Health Studies

Traumatic head injuries can cause internal bleeding within the brain. The resulting hematoma can elevate intracranial pressure, leading to complications and death if left untreated. A craniotomy may be required when conservative measures are ineffective. To augment conventional surgical training, a Virtual Reality-based intracranial hematoma simulator is being developed. A critical step in performing a craniotomy involves cutting burrholes in the skull. This paper describes volumetric-based haptic and visual algorithms developed to simulate burrhole creation for the simulator. The described algorithms make it possible to simulate several surgical tools typically used for a craniotomy.

Over the last decades Nanotechnology has promised to advance science and technology in many areas. Within medicine, Nanomedicine promises to deliver new methods for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. As the amount of available information is rapidly growing, new Biomedical Informatics approaches have to be developed to satisfy the increasing demand on data and knowledge management. In 2007, a new sub-discipline, already named "Nanoinformatics", was created with support from the US National Science Foundation. In Europe, a project named ACTION-Grid was launched in 2008 with support from the European Commission to analyze the challenges and agenda for developing Nanoinformatics as a discipline related to Nanotechnology, Biomedicine and Informatics. For MIE 2009, members of this consortium proposed a workshop to discuss the scientific and strategic issues associated with this topic. Nanoinformatics aims to create a bridge between Nanomedicine and Information Technology applyin...

Although clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) have been suggested as a means of encapsulating best practice in evidence-based medical treatment, their usage in clinical environments has been disappointing. Criticisms of guideline representations have been that they are predominantly narrative and are difficult to incorporate into clinical information systems. This paper analyses the use of UML process modelling techniques for guideline representation and proposes the automated generation of executable guidelines using XMI. This hybrid UML-XMI approach provides flexible authoring of guideline decision and control structures whilst integrating appropriate data flow. It also uses an open XMI standard interface to allow the use of authoring tools and process control systems from multiple vendors. The paper first surveys CPG modelling formalisms followed by a brief introduction to process modelling in UML. Furthermore, the modelling of CPGs in UML is presented leading to a case study of encoding a diabetes mellitus CPG using UML.

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui hubungan pendidikan, pekerjaan, dan dukungan suami dengan keteraturan kunjungan ANC pada ibu hamil trimester III di Puskesmas Gamping 1 Sleman. Jenis penelitian kuantitatif, desain penelitian korelasi dengan pendekatan cross sectional. Teknik sampling menggunakan metode insidental, didapatkan sampel sebanyak 52 orang. Hasil uji statistik diperoleh nilai p value pendidikan (p=0,034), pekerjaan (p=0,032), dukungan suami (p=0,239). Ada hubungan antara pendidikan dan pekerjaan dengan keteraturan kunjungan ANC pada ibu hamil trimester III. Tidak ada hubungan antara dukungan suami dengan keteraturan kunjungan ANC pada ibu hamil trimester III. Diharapkan ibu hamil dapat melibatkan suami atau keluarga dalam melakukan pemeriksaan ANC.

In order for Virtual Environments (VE) to be efficiently developed in the areas of clinical psychology and neuropsychology, a number of basic theoretical and pragmatic issues need to be considered. The current status of VEÕs in these fields, while provocative, is limited by the small number of controlled studies that have been reported which apply this technology to clinical populations. This is to be expected considering itÕs relatively recent development, expense, and the lack of familiarity with the technology by mainstream researchers in these fields. In spite of this, some work has emerged which can begin to provide a basic foundation of knowledge which could be useful for guiding future research efforts. Although much of the work does not involve the use of fully immersive head mounted displays (HMDÕs), studies reporting PC-based flatscreen approaches are providing valuable information on issues necessary for the reasonable and measured development of VE/mental health applications. In light of this, the following review will focus on basic issues that we see as important for the development of both HMD and non-HMD VE applications for clinical psychology, neuropsychological assessment, and cognitive rehabilitation. These basic issues are discussed in terms of decision-making for choosing to develop and apply a VE for a mental health application. The chapter covers the issues involved with choosing a VE approach over already existing methods, deciding on the ÒfitÓ between a VE approach and the clinical population, level of presence, navigation factors, side effects, generalization, and general methodological and data analysis concerns. specific phobia and anxiety disorders. The design and use of a VE modeled after these feared environments may offer the only opportunity for an exposure-based reduction of fear or anxiety with these clients. Hence, the useful and value-added VE approaches that target specific fears of flying, heights, public speaking, etc. have been some of the first systems to demonstrate positive results.

The Shadow Book by Lars Saabye Christensen (published in Norway in 2019) is the last part of the Echoes of the city trilogy, and, according to the author himself, was supposed to be the last novel he has ever written. Saabye Christensen fell seriously ill while working on the book-a process he makes a part of the novel's plot, interweaving himself and his diagnosis into the text. The aim of this article is to place the novel within the rich Norwegian tradition of «reality literature» (virkelighetslitteratur), showing why and in what ways The Shadow Book should be perceived as a unique and highly original project. A range of methods that have so far been applied by literature researchers in order to analyze this particular genre will be presented and the most adequate of those tools will be used to «dissect» and discuss Lars Saabye Christensen's text. The article also attempts to prove that applying analytic methods used in illness studies (discussing metaphors of illness) can shed some new light on this particular novel, and potentially open new spaces of interpretation of other texts within the "reality literature" genre. Finally, the article aims at analyzing the role of the author's journey to Cluj in Romania as a potential catalyst for giving The Shadow Book its highly unique form.

In this essay, I read Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed The SouThern reach Trilogy (2014) as a dramatic reimagining of the body and health in the context of the global ecological crisis. I propose that a particularly “weird” ecology is one explicitly linked to modes of embodiment specific to the environmental conditions of the twenty-first century; the novels stage environmental crisis not only in the marshes and coastlines of a strange fictional ecosystem but in the body itself. As a primary organizing theme of the series, sickness inhabits human and nonhuman bodies, imbricating them in complex relations that reveal their co-constitution. In this essay, I examine the intersection of eco-criticism, feminist science studies, and disability studies, which together illuminate in the Trilogy the ways in which the body is embroiled in climate change as a set of relations imagined as a form of ecosickness.

There is a widespread idea that in grounded theory (GT) research, the researcher has to delay the literature review until the end of the analysis to avoid contamination – a dictum that might turn educational researchers away from GT. Nevertheless, in this article the author (a) problematizes the dictum of delaying a literature review in classic grounded theory, (b) presents arguments for using extant literature in the substantive field within a constructivist grounded theory, and (c) suggests data sensitizing principles in using literature, which are: theoretical agnosticism, theoretical pluralism, theoretical sampling of literature, staying grounded, theoretical playfulness, memoing extant knowledge associations, and constant reflexivity.

The medical record is a key component in the modern health systems, a fundamental basis of higher functionalities that guaranties quality care and the possibility of improved clinical management. The dissemination of information systems for the electronic medical record (EMR) has a growing acceptance and use in developed countries. This type of recognition however has not been widespread in Latin America. Realizing this we conducted a web survey to users of a Latin American medical portal to assess their perception of the EMRs usefulness. Among the results we found that over 90% of respondents were in favor of its use, with values that exceed 80% in the analysis of the utilities by categories. More in-depth studies are needed to determine the reasons for the lack of dissemination and implementation of EMR in our region.

Complete Book of Abstracts of the 28º Scientific Initiation Meeting at the Federal University of Sergipe. Livro de Resumos do 28º Encontro de Iniciação Científica da UFS. São Cristóvão, Sergipe, 2018.
P.217 - Experimentos com estudos em movimento para definição de metodologias para pesquisa em ecomotricidade - Ellber Rodrigo Santos Albuquerque; Cae Rodrigues.
P. 217 - Análise dos estudos em movimento para definição de metodologias para pesquisa em ecomotricidade - Rodrigo Santiago dos Santos; Cae Rodrigues.

This edited collection of scholarly essays considers early modern and postmodern ideals of health, vigor, ability, beauty, well-being, and happiness, uncovering and historicizing the complex negotiations among physical embodiment, emotional response, and communally-sanctioned behavior in Shakespeare's literary and material world. The volume visits a series of questions about the history of the body and how early modern cultures understand physical ability or vigor, emotional competence or satisfaction, and joy or self-fulfillment. Individual essays investigate the purported disabilities of the "crook-back" King Richard III or the "corpulent" Falstaff, the conflicts between different health-care belief-systems in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet, the power of figurative language to delineate or even instigate puberty in the Sonnets or Romeo and Juliet, and the ways in which the powerful or moneyed mediate the access of the poor and injured to cure or even to care. Integrating insights from Disability Studies, Health Studies, and Happiness Studies, this book develops both a detailed literary-historical analysis and a provocative cultural argument about the emphasis we place on popular notions of fitness and contentment today.

This study presents a case report describing the use of Virtual Stop Smoking (VSS) program. The VSS includes a multicomponent behavioural approach and a Virtual Reality graded exposure technique. The subject was a 22-year-old female who smoked 20 cigarettes per day. Six weekly 90-minute sessions were conducted once a week over a 6-week period. Measures of efficacy included the number of cigarettes smoked, breath carbon monoxide levels, and self-reported subjective craving. The results obtained supported the efficacy of ...

This work deals with multidimensional data analysis, precisely cluster analysis applied to a very well known dataset, the Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset. After the introduction of the topics of the paper the cluster analysis concept is shortly explained and different methods of cluster analysis are compared. Further, the Kohonen model of self-organizing maps is briefly described together with an example and with explanations of how the cluster analysis can be performed using the maps. After describing the data set and the methodology used for the analysis we present the findings using textual as well as visual descriptions and conclude that the approach is a useful complement for assessing multidimensional data and that this dataset has been overused for automated decision benchmarking purposes, without a thorough analysis of the data it contains.

This book series was started in 1990 to promote research conducted under the auspices of the EC programmes' Advanced Informatics in Medicine (AIM) and Biomedical and Health Research (BHR) bioengineering branch. A driving aspect of international health informatics is that telecommunication technology, rehabilitative technology, intelligent home technology and many other components are moving together and form one integrated world of information and communication media.

Physicians tend to ignore drug-drug interactions alerts, this is due to the great amount of irrelevant interactions displayed and the interface in which these alerts are shown. The high rate of clinically inadequate alerts produce "alerts fatigue". This high number of incorrect alerts predisposes physicians to underestimate the electronic prescription systems as useful tools in their practice. We decided to analyze and redesign our drug-drug interactions alerting system knowledge database. In order to do so, we proceeded to clean our knowledge database accordingly to the clinical significance of drug-drug interactions. A new drug interactions taxonomy was created based on the recommendations given in each single monograph of interaction. Finally we proceeded to recategorize the alerts as Active or Passive whether if they needed to be intrusive in the prescribing process or not.

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, l’alimentation n’est plus seulement envisagée dans son aspect économique et nutritionnel, mais également en tant que « bien culturel » (F. Braudel) devenant un véritable champ d’études historiques pour comprendre une société. Plus spécifiquement, la prédominance des débats actuels sur l’alimentation dans son rapport à la santé met en exergue des enjeux qui posent de nouvelles problématiques pour les analyses historiques. La diététique, la santé publique, la diffusion des savoirs d’utilisation des aliments, la symbolique des aliments, l’alimentation comme marqueur identitaire sont les thèmes que ce numéro présente à travers cinq contributions couvrant une chronologie large allant de l’Antiquité à l’époque contemporaine, et s’intéressant à différents espaces géographiques. Le numéro est complété par un entretien avec Amanda Herbert, codirectrice du projet Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures.

With the regular progress of technology and infrastructures, a growing number of grid applications are developed and deployed for life science and medical research. At the last HealthGrid conference in April 2005 in Oxford, many groups described successful usage of grids for compute intensive calculations. Very large scale deployment of a biomedical application in the area of drug discovery has been achieved on EGEE during 2005. On the other hand, beside a few pioneers, very few data grids have been deployed so far and knowledge grids are still at a conceptual level. This situation is expected to evolve quickly as many projects are focussed on developing data management services and knowledge management tools relevant to biomedical sciences. At this stage, it is important to identify the potential bottlenecks and to define a roadmap for the wide adoption of grids for healthcare. This article presents an analysis of the present adoption of grids for biomedical sciences and healthcare...

This research was conducted to know the difference of visit number and satisfaction level before and after referral regionalization policy. The research type is quantitative with cross sectional study approach. This study uses secondary data of JKN participants at the Hospital Bantul District. Data analysis using paired t-test paired test and analysis of variance (Anova). Based on the test of normality's output that visit data and satisfaction are normally distributed. The research data was taken in seven hospitals because it has complete data about JKN participants' satisfaction data in Advanced Health Facility Advanced Facility (FKRTL) before and after the policy was enacted.

In the aims of opening a space for research and academic analysis, the CS Journal of the Icesi University, invite researchers of national and international academic community to submit research, reflection or literature review originals and unpublished articles addressing the topic Locality in Science, Health, and Technology, in any of the following thematic areas:
• Social Studies of Health
• Science and Technology Studies
• Public Health
• History of Science and Medicine.

Publication date: CS 23 (September-December, 2017).

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common anxiety disorder characterized by 6 months of "excessive anxiety and worry" about a variety of events and situations. Anxiety and worry are often accompanied by additional symptoms like restlessness, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension and disturbed sleep. GAD is usually treated with medications and/or psychotherapy. In particular, the two most promising treatments seem to be cognitive therapy and applied relaxation. In this study we integrated these approaches through the use of a biofeedback enhanced virtual reality (VR) system used both for relaxation and controlled exposure. Moreover, this experience is strengthened by the use of a mobile phone that allows patients to perform the virtual experience even in an outpatient setting. This paper describe the results of a controlled trial (NCT00602212) involving 20 GAD patients randomly assigned to the following groups: (1) the VR and Mob...

A brain-computer interface (BCI) directly uses brain-activity signals to allow users to operate the environment without any muscular activation. Thanks to this feature, BCI systems can be employed not only as assistive devices, but also as neurorehabilitation tools in clinical settings. However, several critical issues need to be addressed before using BCI in neurorehabilitation, issues ranging from signal acquisition and selection of the proper BCI paradigm to the evaluation of the affective state, cognitive load and system acceptability of the users. Here we discuss these issues, illustrating how a rehabilitation program can benefit from BCI sessions, and summarize the results obtained so far in this field. Also provided are experimental data concerning two important topics related to BCI usability in rehabilitation: the possibility of using dry electrodes for EEG acquisition, and the monitoring of psychophysiological effects during BCI tasks.

Spatiotemporal gait parameters are very important for the detection of gait impairments and associated conditions. Current methods to measure such parameters, e.g. electronic walkways or force plates, are costly and can only be used in a laboratory. The new generation of raw data accelerometers might be a cheap and flexible alternative. We conducted a small feasibility study with 50 subjects from the KORA-Age project exploring the output of GAITRite and Actigraph GT3X. We open-sourced a package to extract and process raw data from GAITRite. The most promising location for the accelerometer seems to be at the ankle. The use of accelerometers showed to be simple and reliable, indicating that they can be used in daily life to extract gait parameters.

Rapid and far-reaching technological advances are changing the ways in which people relate, communicate, and live. Technologies that were hardly used ten years ago, such as the Internet, e-mail, and video teleconferencing are becoming familiar methods for diagnosis, therapy, education and training. This is producing an emerging field -cybertherapy -whose focus is the use of communication and information technologies to improve the health care processes. To exploit and understand this potential was the aim of the " Telemedicine and Portable Virtual Environment in Clinical Psychology" -VEPSY UPDATED -a European Community funded research project (IST-2000-25323, http://www.cybertherapy.info). The chapter describes the clinical and technical rationale behind the cybertherapy applications developed by the project. Further, the actual role of virtual reality in the cybertherapy field is discussed, focusing on the advantages provided by its three different faces: technological, experiential and communicative.

This paper describes the steps followed in the creation of a local Interface Terminology to SNOMED CT (as reference terminology) with a strong focus on user acceptability. The resulting list of terms is used for clinical data input by physicians and nurses at the Hospital Italiano in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Description includes data model, mappings to SNOMED CT and classifications, subsets definitions and extensibility mechanisms. The Interface Terminology is currently used in the recording of diagnosis and procedures in inpatient discharge summaries and its coverage is improving from user feedback. Its current size is 24,800 concepts, 67% of them needed post-coordination for appropriate semantic representation, due to a very flexible policy that allows the use of any number of modifiers on concepts.

This paper describes a protein tertiary structure prediction service implemented in a Grid Environment. The service has been used for predicting the dicarboxylate carrier (DIC) of Saccharomyces cerevisiae by using the homology modelling approach. The visualization of the predicted model is made possible by using an interactive virtual reality environment based on X3D and Ajax3d technologies.

Numerous studies have shown that the quality of health care is inadequate, and healthcare organizations are increasingly turning to clinical decision support systems (CDSS) to address this problem. In implementing CDSS, a highly promising architectural approach is the use of decision support services. However, there are few reported examples of successful implementations of operational CDSS using this approach. Here, we describe how Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires evaluated the feasibility of using the SEBASTIAN clinical decision support Web service to implement a CDSS integrated with its electronic medical record system. The feasibility study consisted of three stages: first, end-user acceptability testing of the proposed CDSS through focus groups; second, the design and implementation of the system through integration of SEBASTIAN and the authoring of new rules; and finally, validation of system performance and accuracy. Through this study, we found that it is feasible to implement CDSS using a service-based approach. The CDSS is now under evaluation in a randomized controlled trial. The processes and lessons learned from this initiative are discussed.

This paper aims to investigate the ways narrative strategy can act to dismantle predominant views about breast cancer. First, the paper examines the very gendered perception of breast cancer and highlights the sexism and corporatization of the illness in relation to women. Subsequently, the paper unpacks how breasts have historically and continue to be viewed as constructing whole women and how a loss of a breast or both breasts unsettles the female identity in relation to this particular illness. This paper then offers narratives and counter-storytelling as a method for reclaiming, diversifying and dismantling cancer narratives that have been skewed to fit into sexist and corporatized molds of what breast cancer performance should be like for women. The importance of a proliferation of breast cancer narratives from the margins being centered is then illustrated through numerous examples to highlight how the narratives can talk back to dominant gendered discourse that entrenches women diagnosed and fighting breast cancer.

please note I wrote this paper in a second year course so I understand that my writing and analysis has come far but I was proud to have it published *

Guinea is one of the poorest countries in the world, as is reflected in its health indicators . According to the Demographic and Health Survey III (DNS/Macro 2006), Guinea's maternal mortality ratio is 980 for 100,000 live births, and it has a neonatal mortality rate of 39 for 1,000 live births.

Although there has been an increase in research on postpartum depression (PPD) among migrant Asian women, there is particularly limited attention given to migrant South Asian women. This is a significant limitation considering the rapidly changing demographics in Canada. Migrant South Asian women face a plethora of unique challenges, which affects their mental health and further prevents them from receiving adequate and equitable mental healthcare services. For migrant South Asian women, many of these stressors are especially amalgamated in the vulnerable postpartum period, resulting in variances of postpartum mood disorders such as postpartum blues, non-psychotic postpartum depression, and in more severe cases, postpartum psychosis. While cultural values and rituals may be protective in curbing PPD symptoms in some instances, in other cases, however, they exacerbate and perhaps even worsen PPD. The objective of this literature review is to provide a basic understanding of postpartu...

The last two decades have seen considerable efforts directed towards making electronic health records interoperable through improvements in medical ontologies, terminologies and coding systems. Unfortunately, these efforts have been hampered by a number of influential ideas inherited from the work of Eugen Wüster, the father of terminology standardization and the founder of ISO TC 37. We here survey Wüster's ideas -which see terminology work as being focused on the classification of concepts in people's minds -and we argue that they serve still as the basis for a series of influential confusions. We argue further that an ontology based unambiguously, not on concepts, but on the classification of entities in reality can, by removing these confusions, make a vital contribution to ensuring the interoperability of coding systems and healthcare records in the future.