262 research outputs found
A Survey of Multimodal Information Fusion for Smart Healthcare: Mapping the Journey from Data to Wisdom
Multimodal medical data fusion has emerged as a transformative approach in
smart healthcare, enabling a comprehensive understanding of patient health and
personalized treatment plans. In this paper, a journey from data to information
to knowledge to wisdom (DIKW) is explored through multimodal fusion for smart
healthcare. We present a comprehensive review of multimodal medical data fusion
focused on the integration of various data modalities. The review explores
different approaches such as feature selection, rule-based systems, machine
learning, deep learning, and natural language processing, for fusing and
analyzing multimodal data. This paper also highlights the challenges associated
with multimodal fusion in healthcare. By synthesizing the reviewed frameworks
and theories, it proposes a generic framework for multimodal medical data
fusion that aligns with the DIKW model. Moreover, it discusses future
directions related to the four pillars of healthcare: Predictive, Preventive,
Personalized, and Participatory approaches. The components of the comprehensive
survey presented in this paper form the foundation for more successful
implementation of multimodal fusion in smart healthcare. Our findings can guide
researchers and practitioners in leveraging the power of multimodal fusion with
the state-of-the-art approaches to revolutionize healthcare and improve patient
outcomes.Comment: This work has been submitted to the ELSEVIER for possible
publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this
version may no longer be accessibl
A Review of Interoperability Standards in E-health and Imperatives for their Adoption in Africa
The ability of healthcare information systems to share and exchange information (interoperate) is essential to facilitate the quality and effectiveness of healthcare services. Although standardization is considered key to addressing the fragmentation currently challenging the healthcare environment, e-health standardization can be difficult for many reasons, one of which is making sense of the e-health interoperability standards landscape. Specifically aimed at the African health informatics community, this paper aims to provide an overview of e-health interoperability and the significance of standardization in its achievement. We conducted a literature study of e-health standards, their development, and the degree of participation by African countries in the process. We also provide a review of a selection of prominent e-health interoperability standards that have been widely adopted especially by developed countries, look at some of the factors that affect their adoption in Africa, and provide an overview of ongoing global initiatives to address the identified barriers. Although the paper is specifically aimed at the African community, its findings would be equally applicable to many other developing countries
Discovering lesser known molecular players and mechanistic patterns in Alzheimer's disease using an integrative disease modelling approach
Convergence of exponentially advancing technologies is driving medical research with life changing discoveries. On the contrary, repeated failures of high-profile drugs to battle Alzheimer's disease (AD) has made it one of the least successful therapeutic area. This failure pattern has provoked researchers to grapple with their beliefs about Alzheimer's aetiology. Thus, growing realisation that Amyloid-β and tau are not 'the' but rather 'one of the' factors necessitates the reassessment of pre-existing data to add new perspectives. To enable a holistic view of the disease, integrative modelling approaches are emerging as a powerful technique. Combining data at different scales and modes could considerably increase the predictive power of the integrative model by filling biological knowledge gaps. However, the reliability of the derived hypotheses largely depends on the completeness, quality, consistency, and context-specificity of the data. Thus, there is a need for agile methods and approaches that efficiently interrogate and utilise existing public data. This thesis presents the development of novel approaches and methods that address intrinsic issues of data integration and analysis in AD research. It aims to prioritise lesser-known AD candidates using highly curated and precise knowledge derived from integrated data. Here much of the emphasis is put on quality, reliability, and context-specificity. This thesis work showcases the benefit of integrating well-curated and disease-specific heterogeneous data in a semantic web-based framework for mining actionable knowledge. Furthermore, it introduces to the challenges encountered while harvesting information from literature and transcriptomic resources. State-of-the-art text-mining methodology is developed to extract miRNAs and its regulatory role in diseases and genes from the biomedical literature. To enable meta-analysis of biologically related transcriptomic data, a highly-curated metadata database has been developed, which explicates annotations specific to human and animal models. Finally, to corroborate common mechanistic patterns — embedded with novel candidates — across large-scale AD transcriptomic data, a new approach to generate gene regulatory networks has been developed. The work presented here has demonstrated its capability in identifying testable mechanistic hypotheses containing previously unknown or emerging knowledge from public data in two major publicly funded projects for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Epilepsy diseases
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