Informatics calls for papers / publications

Call for Papers on the Topic of Nursing Informatics in the 21st Century for the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research

Deadline: July 15 2012

Canadian Journal of Nursing Research
CALL FOR PAPERS: Nursing Informatics in the 21st Century
March 2013 (Volume 45 No 1)

Health information systems (e.g., nursing information systems, electronic health record systems, personal health record systems, telehealth/telenursing systems) are being implemented globally to improve the quality, efficiency, and safety of patient care. Increasingly, nurses are involved in the design, development, implementation, evaluation, and maintenance of health information systems to support patient care, nursing, and the work of health professionals.

For this issue of CJNR we invite papers that focus on issues in nursing informatics and health/biomedical informatics as they relate to nursing. We welcome reports on completed qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research, literature reviews, systematic reviews, and syntheses. Papers on theoretical, methodological, and current trends in nursing informatics are also welcome. Examples of topics include the following: competencies in nursing terminologies; competencies in nursing informatics; implementation of electronic health record systems and its effect on nursing work; patient-nurse use of personal health record systems; disease management systems; systems usability as it relates to nursing personnel and nursing care; impacts of systems on nursing workflow; decision-support systems for nurses; importance of health and information literacy; and mobile health and nursing. We welcome submissions from nurses (e.g., nursing informatics specialists, nurse administrators), health informatics specialists, and nursing/health and biomedical informatics researchers whose focus is nursing informatics. Manuscripts describing international approaches to nursing informatics issues are welcome.

Guest Editors: Dr. Elizabeth Borycki and Dr. Noreen Frisch
Submission deadline: July 15, 2012

Please submit papers online Using CJNR E-journal Press at http://cjnr.msubmit.net

For assistance: cjnr.nursing@mcgill.ca

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology: Using Technology to Facilitate Chronic Disease Management

Guest Editors:
Khin Than Win, University of Wollongong, Australia
Nilmini Wickramasinghe, RMIT University, Australia

Chronic disease continues to be one of the leading causes of death and economic loss in most countries today. Hence, it has become a central problem for healthcare and many are looking for solutions.

Early detection and prevention of chronic disease is one of the preferred strategies for reducing the incidence of chronic disease and address escalating cost issues. It has been widely documented that assisting chronic disease management through information technology tends to facilitate better health outcomes. We are therefore seeing several health IT projects being initiated and successfully supporting chronic disease management.

This special issue aims to host a discussion and discourse on the possible applications of IS/IT (information systems/information technology) to facilitate better chronic disease management.

Subject Coverage

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

Facilitating standardisation via including care plans and guidelines for health information systems and developing decision support systems for assisting healthcare providers' decision making

Technology for delivery of care, e.g. artificial pancreases, implants, telemedicine, radiology, smart devices such as insulin pumps and implants

Electronic health records; health information systems; computerised guidelines; prevention; patient education; care and assistance for elderly people; lifestyle modifications such as physical activities, nutrition, weight management and mental health

Design and development of portals, communication platforms and/or the role of online social networks

Applications for mobile solutions to facilitate monitoring and/or management

Specific technology solutions to address better monitoring and management of asthma, diabetes, congenital heart disease, arthritis, chronic pain and obesity

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Papers due: 20 October, 2012

Review results: 31 January, 2013

Final paper due: 20 April 2013

Editors and Notes

You may send one copy in the form of an MS Word or PDF file attached to an email (details in Author Guidelines) to the following:

Dr. Khin Than Win
University of Wollongong
Faculty of Informatics
Northfields Avenue
Wollongong, NSW 2522
Australia
Email: win@uow.edu.au

Prof. Nilmini Wickramasinghe
Epworth Chair Health Information Management
RMIT University
College of Business
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne, VIC 3001
Australia
E-mail: nilmini.wickramasinghe@rmit.edu.au

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the names of the Guest Editors

Call for Papers: Health Policy and Technology

Health Policy and Technology (HPT), a new journal from the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM), has been launched in March 2012 as a cross-disciplinary journal, which will focus on past, present and future health policy and the role of technology in clinical and non-clinical national and international health environments. HPT is published on the FPM's behalf by Elsevier, a major international scientific, technical and medical publisher (see the Elsevier press release about the new journal).

The FPM continues to publish its first international publication, the Postgraduate Medical Journal, launched in 1925. HPT provides a further excellent way for the FPM to continue to make important national and international contributions to development of policy and practice within medicine and related disciplines. The aim of the FPM in establishing this new international journal is to publish relevant, timely and accessible articles and commentaries to support policy-makers, health professionals, health technology providers, patient groups and academia interested in health policy and technology.

Topics covered by HPT will include

- Health technology, including drug discovery, diagnostics, medicines, devices, therapeutic delivery and eHealth systems
- Cross-national comparisons on health policy using evidence-based approaches
- National studies on health policy to determine the outcomes of technology-driven initiatives
- Cross-border eHealth including health tourism
- The digital divide in mobility, access and affordability of healthcare
- Health technology assessment (HTA) methods and tools for evaluating the effectiveness of clinical and non-clinical health technologies
- Health and eHealth indicators and benchmarks (measure/metrics) for understanding the adoption and diffusion of health technologies
- Health and eHealth models and frameworks to support policy-makers and other stakeholders in decision-making
- Stakeholder engagement with health technologies (clinical and patient/citizen buy-in)
- Regulation and health economics

For more information about the new journal go to: http://www.healthpolicyandtechnology.org

Call for Papers for a Special Section of Translational Behavioral Medicine: Practice, Policy, Research: Smartphones, Sensors, and Social Networks: A New Age of Health Behavior Change

Submission Deadline November 30, 2012

For submission information: http://www.springer.com/medicine/journal/13142

Traditional health behavior change interventions have long been limited by high expense, patient burden, and poor adherence. As health professionals, our access to intervene upon patients’ behavior is constrained by current models of health care which limit care provision to face-to-face visits provided on a weekly schedule or less frequently. Limited access to patients limits our ability to gain an accurate understanding of the antecedents and consequences of behavior, and to intervene in the moments when patients most need help. Computing technology including mobile phones, sensors, and online social networks – by being available in real time – are being explored as ways to enhance our ability to understand health behavior and more effectively intervene upon it. mHealth, the application of mobile technology to health, has reached its tipping point. A rapidly growing body of research evidence demonstrates the efficacy of mHealth approaches across a wide range of conditions, populations, and settings. mHealth has also attracted a parallel explosion of industry attention. An extremely diverse group of companies are capitalizing on the mHealth market, which is projected to reach $23 billion in revenues by 2017. Sensing technologies are also rapidly being developed to gather behavioral, physiological, and contextual data that can then be used to predict behavior or deliver “just-in-time” interventions. Finally, online social networking, a service that allows individuals to interact and communicate with other users without geographical, physical, or logistical barriers has now been used for health surveillance, disseminating information and innovations, and health behavior intervention. The potential of these technologies to impact health behavior change has yet to be fully realized. The purpose of this special issue is to draw papers from academicians, clinicians, and industry professionals who are developing, testing, and/or researching the efficacy of these technologies for health behavior change.

Given that opportunities for academic-industry communication and collaboration have been too infrequent, we have seen relatively limited translation of evidence-based mHealth approaches into the real-world settings that are largely served by industry. We suspect that collaboration between industry and the research community might accelerate the growth of the mHealth market and improve the health of patients and populations. There are important barriers to such collaborations which we hope are explored and discussed further in this special issue. We hope to attract high quality contributions relating to the opportunities and challenges associated with stimulating academic-industry partnerships and creating evidence-based technology-based approaches to health behavior change. We acknowledge differences in the type of data that is collected by academics and industry professionals and aim to be a forum for both types of data, while acknowledging the strengths and limitations of each. Traditional research reports are sought, but also case studies characterizing real world translation efforts, implementation challenges, and academic-industry partnerships are strongly encouraged. Additionally, synopses of practical tools and strategies, applications, and approaches are of interest. Selected manuscripts will be published together with commentaries in this special section of Translational Behavioral Medicine.

Editors of the Special Section:
Sherry Pagoto, PhD, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Gary Bennett, PhD, Duke University

Editor-in-Chief:
Bonnie Spring, PhD, Northwestern University

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine:Evaluation of Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in Health Care

Guest Editors:
Elske Ammenwerth, UMIT, Hall in Tirol, Austria
Nicolette de Keizer, University of Amsterdam, Dept Medical Informatics, The Netherlands
Michael Rigby, Keele University, U.K.
Pirkko Nykänen, Tampere University

Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) in Health Care have a long history going back to the 1970s, with recent reviews showing that their number and uptake increases. CDSS can support many different activities such as diagnosis, therapy, monitoring or prevention and are used in all kinds of medical domains such as chronic illness, acute care, primary care, and patient advice lines. CDSS may provide many different services such as access to knowledge, statistical calculations and individual adaptations, recommendations, reminders or alerts to different user groups including physicians and nurses but also addressing self-management by patients. In some areas, CDSS have been found to increase clinical performance and guidelines adherence, while evidence on improvement of patient outcome is still limited. There are even examples of negative impact. Overall, the number of published CDSS evaluation studies is still limited given their` rising uptake, and the evaluation design and/or reporting of the evaluation studies is often weak, which makes judgment of their cost-benefit ratio difficult.

The momentum surrounding CDSS is even more increasing with the more widespread implementation of electronic patient records enabling CDSS implementation; however health care providers and organizations and development agencies require more intensive evaluation and research for better informed investments, to ensure patient safety, and to recognize clinician anxieties as to their professional liability. Evidence from early CDSS deployments should be informing and guiding subsequent projects to ensure that ineffective approaches are not duplicated and early successes can be replicated and scaled. Building up such an evidence base requires reproducible and well designed evaluation studies of CDSS. Guidelines for evaluation of health informatics interventions in general and their reporting are available although these need to be adapted and extended for the specific case of CDSS evaluation. Also the updated EU Medical Device Directive now defines "medical” software a medical device. This has implications for the way CDSS are developed and evaluated. Safety for patients, users and others is a key aspect of the evaluation of CDSS in the context of the Medical Device Directive.

As with any aspect of healthcare, policies and practice should be firmly based on evidence, and informatics should be no exception. Evaluation of systems is a robust source of such evidence, provided the evaluation is scientific. Whilst generic guidelines now exist for health informatics systems evaluation, application within CDSS is limited, not least because of the methodological issues arising, especially for pilot studies preceding wider general roll-out. In particular, user populations may be dispersed and hard to reach, user profiles and patterns of use are important factors and patient (and organizational) outcomes are hard to track. This special issue will give opportunity to focus on these challenges.

Topics for the special issue
We are inviting people from health care, academia and industry to submit original articles or systematic reviews relevant to the following topics:

Case studies on evaluation of CDSS
Meta analyses or systematic reviews on CDSS
Methodology of CDSS evaluation
Verification, Validiation and testing of CDSS
Impact of CDSS
Costs of CDSS
CDSS and patient safety
Barriers and challenges to CDSS implementation and evaluation
User acceptance and usability of CDSS
Adoption of CDSS in health care environments
Issue of "brittleness” of CDSS
Quality indicators for CDSS
Certification of CDSS
Future of CDSS evaluation

Deadline of submissions:
Deadline for the submission of manuscripts is June 30th, 2012.

We advise all authors interested to contribute to this special issue to contact Elske Ammenwerth beforehand (contact data see below) to indicate the topic of the planned manuscript.

Instruction for authors:
Please consult the Guide for Authors of AIIM available at the journal homepage at: http://ees.elsevier.com/aiim/

The length of manuscripts should not exceed 20 – 25 manuscript pages (1.5-spaced lines).

When submitting the paper, please use the Electronic Manuscript Submission at http://ees.elsevier.com/aiim/

Clearly indicate that it is a submission to the special issue by adding "Special Issue: CDSS Evaluation” to the title of the manuscript.

All papers are refereed through an international peer review process by at least three reviewers.

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine carries no page charges.

The corresponding author, at no cost, will be provided with a PDF file of the article via e-mail or, alternatively, 25 free paper offprints. See instructions for authors for details.

Contact:
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elske Ammenwerth
Eduard Wallnöfer Zentrum 1
UMIT – University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology
Institute of Medical Informatics
6060 Hall in Tyrol
Austria
Mail elske.ammenwerth@umit.athttp://iig.umit.at

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the European Journal for Biomedical Informatics: Standards and Solutions for eHealth Interoperability

The European Journal for Biomedical Informatics (EJBI – http://www.ejbi.eu), an official journal of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI), seeks papers for a special issue on Standards and Solutions for eHealth Interoperability.

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Instructions for Authors (http://www.ejbi.eu/editorial/instructions.html ) and sent electronically to manuscripts[at]ejbi.org EJBI asks for papers in English version, which will be reviewed, and simultaneously the same manuscript translated into at least one other official European language. The deadline for submissions is June 15 , 2012.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Applied Ergonomics: Warnings

Christopher B. Mayhorn, North Carolina State University
Kenneth R. Laughery, Rice University
Michael S. Wogalter, North Carolina State University

Manuscripts are being solicited for a special issue of the Applied Ergonomics on Warnings to be published late 2013.

Theme of the Special Issue

Warnings are used to communicate hazard and risk information to people as a means of preventing accidents and injury. Since the mid 1980s, warning research has undergone tremendous growth in defining the factors that determine whether a warning will or will not be effective. Research has begun to evaluate early and intermediate stages of processing necessary for behavior change (e.g., tests of attention and comprehension), using new technologies and methodologies (e.g., virtual reality and behavioral paradigms), or using assessments of perceptions of risk and hazard. However, there is still a great need for new approaches and research to fill gaps in knowledge in this important area. While it is clear that warnings can be effective in increasing safe behavior in some situations and with some persons, their use remains controversial. Most research and discussions on warnings issues have been presented at conferences and in proceedings, but have not enjoyed wide dissemination in journal publications. As a result, this information has not reached individuals who might be able to use it in practice and research. The purpose of the Special Issue on Warnings in Applied Ergonomics is twofold. First, the Special Issue should make available to academics and practitioners, the state-of-the-art of warnings research and theory. Second, it should serve as a bridge between warnings research and other fields that relate to safety perceptions and behavior.

The co-editors of the Special Issue take a broad view of the area of warnings and they anticipate receiving research articles that address a range of topics. Manuscripts of particular interest might include (but are not limited to):

High quality empirical research applied to areas such as medicine, transportation, workplace safety, public information signage, security, or consumer products.

Theoretical contributions (possibly models) that would integrate and assess existing research in areas such as receiver characteristics (e.g., personality, age, etc.) or delivery modality (e.g., auditory, olfactory, etc.). Cross-cultural topics are especially important given the international readership of Applied Ergonomics.

Studies that address general warnings design and system integration that influence the effectiveness of warning labels on or accompanying consumer products (e.g., their display in owner’s manuals).

Research that includes practitioner case studies that describe domain specific situations where warnings are/are not effective. For example, research might investigate the role of warnings in the media (e.g., in advertisements, public service announcements, or on the web).

New approaches in research including methodological and technological advances to measuring and predicting compliance.

Work that explores non-design influences on warning effectiveness (e.g., personal, social, time, and stress characteristics or effects).

Forensic investigations that measure aspects of warnings and risk communications.

Manuscripts are due August 3, 2012. For further information and manuscript-format instructions, please visit http://ees.elsevier.com/jerg/ or contact any co-editor. Those wishing to submit a manuscript should contact the co-editors as soon as possible as there are specific instructions for identifying manuscripts for this Special Issue within the Elsevier Editorial System. Corresponding authors of accepted manuscripts will receive a printed copy of the special issue.

The co-editors are also soliciting qualified individuals to review submitted manuscripts. If interested, please contact Chris Mayhorn.

Christopher B. Mayhorn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, North Carolina State University
Email: Chris_mayhorn@ncsu.edu
Telephone: (919) 513-4856

Call for Papers for a Special Section of Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Patient-Centered E-Health

Guest Editors: Vance Wilson and Diane Strong, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Patient-Centered E-Health (PCEH) is an emerging discipline that would benefit from receiving much more research attention. As a starting point, we use Wilson’s (2009) definition of PCEH as the combination of three themes:

Patient-focus: PCEH applications are developed primarily based on needs and perspectives of patients.
Patient-activity: PCEH application designs assume that patients can participate meaningfully in providing and consuming information about, and of interest to, them.
Patient-empowerment: PCEH applications assume that patients want to, and are able to, control far-ranging aspects of their health care via a PCEH application.

Although e-health applications have become common, most applications focus on the needs of healthcare providers and organizations, rather than the e-health services that patients actually desire. This is not surprising because most Health IT and health and medical informatics research has necessarily started with the development and integration of electronic records and related systems, rather than delivering e-health to patients.

Our objectives in creating this special section are to explore, clarify, and expand the emerging PCEH field. We are soliciting papers from all research perspectives and disciplines and from all parts of the world.

Conventional research articles are welcome, as are submissions that support research and researchers, a key mission of the CAIS Information Systems and Healthcare Department (Wilson, 2004). We specifically invite submissions in the following areas.

Submissions of PCEH Research

Conceptual articles, including those that build on, critique, or replace the working definition of PCEH presented by Wilson (2009)
Review articles assessing the status or trajectory of PCEH research
Application of theories, methods, design principles, and/or practices of user-centered design and other relevant disciplines to the PCEH context
Qualitative and quantitative empirical studies of PCEH
Design research
Case studies
Teaching cases

Submissions Supporting PCEH Research and Researchers

Instrument development and adaptation of instruments to the PCEH context
Literature reviews and annotated bibliographies
Tutorials related to PCEH
Panel discussions related to PCEH
Timetable

Submit abstract for comment by June 30, 2012 (recommended but not required)
Submit paper by October 1, 2012
Reviews returned to authors by November 10, 2012
Revise and resubmit by January 7, 2013*
Final decisions by February 11, 2013*
Special section papers published during March 2013*

*Papers that are not revised and returned by January 7, 2013 or are not accepted for publication by February 11, 2013 will be invited to continue in the review process for publication within the Information Systems and Healthcare Department of CAIS.

Review Process: Papers will have two rounds of peer review by scholars with knowledge of, and interest in, e health. The first round will provide developmental guidance for improving those papers that show potential to be accepted for the special section. Final selections for the Special Section will be made from the second-round submissions.

Submission Instructions: Submissions to the special section will be handled outside the CAIS ScholarOne review system. All submissions should be delivered in MSWord format, following APA guidelines. Submit as an email attachment to vancewilson@gmail.com.

References

Wilson, E. V. (2004). Editorial statement: Information systems and healthcare department. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 13(27), 456-458
Wilson, E. V. (2009). Patient-Centered E-Health. Hershey, PA, IGI Publications

Call for Papers for a Theme Issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research: Internet of Things: Towards a Mobile and Ubiquitous Healthcare and Prevention

The Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) is the leading international peer-reviewed and open access journal dealing with issues related to health, health care and medicine in the Internet age.

JMIR is the most cited journal on medical informatics, according to the Thompson Reuters Journal Citation Reports (JCR) index, with an Impact Factor of 4.7.

The evolution of the Internet towards the Future Internet with IPv6, Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks (e.g. 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi), mobile computing (e.g. smart phones, tablets), as well as the capabilities for global and uniqueness identification of objects (e.g. RFID, NFC), are making it feasible to identify, sense, locate, and connect people, machines, devices and everyday equipment.

These new capabilities to link Internet with everyday devices, forms of identification and communication among people and things, and exploitation of data capture, define the so-called Internet of things. This is opening an opportunity not only to extend the current e-Health approaches to a more pervasive and mobile healthcare prevention, by connecting citizens’/patients’ clinical and everyday devices to the Internet, but also to interconnect them with clinical platforms through the advantages from technologies such as smart clinical devices and wireless technologies. Furthermore, new identification and tracking solutions are being defined for hospital equipment, and new smart knowledge-based algorithms are developed to support personalized decision-making in the health and home care sector. Additionally, their applications in supplementary sectors such as pharmaceutical, in order to improve drug compliance and avoid adverse drugs reactions.

The objective of this issue is to report high quality research on recent advances developed in various aspects of e-health, more specifically the state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies, and systems in the design, development, deployment, and innovative use of the technologies, tools, and applications from the Future Internet of Things, People and Services for healthcare and prevention. We invite authors to submit their original papers and contributions addressing (but not limited to) the following topics:

-- Medical communications, protocols, standards and interoperability
-- Personal healthcare informatics solutions
-- Wireless Sensor Networks technologies for e-Health (e.g. 6LoWPAN/Bluetooth/WiFi)
-- Sensor technologies for e-Health and personal healthcare (e.g. ISO/IEEE 11073)
-- Identification technologies for e-Health, surgical and medical systems (e.g. QR/RFID/NFC)
- Wearable and continuous health monitoring
-- e-Health service management (e.g. Web of Things)
-- Elderly homecare, Tele-health, and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
-- Usability and HCI interfaces based on mobile computing and the Internet of Things
-- Personal Health Record, Information Systems, and Knowledge-Based Solutions
-- Global Healthcare and Citizens’ Prevention
-- Medication adherence, clinical guideline compliance and pharmaceutical applications
-- Tools and techniques to design, implement, and deploy IoT solutions
-- Mobile computing and Ubiquitous Healthcare applications
-- Living labs and field trials with the Internet of Things technologies

SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Manuscripts must be prepared in accordance with the format and instructions hereto defined in the (www.jmir.org/cms/view/Instructions_for_Authors:Instructions_for_Authors_of_JMIR), and submitted through the Web-Based Manuscript Submission and Tracking System. When submitting, select section “Theme Issue on Internet of Things: Towards Mobile and Ubiquitous Healthcare and Prevention”, in the manuscript type to indicate that the paper is intended for this theme issue.

An OPEN CALL for submissions is issued. In addition, the best papers from the International Workshop on Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT) will be invited to submit a manuscript. For further information, see www.esiot.com.

All contributions will be peer reviewed. As JMIR is an open access journal, authors publish their work under a creative commons license and keep the copyright. Articles will be freely accessible on the JMIR site and will be available in open access archives such as Pubmedcentral.gov.

These articles will be indexed in more than 20 bibliographic databases and abstracting services, including Medline, CINAHL, Information Science Abstracts, INSPEC (Institution of Electrical Engineers), Communication Abstracts, The Informed Librarian Online, LISA, EMBASE, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, PsycINFO, LISTA (Library / Information Sciences & Technology Abstracts), ASSIA (Applied Social Sciences Index and Abstracts) database, CSA Social Services Abstracts database, Pubmed Central, and other databases and abstraction services. Publication costs (APF: article processing fee) for copyediting, and typesetting must be covered by the authors.

TIMELINE AND DEADLINES
-- DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: December 15th, 2012
-- PUBLICATION: The publication is scheduled to end 2013/beginning 2014

EDITOR-in-Chief
Gunther Eysenbach MD, MPH, FACMI.
Editor & Publisher, Journal of Medical Internet Research
University Health Network, Toronto, Canada

RECOMMENDATION: before submit your paper be awareness that JMIR is not an engineering journal, and it will not be published overly technical papers with no real-live application and a thorough evaluation. Therefore, it is required high-quality research articles with technical background, but this also should have a health angle, and an evaluation in hospitals, clinics, living labs, patient‟s homes, residencies, or Ambient Assisted Living scenarios.

For further information, please contact the Guest Editors or the Editor-in-Chief

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Medical Data Streams

An Elsevier Journal

Many artificial intelligence researchers coming from different areas (data mining, machine learning, intelligent data analysis, pattern recognition, fuzzy logic, databases, etc.) design new approaches or adapt some of the traditional algorithms to data streams. In many medical applications different domain experts, e.g. physicians (would) benefit from the integration of the streaming medical data into decision support systems.

The goal of this special issue is to gather researchers who deal with artificial intelligence for data processing, data management and knowledge discovery in clinical scenarios where data is produced as a continuous stream.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 18 Jun 2012 *
Review notification: 18 Sept 2012
Revised submission: 18 Nov 2012
Second notification: 18 Dec 2012
Camera-ready submission: 18 Jan 2013

* earlier submissions are welcome; review process will start immediately after submission

RATIONALE

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine is facing a new challenge, created by the rapid growth in information science and technology in general and the complexity and volume of data in particular. Medical settings are using sensors and networks of health information systems to integrate data from patients, which requires storage, processing and management operators to enable further analysis and knowledge discovery. The main issue is that this data production often takes the form of high-speed continuous flows of data.

Medical domains include several settings where data is produced in a streaming fashion, such as anatomical and physiological sensors, or incidence records and health information systems. New services appear allowing users to store and track information about their medical history, to connect to and stream data from medical devices. Medical data streams have become widespread and call for development of intelligent tools for making use of these data. Decision support, alerting services, ambient intelligence, assisted leaving and personalization services are just few examples of expected uses of actionable knowledge extracted from medical data streams. All of them are characterized by the high-speed at which huge amounts of data are produced, and often require fast and accurate information retrieval and analysis, that can effectively support clinical decisions.

Dealing with continuous, and possibly infinite, flows of data require different approaches for data processing and management, and further machine learning and knowledge discovery. Particular issues to address include summarization of infinite data, incremental and decremental learning, resource-awareness, real-time monitoring of changes and recurrences, etc. This is an incremental task that requires incremental algorithms that integrate very large data bases in medical domains. Streaming artificial intelligence is increasingly important in the research community, as new algorithms are needed to process medical data in reasonable time.

Furthermore, medical domains introduce extra peculiarities to the problem. For example, health information systems now deal with heterogeneous data sources, possibly distributed across health-care institutions. Moreover, this data integration requirement yields privacy-preserving issues. At the same time, it forces the system to take time, resources, and costs into consideration. Currently, generic techniques for intelligent analysis and learning from streaming data include also processing and management techniques which are widely spread in the applied computing research community. Also, in the medical domain, technological issues of data collection and storage, access, integration, information fusion, etc are also widely studied in the health informatics research community. However, adoption and development of tailored techniques for medical stream mining and clinical decision support is still to come.

The goal of this special issue is to present cutting-edge research from experts in data stream processing interested in medical applications and medical domain experts interested in timely analysis of their data streams for clinical decision support.

TOPICS

Topics include but are not restricted to processing, managing and knowledge discovery for:
Anatomical or physiological sensor data streams
Data streams in health-care
Integrating biomedical signals and electronic health records
Integrated health information data streams
Adaptive health information systems
Medical data stream models
Mobile and ubiquitous medical data streams
Data quality in medical data streams
Data streams integration in intensive care units
Remote monitoring of patients in hospital and ambulatory settings
Process mining from medical data streams
Case reports of medical scenarios where data is produced in a stream
Real-time and real-world applications using streaming medical data
Languages and ontologies for medical stream query
Integration with real-time enactment of clinical guidelines
Privacy and security issues in medical data streams

SPECIAL ISSUE GUEST EDITORS

Pedro Pereira Rodrigues - LIAAD & Faculty of Medicine, University of Porto, Portugal
Mykola Pechenizkiy - Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Mohamed Medhat Gaber - University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Carolyn McGregor - University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada
João Gama - LIAAd & Faculty of Economics, University of Porto, Portugal

PAPER FORMATTING, SUBMISSION AND REVIEWING

Authors should follow the guide to authors available at AIIM website to format their article. Please note that, for the initial submission, only PDF format of submissions is allowed. Papers to this special issue should be submitted by email to the guest editors at pprodrigues@med.up.pt and not via the online Elsevier Editorial System.

Each paper submission will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers. The quest editors will screen the submissions for eligibility and quality. Special issue articles should report on significant previously unpublished work.

We do invite authors to submit their revised and substantially extended workshop and conference papers. As a rule of thumb the journal paper submission should contain at least 30% of new previously unpublished material. Please indicate in your cover letter whether the journal paper submission is based on or extend substantially a previously published conference or workshop paper, in case of which a description of what is new must be clarified in the submission.

All papers accepted to the special issue are subject to the final approval by the Editor-in-Chief of AIIM journal. It is planned that the articles will appear in one of the issues of the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine Journal, edited and published by Elsevier, in 2013. AIIM typically has 9 issues per year.