Medical Ecosystem for Personalized Event-Based Surveillance

Special Topic Issue "Webscience in medicine"

2011-11-29T00:05:00.000-08:00

A Call for papers has been released for a special topic issue on Webscience in medicine. The special topic will appear within the Journal "Methods of information in Medicine".

MedEx 2011

2011-11-08T00:10:00.000-08:00

On October 28, 2011 the Second International Workshop on Webscience and Information Exchange (MedEx 2011) took place in Glasgow. The audience had the opportunity to learn more about the facets and research questions related to webscience in medicine and healthcare. Three full papers and five position papers were presented covering a wide spectrum of research problems in medical natural language processing and webscience. Among others, two papers from the M-Eco context have been introduced.
In her keynote, Wendy Chapman provided insights into her vision of enabling collaboration and sharing in clinical natural language processing. The second keynote was held by Sophia Ananiadou on advances of biomedical text mining for semantic search. The position papers provided lots of discussion points so that at the end of the day all of the presenters got interesting feedback.
Talks and short papers are available on the workshop website

Surveillance Workshop at GMDS

2011-09-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

On September 28, 2011, the workshop "From indicator-based to event-based surveillance" took place in conjunction with the GMDS Jahrestagung in Mainz. We had four interesting presentations. Tim Eckmanns gave an overview on indicator- and event based systems and showed the delays in traditional reporting on the EHEC outbreak in 2011. Jas Mantero from ECDC spoke about the event-based surveillace as performed by ECDC. Jens Linge from JRC presented the MediSys System as an example of an event-based system. Kerstin Denecke (L3S) introduced the M-Eco projet. The audience was very interested in the topic and asked motivating questions. All in all a nice workshop in the sunny city of Mainz.

2011-09-26T20:19:00.000-07:00

Nelson Award Nominee @ Hypertext 2011

We were pleased to be nominated for the Nelson Award at Hypertext 2011 for our paper entitled, A Transfer Approach to Detecting Disease Reporting Events in Blog Social Media, Avaré Stewart, et.al.

We continue our work of tackling the burden of manually labelling data and address the problems associated with building a supervised learner to classify frequently evolving, and variable blog content. We automatically classify outbreak reports to train a supervised learner, and the knowledge acquired from the learning process is then transferred to the task of classifying blogs.

For more details about our work, please refer to the following link: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1996001

Second M-Eco User Workshop

2011-07-04T01:40:00.000-07:00

On May 26, the second M-Eco user workshop took place. Again, representatives of WHO, INVS, ECDC as well as from the Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance Oragnisation attended the meeting. he consortium presented the first prototype and several evaluation experiments have been performed. The user feedback will be considered in the secon phase of the project.

Workshop at GMDS conference

2011-06-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

The M-Eco consortium will held a workshop on the topic "From indicator-based to event-based surveillance" at the Annual Meeting of the German Sociaty of Medical Informatics and Society of Epidemiology. The workshop will be held on September 28 at the Johannes-Gutenberg Universität in Mainz. More details are available:
here

Project Meeting in Hannover!

2011-03-28T00:31:00.000-07:00

From March 21-22, we met for another project meeting at NLGA in Hannover. We mainly prepared for the review, discussed integration issues and prepared for the user evaluation.

Another interesting day at CeBIT

2011-03-03T23:43:00.000-08:00

Today we had a couple of political visitors at our booth, among them Mrs. Wanka from the Niedersächsischen Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur and Mr. Busemann, the Justizminister of Lower Saxony.

M-Eco at CeBIT

2011-03-02T09:47:00.001-08:00

M-Eco is presented at CeBIT these days. We already attracted some media interest. NDR made an interview which will be broadcasted in the next days. SAT 1 already sent a broadcast from the M-Eco booth today. Some articles also appeared about the M-Eco CeBIT presentation:

CeBIT News

Gesundheits-News.de

SAT.1 Broadcasting

M-Eco presented results at IMED

2011-02-10T01:31:00.000-08:00

From February 4-7, 2011, the International Meeting on Infectious Diseases took place in Vienna. The M-Eco project was presenting latest research in five poster. One poster introduced the M-Eco project. A second one dealt with the open challenges for Epidemic Intelligence and the various types of events that need to be considered. The work on personalization was shown on a third poster. The other two posters show evaluation results or user assessments, respectively. While on one poster the usefulness of clustering results was assessed, the other poster provided details on a study how fast social media is compared to traditional reporting. This question was assessed with a Norovirus outbreak in Oldenburg in August 2010. Many people were interested in the project ideas and posters and we had some interesting discussions.

Second MedEx Workshop - Call for papers

2011-01-14T04:43:00.000-08:00

The Second International Workshop on Web Science and Information Exchange in the Medical Web (MedEx 2011) will again be co-located with the 20th World Wide Web Conference 2011, March 28, 2011 (half day), Hyderabad, India. For more details on the call and workshop objectives see: http://meco-project.eu/medex2011

Danish press reports about M-Eco

2011-01-12T09:28:00.001-08:00

The danish press currently reports about the M-Eco project. For example: Version 2, UgensErhverv, ComOn, Nordjyske, DR P4 nordjylland, and Dagens Medicin.

First project year is over!

2010-12-22T11:27:00.000-08:00

It was a very exciting and sucessful first project year for M-Eco. The advisory board members and user institutions helped us in collecting requirements for improved Epidemic Intelligence. The project ideas and first approaches have been presented in international conferences and other events (MedEX Workshop, November of Science, etc.) which led to an increased visibility of the project. The feedback was great and people are curious about the M-Eco approach.

We are looking forward to
- The second User Workshop in May 2011,
- to provide access to the first M.Eco System prototype in January 2011.
- to present the project at IMED 2011 ,
- to show the demonstrator at CeBIT 2011,
- .... and to lots of other interesting opportunities and challenges.

Thanks to my colleagues and project team members for this interesting year of collaboration.
All the best for you and your families! I wish you are Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

eHealth conference 2010 (by Marco)

2010-12-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

During the eHealth conference 2010 in Casablanca (Marocco) I presented the work conducted so far in the medical domain. The reasons of our work is that recent pandemics such as Swine Flu, have caused concern for public health officials. Given the ever increasing pace at which infectious diseases can spread globally, officials must be prepared to react sooner and with greater epidemic intelligence gathering capabilities. However, state-of-the-art systems for Epidemic Intelligence have not kept the pace with the growing need for more robust public health event detection.
During the exposition, I presented what LUH proposes: an approach that shifts the paradigm for how public health events are detected. Instead of manually enumerating linguistic patterns to detect public health events in human language text (pattern matching). We propose the use of a statistical approach, which instead learns the patterns of public health events in an automatic or unsupervised way.
I got interesting comments both from Erik van der Goot (one of the original developers of MediSys), and from Maurice Mars (MBChB, MD, Professor and Head of the Department of TeleHealth at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa) about our approach.
I was also interviewed together with the official chair of the conference, Dr. Patty Kostkova, for Medi1Sat.

Meeting in Berlin

2010-12-03T07:16:00.000-08:00

We just finished yet another productive meeting. This time, we had the chance to meet in snowy and cold Berlin and to visit Robert-Koch Institute. Main discussion points were related to the first prototype, integration and evaluation. So, everything is prepared to release the first prototype at the beginning of 2011!

How can the Social Web support in health care?

2010-11-18T22:54:00.000-08:00

This question was addressed by three presentations within a workshop organized by L3S and the Public Health Department of Lower Saxony. Dr. Dreesman from NLGA presented in his talk current problems of reporting in public health and how the medical web could be used for early detection of potential health threats. Dr. Seidel from the Medical School in Hannover introduced means to empower patients by the medical web. Mr. Horak, founder of DocInsider GmbH, showed trends of the last years of internet usage within the context of retrieving health information. The three speakers discussed together with the audience current challenges and limitations of using the Internet for supporting health care and empowering patients. A conclusion of the session is: The Web can support the various public health actors. It is still unclear to what extent and technical challenges still need to be addressed.

M-Eco @ "November der Wissenschaft"

2010-11-07T03:44:00.000-08:00

Feel free to join us, on November 16, 4-5.30 pm at L3S Research Center, Appelstraße 9a, Hannover!

One week ago, in Hannover opened the "November of Science". All over the city and every day various institutes open their doors, and invite interested people to talks, discussions, workshops etc. The M-Eco consortium is also organizing one session on Social Media and its opportunities and challanges for healthcare. We will have a session with three invited speakers. One of them is Johannes Dreesman from our M-Eco consortium who will talk about the Medical Web in the context of early detection of disease outbreaks. Dr. Gabriele Seidel from the Medical School in Hannover will rather focus on the patient and how they can benefit from the Medical Web. A third speaker, Ingo Horak, will enlighten this topic from a company point of view.
For more details look here.

Neues Frühwarnsystem für Pandemien - Article in "Deutsches Ärzteblatt"

2010-09-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

Hannover – Die Europäische Union fördert ein Forschungsvorhaben zur Bekämpfung gefährlicher Krankheiten der Leibniz Universität mit zwei Millionen Euro. Im Rahmen des Projektes „Medical EcoSystem“ (M-Eco) wollen Wissenschaftler ein Frühwarnsystem für Pandemien auf der Basis von Internetforen, Online-Netzwerken und Blogs entwickeln.

Da sich Infektionskrankheiten der Universität zufolge nicht zuletzt durch den zunehmenden Flugverkehr schneller ausbreiten und jedes Jahr weitere Krankheitsbilder hinzukommen, müssen sich Gesundheitsorganisationen auf immer neue Herausforderungen einstellen. „Die einzige Methode, die Pandemien einzudämmen, ist das frühzeitige Erkennen kleinster Hinweise, gefolgt von einer schnellen Reaktion“, sagte Projektmitarbeiterin Avaré Stewart von der Leibniz Universität. Dabei könne das Internet Hilfe bieten. Ziel von M-Eco sei es deshalb, bestehende Frühwarnsysteme mit zusätzlichen Informationsquellen und Methoden zur frühzeitigen Erkennung von Krankheitsausbrüchen zu erweitern.

„Die Meldung, dass ein Patient eine hochgradig ansteckende Krankheit hat, erfolgt bislang ausschließlich über die Krankenhäuser an die jeweils lokal zuständigen Gesundheitsämter“, so Stewart. Dieses Meldesystem sei zwar gründlich, aber langsam. Onlinemedien, Weblogs, wissenschaftliche und nicht-wissenschaftliche Diskussionsforen sowie elektronische Kommunikation könnten hingegen ergänzende Informationen über das Auftreten von Krankheiten und deren Symptome liefern. „Ziel von M-Eco ist es daher, Internetinhalte zu nutzen, um Hinweise auf das gehäufte Auftreten von Infektionskrankheiten zu erhalten“, erklärte Stewart. © hil/aerzteblatt.de

Article published in Deutsches Ärzteblatt

First M-Eco Newsletter released!

2010-09-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

The first issue of the M-Eco newsletter is now available on the project website. It summarizes the collected User requirements and gives an overview on latest news and events. M-Eco Newsletter, 1st issue

M-Eco Press Release

2010-09-23T00:55:00.000-07:00

A note on the M-Eco project has been released through the "Informationsdienst Wissenschaft". Various local and national news agencies reported about M-Eco. A complete press review can be downloaded here.

That's project dissemination ;-)

2010-09-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

We managed to get a road sign with the name of our project ...

Flyer of the M-Eco Project

2010-09-03T04:53:00.000-07:00

We managed to create a nice first flyer with relevant project information. It can be downloaded here.

Project Meeting in Aalborg

2010-08-31T10:58:00.000-07:00

Nice weather and good discussions...We just finished our M-Eco project meeting in Aalborg. It was really interesting to see what every group has been done in the last few months. We had plenty of fruitful discussions, mainly on integration issues and work towards the first prototype. Also a first evaluation was performed.

Another source of project information...

2010-08-23T11:10:00.002-07:00

M-Eco is now also published as "case" at epractice.eu. Learn more here.

How could it look like?

2010-08-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

A first Mock-up for the M-Eco portal has been created reflecting the functionalities of the first prototype: Signal search - result presentation. Hopefully, real data can be search soon.

M-Eco @ Deutschlandfunk

2010-07-05T23:50:00.000-07:00

A radio interview at Deutschlandfunk with Tim Eckmanns (Robert Koch Institut, Berlin) and Lothar Kreienbrock (Medical School Hannover) dealt with current state and challenges in reporting of infectious diseases. They make clear that use of additional sources is crucial for early detection of disease outbreaks. The M-Eco project was mentioned as a current attempt to exploit Web 2.0 data for Epidemic Intelligence. The interview is available
here.

2010-06-14T04:42:00.000-07:00

M-Eco at LREC: We had the pleasure of presenting our work in the M-eco Project at The Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). LREC has become the major event on Language Resources (LRs) and Evaluation for Human Language Technologies (HLT). The goal of LREC is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art; explore new R&D directions and emerging trends; and exchange information regarding LRs and their applications. The conference was quite large - with many interesting topics and parallel sessions.

Our paper focused on how the structure of sentences in outbreak reports could be used to find relevant sentences in blogs. In fact there was an entire workshop devoted to this topic - BUCC - Building and Using Comparable Corpora. We learned a great deal about existing work as well as newly acquired projects in this area - and look forward to further collaboration and applying these ideas to the M-Eco project.

WWW Paper on "Detecting Epidemic Tendency by Mining Search Logs"

2010-05-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

There was a poster paper on detecting epidemic tendency at WWW.

Abstract:
We consider the problem of detecting epidemic tendency by mining search logs. We propose an algorithm based on clickthrough information to select epidemic related queries/terms. We adopt linear regression to model epidemic occurrences and
frequencies of epidemic related terms (ERTs) in search logs. The results show our algorithm is effective in finding ERTs which obtain a high correlation value with epidemic occurrences. We also find the proposed method performs better when combining
different ERTs than using single ERT.

Second M-Eco Project Meeting

2010-05-05T07:59:00.000-07:00

We just finished successfully the second M-Eco Project Meeting. There were lots of fruitful discussions on user requirements, graphical user interface and integration issues.
Because of all the work, we could not enjoy the beautiful Italian weather ;-), but at least we had a chance to enjoy a great dinner.

More information on WWW from Karun

2010-05-05T01:53:00.000-07:00

Karun summarizes his impressions of the WWW conference in the AAU blog: http://iwis.cs.aau.dk/www2010_conference

MedEx 2010 Workshop: Very Interesting Talks

2010-04-26T16:49:00.000-07:00

Today, the MedEx Workshop took place (see March 11). Wendy Hall from the University of Southhampton gave a very interesting talk about the evolution of the Web and Web Science.

After this, we had six talks. Two were given by M-Eco consortium members: Karun from AAU talked about how tags could be used in a recommender system for medical events and how poor tag information could be enriched. I presented our work on labeling victim-reporting sentences through a semi-supervised learning approach.
Another talk from Sebastian Klenk (University of Stuttgart) dealt with recommending people or contacts suffering from similar diseases or having similar medical conditions. Sam Stewart introduces their work on linking mailing lists threads to related PubMed information. Nancy Shepherd discussed the role of RSS in exchanging medical information. Finally, Svitlana Volcova presented her work on recognizinig animal disease-related events from unstructured Web documents. We had very fruitful discussions. Even discussion with co-authors who could not attend in person were possible via videoconferece.
Thanks to all participants!

2010-04-11T23:55:00.000-07:00

Crossing Over to Find a Needle in the Haystack?

Well, in case you have not been following, we are interesting in using medical blog user generated content for gathering facts about disease reporting events to support biosurveillance investigation.

This might seem similar to looking for a needle in a haystack, given the number of blogs and their different topics. However, we start tackling this with our Cross Domain Pattern Analysis.

We address the problem of automatically inferring disease reporting event patterns in blogs by using the sublanguage of outbreak reports. The overall goal is to align sentence structures in the outbreak reports with those in blogs. We are delighted to hear from you, for further information.

If you are at MedInfo 2010 join us in the talk, where we present these ideas. The talk is entitled:

Using ProMED-Mail and MedWorm Blogs for Cross-Domain Pattern Analysis in Epidemic Intelligence

M-Eco Overview Paper at MedInfo 2010

2010-03-22T14:09:00.000-07:00

A first overview on the project ideas will be presented at the World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics(MedInfo) in September 2010. The paper summarizes the main issues relevant to the project. You can find it here!

M-Eco at WWW 2010!

2010-03-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

The M-Eco project team will held the MedEx 2010 workshop on “Web Science and Information Exchange in the Medical Web” on April 26 2010 in Raleigh / North Carolina. A couple of interesting papers have been submitted and will be presented.

This workshop is devoted to the technologies for dealing with social- and multi media for medical information gathering and exchange. The advent of Medicine 2.0 is increasingly making the Web a more accepted source of information for the medical domain and is also exploited for discussing medical problems and treatments. Health organizations monitor online news repositories and web pages for relevant data on epidemiological events. Physicians learn about the experiences of their colleagues provided through social media platforms: such as weblogs, or forums. Moreover, patients can not only search for information, but also provide information about their experiences.

The aim of the workshop is to encourage researchers from the medical web science community to present novel issues and techniques related to medical intelligence (especially in the context of web science). This workshop is intended to address different aspects related to the problem of accessing, exchanging, processing, filtering and making applications that rely upon health related Web information more reliable and adaptable. The workshop will serve as a forum for the confluence of new and multidisciplinary ideas that will help to drive research in the areas of medical web text and data mining.

For more information we refer to http://www.l3s.de/medex2010 .

M-Eco Consortium meets Public Health Officials

2010-02-28T23:48:00.000-08:00

After a two-day Kick-Off Meeting, the first M-Eco User Workshop took place. Representatives from several health organiziations, as well as the M-Eco consortium, came together to discuss the major requirements and challenges for systems devoted to the early detection of public health threats.

The objectives of the M-Eco workshop on User Requirements and Experiences with Event-Based Surveillance Systems were three-fold:

Collecting requirements from Users,
Understanding the daily operations and challenges in the domain of Epidemic Intelligence, and
Learning more about related projects.

Johannes Schnitzler from the World Health Organization Europe (Geneva) presented an international view on health surveillance. Philippe Barboza (Institut de Veille Sanitaire, Paris), Mike Barker (Health Protection Agency, UK) and Edward Velasco (Robert Koch Institut, Berlin) provided insights at a na-tional level, focusing on issues relevant for their countries. Also, a representative of a local health or-ganization, Johannes Dreesmann from Niedersächsisches Landesgesundheitsamt attended the work-shop. On the EU-level, Jas Mantero from the European Center of Disease Control (Stockholm) talked about the systems used by the EU for surveillance. Additionally, Roman Yangarber (University of Helsinki) and Alexander Krämer (University of Bielefeld) presented their work related to the M-Eco project. The collected requirements will be the basis for concrete system development within the M-Eco project.

2010-02-24T03:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the M-Eco Project...

The health of a society’s individuals is not isolated from the natural environment. Symbiotically we influence and are influenced by the ecosystem.

Public health officials are faced with new challenges for outbreak alert and response due to the continuous emergence of infectious diseases and their contributing factors such as demographic change, or globalization. Only the early detection of disease activity, followed by a rapid response, can reduce the impact of epidemics. Conflictingly, the time with which information propagates through the traditional channels, can undermine time-sensitive strategies. Faced with these limitations, the M-Eco project will help to complement traditional systems with additional approaches for the early detection of emerging threats.

Technologies related to the development of the Medicine 2.0, are rapidly changing the possibilities to assess and provide health information. These days, online media, weblogs, scientific and non-scientific discussion forums and direct electronic communication provide complements to the traditional reporting mechanisms. Importantly, the publication barrier for these types of user-generated content is much lower. In light of this, electronic media and discussion groups today are increasingly recognised as valuable sources of public health alerts. Awareness of diseases achieved through first-hand-observations and word of mouth can influence people's behaviour in a way that the risk of an outbreak and the number of infected people is reduced.