Data Analytics Research and Technology in Healthcare
(DARTH group)
25 December 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in IEEE Access
"Remote assessment of Parkinson's disease symptom severity using the simulated cellular mobile telephone network”. We had previously demonstrated the use of high-quality lab-based speech signals to (1) differentiate people with Parkinson's from controls, and (2) replicate UPDRS, a clinical scale quantifying symptom severity. Here, we extend findings demonstrating the use of the standard cellular telephone network towards large-scale Parkinson's telemonitoring.
21 December 2020
New conference articles accepted for oral presentations at BIOSTEC 2021
Andres and Thanasis got their manuscripts accepted as full oral presentations at BIOSTEC. Both papers investigate Parkinson's disease: Andres' paper uses a more mechanistic, first-principles approach of voice production and resulting deficiencies in Parkinson's disease. Thanasis' paper demonstrates new robust clustering results across three English-speaking cohorts and makes a strong case for four distinct subgroups. The paper is shortlisted for the 'best paper award'.
27 November 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in BMC Medical Research Methodology
"Linkage of primary care prescribing records and pharmacy dispensing records in the Salford lung study: application in asthma”. Motivated by challenges in assessing adherence, we developed a novel probabilistic record linkage methodology to match medication pharmacy dispensing records and primary care prescribing records, using semantic (meaning) and syntactic (structure) harmonization, domain knowledge integration, and natural language feature extraction.
2 September 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in Scientific Reports
"Predicting pattern formation in embryonic stem cells using a minimalist, agent-based probabilistic model”. We explored new physiologically plausible rule-based approaches using agent-based modelling to tentatively decipher stem cell pattern formations. This work may have important implications in understanding underlying movement characteristics of stem cells, thus paving the way towards developing novel therapies.
20 August 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in Scientific Reports
"A data-driven typology of asthma medication adherence using cluster analysis”. Medication non-adherence is strongly associated with poor control of symptoms and increased morbidity and mortality. We study in detail the nuanced patterns of medication taking and propose that monitoring patient adherence behaviour is necessary to assess the impact of interventions, and to determine the effect on clinical outcomes.
28 July 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing
"Beyond Mobile Apps: a Survey of Technologies for Mental Well-being”. Mental disorders are closely associated with fear of stigma, structural barriers such as financial burden, and lack of available services and resources which often prohibit the delivery of frequent clinical advice and monitoring. This review article provides an overview of traditional techniques followed by their technological alternatives, sensing devices, behaviour changing tools, and feedback interfaces.
24 June 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology
"Measuring and reporting treatment adherence: what can we learn by comparing two respiratory conditions?". This study investigated medication non-adherence and its longer-term effects in terms of side-effects, morbidity, and mortality. We used as testbeds two respiratory conditions, asthma and tuberculosis, to cross-reference approaches towards assessing adherence, and making recommendations for effective adherence reporting.
24 June 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
"Eye-tracking for longitudinal assessment of social cognition in children born preterm". We have monitored preterm-born and term-born children to investigate social attentional preference in infancy and at 5 years, its relationship with neurodevelopment, and the influence of socioeconomic deprivation.
27 May 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in Neurocomputing
"Artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial Computation: advances in data science, trends and applications". This comprehensive study from an inter-disciplinary international team summarizes many of the recent advances in data science and artificial intelligence within the interplay between natural and artificial computation.
8 May 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in Stroke
"Telemedicine cognitive hebavioural therapy for anxiety after stroke: proof of concept randomized controlled trial". Anxiety affects a large proportion of stroke survivors. We developed a telemedicine-based approach for delivering guided self-help cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety after stroke. The study also explored the use of objective assessment using wrist-worn actigraphy to complement patient reported outcome measures.
2 March 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in JMIR mHealth and uHealth
"Objective characterization of activity, sleep, and circadian variability patterns using a wrist-worn activity sensor: insights into post-traumatic stress disorder". This study provides new approaches towards visualizing, extracting patterns, and interpreting findings to characterize actigraphy data. The application is on post-traumatic stress disorder, but the algorithmic tools can be applied in any setting where we passively record actigraphy signals using wrist-worn wearables.
11 February 2020
New journal article accepted for publication in JMIR Medical Informatics
"Challenges of clustering multimodal clinical data: a review of applications in asthma subtyping" investigates common pitfalls in the application of clustering methodologies in clinical settings, using asthma as an exemplar. The manuscript makes a strong case for careful algorithmic considerations based on data variable type, sample size, and more general issues that appear in multimodal clinical datasets when attempting to infer data properties through clustering.
19 January 2020
Four new conference papers accepted for publication in BioSignals (BIOSTEC 2020)
Thanasis is co-organising a special session 'SERPICO' as part of the 13th Internatonal Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, and four members of the group (Andres, Evi, Minhong, Thanasis) will be presenting work across different topics. Andres and Thanasis present findings on Parkinson's disease, Evi presents work from her PhD on neonatal monitoring, and Minhong presents her latest findings on stem cell pattern formation.