About
105
Publications
13,039
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,049
Citations
Introduction
Dr. Riaño is associate professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, head of the Research Group on Artificial Intelligence at that university, chair of the yearly workshop KR4HC, and editor of multiple Springer LNAI books. His research interests are centered in medical informatics, knowledge management and representation of medical procedures, and data mining technologies for inducing medical knowledge from health care databases.
Publications
Publications (105)
Objective:
The study has dual objectives. Our first objective (1) is to develop a community-of-practice-based evaluation methodology for knowledge-intensive computational methods. We target a whitebox analysis of the computational methods to gain insight on their functional features and inner workings. In more detail, we aim to answer evaluation q...
Drug dose titration (DT) is the clinical process of progressively adjusting the dose of a medication for the maximum benefit of the patient. Several DT clinical models exist based on the elementary concepts of null, initial, and maximal doses, as well as, dose increments and decrements. These values depend on the target disease, the drug considered...
In health-care, medical errors are quantified. Among them, wrong dose prescriptions occur. Drug dose titration (DT) is the process by which dosage is progressively adjusted to the patient till a steady dose is reached. Depending on the clinical disease, drug, and patient, dose titration can follow different procedures. Once modeled, these procedure...
Background:
In the last ten years, the international workshop on knowledge representation for health care (KR4HC) has hosted outstanding contributions of the artificial intelligence in medicine community pertaining to the formalization and representation of medical knowledge for supporting clinical care. Contributions regarding modeling languages,...
Background
Machine learning predictive models for breast cancer survival can improve if they are made specific to the stage of the cancer at the time of diagnosis. However, the relevance of the clinical parameters in that prediction, and the predictive quality of these models may change over time.
Objective
To determine whether the findings on the...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, AIME 2019, held in Poznan, Poland, in June 2019.
The 22 revised full and 31 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: deep learning; simulat...
This book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Health, AIH 2018, in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018. This workshop consolidated the workshops CARE, KRH4C and AI4HC into a single event.
The 18 revised full papers included in this volume were carefully selected from th...
Medical processes combine medical actions which are performed by health care professionals while they observe signs and symptoms and decide about interventions, prescriptions, or tests, in order to deal with the health problem that affects a particular patient.
Our research was centered in the representation of knowledge for the purpose of decision...
Background: In medical practice, long term interventions are common and they require timely planning of the involved processes. Unfortunately, evidence-based statements about time are hard to find in Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) and in other sources of medical knowledge. At the same time, health care centers use medical records and informati...
Background
Correct clinical management of circulatory shock in emergency departments (ER) and intensive care units (ICU) is critical. In this context, the transmission of professional skills by means of the practical supervision of real cases at the point of care entails important issues that can be widely overcome with the use of computer knowledg...
This paper presents medical knowledge representation of data provided within Clinical Practice Guidelines for Heart Failure. The formalization is provided in order to support taking decisions on an appropriate treatment strategy for a specific patient. An intuitive and efficient mechanism of medical knowledge formalization, called extended Timed Tr...
The high prevalence of multimorbid cases is a challenge for Health-Care Systems today. Clinical practice guidelines are the means to register and transmit the available evidence-based medical knowledge concerning concrete diseases. Several computer languages have been defined to represent this knowledge in a way that computers could use to help phy...
Primary care studies related to chronic diseases and their treatment use to be based on the analysis of large amounts of episodes of care (EoC) in order to check standard’s compliance, improve protocols, or perform quality and cost studies. In these EoC, data related to the patient condition and treatment are registered along the different encounte...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of two workshops held at the International Conference on Health – Exploring Complexity and Medical Informatics Europe, HEC 2016, held in Munich, Germany, in September 2016: the 8th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care, KR4HC 2016, and the 9th International Workshop on Proc...
Physicians in Intensive Care Units (ICU) have to deal with shocked patients very often. These are critical emergencies that require rapid and precise clinical reactions in order to avoid fatal organ decline and patient’s death. New treatments cannot be checked directly on real patients because of the risks this could imply. For this reason several...
The Business Process Modelling and Notation (BPMN) is a widely-accepted standard for process modelling, which can be used to model the clinical processes contained in guidelines. Computer systems based on guidelines need to embed these clinical processes, e.g. using a Computer-Interpretable Guideline (CIG) language. However, encoding guidelines in...
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of two workshops held at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, AIME 2015, held in Pavia, Italy, in June 2015: the 7th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care, KR4HC 2015, and the 8th International Workshop on Process-ori...
The raise of chronic diseases poses a challenge for the health care sector worldwide. In many cases, diseases are affected by an environmental component that, until now, could be hardly controlled. However, with the recent advances in information and communication technologies applied to cities, it becomes possible to collect real-time environmenta...
Arterial hypertension (AH) is an abnormal high blood pressure in the arteries with many possible etiologies. Differential diagnosis of the causes of AH is a complex clinical process that requires the simultaneous consideration of many clinical practice guidelines.
Training clinicians to manage, assimilate, and correctly apply the knowledge containe...
The prevalence of chronic diseases is growing year after year. This implies that health care systems must deal with an increasing number of patients with several simultaneous pathologies (i.e., comorbid patients), which involves interventions combining primary, specialist, and hospital cares. Clinical practice guidelines provide evidence-based info...
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed papers from the BPM 2013 Joint Workshop on Process-Oriented Information Systems and Knowledge Representation in Health Care, KR4HC 2013/ProHealth 2013, held in Murcia, Spain, in June 2013. The 10 revised full papers presented together with 1 keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 sub...
This book constitutes thoroughly refereed revised selected papers from the BPM 2012 Joint Workshop on Process-Oriented Information Systems and Knowledge Representation in Health Care, ProHealth 2012/KR4HC 2012, held in Tallinn, Estonia, in September 2012.
The 9 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 19 submissions. In addition t...
The treatment of patients with several chronic diseases (comorbidities) has become a frequent actuation of health-care professionals in their daily practice. As different treatments are needed for each disease, there is a risk of undesired drug interactions that must be detected and solved using evidence-based medical knowledge. In this paper we ha...
Objective: To propose a methodology to automatically induce state-decision-action diagrams from health-care databases and electronic health records in order to show health-care professionals an explicit representation of the past health-care procedures carried out in a health-care organization and to use these representations to study the deviation...
Chronically ill patients are complex health care cases that require the coordinated interaction of multiple professionals. A correct intervention of these sort of patients entails the accurate analysis of the conditions of each concrete patient and the adaptation of evidence-based standard intervention plans to these conditions. There are some othe...
Medical interventions can be compared attending to their health benefits and costs but also considering the similarity of the clinical actions involved. An intervention is a dominant alternative with respect to another intervention if it is better and cheaper. In this paper we introduce a hierarchy of medical actions that provides the semantics req...
Diagnosis, treatment and prognosis are three different stages in the practice of medicine. All of these require some kind of decisions that are based on medical knowledge and the physician's experience, among other factors. In this paper, we first present a set of key questions that involve clinical decisions and that are faced by medical practitio...
Natural language processing (NLP) has been used to process text pertaining to patient records and narratives. However, most of the methods used were developed for specific systems, so new research is necessary to assess whether such methods can be easily retargeted for new applications and goals, with the same performance. In this paper, open-sourc...
In medicine, decision processes are correct not only if they conclude with a right final decision, but also if the sequence
of observations that drive the whole process to the final decision defines a sequence with a medical sense. Decision trees
are formal structures that have been successfully applied to make decisions in medicine; however, the t...
Computers can be helpful to support physicians in medical diagnosis and health care personalization. Here, a health care ontology
for the care of chronically ill patients that was created and validated in the k4care project is used in prospective and retrospective diagnoses, and also in the personalization of medical knowledge. This paper
describes...
Knowledge Engineering allows to automate entity recognition and relation extraction from clinical texts, which in turn can
be used to facilitate clinical practice guideline (CPG) modeling. This paper presents a method to recognize diagnosis and
therapy entities, and to identify relationships between these entities from CPG free-text documents. Our...
Data, information, and knowledge in medicine is varied, changing, interrelated, and for diverse purposes. Medical and Clinical
care depends on the correct and efficient combined application of these elements to concrete health care situations as prophylactics,
screening, diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Manag...
The health-care of the elder at home is highly demanded in modern societies. It is based on the difficult task of coordinating multiple professionals and procedures acting on the same patient. K4CARE is a project aiming at implementing and testing a technology-based incremental and adaptable model to assist health care systems in home care. One of...
Clinical Algorithms (CAs) are obtained from Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) using all the healthcare knowledge available to assist patients that suffer from one or several diseases. For some diseases CAs can be explicitly given, while for others we have to use other mechanisms for their generation. Explicitly given CAs use to be atemporal. To p...
Procedural knowledge in medicine uses to come expressed as isolated sentences in Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) that describe
how to act in front of specific health-care situations. Although CPGs gather all evidence available on concrete medical problems,
their direct application has been proved to have some limitations. One of these limitation...
Increasing longevity and increasing survival to acute accidents and diseases - in addition to the increase in the numbers
of elderly people - imply an increased prevalence of chronic morbidity and disability. The elderly population needing full
time care is considered as equivalent to the percentage of severely disabled elderly, which in turn is es...
One of the tasks towards the definition of a knowledge model for home care is the definition of the different roles of the users involved in the system. The roles determine the actions and services that can or must be performed by each type of user. In this paper the experience of building an ontology to represent the home-care users and their asso...
In this work we present the general classifier system Sedàs. We show how this system implements the description of the domain and how it builds similarity matrices and classification trees. The system uses a new semantics, introduced in [Torra96], to define a distance between qualitative values.
This chapter proposes an agent-based architecture for home care support, whose main capability is to continuously admit and apply new medical knowledge entered into the system, capturing and codifying implicit knowledge deriving from the medical staff. Knowledge is the fundamental catalyst in all application domains, and this is particularly true e...
The incursion of information and communication technologies (ICT) in health care entails evident bene?ts at the levels of security and e?ciency that improve not only the quality of life of the patients, but also the quality of the work of the health care professionals and the costs of national health care systems. Leaving research approaches aside,...
In medicine, prognosis is the task of predicting the probable course and outcome of a disease. Questions like, is a patient
going to improve?, what is his/her chance of recovery?, and how likely a relapse is? are common and they rely on the concept
of state. The feasible states of a disease define a partial order structure with extreme states those...
Procedural knowledge in medicine is embedded in Clinical Practice Guidelines whose textual condition makes it difficult to share and to reuse. Several languages for formal definition of clinical practice guidelines have been proposed to overcome these difficulties. In order to deal with the huge amount of medical situations, these languages use to...
Clinical practice guidelines are important in the work of physicians. These guidelines are manually created by experts using their knowledge and experience. This work gives an approach to automatically develop the clinical guideline charts with the SDA representation model. In addition, this paper details an example of application of the methodolog...
Proposing a treatment to patients is one of the physicians' most common tasks. There are different elements that influence the decision of a physician to propose an appropriate treatment. Formal intervention plans (FIPs) are formal structures representing health care procedures to assist patients suffering from particular ailments or diseases. The...
There are several domains, such as health-care, in which the decision process usually has a background knowledge that must be considered. We need to maximize the accuracy of the models, but we also need them to be meaningful. Otherwise it will lead to the problem that the expert finds the obtained models incomprehensible. We propose a way for repre...
One of the main tasks of physicians is to select an appropriate treatment for patients. Although clinical practice guidelines
(CPGs) are evidence-based documents that help physicians to decide on the appropriate treatment, they use to be restricted
to specific pathologies. On the contrary, elderly patients tend to suffer from several simultaneous d...
Decision support systems in medicine are designed to aid healthcare professionals on making clinical decisions. Clinical Algorithms
derived from Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) make explicit the knowledge necessary to assist physicians in order to make
appropriate decisions. Decision support systems for healthcare procedures are supposed to ans...
The practice of evidence-based medicine requires the integration of individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research and the patient's unique values and circumstances. This paper addresses the problem of making explicit the knowledge on individual clinical expertise which is implicit in the h...
Diagnosis, treatment and prognosis are three of the most frequent labours of physician in health care institutions. In decision making, these activities can be tackled from two approaches: decision and planning. Decision structures are designed to help physician in their task of taking atemporal decisions. Planning structures are designed to guide...
In the framework of Knowledge Management, the Internet can be a valuable source of information to produce new Knowledge. Here, an ontology- based web search system to ease the enterprise managers in the process of dis- covering new knowledge from the documents in the Internet is introduced. By means of a graphical user interface, the user of the sy...
A graph-based probability model has been defined that represents the relations between primary and secondary diagnoses and
procedures in a file of episodes. This model has been used as a basis of an application that permits the graphical visualization
of the relations between diagnoses and procedures. The application can be used by physicians to de...
Clinical practice guidelines are medical and surgical statements to assist practitioners in the therapy procedure. Recently,
the concept computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) has been introduced to describe formal descriptions of clinical practice
guidelines. Ordered time-independent one-visit CIGs are a sort of CIG wich are able to cope with the...
To compete successfully in the global information technology market, the localization and/or internationalization of software
and web contents for disparate users is essential. More or less solutions are available by software producers as an underlying
part of an application’s infrastructure and architecture. Things like date, time, currency symbol...
It has been suggested that multi-agent systems (MAS) are specially adequate for the solution of problems with a dynamic, uncertain and distributed nature. Within industrial applications, there is a wide spectrum of problems with these characteristics, in particular those covering the modelling of artifacts, methodologies and organisations.Three cas...
The Web offers a huge amount of valuable information, but it is very hard and time consuming for a human to retrieve thousands of web pages related to a concept, filter the relevant ones, analyse their information and integrate it in the knowledge repository of a company. A Knowledge Management Platform that performs these tasks has been developed...
The huge amount of medical data in the Internet requires intelligent tools to retrieve and process medical information. In this paper, we introduce GINY, a computer system that integrates several procedures to deal with the structured, semi-structured and non-structured documents that can be found in the Internet. From an ontology that describes a...
Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) are used to represent the clinical procedures that must be followed for patient assistance. The utility of these guidelines is counteracted by the costs of making and updating them. Simultaneously, the minimum basic data set (MBDS) is defined as a health-care standard to represent the patients as a reduced number...
We describe the development of a knowledge man-agement platform for web-enabled environments featuring intelligence and insight capabilities. The effort is the result of a FP5 project under the IST initiative involving 3 universities, a technology provider and 5 user companies. The main objective of the platform is to analyse, search and present in...
The analysis of hospital costs in public health-care systems is a difficult task that the use of diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) has tried to simplify. After more than two decades, DRGs are still used, though they have had important criticisms. In this paper, COSYS (COsting SYStem), a new computer system that incorporates some AI procedures, is int...
Palliative care units are hospital services that assist advanced-state terminal patients. These patients are geographically distributed and some hospital tasks such as the organization of visits, the management of medicines, and the analysis of patients are difficult to manage. Here, a multi-layer computer system is proposed. The communication, inf...
A file of episodes stores data about the patients that are admitted to a hospital. This structure can be analyzed to obtain
clinical, supervision and normative knowledge about the hospital functioning. HISYS1 is a system that integrates graphical
and artificial intelligence techniques to automatically generate hospital decision support systems that...
HISYS1 is an information system that physicians, hospital managers and health-care administrations can use to analyze the
data about the evolution of the admitted patients in a hospital. The system is enriched with a learning procedure that is
able both to extract knowledge about the hospital departments, and also to organize that knowledge in a mo...
The coordination of human organ transplants is a difficult task that involves legal, clinical, organisational and human aspects within a complex distributed environment of hospitals and governmental institutions. We propose a Multi-Agent Architecture that is the kernel of an Intelligent Decision Support System to coordinate the Spanish activity in...
Intelligent agents and multiagent societies are becoming a recurrent solution to complex distributed artificial intelligence
problems. Some of the agent properties determine the sort of problems that they can solve efficiently. Here, we describe a
complex environmental process, Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is difficult to control. An agent- b...
We discuss in this paper how the results of the discipline known as Knowledge Management could improve some types of Environmental Systems. In particular we discuss En-vironmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS). In the last decade, EDSS emerged as a suitable software tool to support control decision-making to maximize the performance of a system a...
The historical evolution of all the patients admitted to a hos- pital is a source of information that can be studied with
intelligent data analysis methods. The transitions of the patients between the hospital services can be represented by a graph
structure that is modified to re- ect only the interesting information and also to represent the poss...
The automatic inductive learning of production rules in a classification environment is a difficult process which requires several considerations and techniques to be studied. This is more noticeable when the learning process is applied to real world domains. Our goal is to focus and study some of the most important problems related to the automati...
In this paper we discuss our approach to learning classiication rules from data. We sketch out two modules of our architecture, namely LINNEO + and GAR. LINNEO + , which is a knowledge acquisition tool for ill-structured domains automatically gener-ating classes from examples that incremen-tally works with an unsupervised strategy. LINNEO + 's outp...
We present a framework for defining trading scenarios based on fish market auctions. In these scenarios, trading (buyer and seller) heterogeneous (human and software) agents of arbitrary complexity participate in auctions under a collection of standardized ...
This paper is to introduce a multistage vision system to detect relevant information for road driving. The system applies fuzzy theory in order to handle less information per image that classical methods use to do. The image processing is based on the fact that the image is splitted up into six horizontal bands and consists of three basic stages: l...
The care of the elder at home is highly demanded in modern societies. It is based on the difficult task of coordinating multiple professionals and proce-dures acting on the same patient. K4CARE is a project aiming at implementing and testing a technology-based incremental and adaptable model to assist health care systems in home care. One of the ke...
Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) represent standard sets of recommendations for the clinical handling of patient affections of a concrete pathology. They reflect the best scientific evidence available for such pathology. Its adoption by health-care professionals has a direct impact in the quality of the assistance, fostering the standardization o...
Machine Learning is defended as a suitable mechanism to deal with the control of environmental domains. Particularly, we use the system gar to learn a set of descriptive rules such that they identify the internal states of a wastewater treatment plant. We also propose this mechanism for classifying the huge amount of possible inputs of the plant in...
Resumen La coordinación de transplantes de órganos es una tarea que involucra aspectos legales, clínicos, organizativos y humanos en un entorno de hospitales e instituciones gubernamentales altamente distribuido. El Modelo Español, uno de los más efectivos del mundo, propone un coordinador de transplantes por cada hospital con unidad de transplante...
Episodes of care (EOC) are then sequences of patient-professional encounters, in which the professional may observe the patient condition and decide some action measures either to provide the sort of care the patient requires or to ascertain some facts that are relevant to the treatment of the patient. Optionally, these action measures have some re...