DASH

News and Events

Edephonce Nfuka’s PhD Dissertation

IT Management, Media Content, PhD Dissertation, Photo, Specific Area, SYSLAB, Unit

On February 24, 2012 our colleague Edephonce Nfuka, PhD student at DSV/Stockholm University has defended successfully his doctoral thesis entitled: “IT Governance in Tanzanian Public Sector Organizations”. The link to his PhD thesis in DiVA at Stockholm University is the following: http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:481199
On behalf of research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Edephonce Nfuka for this great achievement.  In fact he is the first student from our research group who has defended his doctoral thesis in the area of IT Governance. Some pictures from the PhD dissertation are below included.

The Fourth International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM 2011)

Health Informatics, Presentation, Publication, SYSLAB

Sumithra Velupillai attended The Fourth International Symposium on Languages in Biology and Medicine (LBM 2011) at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, December 14-15.

At LBM 2011, Sumithra presented the paper Automatic Classification of Factuality Levels – A Case Study on Swedish Diagnoses and the Impact of Local Context. In this paper, The Stockholm EPR Diagnosis-Factuality Corpus is described and used for building automatic classifiers. The classifier obtains promising results (best overall results are 0.699 average F-measure using all classes, 0.762 F-measure using merged classes), using simple local context features. Preceding context is more useful than posterior, although best results are obtained using a window size of 4. Lower levels of certainty are more problematic than higher levels, which was also the case for the human annotators in creating the corpus. A manual error analysis shows that conjunctions and other higher-level features are common sources of errors.

Happy LBM 2011 participants after a wonderful banquet at Chef Chan's Restaurant

Anayanci Lopez Poveda’s Licentiate Seminar

IT Management, Licentiate Seminar, SYSLAB

On December 9, 2011 our colleague Anayanci Lopez Poveda has defended successfully her Licentiate Thesis named: “Towards a framework for analyzing IT strategy management in public sector”. On behalf of research group in IT Management I would like to congratulate Anayanci for her achievement. Some pictures from the seminar and after the seminar are included below.

Comparing certainty level annotations in clinical NLP: a case study on Swedish and English within the Interlock project

Health Informatics, Presentation, SYSLAB

On the recent return from her research visit to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), Sumithra Velupillai presented the results of a comparative study of certainty-level annotations in clinical NLP written in Swedish and English respectively. The research visit took place within the Interlock project – a collaboration between the IT for Health group at DSV and the School of Medicine’s Division of Biomedical Informatics at UCSD.

The aim of the research visit was to create a taxonomy for a characterization of the expression of (un)certainty in clinical text and to compare these expressions in Swedish and English emergency ward documentation . The overall goal of this research is to improve automatic information extraction from clinical narratives.

Research visit within the Interlock project at DBMI, UCSD

Health Informatics, Presentation, SYSLAB

Sumithra is visiting Dr. Wendy Chapman and Danielle Mowery at the Division for Biomedical Informatics at UC San Diego during November within the Interlock-project.

Sumithra and Danielle have been working on a qualitative, comparative study on models and characterizations of uncertainties and negations in annotated clinical documentation in both English and Swedish electronic patient records.

On November 23, Sumithra gave a talk at the department, describing the IT for Health group at DSV as well as her research on certainty classification of Swedish clinical diagnostic statements.

The Interlock project will continue with further collaboration between the researchers in the respective groups, and during Sumithra’s visit several ideas for future experiments have emerged!

Some snacks before Sumithra's presentation

Dr. Wendy Chapman introducing Sumithra

Danielle, Sumithra and Wendy

A visit at the Department of medical informatics at Hokkaido University

Health Informatics, SYSLAB, Visit

I visited the Department of medical informatics at School of medicine, Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan. The topics of their research range from telemedicine to hospital management.

They also do research that is very close to what is done in the IT for Health group at DSV, that is research on natural language processing of clinical text. Their research is carried out on clinical text written in Japanese. Their current natural language processing project includes the development of a parser, specifically adapted to clinical text, as well as an annotation project where radiology reports are manually annotated for clinical entities such as diseases and body structures. Their work also include ontology developments, especially  ontologies for radiology.

I am very grateful to Dr. Ogasawara and Dr. Nishimoto for inviting me to attend their ontology seminars and giving me an opportunity to learn more about the research at their department, and to the whole of the ontology seminar group for giving me a very warm welcome to their university.

The ontology seminar group:

 

SSF-research proposal accepted = 19 MSEK!!

Health Informatics, Information Systems, Project Proposal, SYSLAB

The research proposal with the title High-Performance Data Mining for Drug Effect Detection to SSF were accepted encompassing 19 MSEK and 5 years. Project leader is professor Henrik Boström at DSV. One part of the project concerns text mining of clinical texts that the research group within IT for Health will carry out, for details about the project click here, in Swedish and in English.

/Hercules