Aleš Bourek

Infrared camera assessment of skin surface temperature - Effect of emissivity

Infrared thermoimaging is one of the options for object temperature analysis. Infrared thermoimaging is unique due to the non-contact principle of measurement. So it is often used in medicine and for scientific experimental measurements. The presented work aims to determine whether the measurement results could be influenced by topical treatment of the hand surface by various substances. The authors attempted to determine whether the emissivity can be neglected or not in situations of topical application of substances such as ultrasound gel, ointment, disinfection, etc. The results of experiments showed that the value of surface temperature is more or less distorted by the topically applied substance. Our findings demonstrate the effect of emissivity of applied substances on resulting temperature and showed the necessity to integrate the emissivity into calculation of the final surface temperature. Infrared thermoimaging can be an appropriate method for determining the temperature of organisms, if this is understood as the surface temperature, and the surrounding environment and its temperature is taken into account.

Automated Selection of Interesting Medical Text Documents by the TEA Text Analyzer

This short paper briefly describes the experience in the automated selection of interesting medical text documents by the TEA text analyzer based on the naive Bayes classifier. Even if the used type of the classifier provides generally good results, physicians needed certain supporting functions to obtain really interesting medical text documents, for example, from resources like the Internet. The influence of the functions is summarized and discussed. In addition, some remaining problems are mentioned.

Filtering Very Similar Text Documents: A Case Study

This paper describes problems with classification and filtration of similar relevant and irrelevant real medical documents from one very specific domain, obtained from the Internet resources. Besides the similarity, the documents are often unbalanced—a lack of irrelevant documents for the training. A definition of similarity is suggested. For the classification, six algorithms are tested from the document similarity point of view. The best results are provided by the back propagation-based neural network and by the radial basis function-based support vector machine.

TEA: A Text Analysis Tool for the Intelligent Text Document Filtering

This paper describes results achieved with a text-document classification tool TEA (TExt Analyzer) based on the naive Bayes algorithm. TEA provides also a set of additional functions, which can assist users at fine-tuning the text classifiers and improving the classification accuracy, mainly through modifications of dictionaries generated during the training phase. Experiments, described in the paper, aimed at supporting work with medical unstructured text documents downloaded from the Internet. Good and stable results (around 97% of the classification accuracy) were achieved for selecting documents in a certain area of interest among a large number of documents from different areas.

Infrared thermography as option for evaluating the treatment effect of percutaneous transluminal angioplasty by patients with peripheral arterial disease.

Aim of this study was to evaluate the possible use of infrared thermography as a supplementary method to the ankle-brachial index used in assessing the treatment effect of percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. The study included 21 patients, mean age was 60.22 years. Healthy control group included 20 persons, mean age was 55.60 years. Patients with symptomatic peripheral arterial disease (Fontaine stages I–III) were admitted for endovascular treatment by percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. Thermal images and ankle-brachial index values were obtained before and after treatment by percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. Median temperature change in the treated limb was 0.4℃, for non-treated limb was –0.5℃. The median value of ankle-brachial index in the treated limb increased by 0.17 from 0.81 after the procedure. The median value of ankle-brachial index in the non-treated limb decreased by 0.03 from the value of 1.01. Significant difference between treated limb and non-treated limb in change of ankle-brachial index was found with p value = .0035. The surface temperature obtained by the infrared thermography correlates with ankle-brachial index. We present data showing that the increase of ankle-brachial index is associated with increase of skin temperature in the case of limbs treated by percutaneous transluminal angioplasty. Our results also suggest potential of the use of infrared thermography for monitoring foot temperature as a means of early detection of onset of foot ischemic disorders.

Multilingual Virtual Quality Center Providing e-Learning Facilities for e-Health and Modern Healthcare Management Education and Training

Multilingual Virtual Quality Center Providing e-Learning Facilities for e-Health and Modern Healthcare Management Education and Training The complete methodology of design, functions and first feedback based on the pilot use of the multilingual Virtual Healthcare Quality Centre designed to educate healthcare managers, caregivers and researchers in understanding how to achieve quality, efficiency and economic effectiveness of services provided by modern healthcare organizations is presented for discussion and possible improvements. Currently Virtual Healthcare Quality Centre offers glossary centred e-learning courses for modern healthcare organization change management, human resource management, quality management, performance management, customer satisfaction and decision making, healthcare economics, e-Health and quality of life and well-being. Management and organizations e-manuals and e-consultation with frequently asked questions focused on use of obtained information and knowledge accumulated for the design and implementation of a new quality management system and a set of tools for follow-up improvement of quality, efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare organizations. Discussion will also be targeted at further development of specific areas as seen from the perspective of users in health care systems in EU countries and EU candidate countries that have not participated in the presented initial pilot projects.

The RICHE taxonomy - an innovative means of classification of child health research

BACKGROUND Research outputs increase inexorably. Health is now a required element in all policies of the European Union. There is a need for a system that helps to navigate the vast body of childrens health research, identify pertinent research institutions, discover ongoing and recently funded research projects and identify gaps where there is little knowledge. METHODS The European Commission funded the Research Inventory of Child Health in Europe (RICHE) project through the Framework 7 Programme, to identify gaps in child health research in Europe. A necessary first step was to identify and index current research, for which a website repository was created. As a basis for this task, an innovative taxonomy was necessary to encompass the many arenas of childrens health and development, including subjects outside the traditional areas of childrens health. Drawing inspiration from existing taxonomies, library systems and other forms of classification, a multi-axial approach was selected as the best way to encompass the many influences on childrens health. Six axes were identified and their contents defined. All of the axes can be viewed and searched independently, as well as in relation to each other. The axes encompass factors and service areas that impact on children, including health, education, justice, the environment and others. This has created a system that is consistent and impartial, but adaptable to an enormous variety of uses. RESULTS The taxonomy has been tested and validated by a number of well-respected academics, researchers and practitioners across Europe. It forms the basis of an intuitive and accessible database. This allows research knowledge to be easily identified and for networking to take place. CONCLUSIONS The RICHE taxonomy facilitates retrieval of knowledge - ongoing research as well as findings - in order to inform researchers and policy makers who wish to include childrens health as an element of new policy.

Educational Paradigm Change and Fostering Sustainable Success of Healthcare Organization with the Aid of Web-Based Interactive Training

This chapter presents quite comprehensive insight into a methodology of acquiring skills for managing healthcare organization for sustained success through interactive WEB based training. The paper describes functions and properties of the IMPROHEALTH portal, as well as services pertaining to integrated e-Learning, e-Implementation of the quality management system with the air of role play simulation, e-Improvement of provided healthcare services, and the way how knowledge accumulated can be glossary-based learning presented in the form of a WEB-log book. Moreover, purpose of this chapter is seen in addressing the obtained experience with regards to the utilization of information and communication technologies among the knowledgeable community. It is intended for professional educators involved in improvement activities of managing healthcare organizations, in e-Health management, but also for all people keen on modern digital ways of caring about their health status and on improving their sense of well-being, further supported by the so-called e-Laboratory. Several innovative approaches augmenting the possibilities of traditional e-Learning options are presented.

Searching for significant word associations in text documents using genetic algorithms

This paper describes some experiments that used Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for looking for important word associations (phrases) in unstructured text documents obtained from the Internet in the area of a specialized medicine. GAs can evolve sets of word associations with assigned significance weights from the document categorization point of view (here two classes: relevant and irrelevant documents). The categorization was similarly reliable like the naive Bayes method using just individual words; in addition, in this case GAs provided phrases consisting of one, two, or three words. The selected phrases were quite meaningful from the human point of view.

Filtering of Large Numbers of Unstructured Text Documents by the Developed Tool TEA

This paper describes a text-document-filtering software tool TEA (TExt Analyzer), which was originally developed for physicians to support selections of large numbers of unstructured medical text documents obtained from available Internet services. TEA learns interesting and relevant documents for individual users basically by the naive Bayes algorithm. Moreover, TEA provides a number of additional functions that can improve its classification accuracy, allow more specific document selection for individual users, and enable users to work with dictionaries generated from analyzed documents. The learning process of TEA is based on a set of labeled positive and negative examples of text documents, which obtain their labels from users interested in documents of certain, usually very specific topics.