Description:
Automated classification algorithms have been applied to breast cancer diagnosis in order to improve the diagnostic accuracy and turnover time. However, classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity could still be improved further. Moreover, reducing computational cost is another challenge as the number of images to be analyzed is typically large. In this paper, a novel Pixel N-gram approach inspired from character N-grams in the text retrieval context has been applied for mammographic lesion classification. The experiments on real world database demonstrate that the Pixel N-grams outperform the existing histogram as well as Haralick features with respect to classification accuracy as well as sensitivity. Effect of varying N and using various classifiers is also analyzed in this paper. Results show that optimum value of N is equal to 3 and MLP classifier performs better than SVM and KNN classifier using 3-gram features.
Description:
To operate enterprise activities, a large number of queries need to be processed every day through an enterprise system. Consequently, such a system frequently faces hugely overloaded information and incurs high delay in producing query responses for big data. This is because, traditional queries are normally treated with equal importance. With the advent of big data and its use in enterprise systems and the growth of process complexity, the traditional approach of query processing is no more suitable as it does not consider semantic information and captures all data irrespective of their relevance to a business organization, which eventually increases the computational time in both big data collection and analysis. The significance level of a query can make a trade-off between query response delay and the extent of data collection and analysis. This motivates us to concentrate on determining the significance level of a query considering its importance to an enterprise system. To our knowledge, no such approach is available in the literature. To bridge this research gap, this paper, for the first time, proposes an approach to determine the significance level of a query to prioritize them with the relevance to a business organization. As business processes play key roles in any enterprise system and all business processes are not equally important, this is done by determining the semantic similarity between a query and the processes of a business organization and the importance of a business process to that organization. With a case study on an enterprise system of a retail company, the results produced by our proposed approach have shown that significance level is higher for more important queries compared to the less important ones.
Description:
An Electrocardiogram (ECG) records the electrical impulses of the heart and indicates rhythm anomalies for diagnostic purposes [1], [2]. A typical ECG tracing of the cardiac cycle consists of a P wave, QRS complex, and T wave [3]. Good performance of an ECG analyzing system depends heavily upon the accurate and reliable detection of the QRS complex, as well as the T and P waves [4]. A Bundle Branch Block (BBB) is a delay or obstruction along electrical impulse pathways of the heart manifesting in a prolonged QRS interval usually greater than 120ms. The automated detection and classification of a BBB is important for prompt, accurate diagnosis and treatment to reduce morbidity and mortality.
Description:
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and next-generation sequencing (NGS) has led to an increase in information about the human genome and cardiovascular disease. Understanding the role of genes in cardiac function and pathology requires modeling gene interactions and identification of regulatory genes as part of a gene regulatory network (GRN). Feature selection and data reduction not sufficient and require domain knowledge to deal with large data. We propose three novel innovations in constructing a GRN based on heuristics. A 2D Visualised Co-regulation function. Post-processing to identify gene-gene interactions. Finally a threshold algorithm is applied to identify the hub genes that provide the backbone of the GRN. The 2D Visualized Co-regulation function performed significantly better compared to the Pearson's correlation for measuring pairwise associations (t=3.46, df=5, p=0.018). The F-measure, improved from 0.11 to 0.12. The hub network provided a 60% improvement to that reported in the literature. The performance of the hub network was then also compared against ARACNe and performed significantly better (p=0.024). We conclude that a heuristics approach in developing GRNs has potential to improve our understanding of gene regulation and interaction in diverse biological function and disease.
Description:
Fully integrated electronic health records (EHR) provide healthcare providers and patients access to records across a health care system and promise efficient and effective provision of health care. However, fully integrated records have proven to be very expensive and difficult to establish. Currently. EHR's have been developed largely to accommodate Western medicine events. These barriers impact on the introduction of EHR's in Sri Lanka, where health budgets are already stretched and Ayurvedic medicine is routinely practiced alongside Allopathic medicine. This article identifies requirements for EHR in the Sri Lankan context and advances a model for the introduction of EHR's that suits that context. The model is justified by drawing on insights and experiences with EHR in Western nations.
Description:
Fully integrated electronic health records (EHR) provide healthcare providers and patients access to records across a health care system and promise efficient and effective provision of health care. However, fully integrated records have proven to be very expensive and difficult to establish. Currently. EHR's have been developed largely to accommodate Western medicine events. These barriers impact on the introduction of EHR's in Sri Lanka, where health budgets are already stretched and Ayurvedic medicine is routinely practiced alongside Allopathic medicine. This article identifies requirements for EHR in the Sri Lankan context and advances a model for the introduction of EHR's that suits that context. The model is justified by drawing on insights and experiences with EHR in Western nations.
Description:
Recently, we are witnessing an exponential growth in remote monitoring and mobile applications for healthcare. These solutions are all designed to ultimately enable the consumer to enjoy better healthcare delivery and /or wellness. In order to understand this growing area, we believe it is necessary to develop a framework to analyse and evaluate these solutions. The purpose of this chapter then is to offer a suitable taxonomy to systematically analyse and evaluate the existing solutions based on number of dimensions including technological, clinical, social, and economic.
Description:
Introduction: The purpose of this research was to conduct a cost-analysis, from a public healthcare perspective, comparing the cost and benefits of face-to-face patient examination assessments conducted by a dentist at a residential aged care facility (RACF) situated in rural areas of the Australian state of Victoria, with two teledentistry approaches utilizing virtual oral examination. Methods: The costs associated with implementing and operating the teledentistry approach were identified and measured using 2014 prices in Australian dollars. Costs were measured as direct intervention costs and programme costs. A population of 100 RACF residents was used as a basis to estimate the cost of oral examination and treatment plan development for the traditional face-to-face model vs. two teledentistry models: an asynchronous review and treatment plan preparation; and realtime communication with a remotely located oral health professional. Results: It was estimated that if 100 residents received an asynchronous oral health assessment and treatment plan, the net cost from a healthcare perspective would be AU$32.35 (AU$27.19–AU$38.49) per resident. The total cost of the conventional face-to-face examinations by a dentist would be AU$36.59 ($30.67–AU$42.98) per resident using realistic assumptions. Meanwhile, the total cost of real-time remote oral examination would be AU$41.28 (AU$34.30–AU$48.87) per resident. Discussion: Teledental asynchronous patient assessments were the lowest cost service model. Access to oral health professionals is generally low in RACFs; however, the real-time consultation could potentially achieve better outcomes due to twoway communication between the nurse and a remote oral health professional via health promotion/disease prevention delivered in conjunction with the oral examination
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
The transmission, storage and analysis of electrocardiogram (ECG) data in real-time is essential for remote patient monitoring with wearable ECG devices and mobile ECG contexts. However, this remains a challenge to achieve within the processing power and the storage capacity of mobile devices. ECG reduction algorithms have an important role to play in reducing the processing requirements for mobile devices, however many existing ECG reduction and compression algorithms are computationally expensive to execute in mobile devices and have not been designed for real-time computation and incremental data arrival. In this paper, we describe a computationally naive, yet effective, algorithm that achieves high ECG reduction rates while maintaining key diagnostic features including PR, QRS, ST, QT and RR intervals. While reduction does not enable ECG waves to be reproduced, the ability to transmit key indicators (diagnostic features) using minimal computational resources, is particularly useful in mobile health contexts involving power constrained sensors and devices. Results of the proposed reduction algorithm indicate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other ECG reduction algorithms at a reduction/compression ratio (CR) of 5:1. If power or processing capacity is low, the algorithm can readily switch to a compression ratio of up to 10: 1 while still maintaining an error rate below 10%.
Description:
Cardiac health screening standards require increasingly more clinical tests consisting of blood, urine and anthropometric measures as well as an extensive clinical and medication history. To ensure optimal screening referrals, diagnostic determinants need to be highly accurate to reduce false positives and ensuing stress to individual patients. However, the data from individual patients partaking in population screening is often incomplete. The current study provides an imputation algorithm that has been applied to patientcentered cardiac health screening. Missing values are iteratively imputed in conjunction with combinations of values on subsets of selected features. The approach was evaluated on the DiabHealth dataset containing 2800 records with over 180 attributes. The results for predicting CVD after data completion showed sensitivity and specificity of 94% and 99% respectively. Removing variables that define cardiac events and associated conditions directly, left ‘age’ followed by ‘use’ of antihypertensive and anti-cholesterol medication, especially statins among the best predictors.
Description:
Recently, we have been witnessing an exponential growth in mobile health (mHealth) for health care. These solutions are all designed ultimate to enable the consumer to enjoy better health-care delivery and/or wellness. In order to understand this growing area, we believe it is necessary to develop a framework to analyse and evaluate these solutions. The purpose of this chapter is to proffer a suitable taxonomy to do this.
Description:
Various statistical methods such as co-occurrence matrix, local binary patterns and spectral approaches such as Gabor filters have been used for generating global features for image classification. However, global image features fail to distinguish between local variations within an image. Bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) model do capture local variations in an image, but typically do not consider spatial relationships between the visual words. Here, a novel image representation ‘Pixel N-grams’, inspired from the character N-gram concept in text retrieval has been applied for texture classification purpose. Texture is an important property for image classification. Experiments on the benchmark texture database (UIUC) demonstrates that the overall classification accuracy resulting from Pixel N-gram approach (89.5%) is comparable with that achieved using BoVW approach (84.4%) with the added advantage of simplicity and reduced computational cost.
Description:
Mammography is a proven way of detecting breast cancer at an early stage. Various feature extraction techniques such as histograms, co-occurrence matrix, local binary patterns, Gabor filters, wavelet transforms are used for analysing mammograms. The novel pixel N-gram feature extraction technique has been inspired from the character N-gram concept of text retrieval. In this paper, we have compared the novel N-gram feature extraction technique with the co-occurrence matrix feature extraction technique. The experiments were conducted on the benchmark miniMIAS mammography database. Classification of mammograms into normal and abnormal category using N-gram features showed promising results with greater classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity compared to classification using co-occurrence matrix features. Moreover, N-gram features computation are found to be considerably faster than co-occurrence matrix feature computation
Description:
Continuous, remote monitoring of patients using wearable sensors can facilitate early detection of many conditions and can help to manage the growing healthcare crisis worldwide. A remote patient monitoring application consists of many emerging services such as wireless wearable sensor configuration, patient registration and authentication, collaborative consultation of doctors, storage and maintenance of electronic health record. The provision of these services requires the development and maintenance of a remote healthcare monitoring application (HMA) that includes a body area wireless sensor network (BASWN) and Health Applications (HA) to detect specific health issues. In addition, the deployment of HMAs for different hospitals is not easily scalable owing to the heterogeneous nature of hardware and software involved. Cloud computing overcomes this aspect by allowing simple and easy maintenance of ICT infrastructure. In this work, we report a realtime- like cloud based architecture known as Assistive Patient monitoring cloud Platform for Active healthcare applications (AppA) using a delegate pattern. The built AppA is highly scalable and capable of spawning new instances based on the monitoring requirements from the health care providers, and is aligned with scalable economic models.
Description:
Continuous, remote monitoring of patients using wearable sensors can facilitate early detection of many conditions and can help to manage the growing healthcare crisis worldwide. A remote patient monitoring application consists of many emerging services such as wireless wearable sensor configuration, patient registration and authentication, collaborative consultation of doctors, storage and maintenance of electronic health record. The provision of these services requires the development and maintenance of a remote healthcare monitoring application (HMA) that includes a body area wireless sensor network (BASWN) and Health Applications (HA) to detect specific health issues. In addition, the deployment of HMAs for different hospitals is not easily scalable owing to the heterogeneous nature of hardware and software involved. Cloud computing overcomes this aspect by allowing simple and easy maintenance of ICT infrastructure. In this work, we report a realtime- like cloud based architecture known as Assistive Patient monitoring cloud Platform for Active healthcare applications (AppA) using a delegate pattern. The built AppA is highly scalable and capable of spawning new instances based on the monitoring requirements from the health care providers, and is aligned with scalable economic models.
Description:
Glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) is now more commonly used as an alternative test to the fasting plasma glucose and oral glucose tolerance tests for the identification of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) because it is easily obtained using the point-of-care technology and represents long-term blood sugar levels. According to WHO guidelines, HbA1c values of 6.5% or above are required for a diagnosis of T2DM. However outcomes of a large number of trials with HbA1c have been inconsistent across the clinical spectrum and further research is required to determine the efficacy of HbA1c testing in identification of T2DM. Medical records from a diabetes screening program in Australia illustrate that many patients could be classified as diabetics if other clinical indicators are included, even though the HbA1c result does not exceed 6.5%. This suggests that a cutoff for the general population of 6.5% may be too simple and miss individuals at risk or with already overt, undiagnosed diabetes. In this study, data mining algorithms have been applied to identify markers that can be used with HbA1c. The results indicate that T2DM is best classified by HbA1c at 6.2% - a cutoff level lower than the currently recommended one, which can be even less, having assumed the threshold flexibility, if additionally to HbA1c being high the rule is conditioned on oxidative stress or inflammation being present, atherogenicity or adiposity being high, or hypertension being diagnosed, etc.
Description:
Glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) is now more commonly used as an alternative test to the fasting plasma glucose and oral glucose tolerance tests for the identification of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) because it is easily obtained using the point-of-care technology and represents long-term blood sugar levels. According to WHO guidelines, HbA1c values of 6.5% or above are required for a diagnosis of T2DM. However outcomes of a large number of trials with HbA1c have been inconsistent across the clinical spectrum and further research is required to determine the efficacy of HbA1c testing in identification of T2DM. Medical records from a diabetes screening program in Australia illustrate that many patients could be classified as diabetics if other clinical indicators are included, even though the HbA1c result does not exceed 6.5%. This suggests that a cutoff for the general population of 6.5% may be too simple and miss individuals at risk or with already overt, undiagnosed diabetes. In this study, data mining algorithms have been applied to identify markers that can be used with HbA1c. The results indicate that T2DM is best classified by HbA1c at 6.2% - a cutoff level lower than the currently recommended one, which can be even less, having assumed the threshold flexibility, if additionally to HbA1c being high the rule is conditioned on oxidative stress or inflammation being present, atherogenicity or adiposity being high, or hypertension being diagnosed, etc.
Description:
Missing values may be present in data without undermining its use for diagnostic / classification purposes but compromise application of readily available software. Surrogate entries can remedy the situation, although the outcome is generally unknown. Discretization of continuous attributes renders all data nominal and is helpful in dealing with missing values; particularly, no special handling is required for different attribute types. A number of classifiers exist or can be reformulated for this representation. Some classifiers can be reinvented as data completion methods. In this work the Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbour, and Naive Bayesian methods are demonstrated to have the required aptness. An approach is implemented whereby the entered missing values are not necessarily a close match of the true data; however, they intend to cause the least hindrance for classification. The proposed techniques find their application particularly in medical diagnostics. Where clinical data represents a number of related conditions, taking Cartesian product of class values of the underlying sub-problems allows narrowing down of the selection of missing value substitutes. Real-world data examples, some publically available, are enlisted for testing. The proposed and benchmark methods are compared by classifying the data before and after missing value imputation, indicating a significant improvement.
Description:
Missing values may be present in data without undermining its use for diagnostic / classification purposes but compromise application of readily available software. Surrogate entries can remedy the situation, although the outcome is generally unknown. Discretization of continuous attributes renders all data nominal and is helpful in dealing with missing values; particularly, no special handling is required for different attribute types. A number of classifiers exist or can be reformulated for this representation. Some classifiers can be reinvented as data completion methods. In this work the Decision Tree, Nearest Neighbour, and Naive Bayesian methods are demonstrated to have the required aptness. An approach is implemented whereby the entered missing values are not necessarily a close match of the true data; however, they intend to cause the least hindrance for classification. The proposed techniques find their application particularly in medical diagnostics. Where clinical data represents a number of related conditions, taking Cartesian product of class values of the underlying sub-problems allows narrowing down of the selection of missing value substitutes. Real-world data examples, some publically available, are enlisted for testing. The proposed and benchmark methods are compared by classifying the data before and after missing value imputation, indicating a significant improvement.