83 research outputs found

    Biomedical ontologies: What part-of is and isn’t

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    AbstractMereological relations such as part-of and its inverse has-part are fundamental to the description of the structure of living organisms. Whereas classical mereology focuses on individual entities, mereological relations in biomedical ontologies are generally asserted between classes of individuals. In general, this practice leaves some basic issues unanswered: type constraints of mereological relations, e.g., concerning artifacts and biological entities, the relation between parthood and time, inferred parts and wholes as well as a delimitation of parthood against spatial inclusion. Furthermore, mereological relations can be asserted not only between physical objects but also between biological processes and medical procedures. We analyze these ambiguities and make suggestions for a standardization of mereological relations in biomedical ontologies

    Foundation, Implementation and Evaluation of the MorphoSaurus System: Subword Indexing, Lexical Learning and Word Sense Disambiguation for Medical Cross-Language Information Retrieval

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    Im medizinischen Alltag, zu welchem viel Dokumentations- und Recherchearbeit gehört, ist mittlerweile der überwiegende Teil textuell kodierter Information elektronisch verfügbar. Hiermit kommt der Entwicklung leistungsfähiger Methoden zur effizienten Recherche eine vorrangige Bedeutung zu. Bewertet man die Nützlichkeit gängiger Textretrievalsysteme aus dem Blickwinkel der medizinischen Fachsprache, dann mangelt es ihnen an morphologischer Funktionalität (Flexion, Derivation und Komposition), lexikalisch-semantischer Funktionalität und der Fähigkeit zu einer sprachübergreifenden Analyse großer Dokumentenbestände. In der vorliegenden Promotionsschrift werden die theoretischen Grundlagen des MorphoSaurus-Systems (ein Akronym für Morphem-Thesaurus) behandelt. Dessen methodischer Kern stellt ein um Morpheme der medizinischen Fach- und Laiensprache gruppierter Thesaurus dar, dessen Einträge mittels semantischer Relationen sprachübergreifend verknüpft sind. Darauf aufbauend wird ein Verfahren vorgestellt, welches (komplexe) Wörter in Morpheme segmentiert, die durch sprachunabhängige, konzeptklassenartige Symbole ersetzt werden. Die resultierende Repräsentation ist die Basis für das sprachübergreifende, morphemorientierte Textretrieval. Neben der Kerntechnologie wird eine Methode zur automatischen Akquise von Lexikoneinträgen vorgestellt, wodurch bestehende Morphemlexika um weitere Sprachen ergänzt werden. Die Berücksichtigung sprachübergreifender Phänomene führt im Anschluss zu einem neuartigen Verfahren zur Auflösung von semantischen Ambiguitäten. Die Leistungsfähigkeit des morphemorientierten Textretrievals wird im Rahmen umfangreicher, standardisierter Evaluationen empirisch getestet und gängigen Herangehensweisen gegenübergestellt

    HSLIC Annual Report FY2002-03

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    https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hslic-annual-reports/1013/thumbnail.jp

    HSLIC Annual Report FY2003-04

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    https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/hslic-annual-reports/1014/thumbnail.jp

    Safeguarding Privacy Through Deep Learning Techniques

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    Over the last few years, there has been a growing need to meet minimum security and privacy requirements. Both public and private companies have had to comply with increasingly stringent standards, such as the ISO 27000 family of standards, or the various laws governing the management of personal data. The huge amount of data to be managed has required a huge effort from the employees who, in the absence of automatic techniques, have had to work tirelessly to achieve the certification objectives. Unfortunately, due to the delicate information contained in the documentation relating to these problems, it is difficult if not impossible to obtain material for research and study purposes on which to experiment new ideas and techniques aimed at automating processes, perhaps exploiting what is in ferment in the scientific community and linked to the fields of ontologies and artificial intelligence for data management. In order to bypass this problem, it was decided to examine data related to the medical world, which, especially for important reasons related to the health of individuals, have gradually become more and more freely accessible over time, without affecting the generality of the proposed methods, which can be reapplied to the most diverse fields in which there is a need to manage privacy-sensitive information

    OQAFMA Querying Agent for the Foundational Model of Anatomy: a Prototype for Providing Flexible and Efficient Access to Large Semantic Networks

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    The development of large semantic networks, such as the UMLS, which are intended to support a variety of applications, requires a exible and e cient query interface for the extraction of information. Using one of the source vocabularies of UMLS as a test bed, we have developed such a prototype query interface. We rst identify common classes of queries needed by applications that access these semantic networks. Next, we survey STRUQL, an existing query language that we adopted, which supports all of these classes of queries. We then describe the OQAFMA Querying Agent for the Foundational Model of Anatomy (OQAFMA), which provides an e cient implementation of a subset of STRUQL by pre-computing a variety of indices. We describe how OQAFMA leverages database optimization by converting STRUQL queries to SQL. We evaluate the exibility and e ciency of our implementation using English queries written by anatomists. This evaluation veri es that OQAFMA provides exible, e cient access to one such large semantic network, the Foundational Model of Anatomy, and suggests that OQAFMA could be an e cient query interface to other large biomedical knowledge bases, such as the Uni ed Medical Language System

    Noninvasive methods for children\u27s cholesterol level determination

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    Today, there is a controversy about the role of cholesterol in infants and the measurement and management of blood cholesterol in children. Several scientific evidences are supporting relationship between elevated blood cholesterol in children and high cholesterol in adults and development of adult arteriosclerotic diseases such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. Therefore controlling the level of blood cholesterol in children is very important for the health of the whole population. Non-invasive methods are much more convenient for the children because of their anxieties about blood examinations. In this paper we will present a new try to find non-invasive methods for determining the level of blood cholesterol in children with the use of intelligent system

    Surface EMG decomposition using a novel approach for blind source separation

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    We introduce a new method to perform a blind deconvolution of the surface electromyogram (EMG) signals generated by isometric muscle contractions. The method extracts the information from the raw EMG signals detected only on the skin surface, enabling longtime noninvasive monitoring of the electromuscular properties. Its preliminary results show that surface EMG signals can be used to determine the number of active motor units, the motor unit firing rate and the shape of the average action potential in each motor unit

    A PROCESS FOR ACHIEVING COMPARABLE DATA FROM HETEROGENEOUS DATABASES

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    The current state of health and biomedicine includes an enormity of heterogeneous data ‘silos’, collected for different purposes and represented differently, that are presently impossible to share or analyze in toto. The greatest challenge for large-scale and meaningful analyses of health-related data is to achieve a uniform data representation for data extracted from heterogeneous source representations. Based upon an analysis and categorization of heterogeneities, a process for achieving comparable data content by using a uniform terminological representation is developed. This process addresses the types of representational heterogeneities that commonly arise in healthcare data integration problems. Specifically, this process uses a reference terminology, and associated maps to transform heterogeneous data to a standard representation for comparability and secondary use. The capture of quality and precision of the “maps” between local terms and reference terminology concepts enhances the meaning of the aggregated data, empowering end users with better-informed queries for subsequent analyses. A data integration case study in the domain of pediatric asthma illustrates the development and use of a reference terminology for creating comparable data from heterogeneous source representations. The contribution of this research is a generalized process for the integration of data from heterogeneous source representations, and this process can be applied and extended to other problems where heterogeneous data needs to be merged
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