Data Science Commons^™

Application Of Cognitive Engineering Principles To The Redesign Of A Dichotomous Identification Key For Parasitology, Kimberly A. Smith-Akins, Sharon Mclane, Thomas M. Craig, Todd R. Johnson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Dichotomous identification keys are used throughout biology for identification of plants, insects, and parasites. However, correct use of identification keys can be difficult as they are not usually intended for novice users who may not be familiar with the terminology used or with the morphology of the organism being identified. Therefore, we applied cognitive engineering principles to redesign a parasitology identification key for the Internet. We addressed issues of visual clutter and spatial distance by displaying a single question couplet at a time and by switching to the appropriate next couplet after the user made a choice. Our analysis of …

A Time-Motion Study Of Registered Nurses’ Workflow In Intensive Care Unit Remote Monitoring, Zhihua Tang, Janine Mazabob, Liza Weavind, Eric Thomas, Todd R. Johnson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Utilizing advanced information technology, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) remote monitoring allows highly trained specialists to oversee a large number of patients at multiple sites on a continuous basis. In the current research, we conducted a time-motion study of registered nurses’ work in an ICU remote monitoring facility. Data were collected on seven nurses through 40 hours of observation. The results showed that nurses’ essential tasks were centered on three themes: monitoring patients, maintaining patients’ health records, and managing technology use. In monitoring patients, nurses spent 52% of the time assimilating information embedded in a clinical information system and 15% on …

Using Citation Data To Improve Retrieval From Medline, Elmer V Bernstam, Jorge R Herskovic, Yindalon Aphinyanaphongs, Constantin F Aliferis, Madurai G Sriram, William R Hersh

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether algorithms developed for the World Wide Web can be applied to the biomedical literature in order to identify articles that are important as well as relevant. DESIGN AND MEASUREMENTS A direct comparison of eight algorithms: simple PubMed queries, clinical queries (sensitive and specific versions), vector cosine comparison, citation count, journal impact factor, PageRank, and machine learning based on polynomial support vector machines. The objective was to prioritize important articles, defined as being included in a pre-existing bibliography of important literature in surgical oncology. RESULTS Citation-based algorithms were more effective than noncitation-based algorithms at identifying important articles. …

Mapping Concepts In Medical Error Taxonomies, Min Zhu, Yong Huang, Yang Gong, Juliana J. Brixey, Jiajie Zhang, James P. Turley

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

No abstract provided.

Synchronization And Multiple Group Server Support For Kepler, K. Maly, M. Zubair, H. Siripuram, S. Zunjarwad, Yannis Manolopoulos (Ed.), Joaquim Filipe (Ed.), Panos Constantopoulos (Ed.), José Cordeiro (Ed.)

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In the last decade literally thousands of digital libraries have emerged but one of the biggest obstacles for dissemination of information to a user community is that many digital libraries use different, proprietary technologies that inhibit interoperability. Kepler framework addresses interoperability and gives publication control to individual publishers. In Kepler, OAI-PMH is used to support "personal data providers" or "archivelets".". In our vision, individual publishers can be integrated with an institutional repository like Dspace by means of a Kepler Group Digital Library (GDL). The GDL aggregates metadata and full text from archivelets and can act as an OAI-compliant data provider …

Biomass Estimation Using Statistical And Neural Network Analysis Of Aster Data, Vijay O. Lulla

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study assessed the performance of different biomass estimation methods using Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) lll data in a temperate forest. Multiple linear regression statistics of spectral band data and derived indices with biomass values were compared with advanced neural network models created with spectral band data and indices to model biomass values. Biomass for the study area was estimated using both of these methods and the results were discussed. The data were analyzed using multivariate statistical analysis. Correlation analysis and regression analysis were employed to understand the relationship of biomass to the spectral data and …

Hispanic Physicians' Tobacco Intervention Practices: A Cross-Sectional Survey Study, Francisco G. Soto Mas, Richard L. Papenfuss, Holly E. Jacobson, Chiehwen E. Hsu, William M. Kane

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background U.S. Hispanic physicians constitute a considerable professional collective, and they may be most suited to attend to the health education needs of the growing U.S. Hispanic population. These educational needs include tobacco use prevention and smoking cessation. However, there is a lack of information on Hispanic physicians' tobacco intervention practices, their level of awareness and use of cessation protocols, and the type of programs that would best address their tobacco training needs. The purpose of this study was to assess the tobacco intervention practices and training needs of Hispanic physicians.

Methods Data was collected through a validated survey instrument …

Fisheries Occasional Paper No. 19 - Management Of Western Rock Lobster Fishery - Proposed Resource Sustainability Management Package For The Northern Zones (A And B), Department Of Fisheries Western Australia

Fisheries Occasional Publications

The proposed effort reduction management package presented in this paper was developed in close co-operation with rock lobster industry to address the short-term sustainability concerns regarding the level of breeding stock in the northern region.

The management package does not address the serious long-term sustainability or socio-economic issues (e.g. cost pressures and related fleet capacity) facing the industry. If the fishery stays with input controls there will need to be regular reviews of the level of exploitation and its impact on the breeding stock. If exploitation increases and the breeding stock continues to decline additional fishing effort reductions in the …

Fisheries Occasional Paper No. 20 - Management Of Western Rock Lobster Fishery - Advice To Stakeholders - Assessment Of Southern Zone Resource Sustainability Options, Department Of Fisheries, Western Australia

Fisheries Occasional Publications

The management options presented in this paper have been developed in close cooperation with the rock lobster industry to address the short-term sustainability and economic concerns regarding the level of exploitation and its impact on the breeding stock in the southern region. The main focus in the short-term is to consider options that reduce fishing effort during periods that may be economically inefficient to fish and at the same time reduce the level of exploitation.

The management package does not address the serious long-term sustainability or socioeconomic issues (e.g. cost pressures and related fleet capacity) facing the industry. If the …

A Web Services Architecture For Umls Knowledge Sources, Parsa Mirhaji, Narendra Kunapareddy, Yanko Michea, Arunkumar Srinivasan

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

A web service is a collection of industry standards to enable reusability of services and interoperability of heterogeneous applications. The UMLS Knowledge Source (UMLSKS) Server provides remote access to the UMLSKS and related resources. We propose a Web Services Architecture that encapsulates UMLSKS-API and makes it available in distributed and heterogeneous environments. This is the first step towards intelligent and automatic UMLS services discovery and invocation by computer systems in distributed environments such as web.

Interruptions In Workflow For Rns In A Level One Trauma Center, Juliana J. Brixey, David J. Robinson, Zhihua Tang, Todd R. Johnson, Jiajie Zhang, James P. Turley

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

An understanding of interruptions in healthcare is important for the design, implementation, and evaluation of health information systems and for the management of clinical workflow and medical errors. The purpose of this study is to identify and classify the types of interruptions experienced by Emergency Department(ED) nurses working in a Level One Trauma Center. This was an observational field study of Registered Nurses (RNs) employed in a Level One Trauma Center using the shadowing method. Results of the study indicate that nurses were both recipients and initiators of interruptions. Telephones, pagers, and face-to-face conversations were the most common sources of …

State Of The Fisheries Report 2003/04, J. W. Penn, W. J. Fletcher, F. Head

Status Reports of the Fisheries and Aquatic Resources

The State ofthe Fisheries Report is published annually to provide an additional level of detailed reporting of the management of fish stocks and their environment undertaken by the Department of Fisheries. A summary report from the document is included in the Department's Annual Report to Parliament, which includes the Department's non-financial (fishery) performance indicators.

By summarising management changes, compliance activities and research data including stock assessments and breeding stock levels, this document provides a valuable reference point for Western Australian fisheries of major importance to the commercial and recreational sectors, and the developing aquaculture sector.

This year's State of the …

Guideview: Structured Multi-Modal Delivery Of Clinical Guidelines, M Sriram Iyengar, Subhajit Sarkar, Kira Bacal, Gregory Defouw, Phyllis Mcculley, Victor Hurst

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

GuideView is a system designed for structured, multi-modal delivery of clinical guidelines. Clinical instructions are presented simultaneously in voice, text, pictures or video or animations. Users navigate using mouse-clicks and voice commands. An evaluation study performed at a medical simulation laboratory found that voice and video instructions were rated highly.

Using Incomplete Citation Data For Medline Results Ranking, Jorge R Herskovic, Elmer V Bernstam

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Information overload is a significant problem for modern medicine. Searching MEDLINE for common topics often retrieves more relevant documents than users can review. Therefore, we must identify documents that are not only relevant, but also important. Our system ranks articles using citation counts and the PageRank algorithm, incorporating data from the Science Citation Index. However, citation data is usually incomplete. Therefore, we explore the relationship between the quantity of citation information available to the system and the quality of the result ranking. Specifically, we test the ability of citation count and PageRank to identify "important articles" as defined by experts …

Persuasive Email Messages For Patient Communication, Muhammad Walji, Kathy Johnson-Throop, Todd Johnson, Elmer Bernstam, Jiajie Zhang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

To improve health and reduce costs, we need to encourage patients to make better health care decisions. Since email is widely available, it may be useful for patient-directed interventions. However, we know little about how the contents of an email message can influence a health-related decision. We propose a model to understand how patients may process persuasive email messages.

Predicting Childhood Sexual Or Physical Abuse: A Logistic Regression Geo-Mapping Approach To Prevention, Roland K. Tadoum, Kamila Smolij, Michelle A. Lyn, Craig W. Johnson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This study investigates the degree to which gender, ethnicity, relationship to perpetrator, and geomapped socio-economic factors significantly predict the incidence of childhood sexual abuse, physical abuse and non- abuse. These variables are then linked to geographic identifiers using geographic information system (GIS) technology to develop a geo-mapping framework for child sexual and physical abuse prevention.

Using Technology To Teach Technology: Design And Evaluation Of Bilingual Online Physician Education About Electronic Medical Records, Sarah R. Edmonson, Adol Esquivel, Pallavi Mokkarala, Craig W. Johnson, Cynthia L. Phelps

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The "EMR Tutorial" is designed to be a bilingual online physician education environment about electronic medical records. After iterative assessment and redesign, the tutorial was tested in two groups: U.S. physicians and Mexican medical students. Split-plot ANOVA revealed significantly different pre-test scores in the two groups, significant cognitive gains for the two groups overall, and no significant difference in the gains made by the two groups. Users rated the module positively on a satisfaction questionnaire.

Recommender Systems For Multimedia Libraries: An Evaluation Of Different Models For Datamining Usage Data, Raquel Oliveira Araujo

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Many recommender systems exist today to help users deal with the large growth in the amount of information available in the Internet. Most of these recommender systems use collaborative filtering or content-based techniques to present new material that would be of interest to a user. While these methods have proven to be effective, they have not been designed specifically for multimedia collections. In this study we present a new method to find recommendations that is not dependent on traditional Information Retrieval (IR) methods and compare it to algorithms that do rely on traditional IR methods. We evaluated these algorithms using …

Efficacy Of Quality Criteria To Identify Potentially Harmful Information: A Cross-Sectional Survey Of Complementary And Alternative Medicine Web Sites, Muhammad Walji, Smitha Sagaram, Deepak Sagaram, Funda Meric-Bernstam, Craig Johnson, Nadeem Q Mirza, Elmer V Bernstam

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Many users search the Internet for answers to health questions. Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a particularly common search topic. Because many CAM therapies do not require a clinician's prescription, false or misleading CAM information may be more dangerous than information about traditional therapies. Many quality criteria have been suggested to filter out potentially harmful online health information. However, assessing the accuracy of CAM information is uniquely challenging since CAM is generally not supported by conventional literature. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study is to determine whether domain-independent technical quality criteria can identify potentially harmful online CAM content. …

Miscellaneous Publication 8/2004 - Midas User Manual. Version 1, Ross Kingwell, Felicity Flugge, Emma Kopke, Michael O'Connell

Farm Systems and Economics published reports

What is MIDAS?

It's a computer model of dryland farming in Western Australia. MIDAS is an acronym (Model of an Integrated Dryland Agricultural System). Currently there are five versions of MIDAS, each describes a representative farm in a particular farming region of Western Australia. Versions exist for the following regions (see Figure 1):

• the Eastern Wheatbelt;
• the Central Wheatbelt;
• the West Midlands;
• the Great Southern; and,
• the South Coast.

Each of these versions is a mathematical programming model of a representative farm.

Evaluating The Disparity Of Female Breast Cancer Mortality Among Racial Groups - A Spatiotemporal Analysis, Chiehwen E. Hsu, Holly Jacobson, Francisco Soto Mas

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background The literature suggests that the distribution of female breast cancer mortality demonstrates spatial concentration. There remains a lack of studies on how the mortality burden may impact racial groups across space and over time. The present study evaluated the geographic variations in breast cancer mortality in Texas females according to three predominant racial groups (non-Hispanic White, Black, and Hispanic females) over a twelve-year period. It sought to clarify whether the spatiotemporal trend might place an uneven burden on particular racial groups, and whether the excess trend has persisted into the current decade.

Methods The Spatial Scan Statistic was employed …

Detecting Spatiotemporal Clusters Of Accidental Poisoning Mortality Among Texas Counties, Us, 1980 – 2001, Ella T. Nkhoma, Chiehwen E. Hsu, Victoria I. Hunt, Ann M. Harris

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background Accidental poisoning is one of the leading causes of injury in the United States, second only to motor vehicle accidents. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rates of accidental poisoning mortality have been increasing in the past fourteen years nationally. In Texas, mortality rates from accidental poisoning have mirrored national trends, increasing linearly from 1981 to 2001. The purpose of this study was to determine if there are spatiotemporal clusters of accidental poisoning mortality among Texas counties, and if so, whether there are variations in clustering and risk according to gender and race/ethnicity. The Spatial …

Surveying Cost Growth, Michael A. Greiner, Vince Sipple, Edward D. White

Faculty Publications

Cost growth that weapon systems incur throughout their acquisition life cycle concerns those who work in the acquisition environment. One way to reduce the amount of unexpected cost growth is to develop better cost estimates. In attaining better cost estimates though, it is often helpful to understand and account for potential cost drivers. Several cost studies, some of which specifically focus on the aircraft industry, have been performed documenting and investigating these growth factors. Overviews of these various cost growth studies are presented as other tools for the cost estimators and program managers.

Detecting Patterns Of Fraudulent Behavior In Forensic Accounting, Boris Kovalerchuk, Evgenii Vityaev

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of the Sciences

Often evidence from a single case does not reveal any suspicious patterns to aid investigations in forensic accounting and other forensic fields. In contrast, correlation of sets of evidence from several cases with suitable background knowledge may reveal suspicious patterns. Link Discovery (LD) has recently emerged as a promising new area for such tasks. Currently LD mostly relies on deterministic graphical techniques. Other relevant techniques are Bayesian probabilistic and causal networks. These techniques need further development to handle rare events. This paper combines first-order logic (FOL) and probabilistic semantic inference (PSI) to address this challenge. Previous research has shown this …

An Extended Hierarchical Task Analysis For Error Prediction In Medical Devices, Phillip H. Chung, Jiajie Zhang, Todd R. Johnson, Vimla L. Patel

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This paper introduces an extended hierarchical task analysis (HTA) methodology devised to evaluate and compare user interfaces on volumetric infusion pumps. The pumps were studied along the dimensions of overall usability and propensity for generating human error. With HTA as our framework, we analyzed six pumps on a variety of common tasks using Norman’s Action theory. The introduced method of evaluation divides the problem space between the external world of the device interface and the user’s internal cognitive world, allowing for predictions of potential user errors at the human-device level. In this paper, one detailed analysis is provided as an …

Rigorously Assessing Whether The Data Backs The Back School, David T. Vinh, Craig W. Johnson, Cynthia L. Phelps

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

A rigorous between-subjects methodology employing independent random samples and having broad clinical applicability was designed and implemented to evaluate the effectiveness of back safety and patient transfer training interventions for both hospital nurses and nursing assistants. Effects upon self-efficacy, cognitive, and affective measures are assessed for each of three back safety procedures. The design solves the problem of obtaining randomly assigned independent controls where all experimental subjects must participate in the training interventions.

Randomized Comparisons Among Health Informatics Students Identify Hypertutorial Features As Improving Web-Based Instruction, Craig W. Johnson, Yan Xing, Lan Yang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Hypertutorials optimize five features - presentation, learner control, practice, feedback, and elaborative learning resources. Previous research showed graduate students significantly and overwhelmingly preferred Web-based hypertutorials to conventional "Book-on-the-Web" statistics or research design lessons. The current report shows that the source of hypertutorials' superiority in student evaluations of instruction lies in their hypertutorial features. Randomized comparisons between the two methodologies were conducted in two successive iterations of a graduate level health informatics research design and evaluation course. The two versions contained the same text and graphics, but differed in the presence or absence of hypertutorial features: Elaborative learning resources, practice, feedback, …

Encouraging Adolescents Toward Mental Health Careers Via Website Biographies, Irmi U. Willcockson, Prabhu R. Shankar, Cynthia L. Phelps, Craig W. Johnson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

This project designed, developed, implemented and is currently evaluating the effectiveness of an interactive, multi-media website designed to encourage adolescents to consider careers in mental health. This Web-based learning environment features biographies of mental health scientists. Evaluation is conducted in a systematic, structured way using cognitive achievement, usability (ease of use), and affective scales (e.g., fun to use) as outcome measures

The Physician's Perception Of Medical Error And Its Application To The Development Of An Educational Training Tool, Johnny E. Bates, Cynthia Phelps, Craig W. Johnson

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

It is becoming clear that if we are to impact the rate of medical errors it will have to be done at the practicing physician level. The purpose of this project was to survey the attitude of physicians in Alabama concerning their perception of medical error, and to obtain their thoughts and desires for medical education in the area of medical errors. The information will be used in the development of a physician education program.

Autoassociative-Heteroassociative Neural Network, Claudia V. Kropas-Hughes, Steven K. Rogers, Mark E. Oxley, Matthew Kabrisky

AFIT Patents

An efficient neural network computing technique capable of synthesizing two sets of output signal data from a single input signal data set. The method and device of the invention involves a unique integration of autoassociative and heteroassociative neural network mappings, the autoassociative neural network mapping enabling a quality metric for assessing the generalization or prediction accuracy of the heteroassociative neural network mapping.