Giulio Napolitano

Electronic Patient Data Confidentiality Practices Among Surgical Trainees: Questionnaire Study

INTRODUCTION The objective of this work was to evaluate the safeguards implemented by surgical trainees to protect the confidentiality of electronic patient data through a structured questionnaire sent to Northern Ireland surgical trainees. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS A group of 32 basic and higher surgical trainees attending a meeting of the Northern Ireland Association of Surgeons-in-Training were invited to complete a questionnaire regarding their computer use, UK Data Protection Act, 1988 registration and electronic data confidentiality practices. RESULTS Of these 32 trainees, 29 returned completed questionnaires of whom 26 trainees regularly stored sensitive patient data for audit or research purposes on a computer. Only one person was registered under the Data Protection Act, 1988. Of the computers used to store and analyse sensitive data, only 3 of 14 desktops, 8 of 19 laptops and 3 of 14 hand-held computers forced a password logon. Of the 29 trainees, 16 used the same password for all machines, and 25 of 27 passwords were less than 8 characters long. Two respondents declined to reveal details of their secure passwords. Half of all trainees had never adjusted their internet security settings, despite all 14 desktops, 16 of 19 laptops and 5 of 14 hand-helds being routinely connected to the internet. Of the 29 trainees, 28 never encrypted their sensitive data files. Ten trainees had sent unencrypted sensitive patient data over the internet, using a non-secure server. CONCLUSIONS Electronic data confidentiality practices amongst Northern Ireland surgical trainees are unsafe. Simple practical measures to safeguard confidentiality are recommended.

CEO statements in sustainability reports: Substantive information or background noise?

Highlights • We use sentiment analysis to analyze CEO statements of corporate sustainability reports.• We conduct a longitudinal analysis, of the rhetoric used in these CEO statements.• In contrast to financial reporting there is no discriminatory value of CEO statements.• Unlike in financial reporting we do not find a link between reporting and performance.• This missing link persists despite increased standardization of sustainability reporting. Abstract This paper examines the question of whether corporate sustainability reports can serve as accurate and fair representations of corporate sustainability performance. It presents the results of a sentiment analysis of CEO statements in corporate sustainability reports and corporate financial reports between 2001 and 2010. Making an analogy with corporate financial reporting it is expected that if corporate sustainability reports accurately reflect sustainability performance, then this should be reflected in the rhetoric used. The analysis shows that the rhetoric in the CEO statements of sustainability reports is indicative of impression management rather than accountability, despite increasing standardization of sustainability reporting.

A Longitudinal and Contextual Analysis of Media Representation of Business Ethics

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of media representation of business ethics within 62 international newspapers to explore the longitudinal and contextual evolution of business ethics and associated terminology. Levels of coverage and contextual analysis of the content of the articles are used as surrogate measures of the penetration of business ethics concepts into society.Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a text mining application based on two samples of data: analysis of 62 national newspapers in 21 countries from 1990 to 2008; analysis of the content of two samples of articles containing the term business ethics (comprised of 100 newspaper articles spread over an 18‐year period from a sample of US and UK newspapers).Findings – The paper demonstrates increased coverage of sustainability topics within the media over the last 18 years associated with events such as the Rio Summit. Whilst some peaks are associated with business ethics scandals, the overall coverage ...

Real-time multidisciplinary team meeting management systems. A comparison with paper records for staging completeness and waiting times

A bespoke electronic system, now being used regularly across Northern Ireland to facilitate the multidisciplinary team process in its recording of the team decisions for cancer patients, is investigated. Over 80% of the expected targets for cancer waiting times are being achieved and clinical stage recording for lung cancers has increased from 67% in 2006 to 88% in 2009.

Pattern-based information extraction from pathology reports for cancer registration

ObjectiveTo evaluate precision and recall rates for the automatic extraction of information from free-text pathology reports. To assess the impact that implementation of pattern-based methods would have on cancer registration completeness.MethodOver 300,000 electronic pathology reports were scanned for the extraction of Gleason score, Clark level and Breslow depth, by a number of Perl routines progressively enhanced by a trial-and-error method. An additional test set of 915 reports potentially containing Gleason score was used for evaluation.ResultsValues for recall and precision of over 98 and 99%, respectively, were easily reached. Potential increase in cancer staging completeness of up to 32% was proved.ConclusionsIn cancer registration, simple pattern matching applied to free-text documents can be effectively used to improve completeness and accuracy of pathology information.

Predicting CYP2D6 phenotype from resting brain perfusion images by gradient boosting

The cytochrome P450 enzyme 2D6 is involved in the metabolism of 20% of all commonly used drugs, including many psychotropic drugs and CNS-active substances. CYP2D6 is among the CYP enzymes with the highest expression levels in the brain, suggesting a role in the local brain metabolism of psychotropic drugs and the existence of endogenous substrates. The genetic polymorphism of CYP2D6, which causes individual differences in activity levels of the enzyme, has also been characterized functionally in human brain imaging studies. Here we explore the feasibility of predicting CYP2D6 phenotype using component-wise gradient boosting on fMRI resting brain perfusion images. The images belonged to subjects showing a range of genetic CYP2D6 variants. We achieved sensitivity and specificity values between 85% and 87% for the classification of ultrarapid metabolisers, and between 71% and 79% for poor metabolisers. An extension of the boosting algorithm, developed to improve the clinical plausibility of the inherently sparse models, produced enhanced models in agreement with the results of previous studies, showing some brain regions as positively associated with genotypic variation, most prominently in the prefrontal white matter and the corpus callosum. With further development, such a probabilistic method might constitute a valuable, non-invasive alternative to actual genotyping.

Rebirth, devastation and sickness: analyzing the role of metaphor in media discourses of nuclear power

ABSTRACT Nuclear power plays an important but controversial role in policies to ensure domestic energy security, fuel poverty reduction and the mitigation of climate change. Our article construes the problem of nuclear power in terms of social discourse, language and public choice; specifically examining the role that metaphors play in the policy domain. We empirically analyze metaphors as framing devices in nuclear energy policy debates in the UK between April 2009 and March 2013, thereby capturing the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. We employ documentary analysis of major UK national broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, using electronic bibliographic tools to extract the metaphors. We then map these metaphors using a Type Hierarchy Analysis, which examines how elements of the target domain (energy technologies and policies) originate from a different source domain. Type hierarchies identify and categorize metaphors, defining the affectual and emotional responses associated with them, providing us with grounded insight into their role in shaping discourse and as a consequence influence public engagement with energy policy. Our analysis highlights three emergent domains of discourse metaphors and discusses the implications of their deployment. Metaphors were found to be classified into three different categories: Rebirth (Renaissance), Devastation (Apocalypse, Inferno, Genie and Bomb) and Sickness (Addiction and Smoking).

Towards a data science collaboratory

Data-driven research requires many people from different domains to collaborate efficiently. The domain scientist collects and analyzes scientific data, the data scientist develops new techniques, and the tool developer implements, optimizes and maintains existing techniques to be used throughout science and industry. Today, however, this data science expertise lies fragmented in loosely connected communities and scattered over many people, making it very hard to find the right expertise, data and tools at the right time. Collaborations are typically small and cross-domain knowledge transfer through the literature is slow. Although progress has been made, it is far from easy for one to build on the latest results of the other and collaborate effortlessly across domains. This slows down data-driven research and innovation, drives up costs and exacerbates the risks associated with the inappropriate use of data science techniques. We propose to create an open, online collaboration platform, a ‘collaboratory’ for data-driven research, that brings together data scientists, domain scientists and tool developers on the same platform. It will enable data scientists to evaluate their latest techniques on many current scientific datasets, allow domain scientists to discover which techniques work best on their data, and engage tool developers to share in the latest developments. It will change the scale of collaborations from small to potentially massive, and from periodic to real-time. This will be an inclusive movement operating across academia, healthcare, and industry, and empower more students to engage in data science. Fig. 1. Roles within the data science ecosystem and the gaps between them.