Principle‐based analysis of the concept of telecare

Aim. To report a concept analysis of telecare. Background. Lately telecare has become a worldwide, modern way of giving care over distance by means of technology. Other concepts, like telemedicine, e‐health, and telehealth, focus on the same topic though the boundaries between them seem to be blurred. Data sources. Sources comprise 44 English language research articles retrieved from the database of Medline and Cinahl (1995–October 2011). Design. Literature Review. Method. A principle‐based analysis was undertaken through content analysis of the definitions, attributes, preconditions, and outcomes of the concept. Results. The attributes are well described according to the use of technology, caring activity, persons involved, and accessibility. Preconditions and outcomes are well described concerning individual and health political needs and benefits. The concept did not hold its boundaries through theoretical integration with the concept of telemedicine and telehealth. The definition of telecare competes with concepts like home‐based e‐health, telehomecare, telephonecare, telephone‐based psychosocial services, telehealth, and telemedicine. Assessment of the definitions resulted in a suggestion of a new definition: Telecare is the use of information, communication, and monitoring technologies which allow healthcare providers to remotely evaluate health status, give educational intervention, or deliver health and social care to patients in their homes. Conclusion. The logical principle was assessed to be partly immature, whereas the pragmatical and linguistical principles were found to be mature. A new definition is suggested and this has moved the epistemological principle forward to maturity.     

自然药学观的相关性思考

基于天人合一整体观,结合研究发现感悟,分析药物本质的必然性,提出自然药学观,认为自然界必然存在着维存人类生命的自然药物界及其药物体系。其组成药物元素及其关联药物,为具有特定应答生命体系状态信息、维存生命的相应独特的物质,具有特定组成规律,而呈现相应的药物属性特性,其总集合药物体系为自然药物界。自然药物界的相关性主要表征为药物体系的网络关联性,网络单元为药物-性能-(生命)信息。以药物体系为网络单元,可逐一揭示单物质药物、多物质药物、所有药物的组成体系与相关性及其存在规律,从而以其特定的相关性将自然药物界中各药物体系相互连接,构建出自然药物界网络关联体系,以发现最适药物体系,创造最佳药物,实现从药物必然王国进入药物自由王国。     

关于检验质量理论几个基本概念的思考和建议

检验结果的准确度（性）与可靠性是同一概念的两种说法，“精密度”是准确度的基础部分，而不应当说可靠包括了准确和精密两个方面。“精密度”概念在检验医学上的内涵与其在《汉语词典》中的词义有很大出入，且precision与accuracy这两个英文单词也有词义交叉。科学与文化从来就不割裂，故而作者建议在这个概念上停止使用“精密度”这一名词，改用稳定性（度）和（或）重复性之名。定义“正确度”这一概念来表示均值与真值的接近程度不合适，何况“偏倚”这个概念已能说明相关问题。严谨的表述应当为，室内质量控制反映检验结果的稳定性，室间质量评价则评估检验结果的准确性。由此建议，将室问质量评价又称作准确性验证．室内质量控制也可另称作稳定性监控。     

Bayesian species delimitation using multilocus sequence data

In the absence of recent admixture between species, bipartitions of individuals in gene trees that are shared across loci can potentially be used to infer the presence of two or more species. This approach to species delimitation via molecular sequence data has been constrained by the fact that genealogies for individual loci are often poorly resolved and that ancestral lineage sorting, hybridization, and other population genetic processes can lead to discordant gene trees. Here we use a Bayesian modeling approach to generate the posterior probabilities of species assignments taking account of uncertainties due to unknown gene trees and the ancestral coalescent process. For tractability, we rely on a user-specified guide tree to avoid integrating over all possible species delimitations. The statistical performance of the method is examined using simulations, and the method is illustrated by analyzing sequence data from rotifers, fence lizards, and human populations.     

Tone as a health concept: An analysis

Study designConcept analysis.IntroductionThis paper is a report on the analysis of the concept of tone in chiropractic.PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to clarify the concept of tone as originally understood by Daniel David Palmer from 1895 to 1914 and to monitor its evolution over time.MethodsData was sourced from Palmer's original work, published between 1895 and 1914. A literature search from 1980 to 2016 was also performed on the online databases CINHAL, PubMed and Scopus with key terms including ‘tone’, ‘chiropractic’, ‘Palmer’, ‘vitalism’, ‘health’, ‘homeostasis’, ‘holism’ and ‘wellness’. Finally hand-searches were conducted through chiropractic books and professional literature from 1906 to 1980 for any references to ‘tone’. Rodgers' evolutionary method of analysis was used to categorise the data in relation to the surrogates, attributes, references, antecedents and consequences of tone.ResultsA total of 49 references were found: five from publications by Palmer; three from the database searches, and; the remaining 41 from professional books, trade journals and websites.Major conclusionsThere is no clear interpretation of tone in the contemporary chiropractic literature. Tone is closely aligned with functional neurology and can be understood as an interface between the metaphysical and the biomedical. Using the concept of tone as a foundation for practice could strengthen the identity of the chiropractic profession.     

Recurrent neural networks with specialized word embeddings for health-domain named-entity recognition

BackgroundPrevious state-of-the-art systems on Drug Name Recognition (DNR) and Clinical Concept Extraction (CCE) have focused on a combination of text “feature engineering” and conventional machine learning algorithms such as conditional random fields and support vector machines. However, developing good features is inherently heavily time-consuming. Conversely, more modern machine learning approaches such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have proved capable of automatically learning effective features from either random assignments or automated word “embeddings”.Objectives(i) To create a highly accurate DNR and CCE system that avoids conventional, time-consuming feature engineering. (ii) To create richer, more specialized word embeddings by using health domain datasets such as MIMIC-III. (iii) To evaluate our systems over three contemporary datasets.MethodsTwo deep learning methods, namely the Bidirectional LSTM and the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF, are evaluated. A CRF model is set as the baseline to compare the deep learning systems to a traditional machine learning approach. The same features are used for all the models.ResultsWe have obtained the best results with the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model, which has outperformed all previously proposed systems. The specialized embeddings have helped to cover unusual words in DrugBank and MedLine, but not in the i2b2/VA dataset.ConclusionsWe present a state-of-the-art system for DNR and CCE. Automated word embeddings has allowed us to avoid costly feature engineering and achieve higher accuracy. Nevertheless, the embeddings need to be retrained over datasets that are adequate for the domain, in order to adequately cover the domain-specific vocabulary.