Dimitrios Alexandrou

A Holistic Environment for the Design and Execution of Self-Adaptive Clinical Pathways

One of the main challenges to be confronted by modern health care, so as to increase treatment quality, is the personalization of treatment. The treatment personalization requires the continuous reconfiguration and adaptation of the selected treatment schemes according to the “current” clinical status of each patient and “current” circumstances inside a health care organization that change rapidly, as well as the updated medical knowledge. In this paper, we present an innovative software environment that provides an integrated IT solution concerning the adaptation of health care processes (clinical pathways) during execution time. The software comprises a health care process execution engine assisted by a semantic infrastructure for reconfiguring the clinical pathways. During the execution of clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules and reconfigures the next steps of the treatment. A graphical designer interface is implemented for the definition of the rule-set for the clinical pathways adaptation in a user-friendly way.

SEMPATH: Semantic Adaptive and Personalized Clinical Pathways

As scientific achievements in the area of Healthcare have increased during the last decade, inevitably there has been an increase of treatment quality. One of the challenges to be confronted is the personalization of treatment. The personalization requires the continuous reconfiguration of the treatment schemes since the clinical status of each patient and circumstances inside a healthcare organization constantly change. In this paper we present a prototype that provides an IT solution concerning the real-time adaptation of healthcare processes. The software comprises a healthcare process execution engine assisted by a semantic info-structure for reconfiguring the pathways. The semantic info-structure utilizes an ontology enclosing the required knowledge and a semantic rule-set. During the execution of clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules, the knowledge and information, and reconfigures the next steps of the treatment. The results of the rule-set execution may generate knowledge objects to be inserted in the ontology.

A holistic environment for the design and execution of self-adaptive clinical pathways

As scientific achievements in the area of Healthcare have evolved during the last decade, inevitably there has been an increase of treatment quality. One of the challenges to be confronted is the personalization of treatment since each patient constitutes a unique case. The personalization requires the continuous reconfiguration of the treatment schemes since the clinical status of each patient and circumstances inside a healthcare organization constantly change. In this paper we present a holistic software environment that provides an IT solution concerning the real-time adaptation of healthcare processes. The software comprises a healthcare process execution engine assisted by a semantic info-structure for reconfiguring the pathways. The semantic info-structure utilizes an ontology enclosing the required knowledge and a semantic rule-set. During the execution of clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules, the knowledge and information, and reconfigures the next steps of the treatment. The results of the rule-set execution may generate knowledge objects to be inserted in the ontology. A graphical designer is provided for the definition of the rule-set for the clinical pathways adaptation.

Design of Fundamental Ontology for Manufacturing Product Lifecycle Applications

In today’s world of fast manufacturing, high quality demands and highly competitive markets, it has become vital for companies to be able to extract knowledge from their operating data, to manage and to reuse this knowledge in efficient and automated manner. Ontology has proven to be one of the most successful methods in fulfilling this demand and to this day, it has been applied in number of scenarios within companies of all scales. The most appealing features of the ontology are well-defined structure of the knowledge organization; being machine understandable enables automatic reasoning and inference and finally, well defined semantics enables easy interoperability and design of the plug-in modules. Still, one key downfall of ontology is that it usually has to be manually designed from the beginning for each new use-case. This requires highly specialized knowledge experts working closely with the domain experts for, sometimes, significant period of time. In this paper we propose LinkedDesign solution for described issues, as an example of design of fundamental ontology which can be easily adjusted and adopted for different production systems, thus eliminating the need for repetition of entire design process for every individual company. We also discuss and point to a new and challenging fields of research emerging from application of ontology into manufacturing companies, mainly concerning rapidly growing amounts of knowledge which are beginning to exceed human ability to process it.

SEMPATH Ontology: Modeling multi-disciplinary treatment schemes utilizing semantics

A dramatic increase of demand for provided treatment quality has occurred during last decades. The main challenge to be confronted, so as to increase treatment quality, is the personalization of treatment, since each patient constitutes a unique case. Healthcare provision encloses a complex environment since healthcare provision organizations are highly multidisciplinary. In this paper, we present the conceptualization of the domain of Clinical Pathways. The SEMPATH Ontology comprises three main parts: a) the Clinical Pathway part, b) the Business & Finance part and c) the Quality Assurance part. Our implementation achieves the conceptualization of the multidisciplinary domain of healthcare provision, in order to be further utilized for the implementation of a Semantic Web Rules (SWRL rules) repository.

SEMPATH Ontology: Modeling Multidisciplinary Treatment Schemes Utilizing Semantics

A dramatic increase of demand for provided treatment quality has occurred during last decades. The main challenge to be confronted, so as to increase treatment quality, is the personalization of treatment, since each patient constitutes a unique case. Healthcare provision encloses a complex environment since healthcare provision organizations are highly multidisciplinary. In this paper, we present the conceptualization of the domain of clinical pathways (CP). The SEMPATH (SEMantic PATHways) Oontology comprises three main parts: 1) the CP part; 2) the business and finance part; and 3) the quality assurance part. Our implementation achieves the conceptualization of the multidisciplinary domain of healthcare provision, in order to be further utilized for the implementation of a Semantic Web Rules (SWRL rules) repository. Finally, SEMPATH Ontology is utilized for the definition of a set of SWRL rules for the human papillomavirus) disease and its treatment scheme.

SEMPATH: Adapting Clinical Pathways by Utilizing Semantic Technologies

The increase of treatment quality offered by the healthcare organizations is one of the main challenges of the modern health informatics. The personalization of treatment presupposes the real-time adaptation of treatment schemes since the clinical status of the patient and circumstances inside a healthcare organization constantly change. In this paper we present SEMPATH prototype which aims at providing a solution concerning the real-time adaptation of healthcare business processes. The prototype consists of a healthcare process execution engine assisted by a semantic framework for the adaptation. The semantic framework consists of an ontology enclosing the required knowledge based on which a semantic rule set was created. During the execution time of the clinical pathways, the system reasons over the rules, the knowledge and information collected, and provides decisions and recommendations for the next steps of the treatment. Moreover, the results of the rule-set execution may produce new knowledge objects which are inserted in the ontology. The continuous recycling of knowledge combined with the rule-set leads to the personalization of treatment of the patients.

Web service-enabled grid-based platform for drug resistance management

HIV Drug Resistance testing has been established as a routine test in several cases. Estimation of genotypic resistance is a laborious task consisting of experimental procedure and complicated algorithmic interpretation of mutational pattern (sequence data). Since the sequencing procedure is not error free, it is often necessary to proceed into quality checking and manual editing of the raw data (chromatograms). This paper presents the design and development of a grid-based platform that assists the storage and analysis of HIV nucleotide sequences both for clinical practice and research purposes. Modular software components were implemented for sequence uploading, quality verification, mutation identification, genotypic resistance interpretation, phylogenetic analysis, multiple-sequence alignment and sophisticated mutation querying. Moreover these services have been exported as web services in order to provide a high layer of abstraction and enhanced collaboration among researchers. The platform has been validated and tested with more than 500 HIV sequences.