Introduction to the ACM TIST Special Issue on Intelligent Healthcare Informatics

Healthcare Informatics is a research area dealing with the study and application of computer science and information and communication technology to face both theoretical/methodological and practical issues in healthcare, public health, and everyday wellness. Intelligent Healthcare Informatics may be defined as the specific area focusing on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) theories and techniques to offer important services (such as a component of complex systems) to allow integrated systems to perceive, reason, learn, and act intelligently in the healthcare arena. One of the many peculiarities of healthcare is that decision support systems need to be integrated with several heterogeneous systems supporting both collaborative work and process coordination and the management and analysis of a huge amount of clinical and health data, to compose intelligent, process-aware health information systems. After some pioneering work focusing explicitly on specific medical aspects and providing some efficient, even ad hoc, solutions, in recent years, AI in healthcare has been faced by researchers with different backgrounds and interests, taking into consideration the main results obtained in the more general and theoretical/methodological area of intelligent systems. Moreover, from a focus on reasoning strategies and deep knowledge representation, research in healthcare intelligent systems moved to data-intensive clinical tasks, where there is the need for supporting healthcare decision making in the presence of overwhelming amounts of clinical data. Significant solutions have been provided through a multidisciplinary combination of the results from the different research areas and their associated cultures, ranging from algorithms, to information systems and databases, to human-computer interaction, to medical informatics. To this regard, it is interesting to observe that, from one side, medical informaticians benefited by the general solutions coming from the generic computer science area, tailoring them to specific medical domains, while from the other side, computer scientists found several (still open) challenges in the medical and, more generally, health domains. This ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST) special issue contains articles discussing fundamental principles, algorithms, or applications for process-aware health information systems. Such articles are a sound answer to the research challenges for novel techniques, combinations of tools, and so forth to build effective ways to manage and deal in an integrated way with healthcare processes and data

58 Smart Colonography for Distributed Medical Databases with Group Kernel Feature Analysis

Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) of polyps in Computed Tomographic (CT) colonography is currently very limited since a single database at each hospital/institution doesn't provide sufficient data for training the CAD system's classification algorithm. To address this limitation, we propose to use multiple databases, (e.g., big data studies) to create multiple institution-wide databases using distributed computing technologies, which we call smart colonography. Smart colonography may be built by a larger colonography database networked through the participation of multiple institutions via distributed computing. The motivation herein is to create a distributed database that increases the detection accuracy of CAD diagnosis by covering many true-positive cases. Colonography data analysis is mutually accessible to increase the availability of resources so that the knowledge of radiologists is enhanced. In this article, we propose a scalable and efficient algorithm called Group Kernel Feature Analysis (GKFA), which can be applied to multiple cancer databases so that the overall performance of CAD is improved. The key idea behind the proposed GKFA method is to allow the feature space to be updated as the training proceeds with more data being fed from other institutions into the algorithm. Experimental results show that GKFA achieves very good classification accuracy