Data quality assessment in healthcare data: A case study

Reliable data is essential for monitoring and evaluating business activities. When critical domains such as Healthcare are involved, data quality has a crucial impact on de- livering more accurate and fast healthcare services. Considering epidemiological scenarios such as the COVID-19 pandemic, data can assume an essential role in supporting social answers carried on by the primary decision-makers. For that, sharing and having an inte- grated view of the data allow for identifying the best approaches and critical signals that could lead to better treatments and diagnoses. Nevertheless, leading with data extraction from several sources is not an easy task and can lead to enormous challenges related to data accessibility, representation, and interpretation. Several data quality problems can occur and, when not adequately addressed, can question the decision-making support. The contribution of this thesis was to perform a data quality assessment from a subset of data from a Portuguese hospital when used in the context of integration to a common shared repository within the scope of a European project. A deep data profiling analysis in the source database was conducted, identifying the main characteristics and, after- wards, the main issues. Each issue was later mapped with its corresponding data quality violation, and rules were defined as guidelines to address these issues and prevent future ones. To classify the quality of the source data, a methodology was proposed to evaluate the data into two levels, quality roles level and data quality dimensions level, calculating the data quality score. The final results are discussed and evaluated in this work.Dados com qualidade são essenciais para monitorizar e avaliar as atividades do negócio. Quando se trata de domínios críticos como a área da saúde, a qualidade dos dados tem um impacto fundamental na prestação de serviços mais precisos e rápidos. Considerando cenários epidemiológicos como a COVID-19, os dados assumem um papel essencial no apoio às respostas sociais dadas pelos decisores. Para tal, a partilha e a visão integrada dos dados permitem identificar as melhores abordagens e os sinais críticos que podem conduzir a melhores diagnósticos e tratamentos, entretanto, lidar com a extração e integração de dados provenientes de várias fontes não é uma tarefa fácil e implicam inúmeros desafios relacionados com a acessibilidade, representação e interpretação dos mesmos. Diferentes problemas relacionados à qualidade dos dados podem ser levantados e quando não tratados corretamente, podem pôr em causa à tomada de decisões. O principal contributo desta tese é avaliar a qualidade de um conjunto de dados de um hospital português aquando utilizados para integração com repositório de dados partilhado no âmbito de um projeto europeu. Estes dados foram analisados, identificando as principais características e problemas. Os problemas identificados foram posteriormente mapeados com a respetiva dimensão da qualidade de dados violado. Regras foram definidas servindo como diretrizes para auxiliar na correção dos problemas e prevenir que os mesmos ocorram futuramente. Para efetuar esta avaliação, propôs-se uma metodologia que avalia a qualidade dos dados a dois níveis, a nível das regras e das dimensões da qualidade dos dados, calculando posteriormente o score relativamente a qualidade dos dados avaliados. Os resultados foram discutidos e avaliados

Wolf breeding sites in human grounds: insights on habitat features and sources of disturbance to support conservation measures

Disturbance at key areas used by wolves may have negative impacts on population dynamics and species recovery, becoming particularly critical in regions with high human activity, such as the Iberian Peninsula. This study evaluated the sources of human-related disturbances and ecological features in the Iberian wolf key areas, including feeding sites, highway crossing structures and, more exhaustively, breeding sites, using available data from camera trapping obtained in two areas within wolf range in Portugal. Differences at spatial and temporal level were observed in the use of these areas by wolves, other wildlife, domestic animals and humans. A decreasing use of these sites by wildlife with an increase in the use by domestic animals and humans was predicted. However, wild species shown to benefit from areas with intermediate human intervention. The expansion of traditional agriculture and fire mitigation measures seems to mitigate or revert the decreasing trends of wolves, mesocarnivores and wild ungulates; Locais de reprodução do lobo em territórios humanos: perceções sobre as características do habitat e fontes de perturbação para apoiar medidas de conservação RESUMO: Perturbações em áreas-chave ocupadas pelos lobos podem causar impactos negativos na dinâmica populacional e na recuperação desta espécie, tornando-se particularmente crítico em regiões com elevada presença humana, como na Península Ibérica. Este estudo avaliou as fontes de perturbações humanas e características ecológicas nas áreas-chave do lobo-ibérico, incluindo locais de alimentação, passagens de autoestradas e, mais exaustivamente, locais de reprodução, utilizando dados de armadilhagem fotográfica obtida em duas áreas de distribuição do lobo em Portugal. Diferenças espaciais e temporais foram observadas nas deteções de lobos, outros animais selvagens, animais domésticos e humanos. Foi prevista uma diminuição do uso desses locais pela fauna selvagem com um aumento do uso por animais domésticos e humanos. No entanto, espécies selvagens demonstraram beneficiar de áreas com intervenção humana intermédia. A expansão da agricultura tradicional e medidas de mitigação de incêndios mostraram desacelerar ou mesmo reverter as tendências decrescentes de lobos, mesocarnívoros e ungulados selvagens

A rat model of restrictive bariatric surgery with gastric banding

Obes Surg. 2006 Jan;16(1):48-51. A rat model of restrictive bariatric surgery with gastric banding. Monteiro MP, Monteiro JD, Aguas AP, Cardoso MH. Department of Anatomy of ICBAS (Abel Salazar Institute for the Biomedical Sciences), and Division of Endocrinology of Santo Antonio General Hospital, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal. [email protected] Abstract BACKGROUND: Gastric banding is a well established weight reduction operation that is effective in the treatment of severe obesity. Its metabolic and endocrine mechanisms of action, however, remain unclear. The aim of this study was to establish a rat model of gastric banding that would replicate the procedure performed in human obese patients. METHODS: Male Wistar rats were submitted either to gastric banding (n=5) or sham gastric banding (n=4), and were followed for 21 days. Detailed description on how to perform gastric banding in rats are herein described. RESULTS: The Wistar rats submitted to gastric banding showed a decrease in weight gain and food intake when compared to sham-operated rats. The cumulative weight gain during the 21 days after the surgical procedure was 143+/-2.58 g for the gastric banded rats and 162+/-2.48 g for the sham-operated animals (P=0.001). The cumulative food intake was 329+/-0.53 g for the gastric banded rats and 380+/-15.22 g for the sham-operated animals, also statistically significant (P=0.025). CONCLUSION: A rat model to study gastric banding is described. This model can now be used for experimental investigation of biochemical and molecular mechanisms of weight loss resulting from this type of surgery. PMID: 16417758 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE

Rats submitted to gastric banding are leaner and show distinctive feeding patterns

Obes Surg. 2006 May;16(5):597-602. Rats submitted to gastric banding are leaner and show distinctive feeding patterns. Monteiro MP, Monteiro JD, Aguas AP, Cardoso MH. Department of Anatomy, Unit for Multidisciplinary Biomedical Research, Abel Salazar Institute for the Biomedical Sciences, University of Porto, 4099-003 Porto, Portugal. [email protected] Abstract BACKGROUND: Bariatric surgery is expanding to meet the global epidemic of morbid obesity, because this surgery is successful in achieving sustained weight loss. After having recently established a rat model of gastric banding, our aim now was to investigate the relative fat mass content and the feeding patterns of gastric banded rats. METHODS: Two groups of Wistar rats, submitted either to gastric banding or to sham surgery, were followed-up for 26 days regarding weight, daily food intake and feeding patterns both under resting conditions and when refed after fasting. Weight of the epididymal fat pad was used as a measure to evaluate changes in white adipose tissue in the rats. RESULTS: 10 days after surgery and thereafter, rats submitted to gastric banding showed the same daily food intake that was observed in sham-operated rats. Nevertheless, gastric banded rats kept lower body weights and were leaner than controls. These differences were associated with distinctive feeding patterns, both under resting conditions and when refed after fasting, suggesting that gastric banded rats present a significant increase in feeding frequency when compared with controls. CONCLUSION: This data is the first experimental evidence that an increase in feeding frequency is associated with weight loss after gastric banding, even if there is no decrease in total energy intake. Thus, medical advice on the advantages of fractionating daily caloric intake into multiple meals is further supported by the herein new information obtained in an animal model of gastric banding

The brand equity of a destination: A user-generated content analysis

Customer-based brand equity can be defined as the differential effect of brand knowledge on consumer response to the marketing of the brand. Although there are already studies focused on the brand equity of destinations, most of them are based on surveys. Still, it is possible to extract and analyse visitors’ opinion by their self-reported experience that is available on travel blogs, in which bloggers write in a way that best represents their experience. Tourism in Lisbon has been increasing over the last years and Portugal is one of the most visited countries in Europe. The novelty of this dissertation is to propose a new methodology of measuring brand equity through text-mining of user-generated blog posts, based on the visitors’ evaluations of Lisbon. For this purpose, 100 posts were collected to test a brand equity model measured by four constructs: brand awareness, brand image - decomposed in cognitive, affective, and unique image components, perceived quality, and brand loyalty. Findings revealed that the components of destination image are highly related, with the cognitive image being strongly related to higher destination brand image. Regarding to the constructs, awareness and image are the most important to make the consumers loyal to Lisbon, with image and perceived quality representing the strongest relationship between constructs. Further, higher awareness can lead to negative perceived quality, but the image can work as a moderator of this relationship. Perceived quality was the only construct that did not reveal a significant relationship with destination loyalty.O valor da marca baseado no cliente pode ser definido como o efeito diferencial do conhecimento da marca na resposta do consumidor ao marketing da marca. Embora existam estudos focados no valor da marca dos destinos, a maioria são baseados em questionários. Contudo, é possível extrair e analisar a opinião dos visitantes através do seu relato da experiência, disponível em blogs de viagens, nos quais os bloggers escrevem da forma que melhor representa a sua experiência. O turismo em Lisboa tem aumentado nos últimos anos e Portugal é um dos países mais visitados da Europa. A novidade desta dissertação é propor uma nova metodologia para medir o valor da marca através da mineração de dados de publicações em blogs, baseada na avaliação dos visitantes de Lisboa. Para isso, 100 publicações foram recolhidas para testar um modelo de valor da marca medido por quatro construtos: notoriedade, imagem - decomposta em componentes cognitivos, afetivos e imagem única, qualidade percebida e lealdade. Os resultados revelaram que as componentes da imagem do destino estão altamente relacionadas, com a imagem cognitiva fortemente relacionada à imagem da marca. Relativamente aos construtos, a notoriedade e a imagem são os mais importantes para fidelizar os consumidores a Lisboa, com a imagem e a qualidade percebida representando a relação mais forte entre eles. Além disso, maior notoriedade pode levar a qualidade percebida negativa, mas a imagem pode funcionar como moderadora desta relação. A qualidade percebida foi o único construto que não revelou relação significativa com a lealdade ao destino

Spatio-temporal action localization with Deep Learning

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia InformáticaThe system that detects and identifies human activities are named human action recognition. On the video approach, human activity is classified into four different categories, depending on the complexity of the steps and the number of body parts involved in the action, namely gestures, actions, interactions, and activities, which is challenging for video Human action recognition to capture valuable and discriminative features because of the human body’s variations. So, deep learning techniques have provided practical applications in multiple fields of signal processing, usually surpassing traditional signal processing on a large scale. Recently, several applications, namely surveillance, human-computer interaction, and video recovery based on its content, have studied violence’s detection and recognition. In recent years there has been a rapid growth in the production and consumption of a wide variety of video data due to the popularization of high quality and relatively low-price video devices. Smartphones and digital cameras contributed a lot to this factor. At the same time, there are about 300 hours of video data updates every minute on YouTube. Along with the growing production of video data, new technologies such as video captioning, answering video surveys, and video-based activity/event detection are emerging every day. From the video input data, the detection of human activity indicates which activity is contained in the video and locates the regions in the video where the activity occurs. This dissertation has conducted an experiment to identify and detect violence with spatial action localization, adapting a public dataset for effect. The idea was used an annotated dataset of general action recognition and adapted only for violence detection.O sistema que deteta e identifica as atividades humanas é denominado reconhecimento da ação humana. Na abordagem por vídeo, a atividade humana é classificada em quatro categorias diferentes, dependendo da complexidade das etapas e do número de partes do corpo envolvidas na ação, a saber, gestos, ações, interações e atividades, o que é desafiador para o reconhecimento da ação humana do vídeo para capturar características valiosas e discriminativas devido às variações do corpo humano. Portanto, as técnicas de deep learning forneceram aplicações práticas em vários campos de processamento de sinal, geralmente superando o processamento de sinal tradicional em grande escala. Recentemente, várias aplicações, nomeadamente na vigilância, interação humano computador e recuperação de vídeo com base no seu conteúdo, estudaram a deteção e o reconhecimento da violência. Nos últimos anos, tem havido um rápido crescimento na produção e consumo de uma ampla variedade de dados de vídeo devido à popularização de dispositivos de vídeo de alta qualidade e preços relativamente baixos. Smartphones e cameras digitais contribuíram muito para esse fator. Ao mesmo tempo, há cerca de 300 horas de atualizações de dados de vídeo a cada minuto no YouTube. Junto com a produção crescente de dados de vídeo, novas tecnologias, como legendagem de vídeo, respostas a pesquisas de vídeo e deteção de eventos / atividades baseadas em vídeo estão surgindo todos os dias. A partir dos dados de entrada de vídeo, a deteção de atividade humana indica qual atividade está contida no vídeo e localiza as regiões no vídeo onde a atividade ocorre. Esta dissertação conduziu uma experiência para identificar e detetar violência com localização espacial, adaptando um dataset público para efeito. A ideia foi usada um conjunto de dados anotado de reconhecimento de ações gerais e adaptá-la apenas para deteção de violência

Profile and Motivation of Women Enrolled in the Brazilian Telemedicine and Telehealth Postgraduation Distance Education Programme

Purpose:  Women’s participation in Telehealth is increasing around the world and they should be prepared to work in this new job market. The aim of this study was to evaluate the profile and motivation of women enrolled in the Brazilian Postgraduate Programme on Telemedicine and Telehealth. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted from May to July 2018 of all women enrolled in the postgraduate programme using an anonymous online Google form. It consisted of a multiple choice form regarding: age, number of children, profession, date of graduation, current occupation, current number of jobs, workload, postgraduate programmes completed,  duration of Telehealth experience  and motivation to enrol on the Programme.  Data collected were exported to an Excel® sheet, summarised and analysed. Results: Of 44 women, 36 completed the survey. Mean age and time passed since graduation were respectively 43.5±13.5 years and 18±17 years for student and 53±13.5 years and 31.5±8.5 for professors; 25 women have at least one child, work more than 30 hours weekly and 10 of them work in two jobs.  Health professionals and health occupations were predominant in both groups. Most students had little or no experience in Telehealth.  The decreasing order of frequency motivation was professional refinement (63.8%), job opportunity (55.5%), financial gain (52.7%) and innovation (38.8%). Conclusion: Regardless of age, children, workload and professional qualification, the major women's motivation for enrolling in the Telehealth Postgraduate Programme is to professional refinement in this field

A systematic approach to global equity sectors rotation

Back in 2000, the burst of the IT bubble sunk global equities. Regardless, five out of ten GICS sectors had positive returns over that year. Global equity sectors rotation might become even more relevant as globalisation/integration evolve, with industry effects eventually taking over country effects. This paper details the set-up and performance of a sector rotation systematic strategy, supporting Millennium BCP’s Wealth Management Unit on its asset allocation procedures. It is shown that momentum and low-volatility “anomalies” are evidenced at industry level, macroeconomic indicators support a choice between cyclical/defensive sectors, and that specific factors further fine-tune an efficient rotation

Innovation in hospitality: the manager’s role

This research was designed to explain the process of innovation in hospitality through the action of innovative managers. Responses OF employees to a questionnaire allowed the separation of managers’ skills into two factors: decision making and relationship. Further, data analysis was used extract the managers’ perceptual maps. Results show the differences between more and less innovative managers in their perceptions of ways to lead employees using creativity in their respective organizations. The match between an external criteria of separating the hotels in more and less innovative, and the perceived level of team and department innovation, clarified the relationship between organizational innovation and innovative management

Understanding innovation in hospitality through the words of innovative managers

Recently, researchers have become more interested in service innovation, and they describe it mostly as a process of continuous improvement of service quality, quite different from the industrial sector, more directed to technological innovation. This paper summarizes research designed to explain the role of hotel managers in fostering innovation in high quality hospitality industry. Within a role theory approach, interviews with 24 managers considered innovative by their employees, and six considered less innovative, were subjected to content analysis and correspondence analysis in order to extract the managers’ perceptual maps. Results show the differences between innovative and non-innovative managers’ self perceptions and the implications in service innovation. This research suggested ways that can be used to bring better results to the hospitality organizations, and stressed the value of employee creativity in the management process