Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A decision support system was developed for the grading of hip osteoarthritis (OA) severity. Sixty four hips (18 normal, 46 osteoarthritic) were studied from the digitized radiographs of 32 patients with unilateral or bilateral hip-OA. Hips were allocated into three OA-severity categories, formed accordingly to the Kellgren and Lawrence scale: “Normal”, “Mild-Moderate”, and “Severe”. Employing custom developed algorithms: (i) the radiographic contrast was enhanced, (ii) 64 ROIs, corresponding to patients’ radiographic Hip Joint Spaces (HJSs), were determined, and (iii) Fourier descriptors of the HJS-ROIs boundary were generated. These descriptors were used in the design of a two-level hierarchical decision tree structure, employed for the discrimination of the OA-severity categories. The overall classification accuracies accomplished by the system, regarding the discrimination between: (i) Normal and osteoarthritic hips, and (ii) hips of “Mild-Moderate” OA and of “Severe” OA were 92.2% and 86.0%, respectively. The proposed system may contribute to osteoarthritic patients management.

U-Health (Ubiquitous based Healthcare System that supports medical services) is one of the technology areas proposed to realize the vision of ubiquitous computing. A plethora of different alternative or complementary RFID sensing technologies and RFID management systems are available. And mostly RFID technologies in medical facilities are applied for tracking a patient’s location, storing medical equipment, and keeping on patient’s record. In this paper, we primarily apply RFID technology to measure the affected part which is needed to gain information about its volume, size and mass. Thus we will propose modeling method with using RFID tags for making missing tissue compensator which is used in Radiation Therapy. The missing tissue compensator is commonly used to maximize the effect of skin protection and to irradiate an even dose on tumor tissue. Existing missing tissue compensator marked the contour of the body surface directly on the patient’s skin using a curved ruler or used medical images such as computerized tomography images and magnetic resonance images. In addition, the application of medical images is expensive. In this paper we will obtain necessary 3 dimension location information using RFID technology which is fixed on the surface of the patient’s affected parts using a rubber mask. The rubber mask has RFID tags on its surface. So RFID readers to detect RFID tags on the mask obtain each of tags’ location information, and we calculate them to make a missing tissue compensator. According to the result, the missing tissue compensator modeled in this research compensated defective tissue and protected normal tissue, so it was considered clinically applicable.

An algorithm estimating vocabulary complexity of a consumer health text can help improve readability of consumer health materials. We had previously developed and validated an algorithm predicting lay familiarity with health terms on the basis of the terms’ frequency in consumer health texts and experimental data. Present study is part of the program studying the influence of reader factors on familiarity with health terms and concepts. Using gender as a proxy for background knowledge, the study evaluates male and female participants’ familiarity with terms and concepts pertaining to three types of health topics: male-specific, female-specific and gender-neutral. Of the terms / concepts of equal predicted difficulty, males were more familiar with those pertaining to neutral and male-specific topics (the effect was especially pronounced for “difficult” terms); no topic effect was observed for females. The implications for tailoring health readability formulas to various target populations are discussed.

This paper analyses key issues towards a research roadmap for eHealth-supported patient safety. The raison d’etre for research in this area is the high number of adverse patient events and deaths that could be avoided if better safety and risk management mechanisms were in place. The benefits that ICT applications can bring for increased patient safety are briefly reviewed, complemented by an analysis of key ICT tools in this domain. The paper outlines the impact of decision support tools, CPOE, as well as incident reporting systems. Some key research trends and foci like data mining, ontologies, modelling and simulation, virtual clinical trials, preparedness for large-scale events are touched upon. Finally, the synthesis points to the fact that only a multilevel analysis of ICT in patient safety will be able to address this complex issue adequately. The eHealth for Safety study will give insights into the structure of such an analysis in its lifetime and arrive at a vision and roadmap for more detailed research on increasing patient safety through ICT.