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Biomedical subjects

Tsunetaro Sakurai

Publications and source records attributed to Tsunetaro Sakurai.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

An ontological approach to support the description of nursing practice in Japan with the ICNP.

BACKGROUND: With increasing computerization of nursing records in Japan, standardization of nursing terminology is becoming imperative. Although some efforts have been made to formalize description of nursing practice in Japan with the International Classification of Nursing Practice (ICNP), lack of effective description tools has impacted negatively on the initiatives. PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate an ontological approach that could be used to facilitate the description of nursing practice in Japan with the ICNP. METHODOLOGY: An ontology-based support system was developed using Protégé-2000, mainly by the following three steps: (1) representing a standard classification of nursing practice (the Nursing Master) in Japan; (2) representing a Japanese version of the ICNP; (3) designing an ontology-based framework. A heuristic matching algorithm was developed to automatically match the action labels in the Nursing Master with the terms of the eight axes of the ICNP Nursing Actions Classification. A preliminary evaluation was performed to examine the usefulness of the system. RESULTS: High hit rate was shown on the ICNP axes ActionType, Target, and Location. The evaluation indicated that 51.7+/-5.8% (mean+/-S.D.) of the action labels with only one action type were properly matched, and that in 80+/-4% (mean+/-S.D.) of action labels with more than one action type, at least one valid action type was matched correctly. CONCLUSION: The ontology-based approach using a frame-based knowledge representation system (e.g., Protégé-2000) is useful for supporting the formal description of nursing practice in Japan with the ICNP.

Japan↗

Extraction of specific nursing terms using corpora comparison.

The purpose of the study is to develop and evaluate a bottom-up approach to extract the specific nursing terms from textual nursing records using corpora comparison. A nursing records corpus was developed as the target corpus, and a newspaper corpus and a medical literature abstracts corpus were developed as the reference corpora. Two filters were established to extract the technical terms and the relative frequency ratio was used for corpora comparison. The issues related to the improvement of both the algorithms and the evaluation methods were discussed.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Context-based ontology building support in clinical domains using formal concept analysis.

OBJECTIVE: Ontology in clinical domains is becoming a core research field in the realm of medical informatics. The objective of this study is to explore the potential role of formal concept analysis (FCA) in a context-based ontology building support in a clinical domain (e.g. cardiovascular medicine here). METHODOLOGY: We developed an ontology building support system that integrated an FCA module with a natural language processing (NLP) module. The user interface of the system was developed as a Protégé-2000 JAVA tab plug-in. A collection of 368 textual discharge summaries and a standard dictionary of Japanese diagnostic terms (MEDIS ver2.0) were used as the main knowledge sources. A preliminary evaluation was taken to show the usefulness of the system. RESULTS: Stability was shown on the MEDIS-based medical concept extraction with high precision. 73+/-14% (mean+/-S.D.) of the compound medical phrases extracted were sufficiently meaningful to form a medical concept from a clinical perspective. Also, 57.7% of attribute implication pairs (i.e. medical concept pairs) extracted were identified as positive from a clinical perspective. CONCLUSION: Under the framework of our ontology building support system using FCA, the clinical experts could reach a mass of both linguistic information and context-based knowledge that was demonstrated as useful to support their ontology building tasks.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗

Preliminary clinical evaluation of a video transmission system for home visits.

A portable video transmission system based on a hand-held computer and cellular telephone was developed for use with patients undergoing rehabilitation at home. It was designed to be simple to operate, for use by nurses on home care visits. The whole system can be held in one hand, and video pictures can be recorded and transmitted with the touch of a few buttons. The quality of the transmitted pictures and the feasibility of the system were clinically evaluated by physical therapists and nurses. Three image transmission scenes were used to evaluate the system: turning over in bed; walking; and raising and lowering a shoulder. Nurses reported that the system was easy to carry and simple to use. Physiotherapists found the system to be useful in making a judgement about the patient's condition. The patients were all enthusiastic about the system. The increased interaction had the effect of improving the patients' desire to continue their in-home rehabilitation.

House Calls↗

Cost-utility of living donor liver transplantation in a single Japanese center.

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Living donor liver transplantation is becoming increasingly important in the Western world, but the economic issues remain controversial. We conducted a cost-utility analysis to evaluate whether living donor liver transplantation is cost-effective. METHODOLOGY: Cost and utility analyses were performed in a longitudinal survey of a single center in Sapporo, Japan. Medical costs were derived from 11 patients who underwent living donor liver transplantation. Health utility was measured in quality-adjusted life year. Data for health utility scores were derived from 19 patients who underwent living donor liver transplantation. RESULTS: Median medical cost was U.S. dollars 154,626 from the first day of preoperative evaluation to 24 months post-transplantation. Cumulative quality-adjusted life years were 1.60 at 24 months after transplantation. Medical cost per quality-adjusted life year decreased progressively, leading to medical cost of U.S. dollars 605,131 per quality-adjusted life year at 3 months to U.S. dollars 94,169 at 24 months after transplantation. The results were sensitive to medical cost. CONCLUSIONS: Follow-up survey identified progressive increases in the cost-effectiveness of living donor liver transplantation for patients with end-stage liver disease. Living donor liver transplantation appears to represent a cost-effective medical technology.

Adolescent↗