Semantic interoperability requires the use of standards, not only for Electronic Health Record (EHR) data to be transferred and structurally mapped into a receiving repository, but also for the clinical content of the EHR to be interpreted in conformity with the original meanings intended by its authors. Accurate and complete clinical documentation, faithful to the patient’s situation, and interoperability between systems, require widespread and dependable access to published and maintained collections of coherent and quality-assured semantic resources, including models such as (...) archetypes and templates that would (1) provide clinical context, (2) be mapped to interoperability standards for EHR data, (3) be linked to well specified, multi-lingual terminology value sets, and (4) be derived from high quality ontologies. Wide-scale engagement with professional bodies, globally, is needed to develop these clinical information standards. (shrink)

Logic-Based Therapy, a modality of Philosophical Counselling, believes that humans suffer because of their faulty thinking patterns. It suggests antidotal reasoning and uplifting philosophies that help counselees refute these thinking patterns and adopt a healthier way of life. This paper investigates the possibility of using the influential ideologies found in Naruto in the framework of LBT, as suitable uplifting philosophies. The anime has been interpreted through the lens of Conversational Model Therapy, Japanese values, violence studies, etc.; there is an unavailability (...) of research on its connection with philosophical counselling. This paper aims to fill the gap by reviewing literature on concepts in counselling, LBT, and philosophical counseling. It also attempts at providing behavioral exercises for the readers to implement in their own life. (shrink)

. Effective text region extraction and binarization of image embedded text documents on mobile devices having limited computational resources is an open research problem. In this paper, we present one such technique for preprocessing images captured with built-in cameras of handheld devices with an aim of developing an efficient Business Card Reader. At first, the card image is processed for isolating foreground components. These foreground components are classified as either text or non-text using different feature descriptors of texts and images. (...) The non-text components are removed and the textual ones are binarized with a fast adaptive algorithm. Specifically, we propose new techniques for foreground component isolation, text extraction and binarization of text regions from camera captured business card images. Experiments with business card images of various resolutions show that the present technique yields better accuracy and involves low computational overhead in comparison with the state-of-the-art. We achieve optimum text/non-text separation performance with images of resolution 800×600 pixels with an average recall rate of 93.90% and a precision rate of 96.84%. It involves a peak memory consumption of 0.68 MB and processing time of 0.102 seconds on a moderately powerful notebook, and 4 seconds of processing time on a PDA. (shrink)

This paper makes attempts to argue that language inevitably affects emotions, and philosophical therapy is possible through deconstruction of language; here the horizon of language is extended not only to its traditional usage, but also as thoughts. Emotions are perceived through our conditioned thoughts and hence by an analysis of the latter, the former will become clearer. The paper is a literature review of a few books by Jiddu Krishnamurti, a contemporary Indian Philosopher; and a book on Buddhist logic. Since (...) the paper is a literature review, it does not have any practical claim to support the points and hence is a speculative approach towards therapy. The paper also does not extend its claims to psychological views on language, rather restricts itself to purely philosophical approach. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Page 49-68, Spring 2022.

As health systems around the world turn towards highly distributed, specialized and cooperative structures to increase quality and safety of care as well as efficiency and efficacy of delivery processes, there is a growing need for supporting communication and collaboration of all parties involved with advanced ICT solutions. The Electronic Health Record (EHR) provides the information platform which is maturing towards the eHealth core application. To meet the requirements for sustainable, semantically interoperable, and trustworthy EHR solutions, different standards and different (...) national strategies have been established. The workshop summarizes the requirements for such advanced EHR systems and their underlying architecture, presents different strategies and solutions advocated by corresponding protagonists, discusses pros and cons as well as harmonization and migration strategies for those approaches. It particularly highlights a turn towards ontology-driven architectures. (shrink)

The European Medical Information Framework project, funded through the IMI programme, has designed and implemented a federated platform to connect health data from a variety of sources across Europe, to facilitate large scale clinical and life sciences research. It enables approved users to analyse securely multiple, diverse, data via a single portal, thereby mediating research opportunities across a large quantity of research data. EMIF developed a code of practice to ensure the privacy protection of data subjects, protect the interests of (...) data sharing parties, comply with legislation and various organisational policies on data protection, uphold best practices in the protection of personal privacy and information governance, and eventually promote these best practices more widely. EMIF convened an Ethics Advisory Board, to provide feedback on its approach, platform, and the EcoP. The most important challenges the ECoP team faced were: how to define, control and monitor the purposes for which federated health data are used; the kinds of organisation that should be permitted to conduct permitted research; and how to monitor this. This manuscript explores those issues, offering the combined insights of the EAB and EMIF core ECoP team. For some issues, a consensus on how to approach them is proposed. For other issues, a singular approach may be premature but the challenges are summarised to help the community to debate the topic further. Arguably, the issues and their analyses have application beyond EMIF, to many research infrastructures connected to health data sources. (shrink)

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a (...) standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource. (shrink)

An Analytical Study of Four Nikayas. Dipak Kumar Barua. Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta 1971. xviii + 626 pp.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Social Teaching in Global PerspectiveRon MercierCatholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective Edited by Daniel Mcdonald, SJ Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2010. 218 pp. $26.00The collection of essays in Catholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective, the second in a Gregorian University series, responds to a question posed to its authors: “How can you reflect on your particular continent and its ‘culture’ in order to best apply... CST [Catholic social (...) teaching] in your area of the world?” (x). Although the responses of the various authors to that challenge are uneven, the deliberate emphasis on a cultural-critical approach makes this [End Page 211] volume noteworthy and a significant contribution to the discussions in the field.Thomas Hughson’s introductory essay frames the task provocatively. Exploring the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran on culture, he takes aim at the ways in which “common good” and “Catholic social teaching” too often serve as categorical realities, as if they had a universal and absolute meaning applicable to any concrete situation. He recasts CST by placing it in dialogue with contemporary currents in philosophy and social science and notes both the broader meaning and the fluidity of social justice within CST. He develops what he calls a “modified eudemonistic perspective... to highlight incompleteness in social justice and a common good taken by themselves” (25). This calls for a “reflexive culture,” along the lines of the “transcendental humanism” in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate. While the emphasis on “human flourishing” certainly has a long history in the tradition, Hughson’s approach empowers local communities to make CST their own as a mode of discerning what fosters or undermines human flourishing. For too long CST “has ignored how movement toward just social practice depends on two factors, reflexive culture ‘from above’ and popular culture ‘from within’ practicality” (22). This perspective links well with the insights and concerns of liberation theology, notably its ecclesiology, and helps clarify the meaning and potential of CST.Several essays in the volume pick up this theme even as they explore the many prisms through which one can understand “culture.” David Kaulemu reflects on the African situation in ways similar to Paulinus Odozor and Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, calling for “moral/cultural/spiritual efforts to accompany our political and economic reforms” (37). He explores cultural resources for and barriers to human flourishing in an African context. Agnes Brazal (East Asia) and Joseph Jadhav (India) write in a similar vein: Brazal on the relationship between the role of “harmony” in an East Asian world view and the fragmentation and hybridity engendered by globalization; Jadhav on the interplay between CST and local culture in an arid rural part of India, which has created possibilities for culturally transformative action. John Coleman’s rich and nuanced reflection on North American (especially US) culture underlines the challenges CST faces.Sandie Cornish and David Freeman (Australia) and Johan Verstraeten (EU) explore ecclesiological perspectives: how episcopal, religious, and lay groups have read “the signs of the times” in their area, though largely without a cultural-critical frame. Curiously, the volume avoids any cultural critique of the Church; the dialectic “from above” and “from below” remains ad extra, although Coleman does note how US bishops have frequently undercut their ability to engage culture by focusing narrowly on the institutional interests of the Church. [End Page 212]In sum, the volume advances the work of CST by reframing key concepts within a broader perspective, in particular one that invites voices “from below.” It exposes the reader, especially those familiar with CST, to contemporary dialogues on the ethical significance of “culture” while deepening the value of CST for contemporary reflection. Contributions from Latin America and Eastern Europe, though, would have strengthened the volume.Ron MercierSt. Louis UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)