76,868 research outputs found
Computer- and robot-assisted Medical Intervention
Medical robotics includes assistive devices used by the physician in order to
make his/her diagnostic or therapeutic practices easier and more efficient.
This chapter focuses on such systems. It introduces the general field of
Computer-Assisted Medical Interventions, its aims, its different components and
describes the place of robots in that context. The evolutions in terms of
general design and control paradigms in the development of medical robots are
presented and issues specific to that application domain are discussed. A view
of existing systems, on-going developments and future trends is given. A
case-study is detailed. Other types of robotic help in the medical environment
(such as for assisting a handicapped person, for rehabilitation of a patient or
for replacement of some damaged/suppressed limbs or organs) are out of the
scope of this chapter.Comment: Handbook of Automation, Shimon Nof (Ed.) (2009) 000-00
Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance
One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a
hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff,
patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such
infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational
efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we
propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in
hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene
compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as
proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We
present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and
conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work
is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates
promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.Comment: Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC
Negative findings in electronic health records and biomedical ontologies: a realist approach
PURPOSEâA substantial fraction of the observations made by clinicians and entered into patient records are expressed by means of negation or by using terms which contain negative qualifiers (as in âabsence of pulseâ or âsurgical procedure not performedâ). This seems at first sight to present problems for ontologies, terminologies and data repositories that adhere to a realist view and thus reject any reference to putative non-existing entities. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Referent
Tracking (RT) are examples of such paradigms. The purpose of the research here described was to test a proposal to capture negative findings in electronic health record systems based on BFO and RT.
METHODSâWe analysed a series of negative findings encountered in 748 sentences taken from 41 patient charts. We classified the phenomena described in terms of the various top-level categories and relations defined in BFO, taking into account the role of negation in the corresponding descriptions. We also studied terms from SNOMED-CT containing one or other form of negation. We then explored ways to represent the described phenomena by means of the types of representational units available to realist ontologies such as BFO.
RESULTSâWe introduced a new family of âlacksâ relations into the OBO Relation Ontology. The relation lacks_part, for example, defined in terms of the positive relation part_of, holds between a particular p and a universal U when p has no instance of U as part. Since p and U both exist, assertions involving âlacks_partâ and its cognates meet the requirements of positivity.
CONCLUSIONâBy expanding the OBO Relation Ontology, we were able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the sample studied
Impact of Mobile and Wireless Technology on Healthcare Delivery services
Modern healthcare delivery services embrace the use of leading edge technologies and new
scientific discoveries to enable better cures for diseases and better means to enable early
detection of most life-threatening diseases. The healthcare industry is finding itself in a
state of turbulence and flux. The major innovations lie with the use of information
technologies and particularly, the adoption of mobile and wireless applications in
healthcare delivery [1]. Wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular across the
healthcare field, enabling caregivers to review patient records and test results, enter
diagnosis information during patient visits and consult drug formularies, all without the
need for a wired network connection [2]. A pioneering medical-grade, wireless
infrastructure supports complete mobility throughout the full continuum of healthcare
delivery. It facilitates the accurate collection and the immediate dissemination of patient
information to physicians and other healthcare care professionals at the time of clinical
decision-making, thereby ensuring timely, safe, and effective patient care. This paper
investigates the wireless technologies that can be used for medical applications, and the
effectiveness of such wireless solutions in a healthcare environment. It discusses challenges
encountered; and concludes by providing recommendations on policies and standards for
the use of such technologies within hospitals
Personalised mobile services supporting the implementation of clinical guidelines
Telemonitoring is emerging as a compelling application of Body Area Networks (BANs). We describe two health BAN systems developed respectively by a European team and an Australian team and discuss some issues encountered relating to formalization of clinical knowledge to support real-time analysis and interpretation of BAN data. Our example application is an evidence-based telemonitoring and teletreatment application for home-based rehabilitation. The application is intended to support implementation of a clinical guideline for cardiac rehabilitation following myocardial infarction. In addition to this the proposal is to establish the patientâs individual baseline risk profile and, by real-time analysis of BAN data, continually re-assess the current risk level in order to give timely personalised feedback. Static and dynamic risk factors are derived from literature. Many sources express evidence probabilistically, suggesting a requirement for reasoning with uncertainty; elsewhere evidence requires qualitative reasoning: both familiar modes of reasoning in KBSs. However even at this knowledge acquisition stage some issues arise concerning how best to apply the clinical evidence. Furthermore, in cases where insufficient clinical evidence is currently available, telemonitoring can yield large collections of clinical data with the potential for data mining in order to furnish more statistically powerful and accurate clinical evidence
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