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This paper explores the implications that arise with the selection of specific sustainability evaluation tools. Sustainability evaluation tools are conceptualized in this paper as value articulating institutions and as such their choice is a far from a trivial matter. In fact their choice can entail various ethical and practical repercussions. However, in most cases the choice of the evaluation tool is made by the analyst(s) without taking into consideration the values of the affected stakeholders. By choosing the analytical tool the analyst essentially “subscribes to” and ultimately “enforces” a particular worldview as the legitimate yardstick to evaluate the sustainability of a particular project (or policy). Instead, this paper argues that the selection of evaluation tools should be consistent with the values of the affected stakeholders. With this in mind, different sustainability evaluation tools’ assumptions are critically reviewed and a number of suggestions that could facilitate the choice of the most appropriate tool according to the context of the sustainability evaluation are provided. It is expected that conscious evaluation tool selection, following the suggestions made in this paper, will reduce the risk of providing distorted sustainability evaluations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Malformations of the cerebral cortex are recognized as a common cause of developmental delay, neurological deficits, mental retardation and epilepsy. Currently, the diagnosis of cerebral cortical malformations is based on a subjective interpretation of neuroimaging characteristics of the cerebral gray matter and underlying white matter. There is no automated system for aiding the observer in making the diagnosis of a cortical malformation. In this paper a fuzzy rule-based system is proposed as a solution for this problem. The system collects the available expert knowledge about cortical malformations and assists the medical observer in arriving at a correct diagnosis. Moreover, the system allows the study of the influence of the various factors that take part in the decision. The evaluation of the system has been carried out by comparing the automated diagnostic algorithm with known case examples of various malformations due to abnormal cortical organization. An exhaustive evaluation of the system by comparison with published cases and a ROC analysis is presented in the paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper designs an object-oriented, continuous-time, full simulation model for addressing a wide range of clinical, procedural, administrative, and financial decisions in health care at a high level of biological, clinical, and administrative detail. The full model has two main parts, which with some simplification can be designated “physiology models” and “models of care processes.” The models of care processes, although highly detailed, are mathematically straightforward. However, the mathematics that describes human biology, diseases, and the effects of interventions are more difficult. This paper describes the mathematical formulation and methods for deriving equations, for a variety of different sources of data. Although Archimedes was originally designed for health care applications, the formulation, and equations are general and can be applied to many natural systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Objective: The aim of this paper is to examine knowledge organization and reasoning strategies involved in physician–patient communication and to consider how these are affected by the use of computer tools, in particular, electronic medical record (EMR) systems. Design: In the first part of the paper, we summarize results from a study in which patients were interviewed before their interactions with physicians and where physician–patient interactions were recorded and analyzed to evaluate patients'' and physicians'' understanding of the patient problem. We give a detailed presentation of one of such interaction, with characterizations of physician and patient models. In a second set of studies, the contents of both paper and EMRs were compared and in addition, physician–patient interactions (involving the use of EMR technology) were video recorded and analyzed to assess physicians'' information gathering and knowledge organization for medical decision-making. Results: Physicians explained the patient problems in terms of causal pathophysiological knowledge underlying the disease (disease model), whereas patients explained them in terms of narrative structures of illness (illness model). The data-driven nature of the traditional physician–patient interaction allows physicians to capture the temporal flow of events and to document key aspects of the patients'' narratives. Use of electronic medical records was found to influence the way patient data were gathered, resulting in information loss and disruption of temporal sequence of events in assessing patient problem. Conclusions: The physician–patient interview allows physicians to capture crucial aspects of the patient''s illness model, which are necessary for understanding the problem from the patients'' perspective. Use of computer-based patient record technology may lead to a loss of this relevant information. As a consequence, designers of such systems should take into account information relevant to the patient comprehension of medical problems, which will influence their compliance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Carbon neutrality is an important environmental management tool to deal with the global greenhouse effect. Addressing climate change is an important starting point for promoting the high-quality development of China's economy and the construction of ecological civilization, as well as an important area for participating in global governance and adhering to multilateralism. In this paper, from the perspective of carbon neutrality, taking China's Jiangsu Province as an example, the super-efficiency DEA model is selected to measure the level of ecological efficiency in Jiangsu, and on this basis, the Tobit model is used to verify the main factors affecting regional ecological efficiency. The results are as follows: (1) The regional eco-efficiency in Jiangsu shows a trend of decreasing from south to north, with obvious phenomenon of "club convergence", with significant spatial correlation and agglomeration. (2) The industrial structure is negatively related to the regional eco-efficiency of Jiangsu regions; Energy consumption structure has a positively impact in southern Jiangsu,but negatively in central and northern Jiangsu; FDI has a positively impact in central and northern Jiangsu, but negatively in southern Jiangsu; Regional economic development has a positively impact in southern and northern Jiangsu, but negatively in central Jiangsu; The progress in the technological level has positive effects on the eco-efficiency of all regions of Jiangsu. The final paper puts forward some suggestions based on the carbon neutral target Provide theoretical reference for achieving the goal of carbon neutrality. • Construct an regional ecological efficiency evaluation index system. • Use super-DEAmethod to measure ecological efficiency level. • Study from the perspective of carbon neutrality. • Propose a reference for achieving carbon neutrality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The current paper provides an overview of human evaluation practices in NLG. • The current paper gives an overview of the steps necessary to undertake a human evaluation study. • Building on findings from NLG, but also statistics and the behavioral sciences, the current paper provides a set of recommendations and best practices for human evaluation in NLG. Currently, there is little agreement as to how Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems should be evaluated, with a particularly high degree of variation in the way that human evaluation is carried out. This paper provides an overview of how (mostly intrinsic) human evaluation is currently conducted and presents a set of best practices, grounded in the literature. These best practices are also linked to the stages that researchers go through when conducting an evaluation research (planning stage; execution and release stage), and the specific steps in these stages. With this paper, we hope to contribute to the quality and consistency of human evaluations in NLG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we describe a first step towards a collaborative extension of the well-known 3D-Slicer; this platform is nowadays used as a standalone tool for both surgical planning and medical intervention. We show how this tool can be easily modified to make it collaborative so that it may constitute an integrated environment for expertise exchange as well as a useful tool for academic purposes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article proposes using genomic information to help tailor the output of a drug interaction program for a patient. This paper focuses on a particular CYP450 enzyme to illustrate adding genomic information to an existing drug interaction database. The data are formatted as an Extensible Markup Language (XML) document. The additional interaction information based on genomics for a patient is added to an XML document using XML tags. The suggestion is to combine specifics about a patient’s genome with genomic information in the drug interactions database to increase the accuracy and details of a drug interaction program. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The heart rate signal contains valuable information about cardiac health, which cannot be extracted without the use of appropriate computerized methods. This paper presents an analysis of various electrocardiograms, the aim of which is to categorize them into two distinct groups. Group A represents young male subjects with no prior occurrence of coronary disease events and Group B represents middle-aged male subjects who have symptomatic coronary artery disease without myocardial infarction and whose 12-lead ECGs do not contain any abnormalities, thus wrongly indicating a normal subject. Electrocardiographic recordings are approximately 2 h in length and acquired under conditions that favor the stationarity of collected data. Linear and nonlinear characteristics are studied by applying several techniques including Fourier analysis, Correlation Dimension Estimation, Approximate Entropy, and the Discrete Wavelet Transform. The small variations of the diagnostic information given by each one of the methods as well as the slightly different conclusions among similar studies indicate the necessity of further investigation, combined use, and complementary application of different approaches. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Document search is generally based on individual terms in the document. However, for collections within limited domains it is possible to provide more powerful access tools. This paper describes a system designed for collections of reports of infectious disease outbreaks. The system, Proteus-BIO, automatically creates a table of outbreaks, with each table entry linked to the document describing that outbreak; this makes it possible to use database operations such as selection and sorting to find relevant documents. Proteus-BIO consists of a Web crawler which gathers relevant documents; an information extraction engine which converts the individual outbreak events to a tabular database; and a database browser which provides access to the events and, through them, to the documents. The information extraction engine uses sets of patterns and word classes to extract the information about each event. Preparing these patterns and word classes has been a time-consuming manual operation in the past, but automated discovery tools now make this task significantly easier. A small study comparing the effectiveness of the tabular index with conventional Web search tools demonstrated that users can find substantially more documents in a given time period with Proteus-BIO. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Background. The true incidence and prevalence of liver disease is difficult to ascertain because there are few, if any, population-based registers of liver disease available to ensure proper case and comparator selection. The epidemiology of liver disease in Tayside (ELDIT) is a specially built register of liver disease for a well-defined geographical area of Scotland.Aims. This paper describes the electronic linkage of multiple data sources to form ELDIT and provides initial results from the database.Patients. All subjects resident in Tayside and registered with a general practitioner in the study period 1980–1999, approximately 400,000 people.Methods. Electronic record-linkage techniques were employed to include anonymised data from primary and secondary sources. Hospital admissions, dispensed medication, and laboratory results from immunology, virology, and biochemistry were used to identify cases of liver disease. Diagnostic algorithms were used to verify and classify subjects with liver disease. A validation of the algorithms against the clinical diagnosis was used to determine the measure of agreement (true positive rate) of ELDIT.Results. At present approximately 10,000 subjects have been identified with liver disease or abnormal liver function. The data set is nearing completion with cases of rarer liver disease being identified last. Incidence densities for the population were calculated. From the validation study, agreement between electronic and clinical diagnosis was 0.98 and positive predictive value was 0.83 showing electronic diagnostic algorithms are sensitive enough to identify liver disease using para-clinical data.Conclusions. ELDIT demonstrates how clinical information can be harnessed electronically to provide a better understanding of liver disease in a population. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Clustering algorithms have been shown to be useful to explore large-scale gene expression profiles. Visualization and objective evaluation of clusters are two important considerations when users are selecting different clustering algorithms, but they are often overlooked. The developments of a framework and software tools that implement comprehensive data visualization and objective measures of cluster quality are crucial. In this paper, we describe a theoretical framework and formalizations for consistently developing clustering algorithms. A new clustering algorithm was developed within the proposed framework. We demonstrate that a theoretically sound principle can be uniformly applied to the developments of cluster-optimization function, comprehensive data-visualization strategy, and objective cluster-evaluation measures as well as actual implementation of the principle. Cluster consistency and quality measures of the algorithm are rigorously evaluated against those of popular clustering algorithms for gene expression data analysis (K-means and self-organizing maps), in four data sets, yielding promising results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]