39,675 research outputs found
A semi-automatic semantic method for mapping SNOMED CT concepts to VCM Icons
VCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language for
representing key medical concepts by icons. However, the use of this language
with reference terminologies, such as SNOMED CT, will require the mapping of
its icons to the terms of these terminologies. Here, we present and evaluate a
semi-automatic semantic method for the mapping of SNOMED CT concepts to VCM
icons. Both SNOMED CT and VCM are compositional in nature; SNOMED CT is
expressed in description logic and VCM semantics are formalized in an OWL
ontology. The proposed method involves the manual mapping of a limited number
of underlying concepts from the VCM ontology, followed by automatic generation
of the rest of the mapping. We applied this method to the clinical findings of
the SNOMED CT CORE subset, and 100 randomly-selected mappings were evaluated by
three experts. The results obtained were promising, with 82 of the SNOMED CT
concepts correctly linked to VCM icons according to the experts. Most of the
errors were easy to fix
Conceptual graph-based knowledge representation for supporting reasoning in African traditional medicine
Although African patients use both conventional or modern and traditional healthcare simultaneously, it has been proven that 80% of people rely on African traditional medicine (ATM). ATM includes medical activities stemming from practices, customs and traditions which were integral to the distinctive African cultures. It is based mainly on the oral transfer of knowledge, with the risk of losing critical knowledge. Moreover, practices differ according to the regions and the availability of medicinal plants. Therefore, it is necessary to compile tacit, disseminated and complex knowledge from various Tradi-Practitioners (TP) in order to determine interesting patterns for treating a given disease. Knowledge engineering methods for traditional medicine are useful to model suitably complex information needs, formalize knowledge of domain experts and highlight the effective practices for their integration to conventional medicine. The work described in this paper presents an approach which addresses two issues. First it aims at proposing a formal representation model of ATM knowledge and practices to facilitate their sharing and reusing. Then, it aims at providing a visual reasoning mechanism for selecting best available procedures and medicinal plants to treat diseases. The approach is based on the use of the Delphi method for capturing knowledge from various experts which necessitate reaching a consensus. Conceptual graph formalism is used to model ATM knowledge with visual reasoning capabilities and processes. The nested conceptual graphs are used to visually express the semantic meaning of Computational Tree Logic (CTL) constructs that are useful for formal specification of temporal properties of ATM domain knowledge. Our approach presents the advantage of mitigating knowledge loss with conceptual development assistance to improve the quality of ATM care (medical diagnosis and therapeutics), but also patient safety (drug monitoring)
Finding Street Gang Members on Twitter
Most street gang members use Twitter to intimidate others, to present
outrageous images and statements to the world, and to share recent illegal
activities. Their tweets may thus be useful to law enforcement agencies to
discover clues about recent crimes or to anticipate ones that may occur.
Finding these posts, however, requires a method to discover gang member Twitter
profiles. This is a challenging task since gang members represent a very small
population of the 320 million Twitter users. This paper studies the problem of
automatically finding gang members on Twitter. It outlines a process to curate
one of the largest sets of verifiable gang member profiles that have ever been
studied. A review of these profiles establishes differences in the language,
images, YouTube links, and emojis gang members use compared to the rest of the
Twitter population. Features from this review are used to train a series of
supervised classifiers. Our classifier achieves a promising F1 score with a low
false positive rate.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, Published as a full paper at 2016
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and
Mining (ASONAM 2016
Node Classification in Uncertain Graphs
In many real applications that use and analyze networked data, the links in
the network graph may be erroneous, or derived from probabilistic techniques.
In such cases, the node classification problem can be challenging, since the
unreliability of the links may affect the final results of the classification
process. If the information about link reliability is not used explicitly, the
classification accuracy in the underlying network may be affected adversely. In
this paper, we focus on situations that require the analysis of the uncertainty
that is present in the graph structure. We study the novel problem of node
classification in uncertain graphs, by treating uncertainty as a first-class
citizen. We propose two techniques based on a Bayes model and automatic
parameter selection, and show that the incorporation of uncertainty in the
classification process as a first-class citizen is beneficial. We
experimentally evaluate the proposed approach using different real data sets,
and study the behavior of the algorithms under different conditions. The
results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach
Knowledge-based best of breed approach for automated detection of clinical events based on German free text digital hospital discharge letters
OBJECTIVES:
The secondary use of medical data contained in electronic medical records, such as hospital discharge letters, is a valuable resource for the improvement of clinical care (e.g. in terms of medication safety) or for research purposes. However, the automated processing and analysis of medical free text still poses a huge challenge to available natural language processing (NLP) systems. The aim of this study was to implement a knowledge-based best of breed approach, combining a terminology server with integrated ontology, a NLP pipeline and a rules engine.
METHODS:
We tested the performance of this approach in a use case. The clinical event of interest was the particular drug-disease interaction "proton-pump inhibitor [PPI] use and osteoporosis". Cases were to be identified based on free text digital discharge letters as source of information. Automated detection was validated against a gold standard.
RESULTS:
Precision of recognition of osteoporosis was 94.19%, and recall was 97.45%. PPIs were detected with 100% precision and 97.97% recall. The F-score for the detection of the given drug-disease-interaction was 96,13%.
CONCLUSION:
We could show that our approach of combining a NLP pipeline, a terminology server, and a rules engine for the purpose of automated detection of clinical events such as drug-disease interactions from free text digital hospital discharge letters was effective. There is huge potential for the implementation in clinical and research contexts, as this approach enables analyses of very high numbers of medical free text documents within a short time period
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