Automatic classification of free-text radiology reports to identify limb fractures using machine learning and the SNOMED CT ontology

Objective To develop and evaluate machine learning techniques that identify limb fractures and other abnormalities (e.g. dislocations) from radiology reports. Materials and Methods 99 free-text reports of limb radiology examinations were acquired from an Australian public hospital. Two clinicians were employed to identify fractures and abnormalities from the reports; a third senior clinician resolved disagreements. These assessors found that, of the 99 reports, 48 referred to fractures or abnormalities of limb structures. Automated methods were then used to extract features from these reports that could be useful for their automatic classification. The Naive Bayes classification algorithm and two implementations of the support vector machine algorithm were formally evaluated using cross-fold validation over the 99 reports. Result Results show that the Naive Bayes classifier accurately identifies fractures and other abnormalities from the radiology reports. These results were achieved when extracting stemmed token bigram and negation features, as well as using these features in combination with SNOMED CT concepts related to abnormalities and disorders. The latter feature has not been used in previous works that attempted classifying free-text radiology reports. Discussion Automated classification methods have proven effective at identifying fractures and other abnormalities from radiology reports (F-Measure up to 92.31%). Key to the success of these techniques are features such as stemmed token bigrams, negations, and SNOMED CT concepts associated with morphologic abnormalities and disorders. Conclusion This investigation shows early promising results and future work will further validate and strengthen the proposed approaches.

Automated classification of limb fractures from free-text radiology reports using a clinician-informed gazetteer methodology

Background Timely diagnosis and reporting of patient symptoms in hospital emergency departments (ED) is a critical component of health services delivery. However, due to dispersed information resources and a vast amount of manual processing of unstructured information, accurate point-of-care diagnosis is often difficult. Aims The aim of this research is to report initial experimental evaluation of a clinician-informed automated method for the issue of initial misdiagnoses associated with delayed receipt of unstructured radiology reports. Method A method was developed that resembles clinical reasoning for identifying limb abnormalities. The method consists of a gazetteer of keywords related to radiological findings; the method classifies an X-ray report as abnormal if it contains evidence contained in the gazetteer. A set of 99 narrative reports of radiological findings was sourced from a tertiary hospital. Reports were manually assessed by two clinicians and discrepancies were validated by a third expert ED clinician; the final manual classification generated by the expert ED clinician was used as ground truth to empirically evaluate the approach. Results The automated method that attempts to individuate limb abnormalities by searching for keywords expressed by clinicians achieved an F-measure of 0.80 and an accuracy of 0.80. Conclusion While the automated clinician-driven method achieved promising performances, a number of avenues for improvement were identified using advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques.

UCPR r548 - requirement for report or proof of evidence intended to be relied on at trial

In Oates v Cootes Tanker Service Pty Ltd [2005] QSC 213, Fryberg J considered some interesting questions of construction in relation to the rule requiring the plaintiff to provide a statement of loss and damage in personal injuries proceedings (UCPR r 548) and the rule in relation to the giving of expert evidence (UCPR r427)

An orientation to early childhood education for sustainability and research : framing the text

This publication arose from the interests of the chapter authors, ‘a small group of thoughtful people’ almost all of whom participated in one or both Transnational Dialogues in Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, held in Stavanger, Norway in 2010 and Brisbane, Australia in 2011 (Refer Appendix 1 for list of participants). These meetings were the first time that a critical mass of researchers from vastly different parts of the globe - Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand at the inaugural meeting, with additional participants from Korea, Japan and Singapore attending the second - had come together to debate, discuss and share ideas about research and theory in the emerging field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS. Some of the researchers who joined these Transnational Dialogues, had met serendipitously at earlier conferences and meetings, or corresponded via email, but many had never met face-to-face. Now a significant number are contributing authors in this text. It is a testament to these researchers’ interest in this agenda that they mostly self-funded their travel and other costs to attend the Transnational Dialogues research meetings. While most chapter authors come from the field of early childhood education, a few are more aligned with education for sustainability/environmental education, while a much smaller number are already working at the intersection of early childhood education and education for sustainability. What we share as a group is a range of perspectives and orientations to research and to the research focus at the heart of this book - young children and their actual and potential capabilities as agents of change for sustainability. As researchers, regardless of experience and perspectives, participants knew they had something extra to offer - their expertise as researchers - providing scholarly insights into the work of practitioners, applying critically reflective lenses to curricula, pedagogies and assumptions, testing of ideas and theories, and presenting a sense for where ECEfS might fit or, indeed, go beyond norms and orthodoxies. This is a text, then, for both researchers and those whose primary interests lie in daily interactions with children, families and communities.

CT Anatomy for Radiotherapy

Knowledge of CT anatomy is increasingly vital in daily radiotherapy practice, especially with more widespread use of cross-sectional image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) techniques. Existing CT anatomy texts are predominantly written for the diagnostic practitioner and do not always address the radiotherapy issues while emphasising structures that are not common to radiotherapy practice. CT Anatomy for Radiotherapy is a new radiotherapy-specific text that is intended to prepare the reader for CT interpretation for both IGRT and treatment planning. It is suitable for undergraduate students, qualified therapy radiographers, dosimetrists and may be of interest to oncologists and registrars engaged in treatment planning. All essential structures relevant to radiotherapy are described and depicted on 3D images generated from radiotherapy planning systems. System-based labelled CT images taken in relevant imaging planes and patient positions build up understanding of relational anatomy and CT interpretation. Images are accompanied by comprehensive commentary to aid with interpretation. This simplified approach is used to empower the reader to rapidly gain image interpretation skills. The book pays special attention to lymph node identification as well as featuring a unique section on Head and Neck Deep Spaces to help understanding of common pathways of tumour spread. Fully labelled CT images using radiotherapy-specific views and positioning are complemented where relevant by MR and fusion images. A brief introduction to image interpretation using IGRT devices is also covered. The focus of the book is on radiotherapy and some images of common tumour pathologies are utilised to illustrate some relevant abnormal anatomy. Short self-test questions help to keep the reader engaged throughout.

Time, space, and text in the elementary school digital writing classroom

Theorists of multiliteracies, social semiotics, and the New Literacy Studies have drawn attention to the potential changing nature of writing and literacy in the context of networked communications. This article reports findings from a design-based research project in Year 4 classrooms (students aged 8.5-10 years) in a low socioeconomic status school. A new writing program taught students how to design multimodal and digital texts across a range of genres and text types, such as web pages, online comics, video documentaries, and blogs. The authors use Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device to theorize the pedagogic struggles and resolutions in remaking English through the specialization of time, space, and text. The changes created an ideological struggle as new writing practices were adapted from broader societal fields to meet the instructional and regulative discourses of a conventional writing curriculum.

Can a text message a week improve breastfeeding?

Background Breastfeeding is recognised as the optimal method for feeding infants with health gains made by reducing infectious diseases in infancy; and chronic diseases, including obesity, in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Despite this, exclusivity and duration in developed countries remains resistant to improvement. The objectives of this research were to test if an automated mobile phone text messaging intervention, delivering one text message a week, could increase “any” breastfeeding rates and improve breastfeeding self-efficacy and coping. Methods Women were eligible to participate if they were: over eighteen years; had an infant less than three months old; were currently breastfeeding; no diagnosed mental illness; and used a mobile phone . Women in the intervention group received MumBubConnect, a text messaging service with automated responses delivered once a week for 8 weeks. Women in the comparison group received their usual care and were sampled two years after the intervention group. Data collection included online surveys at two time points, week zero and week nine, to measure breastfeeding exclusivity and duration, coping, emotions, accountability and self-efficacy. A range of statistical analyses were used to test for differences between groups. Hierarchical regression was used to investigate change in breastfeeding outcome, between groups, adjusting for co-variates. Results The intervention group had 120 participants at commencement and 114 at completion, the comparison group had 114 participants at commencement and 86 at completion. MumBubConnect had a positive impact on the primary outcome of breastfeeding behaviors with women receiving the intervention more likely to continue exclusive breastfeeding; with a 6% decrease in exclusive breastfeeding in the intervention group, compared to a 14% decrease in the comparison group (p < 0.001). This remained significant after controlling for infant age, mother’s income, education and delivery type (p = 0.04). Women in the intervention group demonstrated active coping and were less likely to display emotions-focussed coping (p < .001). There was no discernible statistical effect on self-efficacy or accountability. Conclusions A fully automated text messaging services appears to improve exclusive breastfeeding duration. The service provides a well-accepted, personalised support service that empowers women to actively resolve breastfeeding issues. Trial registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12614001091695.

Metal Skin and the cinema of noise

In traditional communication and information theory, noise is the demon Other, an unwelcome disruption in the passage of information. Noise is "anything that is added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source...anything that makes the intended signal harder to decode accurately". It is in Michel Serres' formulation, the "third man" in dialogue who is always assumed, and whom interlocutors continually struggle to exclude. Noise is simultaneously a condition and a by-product of the act of communication, it represents the ever present possibility of disruption, interruption, misunderstanding. In sonic or musical terms noise is cacophony, dissonance. For economists, noise is an arbitrary element, both a barrier to the pursuit of wealth and a basis for speculation. For Mick (Jeremy Sims) and his mate Kev (Ben Mendelsohn) in David Caesar's Idiot Box (1996), as for Hando (Russell Crowe) and his gang of skinheads in Geoffrey Wright's Romper Stomper (1992), or Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn) and Joe (Aden Young) in Wright's Metal Skin (1994) and all those like them starved of (useful) information and excluded from the circuit - the information poor - their only option, their only point of intervention in the loop, is to make noise, to disrupt, to discomfort, to become Serres' "third man", "the prosopopoeia of noise" (5).

Injury narrative text classification : a preliminary study

Description of a patient's injuries is recorded in narrative text form by hospital emergency departments. For statistical reporting, this text data needs to be mapped to pre-defined codes. Existing research in this field uses the Naïve Bayes probabilistic method to build classifiers for mapping. In this paper, we focus on providing guidance on the selection of a classification method. We build a number of classifiers belonging to different classification families such as decision tree, probabilistic, neural networks, and instance-based, ensemble-based and kernel-based linear classifiers. An extensive pre-processing is carried out to ensure the quality of data and, in hence, the quality classification outcome. The records with a null entry in injury description are removed. The misspelling correction process is carried out by finding and replacing the misspelt word with a soundlike word. Meaningful phrases have been identified and kept, instead of removing the part of phrase as a stop word. The abbreviations appearing in many forms of entry are manually identified and only one form of abbreviations is used. Clustering is utilised to discriminate between non-frequent and frequent terms. This process reduced the number of text features dramatically from about 28,000 to 5000. The medical narrative text injury dataset, under consideration, is composed of many short documents. The data can be characterized as high-dimensional and sparse, i.e., few features are irrelevant but features are correlated with one another. Therefore, Matrix factorization techniques such as Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Non Negative Matrix Factorization (NNMF) have been used to map the processed feature space to a lower-dimensional feature space. Classifiers with these reduced feature space have been built. In experiments, a set of tests are conducted to reflect which classification method is best for the medical text classification. The Non Negative Matrix Factorization with Support Vector Machine method can achieve 93% precision which is higher than all the tested traditional classifiers. We also found that TF/IDF weighting which works well for long text classification is inferior to binary weighting in short document classification. Another finding is that the Top-n terms should be removed in consultation with medical experts, as it affects the classification performance.

Text recognition approaches for indoor robotics : a comparison

This paper evaluates the performance of different text recognition techniques for a mobile robot in an indoor (university campus) environment. We compared four different methods: our own approach using existing text detection methods (Minimally Stable Extremal Regions detector and Stroke Width Transform) combined with a convolutional neural network, two modes of the open source program Tesseract, and the experimental mobile app Google Goggles. The results show that a convolutional neural network combined with the Stroke Width Transform gives the best performance in correctly matched text on images with single characters whereas Google Goggles gives the best performance on images with multiple words. The dataset used for this work is released as well.

Text mining with semantic annotation : using enriched text representation for entity-oriented retrieval, semantic relation identification and text clustering

This project is a step forward in the study of text mining where enhanced text representation with semantic information plays a significant role. It develops effective methods of entity-oriented retrieval, semantic relation identification and text clustering utilizing semantically annotated data. These methods are based on enriched text representation generated by introducing semantic information extracted from Wikipedia into the input text data. The proposed methods are evaluated against several start-of-art benchmarking methods on real-life data-sets. In particular, this thesis improves the performance of entity-oriented retrieval, identifies different lexical forms for an entity relation and handles clustering documents with multiple feature spaces.

Old mastheads and new media : newspapers striving to adapt in Australia and South-east Asia

As a key element in their response to new media forcing transformations in mass media and media use, newspapers have deployed various strategies to not only establish online and mobile products, and develop healthy business plans, but to set out to be dominant portals. Their response to change was the subject of an early investigation by one of the present authors (Keshvani 2000). That was part of a set of short studies inquiring into what impact new software applications and digital convergence might have on journalism practice (Tickle and Keshvani 2000), and also looking for demonstrations of the way that innovations, technologies and protocols then under development might produce a “wireless, streamlined electronic news production process (Tickle and Keshvani 2001).” The newspaper study compared the online products of The Age in Melbourne and the Straits Times in Singapore. It provided an audit of the Singapore and Australia Information and Communications Technology (ICT) climate concentrating on the state of development of carrier networks, as a determining factor in the potential strength of the two services with their respective markets. In the outcome, contrary to initial expectations, the early cable roll-out and extensive ‘wiring’ of the city in Singapore had not produced a level of uptake of Internet services as strong as that achieved in Melbourne by more ad hoc and varied strategies. By interpretation, while news websites and online content were at an early stage of development everywhere, and much the same as one another, no determining structural imbalance existed to separate these leading media participants in Australia and South-east Asia. The present research revisits that situation, by again studying the online editions of the two large newspapers in the original study, and one other, The Courier Mail, (recognising the diversification of types of product in this field, by including it as a representative of Newscorp, now a major participant). The inquiry works through the principle of comparison. It is an exercise in qualitative, empirical research that establishes a comparison between the situation in 2000 as described in the earlier work, and the situation in 2014, after a decade of intense development in digital technology affecting the media industries. It is in that sense a follow-up study on the earlier work, although this time giving emphasis to content and style of the actual products as experienced by their users. It compares the online and print editions of each of these three newspapers; then the three mastheads as print and online entities, among themselves; and finally it compares one against the other two, as representing a South-east Asian model and Australian models. This exercise is accompanied by a review of literature on the developments in ICT affecting media production and media organisations, to establish the changed context. The new study of the online editions is conducted as a systematic appraisal of the first level, or principal screens, of the three publications, over the course of six days (10-15.2.14 inclusive). For this, categories for analysis were made, through conducting a preliminary examination of the products over three days in the week before. That process identified significant elements of media production, such as: variegated sourcing of materials; randomness in the presentation of items; differential production values among media platforms considered, whether text, video or stills images; the occasional repurposing and repackaging of top news stories of the day and the presence of standard news values – once again drawn out of the trial ‘bundle’ of journalistic items. Reduced in this way the online artefacts become comparable with the companion print editions from the same days. The categories devised and then used in the appraisal of the online products have been adapted to print, to give the closest match of sets of variables. This device, to study the two sets of publications on like standards -- essentially production values and news values—has enabled the comparisons to be made. This comparing of the online and print editions of each of the three publications was set up as up the first step in the investigation. In recognition of the nature of the artefacts, as ones that carry very diverse information by subject and level of depth, and involve heavy creative investment in the formulation and presentation of the information; the assessment also includes an open section for interpreting and commenting on main points of comparison. This takes the form of a field for text, for the insertion of notes, in the table employed for summarising the features of each product, for each day. When the sets of comparisons as outlined above are noted, the process then becomes interpretative, guided by the notion of change. In the context of changing media technology and publication processes, what substantive alterations have taken place, in the overall effort of news organisations in the print and online fields since 2001; and in their print and online products separately? Have they diverged or continued along similar lines? The remaining task is to begin to make inferences from that. Will the examination of findings enforce the proposition that a review of the earlier study, and a forensic review of new models, does provide evidence of the character and content of change --especially change in journalistic products and practice? Will it permit an authoritative description on of the essentials of such change in products and practice? Will it permit generalisation, and provide a reliable base for discussion of the implications of change, and future prospects? Preliminary observations suggest a more dynamic and diversified product has been developed in Singapore, well themed, obviously sustained by public commitment and habituation to diversified online and mobile media services. The Australian products suggest a concentrated corporate and journalistic effort and deployment of resources, with a strong market focus, but less settled and ordered, and showing signs of limitations imposed by the delay in establishing a uniform, large broadband network. The scope of the study is limited. It is intended to test, and take advantage of the original study as evidentiary material from the early days of newspaper companies’ experimentation with online formats. Both are small studies. The key opportunity for discovery lies in the ‘time capsule’ factor; the availability of well-gathered and processed information on major newspaper company production, at the threshold of a transformational decade of change in their industry. The comparison stands to identify key changes. It should also be useful as a reference for further inquiries of the same kind that might be made, and for monitoring of the situation in regard to newspaper portals on line, into the future.

Can skin cancer prevention and early detection be improved via mobile phone text messaging? a randomised, attention-control trial.

Objective. To test the impact of a theory-based, SMS (text message)-delivered behavioural intervention (Healthy Text) targeting sun protection or skin self-examination behaviours compared to attention-control. Method. Overall, 546 participants aged 18–42 years were randomised using a computer-generated number list to the skin self-examination (N = 176), sun protection (N = 187), or attention-control (N = 183) text messages group. Each group received 21 text messages about their assigned topic over 12 months (12 weekly messages for three months, then monthly messages for the next nine months). Data was collected via telephone survey at baseline, three-, and 12-months across Queensland from January 2012 to August 2013. Results. One year after baseline, the sun protection (mean change 0.12; P = 0.030) and skin self-examination groups (mean change 0.12; P = 0.035) had significantly greater improvement in their sun protection habits (SPH) index compared to the attention-control group (reference mean change 0.02). The increase in the proportion of participants who reported any skin self-examination from baseline to 12 months was significantly greater in the skin self-examination intervention group (103/163; 63%; P < 0.001) than the sun protection (83/173; 48%), or attention-control (65/165; 36%) groups. There was no significant effect of the intervention for participants who self-reported whole-body skin self-examination, sun tanning behaviour, or sunburn behaviours. Conclusion. The Healthy Text intervention was effective in inducing significant improvements in sun protection and any type of skin self-examination behaviours.