No Arabic abstract
Outpatient clinics often run behind schedule due to patients who arrive late or appointments that run longer than expected. We sought to develop a generalizable method that would allow healthcare providers to diagnose problems in workflow that disrupt the schedule on any given provider clinic day. We use a constraint optimization problem to identify the least number of appointment modifications that make the rest of the schedule run on-time. We apply this method to an outpatient clinic at Vanderbilt. For patient seen in this clinic between March 27, 2017 and April 21, 2017, long cycle times tended to affect the overall schedule more than late patients. Results from this workflow diagnosis method could be used to inform interventions to help clinics run smoothly, thus decreasing patient wait times and increasing provider utilization.
Approximately over 50 million people worldwide suffer from epilepsy. Traditional diagnosis of epilepsy relies on tedious visual screening by highly trained clinicians from lengthy EEG recording that contains the presence of seizure (ictal) activities. Nowadays, there are many automatic systems that can recognize seizure-related EEG signals to help the diagnosis. However, it is very costly and inconvenient to obtain long-term EEG data with seizure activities, especially in areas short of medical resources. We demonstrate in this paper that we can use the interictal scalp EEG data, which is much easier to collect than the ictal data, to automatically diagnose whether a person is epileptic. In our automated EEG recognition system, we extract three classes of features from the EEG data and build Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNNs) fed with these features. We optimize the feature extraction parameters and combine these PNNs through a voting mechanism. As a result, our system achieves an impressive 94.07% accuracy, which is very close to reported human recognition accuracy by experienced medical professionals.
It is common practice to partition complex workflows into separate channels in order to speed up their completion times. When this is done within a distributed environment, unavoidable fluctuations make individual realizations depart from the expected average gains. We present a method for breaking any complex workflow into several workloads in such a way that once their outputs are joined, their full completion takes less time and exhibit smaller variance than when running in only one channel. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in two different scenarios; the optimization of a convex function and the transmission of a large computer file over the Internet.
Data from complex modern astronomical instruments often consist of a large number of different science and calibration files, and their reduction requires a variety of software tools. The execution chain of the tools represents a complex workflow that needs to be tuned and supervised, often by individual researchers that are not necessarily experts for any specific instrument. The efficiency of data reduction can be improved by using automatic workflows to organise data and execute the sequence of data reduction steps. To realize such efficiency gains, we designed a system that allows intuitive representation, execution and modification of the data reduction workflow, and has facilities for inspection and interaction with the data. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has developed Reflex, an environment to automate data reduction workflows. Reflex is implemented as a package of customized components for the Kepler workflow engine. Kepler provides the graphical user interface to create an executable flowchart-like representation of the data reduction process. Key features of Reflex are a rule-based data organiser, infrastructure to re-use results, thorough book-keeping, data progeny tracking, interactive user interfaces, and a novel concept to exploit information created during data organisation for the workflow execution. Reflex includes novel concepts to increase the efficiency of astronomical data processing. While Reflex is a specific implementation of astronomical scientific workflows within the Kepler workflow engine, the overall design choices and methods can also be applied to other environments for running automated science workflows.
We investigated the possibility of using a machine-learning scheme in conjunction with commercial wearable EEG-devices for translating listeners subjective experience of music into scores that can be used for the automated annotation of music in popular on-demand streaming services. Based on the established -neuroscientifically sound- concepts of brainwave frequency bands, activation asymmetry index and cross-frequency-coupling (CFC), we introduce a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) system that automatically assigns a rating score to the listened song. Our research operated in two distinct stages: i) a generic feature engineering stage, in which features from signal-analytics were ranked and selected based on their ability to associate music induced perturbations in brainwaves with listeners appraisal of music. ii) a personalization stage, during which the efficiency of ex- treme learning machines (ELMs) is exploited so as to translate the derived pat- terns into a listeners score. Encouraging experimental results, from a pragmatic use of the system, are presented.
Recently, the diagnosability of {it stochastic discrete event systems} (SDESs) was investigated in the literature, and, the failure diagnosis considered was {it centralized}. In this paper, we propose an approach to {it decentralized} failure diagnosis of SDESs, where the stochastic system uses multiple local diagnosers to detect failures and each local diagnoser possesses its own information. In a way, the centralized failure diagnosis of SDESs can be viewed as a special case of the decentralized failure diagnosis presented in this paper with only one projection. The main contributions are as follows: (1) We formalize the notion of codiagnosability for stochastic automata, which means that a failure can be detected by at least one local stochastic diagnoser within a finite delay. (2) We construct a codiagnoser from a given stochastic automaton with multiple projections, and the codiagnoser associated with the local diagnosers is used to test codiagnosability condition of SDESs. (3) We deal with a number of basic properties of the codiagnoser. In particular, a necessary and sufficient condition for the codiagnosability of SDESs is presented. (4) We give a computing method in detail to check whether codiagnosability is violated. And (5) some examples are described to illustrate the applications of the codiagnosability and its computing method.