. Nevertheless, physicians remain wary of adopting telemedicine. This work examines the sources of the resistance to incorporating telemedicine. We adopt a focus centering on the difficulties that human factors have in accepting the practice of telemedicine. Employees’ resistance to change comes mainly from the inertia that perpetuates traditional routines and methods of working. The success of telemedicine projects will be determined by these human factors as well as by an adequate use of information technology and an appropriate organizational management. This work also offers some practical implications in human resource management for managers of telemedicine projects to consider.
SOM-Based Clustering of Textual Documents Using WordNet
Authors: Amine Abdelmalek , Elberrichi Zakaria , Simonet Michel , Bellatreche Ladjel , Malki Mimoun
Published: May 2010

The classification of textual documents has been the subject of many studies. Technologies like the Web and numerical libraries facilitated the exponential growth of available documentation. The classification of textual documents is very important since it allows the users to effectively and quickly fly over and understand better the contents of large corpora. Most classification approaches use the supervised method of training, more suitable with small corpora and when human experts are available to generate the best classes of data for the training phase, which is not always feasible. The unsupervised classification or “clustering” methods make emerge latent (hidden) classes automatically with minimum human intervention, There are many, and the SOM (self Organized Maps) by Kohonen is one of the algorithms for unsupervised classification that gather a certain number of similar objects in groups without a priori knowledge. This chapter introduces the concept of unsupervised classification of textual documents and proposes an experiment with a conceptual approach for the representation of texts and the method of Kohonen for clustering.
The Process and Application of XML Data Mining
Authors: Nayak Richi
Published: May 2010

XML has gained popularity for information representation, exchange and retrieval. As XML material becomes more abundant, its heterogeneity and structural irregularity limit the knowledge that can be gained. The utilisation of data mining techniques becomes essential for improvement in XML document handling. This chapter presents the capabilities and benefits of data mining techniques in the XML domain, as well as, a conceptualization of the XML mining process. It also discusses the techniques that can be applied to XML document structure and/or content for knowledge discovery.
Approximate Range Querying over Sliding Windows
Authors: Buccafurri Francesco
Published: May 2010

In the context of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, data reduction is a pre-processing step delivering succinct yet meaningful data to sequent stages. If the target of mining are data streams, then it is crucial to suitably reduce them, since often analyses on such data require multiple scans. In this chapter, we propose a histogram-based approach to reducing sliding windows supporting approximate arbitrary (i.e., non biased) range-sum queries. The histogram is based on a hierarchical structure (as opposed to the flat structure of traditional ones) and it results suitable to directly support hierarchical queries, such as drill-down and roll-up operations. In particular, both sliding window shifting and quick query answering operations are logarithmic in the sliding window size. Experimental analysis shows the superiority of our method in terms of accuracy w.r.t. the state-of-the-art approaches in the context of histogram-based sliding window reduction techniques.
Slicing and Dicing a Linguistic Data Cube
Authors: Kroeze Jan H.
Published: May 2010

This chapter discusses the application of some data warehousing techniques on a data cube of linguistic data. The results of various modules of clausal analysis can be stored in a three-dimensional data cube in order to facilitate on-line analytical processing of data by means of three-dimensional arrays. Slicing is such an analytical technique, which reveals various dimensions of data and their relationships to other dimensions. By using this data warehousing facility the clause cube can be viewed or manipulated to reveal, for example, phrases and clauses, syntactic structures, semantic role frames, or a two-dimensional representation of a particular clause’s multi-dimensional analysis in table format. These functionalities are illustrated by means of the Hebrew text of Genesis 1:1-2:3. The authors trust that this chapter will contribute towards efficient storage and advanced processing of linguistic data.
Discovering Personalized Novel Knowledge from Text
Authors: Brook Wu Yi-fang , Chen Xin
Published: May 2010

This chapter presents a methodology for personalized knowledge discovery from text. Traditionally, problems with text mining are numerous rules derived and many already known to the user. Our proposed algorithm derives user’s background knowledge from a set of documents provided by the user, and exploits such knowledge in the process of knowledge discovery from text. Keywords are extracted from background documents and clustered into a concept hierarchy that captures the semantic usage of keywords and their relationships in the background documents. Target documents are retrieved by selecting documents that are relevant to the user’s background. Association rules are discovered among noun phrases extracted from target documents. Novelty of an association rule is defined as the semantic distance between the antecedent and the consequent of a rule in the background knowledge. The experiment shows that our novelty measure performs better than support and confidence in identifying novel knowledge.
Untangling BioOntologies for Mining Biomedical Information
Authors: Pesquita Catia
Published: May 2010

Biomedical research generates a vast amount of information that is ultimately stored in scientific publications or in databases. The information in scientific texts is unstructured and thus hard to access, whereas the information in databases, although more accessible, often lacks in contextualization. The integration of information from these two kinds of sources is crucial for managing and extracting knowledge. By structuring and defining the concepts and relationships within a biomedical domain, BioOntologies have taken a key role in this integration. This chapter describes the role of BioOntologies in sharing, integrating and mining biological information, discusses some of the most relevant BioOntologies and illustrates how they are being used by automatic tools to improve our understanding of life.
Web Mining to Identify People of Similar Background
Authors: Li Quanzhi , Brook Wu Yi-fang
Published: May 2010

This chapter presents a new approach of mining the Web to identify people of similar background. To find similar people from the Web for a given person, two major research issues are person representation and matching persons. In this chapter, a person representation method which uses a person’s personal Web site to represent this person’s background is proposed. Based on this person representation method, the main proposed algorithm integrates textual content and hyperlink information of all the Web pages belonging to a personal Web site to represent a person and match persons. Other algorithms are also explored and compared to the main proposed algorithm. The evaluation methods and experimental results are presented.
A Lattice-Based Framework for Interactively and Incrementally Mining Web Traversal Patterns
Authors: Lee Yue-Shi
Published: May 2010

Web mining is one of the mining technologies, which applies data mining techniques in large amounts of Web data to improve the Web services. Web traversal pattern mining discovers most of the users’ access patterns from Web logs. This information can provide the navigation suggestions for Web users such that appropriate actions can be adopted. However, the Web data will grow rapidly in the short time, and some of the Web data may be antiquated. The user behaviors may be changed when the new Web data is inserted into and the old Web data is deleted from Web logs. Besides, it is considerably difficult to select a perfect minimum support threshold during the mining process to find the interesting rules. Even the experienced experts also cannot determine the appropriate minimum support. Thus, we must constantly adjust the minimum support until the satisfactory mining results can be found. The essences of incremental or interactive data mining are that we can use the previous mining results to reduce the unnecessary processes when the minimum support is changed or Web logs are updated. In this chapter, we propose efficient incremental and interactive data mining algorithms to discover Web traversal patterns and make the mining results to satisfy the users’ requirements. The experimental results show that our algorithms are more efficient than the other approaches.
Privacy-Preserving Data Mining on the Web
Authors: Oliveira Stanley R.M. , Zaïane Osmar R.
Published: May 2010

Privacy-preserving data mining (PPDM) is one of the newest trends in privacy and security research. It is driven by one of the major policy issues of the information era—the right to privacy. This chapter describes the foundations for further research in PPDM on the Web. In particular, we describe the problems we face in defining what information is private in data mining. We then describe the basis of PPDM including the historical roots, a discussion on how privacy can be violated in data mining, and the definition of privacy preservation in data mining based on users’ personal information and information concerning their collective activities. Subsequently, we introduce a taxonomy of the existing PPDM techniques and a discussion on how these techniques are applicable to Web-based applications. Finally, we suggest some privacy requirements that are related to industrial initiatives and point to some technical challenges as future research trends in PPDM on the Web.
Determination of Unithood and Termhood for Term Recognition
Authors: Wong Wilson
Published: May 2010

As more electronic text is readily available, and more applications become knowledge intensive and ontology-enabled, term extraction, also known as automatic term recognition or terminology mining is increasingly in demand. This chapter first presents a comprehensive review of the existing techniques, discusses several issues and open problems that prevent such techniques from being practical in real-life applications, and then proposes solutions to address these issues. Keeping afresh with the recent advances in related areas such as text mining, we propose new measures for the determination of unithood, and a new scoring and ranking scheme for measuring termhood to recognise domain-specific terms. The chapter concludes with experiments to demonstrate the advantages of our new approach.