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 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

Mobile Cloud Support for Semantic-Enriched Speech Recognition in Social Care

Nowadays, most users carry high computing power mobile devices where speech recognition is certainly one of the main technologies available in every modern smartphone, although battery draining and application performance (resource shortage) have a big impact on the experienced quality. Shifting applications and services to the cloud may help to improve mobile user satisfaction as demonstrated by several ongoing efforts in the mobile cloud area. However, the quality of speech recognition is still not sufficient in many complex cases to replace the common hand written text, especially when prompt reaction to short-term provisioning requests is required. To address the new scenario, this paper proposes a mobile cloud infrastructure to support the extraction of semantics information from speech recognition in the Social Care domain, where carers have to speak about their patients conditions in order to have reliable notes used afterward to plan the best support. We present not only an architecture proposal, but also a real prototype that we have deployed and thoroughly assessed with different queries, accents, and in presence of load peaks, in our experimental mobile cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) testbed based on Cloud Foundry

Sistemas interativos e distribuídos para telemedicina

doutoramento Ciências da ComputaçãoDurante as últimas décadas, as organizações de saúde têm vindo a adotar continuadamente as tecnologias de informação para melhorar o funcionamento dos seus serviços. Recentemente, em parte devido à crise financeira, algumas reformas no sector de saúde incentivaram o aparecimento de novas soluções de telemedicina para otimizar a utilização de recursos humanos e de equipamentos. Algumas tecnologias como a computação em nuvem, a computação móvel e os sistemas Web, têm sido importantes para o sucesso destas novas aplicações de telemedicina. As funcionalidades emergentes de computação distribuída facilitam a ligação de comunidades médicas, promovem serviços de telemedicina e a colaboração em tempo real. Também são evidentes algumas vantagens que os dispositivos móveis podem introduzir, tais como facilitar o trabalho remoto a qualquer hora e em qualquer lugar. Por outro lado, muitas funcionalidades que se tornaram comuns nas redes sociais, tais como a partilha de dados, a troca de mensagens, os fóruns de discussão e a videoconferência, têm o potencial para promover a colaboração no sector da saúde. Esta tese teve como objetivo principal investigar soluções computacionais mais ágeis que permitam promover a partilha de dados clínicos e facilitar a criação de fluxos de trabalho colaborativos em radiologia. Através da exploração das atuais tecnologias Web e de computação móvel, concebemos uma solução ubíqua para a visualização de imagens médicas e desenvolvemos um sistema colaborativo para a área de radiologia, baseado na tecnologia da computação em nuvem. Neste percurso, foram investigadas metodologias de mineração de texto, de representação semântica e de recuperação de informação baseada no conteúdo da imagem. Para garantir a privacidade dos pacientes e agilizar o processo de partilha de dados em ambientes colaborativos, propomos ainda uma metodologia que usa aprendizagem automática para anonimizar as imagens médicasDuring the last decades, healthcare organizations have been increasingly relying on information technologies to improve their services. At the same time, the optimization of resources, both professionals and equipment, have promoted the emergence of telemedicine solutions. Some technologies including cloud computing, mobile computing, web systems and distributed computing can be used to facilitate the creation of medical communities, and the promotion of telemedicine services and real-time collaboration. On the other hand, many features that have become commonplace in social networks, such as data sharing, message exchange, discussion forums, and a videoconference, have also the potential to foster collaboration in the health sector. The main objective of this research work was to investigate computational solutions that allow us to promote the sharing of clinical data and to facilitate the creation of collaborative workflows in radiology. By exploring computing and mobile computing technologies, we have designed a solution for medical imaging visualization, and developed a collaborative system for radiology, based on cloud computing technology. To extract more information from data, we investigated several methodologies such as text mining, semantic representation, content-based information retrieval. Finally, to ensure patient privacy and to streamline the data sharing in collaborative environments, we propose a machine learning methodology to anonymize medical images

Relevance criteria for medical images applied by health care professionals : A grounded theory study.

This thesis studies relevance criteria for medical images' applied by health care professionals. The study also looks at the image information needs and image resources used by health care professionals, together with the image seeking behaviour of health care professionals from different disciplines. The work is a qualitative study that uses the Straussian version of grounded theory. The population of the study included health care professionals from different health and biomedical departments who worked in Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. In total twenty-nine health care professionals participated in this study and fifteen relevance criteria were identified from the data collected using semi-structured interviews and think-aloud protocols. The work forms part of the medical image retrieval track of ImageCLEF (ImageCLEFMed), and investigated the use of relevance criteria applied to search statements. Analysis indicates that some of the criteria identified by participants could be included in new topics used for future versions of the track. The findings of the study showed that health care professionals paid more attention to the visual attributes of medical images when selecting images and that they applied topical relevancy as the most frequent and most important criterion. The study found that health care professionals looked for medical images mainly for educational and research purposes and judged the relevancy of medical images based on their pictorial information needs and the image resources they used. We identified the difficulties that health care professionals faced when searching medical images in different image resources. Other findings also highlighted the need for, and the value of, looking at narrower subject communities within health and biomedical sciences for better understanding of relevance judgment and image seeking behaviour of the health care professionals

Managing risks and harms associated with the use of anabolic steroids

Background: People using AAS may adopt a range of strategies to prevent and treat adverse health conditions potentially associated with the use of these substances (AAS-HC). These strategies include seeking support from physicians, using the needle and syringe exchange programme (NSP) and seeking support from informal sources such as coaches and online forums. The process of identifying risks and harms, adopting and modifying health-related strategies is similar to the methods of risk-management employed in other fields of human activity. This approach recognises the importance of the informal body of knowledge produced by decades of AAS-related folk-pharmacology and seeks to understand harm-reduction from the users’ perspective.Objectives: The primary objective of this thesis is to investigate the strategies adopted by people using AAS to prevent and treat AAS-HC. Secondary objectives include to explore the factors associated with the adoption of health strategies and the occurrence of AAS-HC, as well as the barriers and facilitators experienced by AAS users when accessing health services and other sources of support.Methods: To achieve the objectives above, three work packages (WP) were produced as part of a mixed-methods research design. WP1 is a systematic review and meta-analysis of the prevalence of AAS users seeking support from physicians. WP2 is a cross-sectional online survey that identified AAS-HC, risk factors and health-related strategies adopted by AAS users in the UK. WP3 is a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews to discuss the experiences of AAS users and their risk-management strategies (RMS).Results: The estimated overall prevalence of AAS users seeking support from physicians is 37.1%. Higher prevalence rates were observed in studies from Australia (67.3%) and amongst clients of the NSP (54.1%), whilst the lowest was observed among adolescents (17.3%). The health conditions most commonly reported by the 883 participants of the online survey were insomnia (33.3%) and anxiety (32.2%). Most participants adopted preventive strategies such as having blood tests in the last 12 months (86.2%) and seeking a GP to treat AAS-HC (55.0%). Those who sought a GP for AAS-related information were 76% less likely to report an AAS-HC in the last 12 months. The interviews described AAS users’ RMS as a continuous process of awareness and behavioural changes. Participants described an extensive use of private health services and other sources of support to bypass the barriers experienced by AAS users engaging with the public health system.Conclusion: A large number of AAS users refrain from seeking support from physicians. Health professionals should be trained to recognise and manage the most common AAS-HC and help users improve their RMS. Further studies should investigate the efficacy of AAS-related RMS and the subpopulations of AAS users more likely to experience AAS-HC and less likely to engage with health services.<br/