Barbara Koroušić Seljak

Jožef Stefan Institute | IJS · Department of Computer systems

Background Older adults living in nursing homes (NHs) are considered a vulnerable population in terms of nutrition. The aim of the present study was to explore the usual intake of energy, macronutrients, and specific food groups, along with offers in the NH menus on a nationally representative sample of Slovenian NH residents and compare dietary pa...

Introduction Recognizing and extracting key information from textual data plays an important role in intelligent systems by maintaining up-to-date knowledge, reinforcing informed decision-making, question-answering, and more. It is especially apparent in the food domain, where critical information guides the decisions of nutritionists and clinician...

Background: The SI.Menu study offers the latest data on the dietary intake of Slovenian adolescents aged 10 to 17. The purpose of this study is to comprehensively assess their dietary intake (energy and nutrients) and compare their food intakes with dietary recommendations for healthy and sustainable diets. Methods: The cross-sectional epidemiologi...

Introduction In this research, we introduce the NutriGreen dataset, which is a collection of images representing branded food products aimed for training segmentation models for detecting various labels on food packaging. Each image in the dataset comes with three distinct labels: one indicating its nutritional quality using the Nutri-Score, anothe...

Objective Present study aimed to assess potential health risk in Slovenian adolescents due to inadequate diet and/or dietary supplement (DS) use. Methods Data on DS use, micronutrient intake (24-h recall), eating habits (FFQ), body height and mass were collected within ACDSi (Analysis of Children’s Development in Slovenia) cross-sectional study co...

Objective The syndrome of relative energy deficiency in sports (RED-S) is the result of a prolonged period of low energy availability in athletes and leads to the deterioration of health and physical performance. Our study aimed to investigate the prevalence of RED-S-related health and performance problems in young Slovenian athletes, comparing mid...

Knowledge about the interactions between dietary and biomedical factors is scattered throughout uncountable research articles in an unstructured form (e.g., text, images, etc.) and requires automatic structuring so that it can be provided to medical professionals in a suitable format. Various biomedical knowledge graphs exist, however, they require...

Nowadays, it is really important and crucial to follow the new biomedical knowledge that is presented in scientific literature. To this end, Information Extraction pipelines can help to automatically extract meaningful relations from textual data that further require additional checks by domain experts. In the last two decades, a lot of work has be...

Objective Evaluate the adequacy of energy/macronutrient intake in adolescents according to the Slovenian national recommendations adopted from the recommendations of the German Nutrition Society and to identify differences in energy/macronutrient intake between differently active adolescents. Methods Data on energy and macronutrient intake (24-hou...

Although recipe data are very easy to come by nowadays, it is really hard to find a complete recipe dataset - with a list of ingredients, nutrient values per ingredient, and per recipe, allergens, etc. Recipe datasets are usually collected from social media websites where users post and publish recipes. Usually written with little to no structure,...

As food choices are usually processed subconsciously, both situational and food environment cues influence choice. This study developed and tested a mobile app to investigate the association between physical and digital environments on snack choices. SnackTrack was designed and used to collect data on the snack choices of 188 users in real-life set...

In the last decades, a great amount of work has been done in predictive modeling of issues related to human and environmental health. Resolution of issues related to healthcare is made possible by the existence of several biomedical vocabularies and standards, which play a crucial role in understanding the health information, together with a large...

Inadequate iron intake and iron deficiency are recognised as a public health problem in the population at large, and particularly in specific subpopulations. Dietary iron intake was analysed using data of the national Slovenian food consumption study, SI.Menu (n = 1248 subjects; 10–74 years), while iron status was evaluated with laboratory analyses...

Background As decision-making shifts more into digital environments, understanding how consumers assess and select foods, particularly healthy foods, in these environments is becoming increasingly important. Online services offer opportunities to improve consumer wellbeing through promoting healthier food choices and positively impacting purchasing...

Uvod: Smernice zdravega prehranjevanja omejujejo vsebnosti enostavnih sladkorjev v šolskih obrokih. Spremljanje sestave obrokov je v praksi pomemben izziv organiza- torja šolske prehrane, saj potrebuje vpogled v sestavo obroka in primerjavo s smer- nicami v realnem času. Z namenom spremljanja energije in hranil v šolskih jedilnikih je bilo razvito...

Introduction: The national dietary guidelines include recommendations regarding the sugar content in school meals. In the practice, the monitoring of school meals composition presents an important challenge for staff, responsible for school meals planning, as they must first assess the nutritional composition of individual meals to then be able t...

Besides the numerous studies in the last decade involving food and nutrition data, this domain remains low resourced. Annotated corpuses are very useful tools for researchers and experts of the domain in question, as well as for data scientists for analysis. In this paper, we present the annotation process of food consumption data (recipes) with se...

Incomparable and insufficiently detailed information on dietary intakes are common challenges associated with dietary assessment methods. Being a European Union country, Slovenia is expected to conduct national food consumption studies in line with harmonised EU Menu methodology. The present study aimed to describe the methodology and protocols in...

Non-communicable diseases are on the rise and are often related to food choices; nutrition affects infectious diseases too. Therefore, there is growing interest in research on public and personal health, as related to food, nutrition behaviour and well-being of consumers throughout the life cycle. These concepts and their relations are complex and...

Food ontologies are acquiring a central role in human nutrition, providing a standardized terminology for a proper description of intervention and observational trials. In addition to bioactive molecules, several fermented foods, particularly dairy products, provide the host with live microorganisms, thus carrying potential “genetic/functional” nut...

We compared three interventions designed for reducing the consumption of sugar-sweet- ened beverages (SSBs) aimed at decreasing the risk of overweight and obesity among children. We included three experimental (n = 508) and one control school (n = 164) in Slovenia (672 children; 10– 16 years) to evaluate interventions that influence behaviour chang...

The focus of the current paper is on a design of responsible governance of food consumer science e-infrastructure using the case study Determinants and Intake Data Platform (DI Data Platform). One of the key challenges for implementation of the DI Data Platform is how to develop responsible governance that observes the ethical and legal frameworks...

Background In response to growing needs for the integration of heterogeneous data on food and nutrition security (FNS), and the current fragmentation of interoperability resources, the ‘FNS-Cloud project’ aims to develop a cross-domain, interoperable ‘food-cloud’ that integrates diverse FNS data. Currently, there is insufficient guidance on how to...

Background & aims Relative energy deficiency syndrome in sport (RED-S) can impair the function of several body systems, resulting in short and long-term threats to athletes’ health and performance. Research showed that these health and performance problems are often unrecognized, and the treatment is not adequate. The retrospective study presented...

Vitamin B12 deficiency poses a health concern, especially in vulnerable populations. Dietary vitamin B12 intake was obtained by two 24 h dietary recalls and food propensity questionnaires in a representative Slovenian cross-sectional food consumption survey, SI.Menu (n = 1248 subjects; 10–74 years). For a subgroup of 280 participants, data on serum...

Branded foods databases are becoming very valuable not only in nutrition research but also for clinical practice, policymakers, businesses, and general population. In contrast to generic foods, branded foods are marked by rapid changes in the food supply because of reformulations, the introduction of new foods, and the removal of existing ones from...

Background: Slovenia similar to some European countries has a long tradition of the organized system of school meals. The present survey aimed to compare school lunch composition in Slovene primary schools (n = 40) with the national dietary guidelines; Methods: The survey took place from January to September 2020. Sampling of a 5-day school lunch...

People with special nutritional needs must monitor their food intake as accurately as possible. One of the problems with food-intake monitoring is a correct estimation of portion sizes. This paper presents an open-source solution to the problem of portion-size estimation consisting of a pocket-sized kitchen scale and a demo mobile application. It i...

Folate deficiency is associated with various health issues, including anemia, cardiovascular disease, and birth defects. Low folate intake and suboptimal folate status were found in several countries; however, this topic has not yet been investigated in Slovenia. Dietary folate intake and serum folate status were investigated through the nationally...

Dietary fibre has proven to promote healthy body mass and reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases. To date, in Slovenia, there were only a few outdated studies of dietary fibre intake; therefore, we explored the dietary fibre intake using food consumption data collected in the SI.Menu project. Following the EU Menu methodology, data were colle...

Vitamin D is involved in calcium and phosphorus metabolism, and is vital for numerous bodily functions. In the absence of sufficient UV-B light-induced skin biosynthesis, dietary intake becomes the most important source of vitamin D. In the absence of biosynthesis, the recommended dietary vitamin D intake is 10–20 µg/day. Major contributors to diet...

In this paper, we present FoodChem, a new Relation Extraction (RE) model for identifying chemicals present in the composition of food entities, based on textual information provided in biomedical peer-reviewed scientific literature. The RE task is treated as a binary classification problem, aimed at identifying whether the contains relation exists...

Background A better understanding of food-related behaviour and its determinants can be achieved through harmonisation and linking of the various data-sources and knowledge platforms. Scope We describe the key decision-making in the development of a prototype of the Determinants and Intake Platform (DI Platform), a data platform that aims to harmo...

Being both a poison and a cure for many lifestyle and non-communicable diseases, food is inscribing itself into the prime focus of precise medicine. The monitoring of few groups of nutrients is crucial for some patients, and methods for easing their calculations are emerging. Our proposed machine learning pipeline deals with nutrient prediction bas...

Background Recently, food science has been garnering a lot of attention. There are many open research questions on food interactions, as one of the main environmental factors, with other health-related entities such as diseases, treatments, and drugs. In the last 2 decades, a large amount of work has been done in natural language processing and mac...

BACKGROUND Being both a poison and a cure for many lifestyle and non-communicable diseases, food is inscribing itself into the prime focus of precise medicine, therefore knowing what is in our food has become utmost important. The monitoring of few groups of nutrients has become crucial for some patients, and with that methods for easing their calc...

Food is one of the main health and environmental factors in today’s society. With modernization the food supply is expanding and food-related data is increasing. This type of data comes in many different forms and making it inter-operable is one of the main requirements for using in any kind of analyses. One step towards this goal is data normaliza...

We aimed to evaluate the changes in eating behaviours of the adult population across 16 European countries due to the COVID-19 confinement and to evaluate whether these changes were somehow related to the severity of the containment measures applied in each country. An anonymous online self-reported questionnaire on socio-demographic characteristic...

BACKGROUND Recently, food science has been garnering a lot of attention. There are many open research questions on food interactions, as one of the main environmental factors, with other health-related entities such as diseases, treatments, and drugs. In the last 2 decades, a large amount of work has been done in natural language processing and mac...

As individuals seek increasingly individualised nutrition and lifestyle guidance, numerous apps and nutrition programs have emerged. However, complex individual variations in dietary behaviours, genotypes, gene expression and composition of the microbiome are increasingly recognised. Advances in digital tools and artificial intelligence can help in...

Consumption of trans fatty acids (TFAs) has been unequivocally linked to several adverse health effects, with the increased risk of cardiovascular disease being one of the most well understood. To reduce TFA-related morbidity and mortality, several countries have imposed voluntary or mandatory measures to minimize the content of industrial TFAs (iT...

Food is one of the main health and environmental factors in today's society. With modernization the food supply is expanding and food-related data is increasing. This type of data comes in many different forms and making it inter-operable is one of the main requirements for using in any kind of analyses. One step towards this goal is data normaliza...

The accelerating growth of big data in the biomedical domain, with an endless amount of electronic health records and more than 30 million citations and abstracts in PubMed, introduces the need for automatic structuring of textual biomedical data. In this paper, we develop a method for detecting relations between food and disease entities from raw...

Human understanding and knowledge about food and nutrition is constantly evolving, and has significantly improved recently, one of the main contributor to this is data. The possibilities of gaining knowledge from food and nutrition-related data are yet to be explored. One of the most important information about food is nutrient content, which is ve...

Food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) are the most commonly selected tools in nutrition monitoring, as they are inexpensive, easily implemented and provide useful information regarding dietary intake. They are usually carefully drafted by experts from nutritional and/or medical fields and can be validated by using other dietary monitoring techniques...

Food Frequency Questionnaires (FFQs) are inexpensive dietary assessment tools used in large epidemiological studies of diet and health. In the WellCo project, we developed the Extended Short Form Food Frequency Questionnaire (ESFFFQ) in order to monitor quality of users’ nutrition. The developed questionnaire returns diet quality scores for eight t...

Assessing nutritional content is very relevant for patients suffering from various diseases, professional athletes, and for health reasons is becoming part of everyday life for many. However, it is a very challenging task as it requires complete and reliable sources. We introduce a machine learning pipeline for predicting macronutrient values of fo...

Background Understanding the content of self-reported meals and online-published recipes is a basic requirement for further linking food and dietary concepts to heterogeneous health networks. Despite the huge amount of work that is done in the biomedical domain, the food and nutrition domains are relatively low-resourced. DietHub represents a step...

In recent years, a great amount of research has been done in predictive modeling in the domain of healthcare. Such research is facilitated by the existence of various biomedical vocabularies and standards which play a crucial role in understanding healthcare information. In addition, the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) links together biomedi...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic affects all aspects of human life including their food consumption. The changes in the food production and supply processes introduce changes to the global dietary patterns. Scope and Approach To study the COVID-19 impact on food consumption process, we have analyzed two data sets that consist of food preparation r...

Excessive free sugars consumption is associated with poor health outcomes. Thus, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends limiting free sugars intake to no more than 10% of total energy intake. To evaluate current intakes of dietary sugars and monitor the adherence to the guidelines, the objective of this study was to comprehensively assess t...

There are many commercially available sensors for acquiring electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, and the predictive analyses are extremely welcome for real-time monitoring in public healthcare. One crucial task of such analysis is the selection of the pre-processing parameters for the ECG signals that carry the most valuable information. For this reaso...

Missing data are a common problem in most research fields and introduce an element of ambiguity into data analysis. They can arise due to different reasons: mishandling of samples, measurement error, deleted aberrant value or simply lack of analysis. The nutrition domain is no exception to the problem of missing data. This paper addresses the probl...

Background: Malnutrition has become a prevalent condition, with European and international studies reporting rates of approximately 25-40% in hospitals. We set out to perform a multi-center cross-sectional study to assess malnutrition rates in Slovenian hospitals and to convert the findings into a mobile application suitable for use by nurses and...

As great amounts of food-related information is presented in the form of heterogeneous textual data, computer-based methods are useful to automatically extract such information. One way to do this is to utilize Named-Entity Recognition (NER) methods that are broadly used in computer science for information extraction. Despite the existence of numer...

In food and toxicology science, a huge amount of research and other data has been collected. To enable its full utilization, advanced statistical and computer methods are required. All data is related to food items, but additionally include different kinds of information. Nowadays the consumption of avocado has increased. To understand the full imp...

Many research questions from different domains involve combining different data sets in order to explore a research hypothesis. One of the main problems that arises here is that different data sets are structured with respect to different domain standards and ensuring their interoperability is a time-consuming task. In the biomedical domain, the Un...

Nowadays, the existence of several available biomedical vocabularies and standards play a crucial role in understanding health information. While there is a large number of available resources in the biomedical domain, only a limited number of resources can be utilized in the food domain. There are only a few annotated corpora with food concepts, a...