Japan Journal of Medical Informatics
Online ISSN : 2188-8469
Print ISSN : 0289-8055
ISSN-L : 0289-8055
Volume 36, Issue 1
Displaying 1-4 of 4 articles from this issue
Original Article-Technical
  • M Hoshi, Y Tachimori
    2016 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 3-15
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: May 08, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

     Our study aims to develop patient grouping by community detection of networks derived from clinical data. We constructed the networks with nodes consisting of patient IDs and the other field’s data of the database in the hospital information system. We found that the networks were divides into several communities and as a result, a set of patients was divided into several groups according to the communities (PGN: Patient Grouping by Network community detection). Using the same data, we also tried to group the set of patients by cluster analysis and MDC (Major Diagnostic Categories). And we get the two other patient groupings (PGC: Patient Grouping by Cluster analysis, PGM: Patient Grouping from MDC). We constructed a new index to measure the similarity degree between two patient groupings (SIG: Similarity Index between two Groupings), and we calculated the SIGs for all combinations of groupings. As a result, the similarity degree between PGN and PGC was comparatively low. The similarity degree between PGN and PGM was higher than that between PGC and PGM. This result indicates that the patient grouping by network community detection is clinically more meaningful than that by cluster analysis. We can produce another grouping by a choice of different field as the nodes of the networks. Therefore, our grouping method has wide applications. For example, using nursing data can gives us a new patient grouping for nursing care.

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Original Article-Short Notes
  • E Aramaki, S Shikata, Y Tomii, H Yajima
    2016 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 17-23
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: May 08, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

     [Background] Social network sites for disease survivors are attracting the attention of many patients for sharing experiences and supporting each other on-line. However, such effects are not verified scientifically. This study examines and compares the patients who are actively involving with a patient SNS, Lifepalette, and who are not quite actively involved, and sees the change of their Quality of Life at 2 different points (on July, 2014 and March, 2015). [Materials & Methods] We have divided the Lifepalette users into 2 groups: the Expert Patients (the active members) and the General Patients (the non-active members). [Results] Expert Patients showed significantly low Social QOL than the General Patients, but the General Patients' score decreased significantly. Whereas the Expert Patients' Social QOL, however, slightly increased at the second measurement, and eventually, the Expert and General Patients did not show the significant difference in the Social QOL. [Discussion] The patients with low Social QOL have become the Expert Patients. The registered patients should be actively involved in the SNSs' activities, such as posting articles, to receive the benefit of maintaining their QOL level.

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Proceedings of the Spring Meeting on Medical Informatics
  • T Tanaka, H Tsukuma, M Ikeuchi
    2016 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 25-31
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: May 08, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

     The world-wide-web (WWW) is an important information media for a visually impaired person in Japan. Although there is lot of variations of their settings to use WWW, most of them use a screen reader. However, most webpages of public institutions in Japan are not coded as taking into account of a screen reader user, and their web accessibilities are not enough to pass JIS X 8341-3. The authors reviewed the top-pages of 47 national university hospital websites from viewpoint of web accessibility, in January, 2015, and found that; 1) as same as other public institutions, many websites did not pass JIS X 8341-3, of which the result did not show remarkable improvement from the reviews in 2014; and that 2) although most of information items on their webpages which patients need to access medical services in general were found near to the top of webpage, there were so many variations of ways to show these items: Such a variation may prevent a visually impaired person’s access to the information due to difficulty of understanding the structure of the webpage. These problems shows the necessity of the standard specifications of hospital webpage for visually impaired persons.

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  • Y Hatakeyama, H Kataoka, N Nakajima, T Watabe, Y Okuhara
    2016 Volume 36 Issue 1 Pages 33-40
    Published: 2016
    Released on J-STAGE: May 08, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS

     We constructed estimation process for time series variation of insulin by only glucose values based on mathematical model of OGTT in previous study in order to evaluate glucose metabolism for patients without insulin data in OGTT. The parameters in the mathematical model for the target patient were defined with Gaussian noise based on other patient's parameters which were identified by glucose and insulin values. The constructed method selected the estimated insulin with similarity between estimated and real glucose level from the defined model parameters. For validation of the constructed method, estimation experiments of insulin levels were executed for OGTT data of 141 patients in Kochi Medical School hospital based on cross-validation approach. The insulin estimation results showed that the true insulin values were contained in the estimated insulin values described as distribution and that characteristics of estimated insulin distribution differed from each glucose metabolism situation. The constructed method supported a certain evaluation of glucose metabolism with estimated insulin level distribution by only glucose level based on other patient's data.

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