Use of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in Portuguese for categorizing web-based healthcare content

Introduction: Internet users are increasingly using the worldwide web to search for information relating to their health. This situation makes it necessary to create specialized tools capable of supporting users in their searches. Objective: To apply and compare strategies that were developed to investigate the use of the Portuguese version of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) for constructing an automated classifier for Brazilian Portuguese-language web-based content within or outside of the field of healthcare, focusing on the lay public. Methods: 3658 Brazilian web pages were used to train the classifier and 606 Brazilian web pages were used to validate it. The strategies proposed were constructed using content-based vector methods for text classification, such that Naive Bayes was used for the task of classifying vector patterns with characteristics obtained through the proposed strategies. Results: A strategy named InDeCS was developed specifically to adapt MeSH for the problem that was put forward. This approach achieved better accuracy for this pattern classification task (0.94 sensitivity, specificity and area under the ROC curve). Conclusions: Because of the significant results achieved by InDeCS, this tool has been successfully applied to the Brazilian healthcare search portal known as Busca Saude. Furthermore, it could be shown that MeSH presents important results when used for the task of classifying web-based content focusing on the lay public. It was also possible to show from this study that MeSH was able to map out mutable non-deterministic characteristics of the web. (c) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Logistics information systems adoption: an empirical investigation in Brazil

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the level of logistics information systems (LIS) adoption in manufacturing companies is influenced by organizational profile variables, such as the company`s size, the nature of its operations and their subsectors. Design/methodology/approach - A review of the mainstream literature on US was carried out to identify the factors influencing the adoption of such information systems and also some research gaps. The empirical study`s strategy is based on a survey research in Brazilian manufacturing firms from the capital goods industry. Data collected were analyzed through Kruskall-Wallis and Mann Whitney`s non-parametric tests. Findings - The analysis indicates that characteristics such as the size of companies and the nature of their operations influence the levels of LIS adoption, whilst comparisons regarding the subsectors appeared to be of little influence. Originality/value - This is the first known study to examine the influence of organizational profiles such as size, nature of operations and subsector on the level of US adoption in manufacturing companies. Moreover, it is unique in portraying the Brazilian scenario on this topic and addressing the adoption of seven types of LIS in a single study.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Assessing Dental Health

The present study investigated the distribution profile of dental caries and its association with areas of social deprivation at the individual and contextual level. The cluster sample consisted of 1,002 12-year-old schoolchildren from Piracicaba, SP, Brazil. The DMFT Index was used for dental caries and the Care Index was used to determine access to dental services. On the individual level, variables were associated with a better oral status. On the contextual level, areas were not associated with oral status. However, maps enabled determining that the central districts have better social and oral conditions than the deprived outlying districts.

The International LAM Registry: A Component of an Innovative Web-Based Clinician, Researcher, and Patient-Driven Rare Disease Research Platform

Background: A relative friability to capture a sufficiently large patient population in any one geographic location has traditionally limited research into rare diseases. Methods and Results: Clinicians interested in the rare disease lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) have worked with the LAM Treatment Alliance, the MIT Media Lab, and Clozure Associates to cooperate in the design of a state-of-the-art data coordination platform that can be used for clinical trials and other research focused on the global LAM patient population. This platform is a component of a set of web-based resources, including a patient self-report data portal, aimed at accelerating research in rare diseases in a rigorous fashion. Conclusions: Collaboration between clinicians, researchers, advocacy groups, and patients can create essential community resource infrastructure to accelerate rare disease research. The International LAM Registry is an example of such an effort.

AMBIVALENT IMPLICATIONS OF HEALTH CARE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A STUDY IN THE BRAZILIAN PUBLIC HEALTH CARE SYSTEM

This article evaluates social implications of the ""SIGA"" Health Care Information System (HIS) in a public health care organization in the city of Sao Paulo. The evaluation was performed by means of an in-depth case study with patients and staff of a public health care organization, using qualitative and quantitative data. On the one hand, the system had consequences perceived as positive such as improved convenience and democratization of specialized treatment for patients and improvements in work organization. On the other hand, negative outcomes were reported, like difficulties faced by employees due to little familiarity with IT and an increase in the time needed to schedule appointments. Results show the ambiguity of the implications of HIS in developing countries, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced view of the evaluation of failures and successes and the importance of social contextual factors.

Information from managing information systems as a fundamental element to support decision-making in hospitals

This article deals with the activity of defining information of hospital systems as fundamental for choosing the type of information systems to be used and also the organizational level to be supported. The use of hospital managing information systems improves the user`s decision -making process by allowing control report generation and following up the procedures made in the hospital as well.

E-contracting with price configuration for Web services and QoS

The large amount of information in electronic contracts hampers their establishment due to high complexity. An approach inspired in Software Product Line (PL) and based on feature modelling was proposed to make this process more systematic through information reuse and structuring. By assessing the feature-based approach in relation to a proposed set of requirements, it was showed that the approach does not allow the price of services and of Quality of Services (QoS) attributes to be considered in the negotiation and included in the electronic contract. Thus, this paper also presents an extension of such approach in which prices and price types associated to Web services and QoS levels are applied. An extended toolkit prototype is also presented as well as an experiment example of the proposed approach.

New perspectives on the processing and release of public information

This article discusses issues related to the organization and reception of information in the context of services and public information systems driven by technology. It stems from the assumption that in a ""technologized"" society, the distance between users and information is almost always of cognitive and socio-cultural nature, a product of our effort to design communication. In this context, we favor the approach of the information sign, seeking to answer how a documentary message turns into information, i.e. a structure recognized as socially useful. Observing the structural, cognitive and communicative aspects of the documentary message, based on Documentary Linguistics, Terminology, as well as on Textual Linguistics, the policy of knowledge management and innovation of the Government of the State of Sao Paulo is analyzed, which authorizes the use of Web 2.0, also questioning to what extent this initiative represents innovation in the environment of libraries.

Modeling of Distributed Control Systems in Intelligent Building based on Colored Petri Nets

Distributed control systems consist of sensors, actuators and controllers, interconnected by communication networks and are characterized by a high number of concurrent process. This work presents a proposal for a procedure to model and analyze communication networks for distributed control systems in intelligent building. The approach considered for this purpose is based on the characterization of the control system as a discrete event system and application of coloured Petri net as a formal method for specification, analysis and verification of control solutions. With this approach, we develop the models that compose the communication networks for the control systems of intelligent building, which are considered the relationships between the various buildings systems. This procedure provides a structured development of models, facilitating the process of specifying the control algorithm. An application example is presented in order to illustrate the main features of this approach.

Supporting content-based image retrieval and computer-aided diagnosis systems with association rule-based techniques

In this work, we take advantage of association rule mining to support two types of medical systems: the Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) systems and the Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems. For content-based retrieval, association rules are employed to reduce the dimensionality of the feature vectors that represent the images and to improve the precision of the similarity queries. We refer to the association rule-based method to improve CBIR systems proposed here as Feature selection through Association Rules (FAR). To improve CAD systems, we propose the Image Diagnosis Enhancement through Association rules (IDEA) method. Association rules are employed to suggest a second opinion to the radiologist or a preliminary diagnosis of a new image. A second opinion automatically obtained can either accelerate the process of diagnosing or to strengthen a hypothesis, increasing the probability of a prescribed treatment be successful. Two new algorithms are proposed to support the IDEA method: to pre-process low-level features and to propose a preliminary diagnosis based on association rules. We performed several experiments to validate the proposed methods. The results indicate that association rules can be successfully applied to improve CBIR and CAD systems, empowering the arsenal of techniques to support medical image analysis in medical systems. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.