Muhammad "Tuan" Amith

University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston · School of Biomedical Informatics

Background: HPV vaccine is an effective measure to prevent and control the diseases caused by Human Papillomavirus (HPV). This study addresses the development of VaxBot-HPV, a chatbot aimed at improving health literacy and promoting vaccination uptake by providing information and answering questions about the HPV vaccine; Methods: We constructed t...

Background Social determinants of health (SDoH) have been described by the World Health Organization as the conditions in which individuals are born, live, work, and age. These conditions can be grouped into 3 interrelated levels known as macrolevel (societal), mesolevel (community), and microlevel (individual) determinants. The scope of SDoH expan...

Objective The Arabic-speaking world had the lowest vaccine rates worldwide. The region's increasing reliance on social media as a source of COVID-19 information coupled with the increasing popularity of YouTube in the Middle East and North Africa region begs the question of what COVID-19 vaccine content is available in Arabic on YouTube. Given the...

BACKGROUND Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) have been described by the World Health Organization as the conditions in which individuals are born, live, work, and age. These conditions can be grouped into three interrelated levels, macro-, meso-, and micro-level determinants. OBJECTIVE Providing a computable artifact that can link health data t...

Background The utilization of dermoscopic analysis is becoming increasingly critical for diagnosing skin diseases by physicians and even artificial intelligence. With the expansion of dermoscopy, its vocabulary has proliferated, but the rapid evolution of the vocabulary of dermoscopy without standardized control is counterproductive. We aimed to de...

BACKGROUND Dermoscopy is a growing field using microscopy to identify skin lesions by dermatologists and primary care physicians. For a given skin lesion, a wide variety of differential diagnoses exist, which may be challenging for inexperienced users to name and understand. OBJECTIVE In this study, we describe the creation of the Dermoscopy Diffe...

Background Dermoscopy is a growing field that uses microscopy to allow dermatologists and primary care physicians to identify skin lesions. For a given skin lesion, a wide variety of differential diagnoses exist, which may be challenging for inexperienced users to name and understand. Objective In this study, we describe the creation of the dermos...

Conversation as trivial as “small talk” has a significant impact on human relationships, including in clinical care environments. Evidence suggests that small talk can improve health and clinical outcomes. This study aims to analyze the characteristics of domain-independent small talk collected from a sample of conversations. We reviewed the impact...

Generating categories and classifications is a common function in life science research; however, categorizing the human population based on "race" remains controversial. There is an awareness and recognition of social-economic disparities with respect to health which are sometimes impacted by someone's ethnicity or race. This work describes an end...

Building applications has become a significant problem during the rapid expansion of the open govern- ment data movement. Recently, Indonesia attempted to establish open data initiatives, particularly in health services involving hospital data. This work attempts to design an ontology to link SINARAP data by the Ministry of Health of the Republic o...

Objective: Social determinants of health (SDoH) play critical roles in health outcomes and well-being. Understanding the interplay of SDoH and health outcomes is critical to reducing healthcare inequalities and transforming a "sick care" system into a "health-promoting" system. To address the SDOH terminology gap and better embed relevant elements...

Model card reports provide a transparent description of machine learning models which includes information about their evaluation, limitations, intended use, etc. Federal health agencies have expressed an interest in model cards report for research studies using machine-learning based AI. Previously, we have developed an ontology model for model ca...

Social determinants of health (SDoH) have a significant impact on health outcomes and well-being. Addressing SDoH is the key to reducing healthcare inequalities and transforming a sick care system into a health-promoting system. To address the SDOH terminology gap and better embed relevant elements in advanced biomedical informatics, we propose an...

Background Model card reports aim to provide informative and transparent description of machine learning models to stakeholders. This report document is of interest to the National Institutes of Health’s Bridge2AI initiative to address the FAIR challenges with artificial intelligence-based machine learning models for biomedical research. We present...

Background: Understanding consumers’ health information needs across all stages of the pregnancy trajectory is crucial to the development of mechanisms that allow them to retrieve high-quality, customized, and layperson-friendly health information. Objective: The objective of this study was to identify research gaps in pregnancy-related consumer i...

The informed consent process is a complicated procedure involving permissions as well a variety of entities and actions. In this paper, we discuss the use of Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to further extend the Informed Consent Ontology (ICO) to allow for semantic machine-based reasoning to manage and generate important permission-based informat...

The quality of patient-provider communication can predict the healthcare outcomes in patients, and therefore, training dental providers to handle the communication effort with patients is crucial. In our previous work, we developed an ontology model that can standardize and represent patient-provider communication, which can later be integrated in...

Narratives can have a powerful impact on our health-related beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine can protect against human papillomavirus that leads to different types of cancers. However, HPV vaccination rates are low. This study explored the effectiveness of a narrative-based interactive game about the HPV vac...

Background Fast food with its abundance and availability to consumers may have health consequences due to the high calorie intake which is a major contributor to life threatening diseases. Providing nutritional information has some impact on consumer decisions to self regulate and promote healthier diets, and thus, government regulations have manda...

The informed consent process is a complicated procedure involving permissions as well a variety of entities and actions. In this paper, we discuss the use of Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to further extend the Informed Consent Ontology (ICO) to allow for semantic machine-based reasoning to manage and generate important permission-based informat...

Background The rapid growth of social media as an information channel has made it possible to quickly spread inaccurate or false vaccine information, thus creating obstacles for vaccine promotion. Objective The aim of this study is to develop and evaluate an intelligent automated protocol for identifying and classifying human papillomavirus (HPV)...

BACKGROUND Understanding consumers’ health information needs across all stages of the pregnancy trajectory is crucial to the development of mechanisms that allow them to retrieve high-quality, customized, and layperson-friendly health information. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to identify research gaps in pregnancy-related consumer inf...

Patient-provider communication plays a major role in healthcare with its main goal being to improve the patient’s health and build a trustworthy relationship between the patient and the doctor. Provider’s efficiency and effectiveness in communication can be improved through training in order to meet the essential elements of communication that are...

Community-clinic linkages may help communities increase HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake. Referrals from community-based organizations may be particularly important for linking Black men who have sex with men (MSM) to PrEP. This study describes PrEP referral and HIV/STI prevention networks among organizations that serve MSM in Houston, TX...

Background: Social media platforms such as YouTube are hotbeds for the spread of misinformation about vaccines. Objective: To explore how individuals are exposed to anti-vaccine misinformation on YouTube. Methods: Four networks of videos based on YouTube recommendations were collected in November 2019. Two search networks were created from pro...

A variety of severe health issues can be attributed to poor nutrition and poor eating behaviors. Research has explored the impact of nutritional knowledge on an individual’s inclination to purchase and consume certain foods. This paper introduces the Ontology of Fast Food Facts, a knowledge base that models consumer nutritional data from major fast...

Background Dyadic-based social networks analyses have been effective in a variety of behavioral- and health-related research areas. We introduce an ontology-driven approach towards social network analysis through encoding social data and inferring new information from the data. Methods The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) ontology is a lightweight social...

Background Previously, we introduced our Patient Health Information Dialogue Ontology (PHIDO) that manages the dialogue and contextual information of the session between an agent and a health consumer. In this study, we take the next step and introduce the Conversational Ontology Operator (COO), the software engine harnessing PHIDO. We also develop...

BACKGROUND The rapid growth of social media as an information channel has made it possible to quickly spread inaccurate or false vaccine information and thus create obstacles for vaccine promotion. OBJECTIVE To develop and evaluate an intelligent automated protocol to identify and classify HPV vaccine misinformation on social media, using machine...

BACKGROUND Social media platforms such as YouTube are hotbeds for the spread of misinformation about vaccines. OBJECTIVE To explore how individuals are exposed to anti-vaccine misinformation on YouTube. METHODS Four networks of videos based on YouTube recommendations were collected in November 2019. Two search networks were created from pro- and...

The aim of this study is to develop an educational video game and to assess its feasibility to influence youths’ interest in e-cigarettes. We first built a prototype storytelling game with facts about e-cigarettes, and then recruited 30 participants to evaluate the game. Each participant took pre- and post-game surveys on their knowledge, risk awar...

HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) can damage a human's immune system and cause Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) which could lead to severe outcomes, including death. While HIV infections have decreased over the last decade, there is still a significant population where the infection permeates. PrEP and PEP are two proven preventive measur...

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is the most effective way to prevent HPV-related cancers. Integrating provider vaccine counseling is crucial to improving HPV vaccine completion rates. Automating the counseling experience through a conversational agent could help improve HPV vaccine coverage and reduce the burden of vaccine counseling for pro...

Software tools now are essential to research and applications in the biomedical domain. However, existing software repositories are mainly built using manual curation, which is time-consuming and unscalable. This study took the initiative to manually annotate software names in 1,120 MEDLINE abstracts and titles and used this corpus to develop and e...

Many younger Black men who have sex with men (YBMSM) are exposed to homonegativity, societal stigma, and racial discrimination in their social environment. This study uses a social network modeling methodology to identify aspects of the social environment that are not often described, that is, the places and spaces or “venues” where YBMSM socialize...

BACKGROUND Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease, of which the pathophysiology is insufficiently understood, and the curative drugs are long-awaited to be developed. Computational drug repurposing introduces a promising complementary strategy of drug discovery, which benefits from an accelerated development process and...

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine protects adolescents and young adults from 9 high-risk HPV virus types that cause 90% of cervical and anal cancers and 70% of oropharyngeal cancers. This study extends our previous research analyzing online content concerning the HPV vaccination in social media platforms used by young adults, in which we used...

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is the most effective way to prevent HPV-related cancers. Integrating provider vaccine counseling is crucial to improving HPV vaccine completion rates. Automating the counseling experience through a conversational agent could help improve HPV vaccine coverage and reduce the burden of vaccine counseling for pro...

Background: In the United States and parts of the world, the human papillomavirus vaccine uptake is below the prescribed coverage rate for the population. Some research have noted that dialogue that communicates the risks and benefits, as well as patient concerns, can improve the uptake levels. In this paper, we introduce an application ontology f...

In this study, we introduce an ontology-driven software engine to provide dialogue interaction functionality for a conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling. Currently, the HPV vaccination rates are low that risks unprotected individuals at being infected with HPV, a virus that leads to life-threatening cancers. In addition, we developed a qu...

Background: The existing community-wide bodies of biomedical ontologies are known to contain quality and content problems. Past research has revealed various errors related to their semantics and logical structure. Automated tools may help to ease the ontology construction, maintenance, assessment and quality assurance processes. However, there ar...

In this study, we introduce an ontology-driven software engine to provide dialogue interaction functionality for a conversational agent for HPV vaccine counseling. Currently, the HPV vaccination rates are low that risks unprotected individuals at being infected with HPV, a virus that leads to life-threatening cancers. In addition, we developed a qu...

Social network analysis (SNA) concerns itself in studying network structures in relation to individuals’ behavior. Individuals may be influenced by their network members in their behavior, and thus past researchers have developed computational methods that allow us to measure the extent to which individuals are exposed to members with certain behav...

The objective of this study is to identify individual-level factors and health venue utilization patterns associated with uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and to evaluate whether PrEP uptake behavior is further diffused among young men who have sex with men (YMSM) through health venue referral networks. A sample of 543 HIV-seronegative YMS...

For individuals living with HIV, disclosure of HIV status to their partners can be a source of psychological and emotional stress. Minimal information about serostatus disclosure is available for young men who have sex with men (YMSM). This study examined the disclosure of HIV status to social and sexual partners among YMSM using social and sexual...

With the emerging use of speech technology in consumer goods, we experimented with the application of conversational agents for the communication of health information relating to HPV vaccine. Research have stated that one-to-one contact between providers and patients have a variety of positive influences on patients' perception towards vaccines, e...

Background: In this paper, we discuss the design and development of a formal ontology to describe misinformation about vaccines. Vaccine misinformation is one of the drivers leading to vaccine hesitancy in patients. While there are various levels of vaccine hesitancy to combat and specific interventions to address those levels, it is important to...

Background: Healthcare services, particularly in patient-provider interaction, often involve highly emotional situations, and it is important for physicians to understand and respond to their patients' emotions to best ensure their well-being. Methods: In order to model the emotion domain, we have created the Visualized Emotion Ontology (VEO) to...

In order for machines to understand or express emotion to users, the specific emotions must be formally defined and the software coded to how those emotions are to be expressed. This is particularly important if devices or computer-based tools are utilized in clinical settings, which may be stressful for patients and where emotions can dominate the...

We report on a study of our custom Hootation software for the purposes of assessing its ability to produce clear and accurate natural language phrases from axioms embedded in three biomedical ontologies. Using multiple domain experts and three discrete rating scales, we evaluated the tool on clarity of the natural language produced, fidelity of the...

This study demonstrates the use of distributed vector representations and Pathfinder Network Scaling (PFNETS) to represent online vaccine content created by health experts and by laypeople. By analyzing a target audience's conceptualization of a topic, domain experts can develop targeted interventions to improve the basic health knowledge of consum...

Background Knowledge engineering for ontological knowledgebases is resource and time intensive. To alleviate these issues, especially for novices, automated tools from the natural language domain can assist in the development process of ontologies. We focus towards the development of ontologies for the public health domain and use patient-centric s...

Statistical and machine learning approaches to named entity recognition have risen to prominence in the field of natural language processing. Certain named entities, specifically biomedical software, is a challenge to identify as a named entity. One direction is investigating the use of contextual semantic information to assist in this task as allu...

Background Research for ontology evaluation is scarce. If biomedical ontological datasets and knowledgebases are to be widely used, there needs to be quality control and evaluation for the content and structure of the ontology. This paper introduces how to effectively utilize a semiotic-inspired approach to ontology evaluation, specifically towards...

Human papillomavirus is a widespread sexually transmitted infection that can be prevented with vaccination. However, HPV vaccination rates in the United States are disappointingly low. This paper will introduce a patient oriented web ontology intended to provide an interactive way to educate patients about HPV and the HPV vaccine that will to empow...

Objective To construct a comprehensive vaccine information ontology that can support personal health information applications using patient-consumer lexicon, and lead to outcomes that can improve patient education. Methods The authors composed the Vaccine Information Statement Ontology (VISO) using the web ontology language (OWL). We started with...

With the emerging importance of biomedical ontology research impacting Big Biomedical Data, there will be a need for knowl-edgebase evaluation that is both systematic and also engage a community of experts. This paper will introduce a prototype in production to evaluate the quality of formal ontologies through an online web tool, using the semiotic...

Adolescent and Young Adult (AYA) cancer survivors manage an array of health-related issues. Survivorship Care Plans (SCPs) have the potential to empower these young survivors by providing information regarding treatment summary, late-effects of cancer therapies, healthy lifestyle guidance, coping with work-life-health balance, and follow-up care. H...

Since the early 90s, healthcare providers have been mandated to provide VIS (Vaccine Information Statement) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to parents and patients before their children or themselves receive any vaccination uptake. Despite the initiative, there exist issues of patients not receiving a comprehensive underst...

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) distributes Vaccine Information Statements (VIS) documentation to clinician to inform patients of the benefits and risk of the vaccines that are available. The effectiveness of the learning and comprehension has been reported to have been insufficient, particularly with population with lower than average literac...

Drchrono is an Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) application designed specifically for the iPad. Described as portable, efficient and accessible anywhere, drchrono has several features that might be attractive to health care providers. However, EHRs have to conform to certain Federal Healthcare Information Technology Guidelines, which are evaluate...

This paper examines the state of software design in 2011. It covers the benefits of good design, drawbacks of poor design, overviews the major challenges to good design, and categorizes the major strategies in use for design creation. Known design principles that have held the past 20-30 years are presented as well as the compositional makeup of a...