Computer methods and programs in biomedicine
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Jun 2016
Toward automated classification of acetabular shape in ultrasound for diagnosis of DDH: Contour alpha angle and the rounding index.
The diagnosis of Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip (DDH) in infants is currently made primarily by ultrasound. However, two-dimensional ultrasound (2DUS) images capture only an incomplete portion of the acetabular shape, and the alpha and beta angles measured on 2DUS for the Graf classification technique show high inter-scan and inter-observer variability. This variability relates partly to the manual determination of the apex point separating the acetabular roof from the ilium during index measurement. This study proposes a new 2DUS image processing technique for semi-automated tracing of the bony surface followed by automatic calculation of two indices: a contour-based alpha angle (αA), and a new modality-independent quantitative rounding index (M). The new index M is independent of the apex point, and can be directly extended to 3D surface models. ⋯ The rounding index provides complimentary information to conventional indices such as alpha angle and coverage. Calculation of the contour-based alpha angle and rounding index is rapid, shows potential to improve the reliability and accuracy of DDH diagnosis from 2DUS, and could be extended to 3D ultrasound in future.
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Oct 2015
Implementation of a two-group likelihood time-to-event continual reassessment method using SAS.
Dose finding trials using model-based methods have the ability to handle the increasingly complex landscape being seen in clinical trials. Issues such as patient heterogeneity in trial populations are important to address in the designing of a trial in addition to the inclusion/exclusion criteria. Designs accommodating patient heterogeneity have been described using the continual reassessment method (CRM) and time-to-event CRM (TITE-CRM), yet, the implementation of these trials in practice have been limited. These methods and other model-based methods generally need statisticians to help design and conduct these trials. However, the statistical programs which facilitate the use of these methods, currently available focus on estimation in the one-sample case. ⋯ This program provides researchers with a valuable tool for designing dose-finding studies to account for the presence of patient heterogeneity and conduct a trial using a hypothetical example.
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Aug 2015
Building a national electronic medical record exchange system - experiences in Taiwan.
There are currently 501 hospitals and about 20,000 clinics in Taiwan. The National Health Insurance (NHI) system, which is operated by the NHI Administration, uses a single-payer system and covers 99.9% of the nation's total population of 23,000,000. Taiwan's NHI provides people with a high degree of freedom in choosing their medical care options. ⋯ Inter-institution EMR exchange can make it much easier for people to access their own medical records, reduce the waste of medical resources, and improve the quality of medical care. The implementation of an inter-institution EMR exchange system faces many challenges. This article provides Taiwan's experiences as a reference.
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Apr 2015
Comparative StudyDesigning a robust feature extraction method based on optimum allocation and principal component analysis for epileptic EEG signal classification.
The aim of this study is to design a robust feature extraction method for the classification of multiclass EEG signals to determine valuable features from original epileptic EEG data and to discover an efficient classifier for the features. An optimum allocation based principal component analysis method named as OA_PCA is developed for the feature extraction from epileptic EEG data. As EEG data from different channels are correlated and huge in number, the optimum allocation (OA) scheme is used to discover the most favorable representatives with minimal variability from a large number of EEG data. ⋯ Furthermore, our approaches are also compared with some recent research work. The experimental results show that the LS-SVM_1v1 approach yields 100% of the overall classification accuracy (OCA), improving up to 7.10% over the existing algorithms for the epileptic EEG data. The major finding of this research is that the LS-SVM with the 1v1 system is the best technique for the OA_PCA features in the epileptic EEG signal classification that outperforms all the recent reported existing methods in the literature.
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Comput Methods Programs Biomed · Nov 2014
ReviewOpen source EMR software: profiling, insights and hands-on analysis.
The use of open source software in health informatics is increasingly advocated by authors in the literature. Although there is no clear evidence of the superiority of the current open source applications in the healthcare field, the number of available open source applications online is growing and they are gaining greater prominence. This repertoire of open source options is of a great value for any future-planner interested in adopting an electronic medical/health record system, whether selecting an existent application or building a new one. The following questions arise. How do the available open source options compare to each other with respect to functionality, usability and security? Can an implementer of an open source application find sufficient support both as a user and as a developer, and to what extent? Does the available literature provide adequate answers to such questions? This review attempts to shed some light on these aspects. ⋯ More detailed analysis of popular open source software can benefit the potential implementers of electronic health/medical records systems. The number of examined systems and the measures by which to compare them vary across studies, but still rewarding insights start to emerge. Our work is one step toward that goal. Our overall conclusion is that open source options in the medical field are still far behind the highly acknowledged open source products in other domains, e.g. operating systems market share.