Publications | Digital Health

Albarqouni L, Moynihan R, Clark J, Scott AM, Duggan A, Del Mar C. Head of bed elevation to relieve gastroesophageal reflux symptoms: a systematic review. BMC Fam Pract. 2021 Jan 19;22(1):24. doi: 10.1186/s12875-021-01369-0. PMID: 33468060; PMCID: PMC7816499.

Background: Overuse of proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) – frequently used for relieving symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GORD) – raises long-term safety concerns, warranting evidence-based non-drug interventions. We conducted a systematic review to evaluate the effect of head-of-bed elevation on relieving symptoms of GORD in adults. Methods: We included controlled trials comparing the effect of

Yin K & AYS Lau. Field Methods for Patient Ergonomics. In Holden, R.J., & Valdez, R.S. (Eds.). (2021). The Patient Factor: Theories and Methods for Patient Ergonomics (1st ed.). CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429292996

Patients are increasingly encouraged to take an active role in managing their health and health care. New technologies, cultural shifts, trends in healthcare delivery, and policies have brought to the forefront the “work” patients, families, and other non-professionals perform in pursuit of health. Volume 1 provides theoretical and methodological foundation for the emerging discipline of

Wang Y, Verspoor K, Baldwin T. (2020) Learning from Unlabelled Data for Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity. Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop at EMNLP2020.

Domain pretraining followed by task fine-tuning has become the standard paradigm for NLP tasks, but requires in-domain labelled data for task fine-tuning. To overcome this, we propose to utilise domain unlabelled data by assigning pseudo labels from a general model. We evaluate the approach on two clinical STS datasets, and achieve r= 0.80 on N2C2-STS.

Wang Y, Liu F, Verspoor K, Baldwin T (2020) Evaluating the Utility of Model Configurations and Data Augmentation on Clinical Semantic Textual Similarity. Proceedings of the Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing (BioNLP) at ACL2020.

In this paper, we apply pre-trained language models to the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task, with a specific focus on the clinical domain. In low-resource setting of clinical STS, these large models tend to be impractical and prone to overfitting. Building on BERT, we study the impact of a number of model design choices, namely

Scott AM, Clark J, Mar CD, Glasziou P. Increased fluid intake to prevent urinary tract infections: systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Gen Pract. 2020 Feb 27;70(692):e200-e207. doi: 10.3399/bjgp20X708125. PMID: 31988085; PMCID: PMC6988703.

Background: Approximately 15% of community-prescribed antibiotics are used in treating urinary tract infections (UTIs). Increase in antibiotic resistance necessitates considering alternatives. Aim: To assess the impact of increased fluid intake in individuals at risk for UTIs, for impact on UTI recurrence (primary outcome), antimicrobial use, and UTI symptoms (secondary outcomes). Design and setting: A systematic

Redfern J, Coorey G, Mulley J, Scaria A, Neubeck L, Hafiz N, Pitt C, Weir K, Forbes J, Parker S, Bampi F, Coenen A, Enright G, Wong A, Nguyen T, Harris M, Zwar N, Chow CK, Rodgers A, Heeley E, Panaretto K, Lau A, Hayman N, Usherwood T, Peiris D. A digital health intervention for cardiovascular disease management in primary care (CONNECT) randomized controlled trial. NPJ Digit Med. 2020 Sep 10;3:117. doi: 10.1038/s41746-020-00325-z. PMID: 32964140; PMCID: PMC7484809.

Digital health applications (apps) have the potential to improve health behaviors and outcomes. We aimed to examine the effectiveness of a consumer web-based app linked to primary care electronic health records (EHRs). CONNECT was a multicenter randomized controlled trial involving patients with or at risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) recruited from primary care (Clinical Trial

Rahimi A, Baldwin T, Verspoor K. (2020) WikiUMLS: Aligning UMLS to Wikipedia via Cross-lingual Neural Ranking. COLING 2020.

We present our work on aligning the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) to Wikipedia, to facilitate manual alignment of the two resources. We propose a cross-lingual neural reranking model to match a UMLS concept with a Wikipedia page, which achieves a recall@1of 72%, a substantial improvement of 20% over word- and char-level BM25, enabling manual

Pederson M, Verspoor K, Jenkinson M, Law M, Abbott DF, Jackson GD (2020). Artificial Intelligence for clinical decision support in neurology. Brain Communications. doi: 10.1093/braincomms/fcaa096

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting methodological shifts in our era. It holds the potential to transform healthcare as we know it, to a system where humans and machines work together to provide better treatment for our patients. It is now clear that cutting edge artificial intelligence models in conjunction with high-quality clinical

Ellis LA, Lee MD, Ijaz K, Smith J, Braithwaite J, Yin K. COVID-19 as ‘Game Changer’ for the Physical Activity and Mental Well-Being of Augmented Reality Game Players During the Pandemic: Mixed Methods Survey Study. J Med Internet Res 2020;22(12):e25117

Background: Location-based augmented reality (AR) games, such as Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, have been shown to have a beneficial impact on the physical activity, social connectedness, and mental health of their players. In March 2020, global social distancing measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the AR games developer Niantic Inc to

Akhtyamova L, Martínez P, Verspoor K, Cardiff J. (2020) Testing Contextualized Word Embeddings to Improve NER in Spanish Clinical Case Narratives. IEEE Access. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3018688

In the Big Data era, there is an increasing need to fully exploit and analyze the huge quantity of information available about health. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies can contribute by extracting relevant information from unstructured data contained in Electronic Health Records (EHR) such as clinical notes, patients’ discharge summaries and radiology reports. The extracted

Yin K, Lau, AYS. [invited book chapter] Field Methods for Patient Ergonomics: Interviews, Focus Groups, Surveys, and Observations. The Patient Factor: Theories and Methods for Patient Ergonomics. May 12, 2021, CRC Press

Patients are increasingly encouraged to take an active role in managing their health and healthcare. New technologies, cultural shifts, trends in healthcare delivery, and policies have brought to the forefront the “”work”” patients, families, and other non-professionals perform in pursuit of health. This volume provides a theoretical and methodological foundation for the emerging discipline of

Clark, J., Scott, A.M. and Glasziou, P., 2020. Not All Systematic Reviews Can Be Completed in 2 Weeks-But Many Can Be (And Should Be). Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, pp.S0895-4356.

Dear Editors, We would like to thank Yan et al. for providing us with an opportunity to expand on the applicability of our 2-week systematic review (2weekSR) processes [1]. Yan et al. correctly point out that “it is important to recognize not all systematic reviews (SRs) are created equal and complexity of the [SR] topic

Godinho MA, Borda A, Kostkova P, Molnar A, Liaw ST. ‘Serious Games’ for unboxing Global Digital Health policymaking. BMJ Stel 2020; 0:1–2. doi:10.1136/bmjstel-2020-000606

The news headlines report daily on the global political impacts of digital technology: the secondary use of social media data has been implicated in election meddling, though the complex issues surrounding data governance, data ownership and the ethics of personalised advertising remain to be addressed. Meanwhile, digital automation drives unemployment and income inequality, even as

Liaw ST, Georgiou A, Marin H. Evaluation of digital health and information technology in primary care. Int J Med Informatics 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2020.104285.

Primary care is where the health care system meets the people – the first point of care for the citizenry. General practice and primary care DH&IT tools are essential strategies to strengthen health systems to achieve health priorities and universal health coverage and sustainable development goals. While primary care DH&IT systems are just as if

Struelens MJ, Sintchenko V. Pathogen genomics: Empowering infectious disease surveillance and outbreak investigations. Frontiers in Public Health 2020 May 19;8:179.

Comparative microbial genomics analysis by high-throughput whole-genome sequencing (WGS) offers exquisite resolution for epidemiological investigations of infectious disease. This approach has revolutionized outbreak detection and monitoring of transmission dynamics of infectious agents and antimicrobial resistance across humans, animals, and environment. The objective of this Research Topic was to assemble articles on genomic epidemiological approaches to