Careggi Smart Hospital: A mobile app for patients, citizens and healthcare staff

This paper presents a mobile app called “Careggi Smart Hospital” which has been developed for the Careggi Polyclinic in Florence. The application is designed for Android smartphones and tablets and it is freely downloadable from the Google Play Store. It provides various useful tools to the hospital's users such as personnel and structures finding, way-finding and the possibility to access personal medical records collected on regional electronic health record

Heart Failure Artificial Intelligence-Based Computer Aided Diagnosis Telecare System

In this paper we present an Artificial Intelligence-based Computer Aided Diagnosis system designed to assist the clinical decision of non-specialist staff in the analysis of Heart Failure patients. The system computes the patient's pathological condition and highlights possible aggravations. The system is based on three functional parts: Diagnosis (severity assessing), Prognosis, and Follow-up management. Four Artificial Intelligence-based techniques are used and compared in diagnosis function: a Neural Network, a Support Vector Machine, a Decision Tree and a Fuzzy Expert System whose rules are produced by a Genetic Algorithm. In order to offer a complete HF analysis dashboard, state of the art algorithms are implemented to support a score-based prognosis function. The patient's Follow-up is used to refine the diagnosis by adding Heart Failure type information and to detect any worsening of patient's clinical status. In the Results section we compared the accuracy of the different implemented techniques. © 2012 Springer-Verlag

Automatic risk evaluation in elderly patients based on Autonomic Nervous System assessment

Dysfunction of Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) is a typical feature of chronic heart failure and other cardiovascular disease. As a simple non-invasive technology, heart rate variability (HRV) analysis provides reliable information on autonomic modulation of heart rate. The aim of this thesis was to research and develop automatic methods based on ANS assessment for evaluation of risk in cardiac patients. Several features selection and machine learning algorithms have been combined to achieve the goals. Automatic assessment of disease severity in Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients: a completely automatic method, based on long-term HRV was proposed in order to automatically assess the severity of CHF, achieving a sensitivity rate of 93% and a specificity rate of 64% in discriminating severe versus mild patients. Automatic identification of hypertensive patients at high risk of vascular events: a completely automatic system was proposed in order to identify hypertensive patients at higher risk to develop vascular events in the 12 months following the electrocardiographic recordings, achieving a sensitivity rate of 71% and a specificity rate of 86% in identifying high-risk subjects among hypertensive patients. Automatic identification of hypertensive patients with history of fall: it was explored whether an automatic identification of fallers among hypertensive patients based on HRV was feasible. The results obtained in this thesis could have implications both in clinical practice and in clinical research. The system has been designed and developed in order to be clinically feasible. Moreover, since 5-minute ECG recording is inexpensive, easy to assess, and non-invasive, future research will focus on the clinical applicability of the system as a screening tool in non-specialized ambulatories, in order to identify high-risk patients to be shortlisted for more complex investigations