Naresuan University Journal
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Using local lexicalized rules to identify heart disease risk factors in clinical notes
No full textHeart disease is the leading cause of death globally and a significant part of the human population lives with it. A number of risk factors have been recognized as contributing to the disease, including obesity, coronary artery disease (CAD), hypertension, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, smoking, and family history of premature CAD. This paper describes and evaluates a methodology to extract mentions of such risk factors from diabetic clinical notes, which was a task of the i2b2/UTHealth 2014 Challenge in Natural Language Processing for Clinical Data. The methodology is knowledge-driven and the system implements local lexicalized rules (based on syntactical patterns observed in notes) combined with manually constructed dictionaries that characterize the domain. A part of the task was also to detect the time interval in which the risk factors were present in a patient. The system was applied to an evaluation set of 514 unseen notes and achieved a micro-average F-score of 88% (with 86% precision and 90% recall). While the identification of CAD family history, medication and some of the related disease factors (e.g. hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia) showed quite good results, the identification of CAD-specific indicators proved to be more challenging (F-score of 74%). Overall, the results are encouraging and suggested that automated text mining methods can be used to process clinical notes to identify risk factors and monitor progression of heart disease on a large-scale, providing necessary data for clinical and epidemiological studies
Value or rent? A discussion of the research protocol from a political economic perspective
No full textThis paper discusses the research protocol adopted at the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value. The analytical power of the protocol’s concepts, influenced by Actor Network Theory, is weighed against Marxist theoretical contributions on value. The Centre’s focus on valuation processes is complemented by an investigation of the relation between valuation processes and the production of value. Theoretical considerations are interspersed with empirical ones relating to agricultural production and the valuation processes of land and water resources. The main argument is that valuation processes attached to the commodification of natural resources, such as land and water, are to be understood as ideological tools conferring an appearance of naturalness to capitalist conceptions of value. Because of that, the politics of the value relation are to be spelled out as a constitutive moment of the ideological function of the politics of property relations in capitalist society. From this derives that valuation processes are best understood in conjunction with the operations of the law of value, rather than as autonomous entities with a distinctive meaning; and that the labour theory of value is to be retained as the underlying theoretical principle which props up valuation processes. Under this light, valuation processes are understood beyond their material fixity in their uniquely ideological function. While they do not pertain directly to production and consumption, they mediate the extraction of rent – a deduction of value produced in the different sectors of the economy. On the basis of this theoretical anchoring, the paper concludes with a presentation of the research stream on African agriculture, value and valuation
Increasing resilience to climate change in informal settlements of two Latin American cities: Condega and Cartagena
No full textEl marco conceptual de esta investigación se basa en la documentación sobre los efectos del cambio climático y estrategias de adaptación publicada por el Panel Intergubernamental sobre el Cambio Climático (IPCC), pero se concentra en los riesgos para los asentamientos informales y de bajos ingresos. Adapta a estos asentamientos ciertos lineamientos básicos que aplican principios fundamentales de la literatura actual sobre el clima y la planificación urbana. A pesar de las advertencias del IPCC, muchas ciudades del mundo en vías de desarrollo están adoptando un enfoque reactivo al cambio climático, tratando de resolver su impacto sólo cuando se transforma en una emergencia. Se necesita un enfoque estratégico que promueva la adaptación para confrontar las múltiples dimensiones de riesgo que corren los asentamientos urbanos, y en particular las comunidades de bajos ingresos para construir resiliencia. Las causas subyacentes de dicha vulnerabilidad incluyen la falta de suelo urbano desarrollable y con acceso a servicios públicos, la urbanización no planificada y los recursos públicos limitados, factores todos que surgen debido a una gestión inefectiva del suelo como un activo valioso, creador de desarrollo potencial y generador de ingresos públicos. Dos estudios de caso documentan y evalúan las estrategias adoptadas por las ciudades de Condega (Nicaragua) y Cartagena (Colombia), para reducir los riesgos relacionados con el cambio climático en asentamientos informales, y para evaluar las fuentes de riesgo remanentes. La intención de las políticas, instrumentos y proyectos del suelo propuestos —algunos de ellos convencionales y otros más innovadores— es que las comunidades se puedan preparar mejor, adoptando medidas de adaptación correctivas y preventivas
Energy Efficiency Optimization With Interference Alignment in Multi-Cell MIMO Interfering Broadcast Channels
No full textCharacterizing the fundamental energy efficiency (EE) performance of multiple-input-multiple-output interfering broadcast channels (MIMO-IFBC) is important for the design of green wireless system. In this paper, we propose a new network architecture proposition based on EE maximization for Multi-Cell MIMO-IFBC within the context of interference alignment (IA). Particularly, EE is maximized subject to maximum power and minimum throughput constraints. We propose two schemes to optimize EE for different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. For high-SNR operating regions, we employ a grouping-based IA scheme to jointly cancel intra- and inter-cell interferences and thus transform the MIMO-IFBC to a single-cell MIMO scenario. A gradient-based power adaptation scheme is proposed based on water-filling power adaptation and singular value decomposition to maximize EE for each cell. For moderate SNR cases, we propose an approach using dirty paper coding (DPC) with the principle of multiple access channel and broadcast channel duality to perform IA while maximizing EE in each cell. The algorithm in its dual form is solved using a subgradient method and a bisection searching scheme. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed schemes over several existing approaches. It also shows that interference-nulling-based IA approaches outperform hybrid DPC-IA approach in high-SNR region, and the opposite occurs in low-SNR region
Independent evidence for an association between general cognitive ability and a genetic locus for educational attainment.
No full textCognitive deficits and reduced educational achievement are common in psychiatric illness; understanding the genetic basis of cognitive and educational deficits may be informative about the etiology of psychiatric disorders. A recent, large genome-wide association study (GWAS) reported a genome-wide significant locus for years of education, which subsequently demonstrated association to general cognitive ability ("g") in overlapping cohorts. The current study was designed to test whether GWAS hits for educational attainment are involved in general cognitive ability in an independent, large-scale collection of cohorts. Using cohorts in the Cognitive Genomics Consortium (COGENT; up to 20,495 healthy individuals), we examined the relationship between g and variants associated with educational attainment. We next conducted meta-analyses with 24,189 individuals with neurocognitive data from the educational attainment studies, and then with 53,188 largely independent individuals from a recent GWAS of cognition. A SNP (rs1906252) located at chromosome 6q16.1, previously associated with years of schooling, was significantly associated with g (P = 1.47 × 10(-4) ) in COGENT. The first joint analysis of 43,381 non-overlapping individuals for this a priori-designated locus was strongly significant (P = 4.94 × 10(-7) ), and the second joint analysis of 68,159 non-overlapping individuals was even more robust (P = 1.65 × 10(-9) ). These results provide independent replication, in a large-scale dataset, of a genetic locus associated with cognitive function and education. As sample sizes grow, cognitive GWAS will identify increasing numbers of associated loci, as has been accomplished in other polygenic quantitative traits, which may be relevant to psychiatric illness
