Background: General practitioners play a unique key role in diagnosing patients with unclear diseases. Decision support systems in primary care can assist with diagnosis provided that they are efficient and user-friendly.
Objectives: The objective of this study is to develop a high-fidelity prototype of the user interface of a clinical decision support system for primary care, particularly for diagnosis support in unclear diseases, using expert inspections at an early stage of development to ensure a high level of usability.
Background: The Communication and Tracing App HIV (COMTRAC-HIV) project is developing a mobile health (mHealth) app for integrated care of HIV patients in Germany. The complexity of HIV treatment and continuous care necessitates the need for tailored mHealth solutions. This qualitative study explores design solutions and a prototype to enhance the app's functionality and effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Approximately one-third of sudden cardiac deaths in the young (SCDY) occur due to a structural cardiac disease. Forty to fifty percent of SCDY cases remain unexplained after autopsy (including microscopic and forensic-toxicological analyses), suggesting arrhythmia syndromes as a possible cause of death. Due to the possible inheritability of these diseases, blood relatives of the deceased may equally be carriers of the causative genetic variations and therefore may have an increased cardiac risk profile.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
April 2024
Unlabelled: The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into digital healthcare, particularly in the anonymisation and processing of health information, holds considerable potential.
Objectives: To develop a methodology using Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models to preserve the essence of medical advice in doctors' responses, while editing them for use in scientific studies.
Methods: German and English responses from EXABO, a rare respiratory disease platform, were processed using iterative refinement and other prompt engineering techniques, with a focus on removing identifiable and irrelevant content.
Stud Health Technol Inform
January 2024
SelEe is a German citizen science project aiming to develop a smartphone app for a patient-managed record. The goal is to study rare diseases with the support of interested citizens and people affected by rare diseases. We established a core research team, including professional researchers (leading the project) and citizens.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
January 2024
A clinical decision support system based on different methods of artificial intelligence (AI) can support the diagnosis of patients with unclear diseases by providing tentative diagnoses as well as proposals for further steps. In a user-centred-design process, we aim to find out how general practitioners envision the user interface of an AI-based clinical decision support system for primary care. A first user-interface prototype was developed using the task model based on user requirements from preliminary work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMedical ontologies are mostly available in English. This presents a language barrier that is a limitation in research and automated processing of patient data. The manual translation of ontologies is complex and time-consuming.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Children and youth at risk for mental health disorders, such as eating disorders (ED), were particularly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, yet evidence for the most seriously affected and thus hospitalized youth in Germany is scarce.
Methods: This crosssectional study investigated anonymized routine hospital data (demographic information, diagnoses, treatment modalities) of patients admitted ( = 2,849) to the Department of Child and Adolescence Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy (DCAPPP) of a German University Hospital between 01/2016 and 02/2022. Absolute and relative number of inpatients with or without ED prior to (01/2016-02/2020) and during the COVID-19 pandemic (03/2020-02/2022) were compared.
The current state-of-the-art analysis of central nervous system (CNS) tumors through DNA methylation profiling relies on the tumor classifier developed by Capper and colleagues, which centrally harnesses DNA methylation data provided by users. Here, we present a distributed-computing-based approach for CNS tumor classification that achieves a comparable performance to centralized systems while safeguarding privacy. We utilize the t-distributed neighborhood embedding (t-SNE) model for dimensionality reduction and visualization of tumor classification results in two-dimensional graphs in a distributed approach across multiple sites (DistSNE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
October 2023
In recent years, telemedicine has advanced significantly, offering new possibilities for improving healthcare and patient outcomes. This paper presents a telemedicine app for HIV patients, developed using a human-centered design approach. Designed to meet the diverse and specific needs of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) users and Late Presenters (LP), the app is part of the COMTRAC-HIV Project at the University Hospital Frankfurt.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStandardised medical terminologies are used to ensure accurate and consistent communication of information and to facilitate data exchange. Currently, many terminologies are only available in English, which hinders international research and automated processing of medical data. Natural language processing (NLP) and Machine Translation (MT) methods can be used to automatically translate these terms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Communication and Tracing App HIV (COMTRAC-HIV) project aims to develop a mobile health application for integrated care of HIV patients due to the low availability of those apps in Germany. This study addressed organizational conditions and necessary app functionalities, especially for the care of late diagnosed individuals (late presenters) and those using pre-exposure prophylaxis. We followed a human-centered design approach and interviewed HIV experts in Germany to describe the context of use of the app.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Physiol Cell Physiol
July 2023
Liver cirrhosis is the end stage of all chronic liver diseases and contributes significantly to overall mortality of 2% globally. The age-standardized mortality from liver cirrhosis in Europe is between 10 and 20% and can be explained by not only the development of liver cancer but also the acute deterioration in the patient's overall condition. The development of complications including accumulation of fluid in the abdomen (ascites), bleeding in the gastrointestinal tract (variceal bleeding), bacterial infections, or a decrease in brain function (hepatic encephalopathy) define an acute decompensation that requires therapy and often leads to acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) by different precipitating events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe common occurrence of characteristic symptoms can be used to infer diagnoses. The aim of this study is to show how syndrome similarity analysis using given phenotypic profiles can help in the diagnosis of rare diseases. HPO was used to map syndromes and phenotypic profiles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz
November 2022
In the European Union (EU), rare diseases (RDs) are diseases that affect no more than 5 in 10,000 people. Due to their rarity, clinical expertise and quality-assured care structures are scarce, and research is more difficult compared to other diseases. However, these problems can be overcome by means of national and transnational RD care networks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Due to their low prevalence (< 5 in 10,000), rare diseases are an important area of research, with the active participation of those affected being a key factor. In the Citizen Science project "SelEe" (Researching rare diseases in a citizen science approach), citizens collaborate with researchers using a digital application, developed as part of the project together with those affected, to answer research questions on rare diseases. The aim of this study was to define the rare diseases to be considered, the project topics and the initial requirements for the implementation in a digital application.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWithin the scope of the two NUM projects CODEX and RACOON we developed a preliminary technical concept for documenting clinical and radiological COVID-19 data in a collaborative approach and its preceding findings of a requirement analysis. At first, we provide an overview of NUM and its two projects CODEX and RACOON including the GECCO data set. Furthermore, we demonstrate the foundation for the increased collaboration of both projects, which was additionally supported by a survey conducted at University Hospital Frankfurt.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutomated coding of diseases can support hospitals in the billing of inpatient cases with the health insurance funds. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of classification methods for two selected Rare Diseases. Different classifiers of an off-the-shelf system and an own application are applied in a supervised learning process and comparatively examined for their suitability and reliability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ERN-LUNG Population Registry is a new European-wide collection of patients with rare lung diseases, allowing patients to register online in the registry. Medical experts can recruit patients in the registry for disease-specific registries and care options. The Population Registry was implemented on the basis of the open source software OSSE and extended by functions for the self-registration of patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: With hundreds of registries across Europe, rare diseases (RDs) suffer from fragmented knowledge, expertise, and research. A joint initiative of the European Commission Joint Research Center and its European Platform on Rare Disease Registration (EU RD Platform), the European Reference Networks (ERNs), and the European Joint Programme on Rare Diseases (EJP RD) was launched in 2020. The purpose was to extend the set of common data elements (CDEs) for RD registration by defining domain-specific CDEs (DCDEs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStud Health Technol Inform
May 2022
Background: The Open Source Registry System for Rare Diseases (OSSE), a web-based tool to create rare disease patient registries, currently offers no possibility to view aggregated registry data within the system. Here, we present the development and implementation of a dashboard for the registry of the German NEOCYST (Network for early onset cystic kidney diseases) consortium.
Methods: Based on user requirements from NEOCYST, we developed a general dashboard for all OSSE registries, which was extended with NEOCYST-specific statistics.
Stud Health Technol Inform
May 2022
The diagnosis of rare diseases is often challenging for physicians, but can be supported by Clinical Decision Support Systems. The MIRACUM consortia, which includes ten university hospitals in Germany, develops a Clinical Decision Support System to support the diagnosis of patients with rare diseases. The users are involved in different phases using a user-centred design process.
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September 2021
Citizen science allows involving interested citizen in the entire research process in science. In the past, various citizen science projects have been performed in different research fields, especially in human medicine. We conducted a rapid scoping review to determine which citizen projects in human medicine already used software-based systems to engage citizens in the research process.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the European Union a disease is classified as rare if it affects no more than 5 out of 10,000 people. Currently, there are more than 6000 rare diseases, consisting of a large and heterogeneous number of different diseases that are complex in their symptomatology, multidimensional and therefore difficult to classify in everyday medical practice. This complicates the diagnosis and treatment as well as finding a suitable contact person, as there are only a few experts for each individual rare disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe diagnosis of patients with rare diseases is often delayed. A Clinical Decision Support System using similarity analysis of patient-based data may have the potential to support the diagnosis of patients with rare diseases. This qualitative study has the objective to investigate how the result of a patient similarity analysis should be presented to a physician to enable diagnosis support.
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