A Triple Threat: Takayasu Arteritis, Bicuspid Aortic Valve, and Triplets.

Takayasu arteritis is a vasculitis affecting women of reproductive age. Appropriate care of these patients requires a multidisciplinary approach and close monitoring. We present the case of a woman with a triplet gestation and Takayasu arteritis complicated by an ascending aortic aneurysm, aortic regurgitation, and bicuspid aortic valve.

An ontology-driven framework to support the dynamic formation of an interdisciplinary healthcare team.

Background And Purpose: Teamwork has become a modus operandi in healthcare and delivery of patient care by an interdisciplinary healthcare team (IHT) is now a prevailing modality of care. We argue that a formal and automated support framework is needed for an IHT to properly leverage information technology resources. Such a framework should allow for patient preferences and expand a representation of a clinical workflow with a formal model of dynamic formation of a team, especially with regards to team leader- and membership, and the assignment of tasks to team members.

Postpartum Coronary Arterial Spasm.

Background: Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) during postpartum period is rare. In the current manuscript we present a case of a postpartum patient who developed ACS attributed to coronary vasospasm in the absence of vasocontrictive medication or smoking. This condition resolved with intracoronary injection of nitroglycerine and verapamil.

Why Is Reverse Takotsubo "Reverse"?

Objectives: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TTC) is an acute cardiac syndrome simulating myocardial infarction that is characterized by transient wall motion abnormalities in the absence of coronary artery obstruction. Reverse TTC (rTTC) is a recently described variant of TTC. This review defines and compares both forms of TTC, stating their resemblances and differences.

Comprehensive mitigation framework for concurrent application of multiple clinical practice guidelines.

In this work we propose a comprehensive framework based on first-order logic (FOL) for mitigating (identifying and addressing) interactions between multiple clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) applied to a multi-morbid patient while also considering patient preferences related to the prescribed treatment. With this framework we respond to two fundamental challenges associated with clinical decision support: (1) concurrent application of multiple CPGs and (2) incorporation of patient preferences into the decision making process. We significantly expand our earlier research by (1) proposing a revised and improved mitigation-oriented representation of CPGs and secondary medical knowledge for addressing adverse interactions and incorporating patient preferences and (2) introducing a new mitigation algorithm.

Using Semantic Components to Represent Dynamics of an Interdisciplinary Healthcare Team in a Multi-Agent Decision Support System.

In healthcare organizations, clinical workflows are executed by interdisciplinary healthcare teams (IHTs) that operate in ways that are difficult to manage. Responding to a need to support such teams, we designed and developed the MET4 multi-agent system that allows IHTs to manage patients according to presentation-specific clinical workflows. In this paper, we describe a significant extension of the MET4 system that allows for supporting rich team dynamics (understood as team formation, management and task-practitioner allocation), including selection and maintenance of the most responsible physician and more complex rules of selecting practitioners for the workflow tasks.

A Framework for Modeling Workflow Execution by an Interdisciplinary Healthcare Team.

The use of business workflow models in healthcare is limited because of insufficient capture of complexities associated with behavior of interdisciplinary healthcare teams that execute healthcare workflows. In this paper we present a novel framework that builds on the well-founded business workflow model formalism and related infrastructures and introduces a formal semantic layer that describes selected aspects of team dynamics and supports their real-time operationalization.

Expanding a First-Order Logic Mitigation Framework to Handle Multimorbid Patient Preferences.

The increasing prevalence of multimorbidity is a challenge for physicians who have to manage a constantly growing number of patients with simultaneous diseases. Adding to this challenge is the need to incorporate patient preferences as key components of the care process, thanks in part to the emergence of personalized and participatory medicine. In our previous work we proposed a framework employing first order logic to represent clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and to mitigate possible adverse interactions when concurrently applying multiple CPGs to a multimorbid patient.

Novel semantic similarity measure improves an integrative approach to predicting gene functional associations.

Background: Elucidation of the direct/indirect protein interactions and gene associations is required to fully understand the workings of the cell. This can be achieved through the use of both low- and high-throughput biological experiments and in silico methods. We present GAP (Gene functional Association Predictor), an integrative method for predicting and characterizing gene functional associations.