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Third HEXAnord Meeting, Utö 22-24 September 2010

Health Informatics, Networking, Photo, SYSLAB
The third HEXAnord meeting took place on Utö in the Stockholm archipelago last week and was hosted by the IT for Health group at DSV.

HEXAnord is a network with participants from the Nordic (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway) and Baltic countries (Estonia and Lithuania). In addition to SU/DSV, there were representatives from Göteborgs universitet and Linköpings universitet. The participants from DSV were Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel, Gunnar Nilsson, Sumithra Velupillai, Maria Skeppstedt, Helen Allvin, Mia Kvist and I.


This time around the meeting was designed as a PhD training course (3 ECTS) for the 14 PhD students, with seminar talks given on SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms), how to build essential tools and resources for the clinical domain, the nature and problems of nursing documentation, as well as on applying machine learning on clinical text to provide decision support. An assignment was given to the students by each of the lecturers, which are to be completed in groups across the universities.

The next meeting will be held in Trondheim, Norway at the beginning of next year.

The Master Programme in Health Informatics with Karolinska Institute has started

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Now the Master Programme in Health Informatics with Karolinska Institute has started.

40 students are enrolled. Half of the students have Technical / Computer science background,
and the other half have a Health care background. The students are physicians, nurses,
computer scientist, engineers of all types (several MSc, too).
The educational basic concept is that these professional roles to meet and learn from each other
within the framework of the master programme. The Students origins from all around the world:
Sweden, Bosnia, India, Iran, China, Pakistan and several others countries


Aron Henriksson, new employee

Employee, Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Hi!

I have been working full-time at DSV for a month now and would like to take the opportunity to introduce myself on the Syslab blog. I’m currently working on adapting the Web Mining course to a more distance-friendly form. I will also be involved in the research work of the “IT for Health” team, performing natural language processing on patient health records.

I have a BSc in computer science from RMIT in Melbourne, Australia and I just recently completed my Master’s degree from KTH and the EMIS program. In my thesis I explored the possibility of applying the automatic classification methods (corpus annotation and machine learning) used in the biomedical and clinical domain to that of knowledge management. More specifically, I wanted to find out whether it is possible to assess automatically the level of certainty in knowledge-intensive documents. Together with my supervisor, Sumithra Velupillai, the thesis was turned into a paper that was published and presented at a workshop (Negation and Speculation in Natural Language Processing) in Uppsala in July.


I look forward to getting to know you all more in the coming months!

Aron

IADIS e-Health 2010 Conference July 29 – 31, 2010

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

In late July, I participated in the IADIS conference on e-Health (a part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems). The conference was held in Freiburg, Germany, located close to the borders to Switzerland and France. At the conference, I presented a paper written together with Hélène Sandmark. The title of our paper is “Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-health System for Stress Management”. As a committee member of the conference, I also chaired one of the conference sessions.

A PhD student at DSV, Wah-Sui Almberg, participated and presented a paper at the parallel conference on ICT, Society and Human Beings.

Louhi 2010, Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents at NAACL HLT 2010, Los Angeles, June 5, 2010

Health Informatics, SYSLAB

Hercules Dalianis, Martin Hassel and Sumithra Velupillai organized the Louhi 2010, Second Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documuntes. Maria Skeppstedt also from our group presented her paper Negation Detection in Swedish Clinical Text. We presented also a joint paper with the HEXAnord research network. Eduard Hovy from USC/ISI held an excellent invited talk with the title Creating Training Material for Health Informatics: Toward a Science of Annotation for over 30 attendants.


The Louhi 2010 workshop was a success with submissions from eleven countries and three continents. The presentations encompassed clinical texts in Swedish, Finnish, French and English. The main conference NAACL-HLT, the 11th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, had over 600 participants and 200 accepted papers.

Accepted paper "Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-Health System for Stress Management"

Health Informatics, Publication, Research Paper, SYSLAB

Hélène Sandmark at the School of Health and Medical Sciences, Örebro University, and I have got a conference paper accepted at IADIS e-Health 2010. The conference is to be held in Freiburg, Germany, in late July. The paper is entitled “Multiple Help Online: An Integrated E-Health System for Stress Management”. Please see the paper abstract below.

In
working life of today, people experience high levels of stress and often react
strongly to different stressors. If one is exposed to high stress levels for a
long time, this may eventually lead to sickness and absence from work. Web
based systems are available today for people who suffer from stress. However,
these web based systems need to be further explored in order to meet different
‘on demand needs’ of people in stress. In order to offer people in stress a
broad palette of help and support, different forms of online help from both
health experts, peers and published material and exercise programs need to be
well integrated in the web based system. A system that offers multiple help online
can also let the users experience complemented advice and ideas regarding their
stress concerns. The web based stress management system proposed in this paper
outlines a combination of online interactions between health experts and people
in stress, community conversations among peers and published information and
exercises. The paper also introduces a set of design principles to be used to
guide the development of integrated online help for stress management.

Report from the LREC conference in Malta the 19th to 21st of May

Health Informatics, Information Systems, Photo, Research Paper, SYSLAB, Visit

Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai and me (Elin Carlsson) participated in the the seventh international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) that was held in Valletta, Malta 19-21 May 2010. The conference had approximately 1200 participants and about 600 out of 900 submissions were accepted.

We presented three different posters: Creating a Reusable English-Chinese Parallel Corpus for Bilingual Dictionary Construction; How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations; and Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records Written in Swedish. I attach our report from the conference (written in Swedish): LREC2010_notes_and_reflections.pdf

Sumithra and Hercules present their poster: How Certain are Clinical Assessments? Annotating Swedish Clinical Text for (Un)certainties, Speculations and Negations

Elin and Hercules present their poster: Influence of Module Order on Rule-Based De-identification of Personal Names in Electronic Patient Records
Written in Swedish.

 

Hercules and Elin after the poster session.

Second HEXAnord Meeting, Åre 12-14 April 2010

Health Informatics, Information Systems, Networking, SYSLAB

12-14 April the IT for Health group at DSV arranged the second HEXAnord network meeting in Åre, Sweden. Apart from Hercules Dalianis, Sumithra Velupillai, Maria Skeppstedt, Elin Carlsson, Helen Allvin and me from DSV, there were participants from all participating countries (Finland, Norway, Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania) as well as visitors from Karolinska Institutet/KTH and Östra Sjukhuset, Västra Götalandsregionen.

The meeting consisted of seminars mainly on Machine Learning and Clinical Text together with work on the coming the 2nd Louhi Workshop on Text and Data Mining of Health Documents in L.A., June 5 2010. In conjunction to this work no less than three papers from the group, that had passed the double blind peer-review, were finalized.

Nine working groups were created for Intra Nordic cooperation dealing with Automated GTT-Global Trigger Tool, Visual Analytics, Requirements engineering, Release of Data, Negation detection, Decision making and reasoning processes, Characteristics of clinical texts, Compare clinical and general language and finally Comorbidity, all of them in the perspective of health text analysis.

On the agenda was also planning of the 3rd Louhi Workshop, probably to be held next year, as well as further planning for the PhD course to be held later this year.

See more photos below: