E-Health towards ecumenical framework for personalized medicine via Decision Support System

Predictive, Personalized, Preventive and Participatory (4P) Medicine Applied to Telemedicine and eHealth in the Literature

The main objective of this work is to provide a review of existing research work into predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory medicine in telemedicine and ehealth. The academic databases used for searches are IEEE Xplore, PubMed, Science Direct, Web of Science and ResearchGate, taking into account publication dates from 2010 up to the present day. These databases cover the greatest amount of information on scientific texts in multidisciplinary fields, from engineering to medicine. Various search criteria were established, such as ("Predictive" OR "Personalized" OR "Preventive" OR "Participatory") AND "Medicine" AND ("eHealth" OR "Telemedicine") selecting the articles of most interest. A total of 184 publications about predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory (4P) medicine in telemedicine and ehealth were found, of which 48 were identified as relevant. Many of the publications found show how the P4 medicine is being developed in the world and the benefits it provides for patients with different illnesses. After the revision that was undertaken, it can be said that P4 medicine is a vital factor for the improvement of medical services. It is hoped that one of the main contributions of this study is to provide an insight into how P4 medicine in telemedicine and ehealth is being applied, as well as proposing outlines for the future that contribute to the improvement of prevention and prediction of illnesses.

Models and Data Sources Used in Systems Medicine

Background: Systems medicine is a new approach for the development and selection of treatment strategies for patients with complex diseases. It is often referred to as the application of systems biology methods for decision making in patient care. For systems medicine computer applications, many different data sources have to be integrated and included into models. This is a challenging task for Medical Informatics since the approach exceeds traditional systems like Electronic Health Records. To prioritize research activities for systems medicine applications, it is necessary to get an overview over modelling methods and data sources already used in this field.

Objectives: We performed a systematic literature review with the objective to capture current use of 1) modelling methods and 2) data sources in systems medicine related research projects.

Methods: We queried the MEDLINE and ScienceDirect databases for papers associated with the search term systems medicine and related terms. Papers were screened and assessed in full text in a two-step process according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement guidelines.

Results: The queries returned 698 articles of which 34 papers were finally included into the study. A multitude of modelling approaches such as machine learning and network analysis was identified and classified. Since these approaches are also used in other domains, no methods specific for systems medicine could be identified. Omics data are the most widely used data types followed by clinical data. Most studies only include a rather limited number of data sources.

Conclusions: Currently, many different modelling approaches are used in systems medicine. Thus, highly flexible modular solutions are necessary for systems medicine clinical applications. However, the number of data sources included into the models is limited and most projects currently focus on prognosis. To leverage the potential of systems medicine further, it will be necessary to focus on treatment strategies for patients and consider a broader range of data.

Intelligent Techniques Using Molecular Data Analysis in Leukaemia: An Opportunity for Personalized Medicine Support System

The use of intelligent techniques in medicine has brought a ray of hope in terms of treating leukaemia patients. Personalized treatment uses patient's genetic profile to select a mode of treatment. This process makes use of molecular technology and machine learning, to determine the most suitable approach to treating a leukaemia patient. Until now, no reviews have been published from a computational perspective concerning the development of personalized medicine intelligent techniques for leukaemia patients using molecular data analysis. This review studies the published empirical research on personalized medicine in leukaemia and synthesizes findings across studies related to intelligence techniques in leukaemia, with specific attention to particular categories of these studies to help identify opportunities for further research into personalized medicine support systems in chronic myeloid leukaemia. A systematic search was carried out to identify studies using intelligence techniques in leukaemia and to categorize these studies based on leukaemia type and also the task, data source, and purpose of the studies. Most studies used molecular data analysis for personalized medicine, but future advancement for leukaemia patients requires molecular models that use advanced machine-learning methods to automate decision-making in treatment management to deliver supportive medical information to the patient in clinical practice.

Discovery and Clinical Decision Support for Personalized Healthcare

With the advent of electronic health records, more data are continuously collected for individual patients, and more data are available for review from past patients. Despite this, it has not yet been possible to successfully use this data to systematically build clinical decision support systems that can produce personalized clinical recommendations to assist clinicians in providing individualized healthcare. In this paper, we present a novel approach, discovery engine (DE), that discovers which patient characteristics are most relevant for predicting the correct diagnosis and/or recommending the best treatment regimen for each patient. We demonstrate the performance of DE in two clinical settings: diagnosis of breast cancer as well as a personalized recommendation for a specific chemotherapy regimen for breast cancer patients. For each distinct clinical recommendation, different patient features are relevant; DE can discover these different relevant features and use them to recommend personalized clinical decisions. The DE approach achieves a 16.6% improvement over existing state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms regarding kappa coefficients for recommending the personalized chemotherapy regimens. For diagnostic predictions, the DE approach achieves a 2.18% and 4.20% improvement over existing state-of-the-art prediction algorithms regarding prediction error rate and false positive rate, respectively. We also demonstrate that the performance of our approach is robust against missing information and that the relevant features discovered by DE are confirmed by clinical references.

The Assessment of the Readiness of Molecular Biomarker-Based Mobile Health Technologies for Healthcare Applications

Mobile health technologies to detect physiological and simple-analyte biomarkers have been explored for the improvement and cost-reduction of healthcare services, some of which have been endorsed by the US FDA. Advancements in the investigations of non-invasive and minimally-invasive molecular biomarkers and biomarker candidates and the development of portable biomarker detection technologies have fuelled great interests in these new technologies for mhealth applications. But apart from the development of more portable biomarker detection technologies, key questions need to be answered and resolved regarding to the relevance, coverage, and performance of these technologies and the big data management issues arising from their wide spread applications. In this work, we analyzed the newly emerging portable biomarker detection technologies, the 664 non-invasive molecular biomarkers and the 592 potential minimally-invasive blood molecular biomarkers, focusing on their detection capability, affordability, relevance, and coverage. Our analysis suggests that a substantial percentage of these biomarkers together with the new technologies can be potentially used for a variety of disease conditions in mhealth applications. We further propose a new strategy for reducing the workload in the processing and analysis of the big data arising from widespread use of mhealth products, and discuss potential issues of implementing this strategy.

Exploiting expert systems in cardiology: a comparative study

An improved Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) in the field of critical cardiovascular diseases is presented. The system stems from an earlier application based only on a Sugeno-type Fuzzy Expert System (FES) with the addition of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) computational structure. Thus, inherent characteristics of ANNs, along with the human-like knowledge representation of fuzzy systems are integrated. The ANFIS has been utilized into building five different sub-systems, distinctly covering Coronary Disease, Hypertension, Atrial Fibrillation, Heart Failure, and Diabetes, hence aiding doctors of medicine (MDs), guide trainees, and encourage medical experts in their diagnoses centering a wide range of Cardiology. The Fuzzy Rules have been trimmed down and the ANNs have been optimized in order to focus into each particular disease and produce results ready-to-be applied to real-world patients.