Making diagnosis explicit

What is good diagnostic practice? The answer is elusive for many medical students and equally puzzling for those trying to build effective medical decision support systems. Much of the problem lies in the difficult of 'getting at' diagnosis. Expert diagnosticians find it difficult to introspect on their own strategies, thus making it difficult to pass on their expertise.Traditional knowledge acquisition methods are designed for gathering static domain knowledge and are inappropriate for the acquisition of knowledge about the diagnos¬ tic 'task'. More advanced knowledge acquisition methodologies, particularly those which focus on the modelling of problem-solving knowledge seem to hold more promise, but are not sufficiently practicable to allow anyone other than a knowledge engineer to operate directly. Given the difficulty experts have in accessing their own diagnostic strategies what is needed is a tool which would enable diagnosticians themselves to directly formu¬ late and experiment with their own methods of diagnosis.This research describes the development of a knowledge acquisition methodology geared specifically towards the exposition of medical diagnosis. The methodology is implemented as a toolkit enabling exploration and construction of medical diagnostic models and production of model-based medical diagnostic support systems. The toolkit allows someone skilled in diagnosis to articulate their diagnostic strategy so that it can be used by those with less experience

Numerical modeling of the pollutant spread and a web application for environmental monitoring to support mine reclamation activities

Heavy metal pollution is a serious and urgent issue of integrated watershed management in Sardinia and worldwide. To determine the effective management strategies for pollution control, it is essential to quantify the input and output fluxes of metal by analyzing the environmental system in all its main components. Numerical physically-based models can simulate the behavior of a system, such as a river’s watershed, starting from the knowledges of the physical processes that occur in the studied area. In this work, the Rio San Giorgio basin was studied, due to the mining activities in the Iglesias Mine District, that caused severe pollution in the area. This area is in fact characterized by several mining areas, wastes and tailings, abandoned after centuries of intense mining activity, that mainly exploited minerals of Zn and Pb. SWAT hydrological model (Arnold et al., 1998) and SWAT Heavy Metal (HM) module (Meng et al., 2018) were used to simulate the fate and the transport of the Zn and Pb in the different mediums of the watershed system. Moreover, future simulations were run using Regional Climate Models of the Euro-CORDEX experiment (Giorgi et al., 2009) as climate forcing for the watershed models. This toolset allowed to simulate transport of Zn and Pb in the surface waters of Rio San Giorgio for a historical and a future period, with evaluation of some waste management scenarios. The general decrease of mean rainfall and the increase of extreme precipitation events projected by the RCMs for the future is well reflected in the results of the SWAT and SWAT-HM modellization. In fact, the mean loads of Zn and Pb in the river tend to a decrease, but extreme loads are projected for the future in occurrence of intense precipitations predicted by the RCMs models. A web-application (CESApp) Decision Support System (DSS) was also developed to share the results of the modeling, such as models’ inputs, outputs and the different scenarios of the metals spread with researchers and stakeholders

Exploring the development and impact of an Olympic wrestling sport program in Miawpukek Mi’kamawey Mawi’omi (Miawpukek First Nation): A case study

Physical activity has been shown to increase the physical and mental health of youth. Many rural and Indigenous communities offer sport programs. However, many of these sports are not highly accessible to youth for reasons such as social standing, gender, genetics, and physical fitness levels. The sport of Olympic wrestling if implemented correctly can be accessible to participants and could offer Indigenous youth another, more accessible option of physical activity. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of developing and implementing an Olympic wrestling program with Indigenous youth. Working within a Community Based Participatory Research framework and the Indigenous School Health framework, the first part of this thesis examines the needs of the Indigenous community in question and determines how the Olympic wrestling program should be developed and implemented. Following the needs assessment, the program was developed, implemented, and evaluated and the results showed that some youth gained significant changes in their physical and mental health. The program was further evaluated by some of participating youth through the use of photovoice, which showed increases in youth self-perception and self-esteem. Lastly, the changes in youths’ holistic health were determined to have improved after competing with a team of other Indigenous youth at a major competition. The Olympic wrestling program continues in the community with little help from the researcher and is showing a strong likelihood of being offered for the foreseeable future. Thus, this thesis demonstrates that by first creating a relationship built upon reciprocity, respect, and relationality, between implementers and an Indigenous community, in which the researcher is a resource and conduit to be used by the community, a highly accessible sport program such as Olympic wrestling, may have a positive impact on Indigenous youths’ physical and mental health

An Agent-Based Variogram Modeller: Investigating Intelligent, Distributed-Component Geographical Information Systems

Geo-Information Science (GIScience) is the field of study that addresses substantive questions concerning the handling, analysis and visualisation of spatial data. Geo- Information Systems (GIS), including software, data acquisition and organisational arrangements, are the key technologies underpinning GIScience. A GIS is normally tailored to the service it is supposed to perform. However, there is often the need to do a function that might not be supported by the GIS tool being used. The normal solution in these circumstances is to go out and look for another tool that can do the service, and often an expert to use that tool. This is expensive, time consuming and certainly stressful to the geographical data analyses. On the other hand, GIS is often used in conjunction with other technologies to form a geocomputational environment. One of the complex tools in geocomputation is geostatistics. One of its functions is to provide the means to determine the extent of spatial dependencies within geographical data and processes. Spatial datasets are often large and complex. Currently Agent system are being integrated into GIS to offer flexibility and allow better data analysis. The theis will look into the current application of Agents in within the GIS community, determine if they are used to representing data, process or act a service. The thesis looks into proving the applicability of an agent-oriented paradigm as a service based GIS, having the possibility of providing greater interoperability and reducing resource requirements (human and tools). In particular, analysis was undertaken to determine the need to introduce enhanced features to agents, in order to maximise their effectiveness in GIS. This was achieved by addressing the software agent complexity in design and implementation for the GIS environment and by suggesting possible solutions to encountered problems. The software agent characteristics and features (which include the dynamic binding of plans to software agents in order to tackle the levels of complexity and range of contexts) were examined, as well as discussing current GIScience and the applications of agent technology to GIS, agents as entities, objects and processes. These concepts and their functionalities to GIS are then analysed and discussed. The extent of agent functionality, analysis of the gaps and the use these technologies to express a distributed service providing an agent-based GIS framework is then presented. Thus, a general agent-based framework for GIS and a novel agent-based architecture for a specific part of GIS, the variogram, to examine the applicability of the agent- oriented paradigm to GIS, was devised. An examination of the current mechanisms for constructing variograms, underlying processes and functions was undertaken, then these processes were embedded into a novel agent architecture for GIS. Once the successful software agent implementation had been achieved, the corresponding tool was tested and validated - internally for code errors and externally to determine its functional requirements and whether it enhances the GIS process of dealing with data. Thereafter, its compared with other known service based GIS agents and its advantages and disadvantages analysed

An intelligent Geographic Information System for design

Recent advances in geographic information systems (GIS) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have been summarised, concentrating on the theoretical aspects of their construction and use. Existing projects combining AI and GIS have also been discussed, with attention paid to the interfacing methods used and problems uncovered by the approaches. AI and GIS have been combined in this research to create an intelligent GIS for design. This has been applied to off-shore pipeline route design. The system was tested using data from a real pipeline design project. [Continues.

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

Risk management of groundwater pollution: a knowledge-based approach

Risk assessment and risk management now underpin environmental protection in the UK. Risk assessment provides for a structured and systematic analysis of a problem, and is an objective tool to inform risk management decisions. In particular, risk assessment can assist in the prioritisation of management activities to direct resources more effectively to significant risks. However, the application of risk assessment remains ad hoc and often focused on quantified approaches. The problem of how to integrate the results of a risk assessment into decisionmaking processes remains. The objective of this research was to assess whether a knowledgebased approach could be usefully applied to risk management decisions associated with the protection of groundwater. The use of a knowledge-based system offers considerable potential to support regulatory decision-making relating to environmental risks. Such systems utilise expert knowledge to solve specific problems as an expert would but without requiring specialist or skilled users. This research describes the development of a prototype decision-support system to assist non-specialist regulatory personnel, in the prioritisation of risks and management activities relating to groundwater threats from hydrocarbon point-sources. The research focused on the knowledge acquisition process using semi-structured interviews, concept sorting and risk rating to identify the type of information required by the expert in their decision-making processes and also to distinguish any differences of approach between experts and 'non-experts'. A conceptual model was developed that represented expert decision-making and problem solving. This model was used to develop the prototype decision-support system which was subsequently evaluated by experts and users, resulting in system refinements. A positive response to the usability and utility of the system was received from both expert and user groups, suggesting a knowledge-based approach can be usefully applied to risk management decisions associated with the protection of groundwater