Samuel Danso

Samuel Danso
University of Edinburg

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54
Publications
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1,633
Citations

Publications

Publications (54)
Article
Full-text available
Low and middle-income countries continue to use Verbal autopsies (VAs) as a World Health Organisation-recommended method to ascertain causes of death in settings where coverage of vital registration systems is not yet comprehensive. Whilst the adoption of VA has resulted in major improvements in estimating cause-specific mortality in many settings,...
Article
Full-text available
In this open-access opinion paper, we argue that the recent advances in computational psychiatry and computational neurology offer a promising translational neuroscience framework for integrating multiple levels of abstractions and investigating neurobiological and pathological mechanisms of dementia. In addition, they can derive mechanistic models...
Article
Background Promising memory markers for Alzheimer´s dementia (AD) tap into either relational (face‐name) or conjunctive (object‐colour) functions (Rentz et al., 2013). Whereas relational functions appear affected in the early symptomatic stages of AD, conjunctive functions have been found impaired in the pre‐symptomatic stages. Relational but not c...
Article
Functional brain connectivity of the resting-state networks has gained recent attention as a possible biomarker of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). In this paper, we review the literature of functional connectivity differences in young adults and middle-aged cognitively intact individuals with non-modifiable risk factors of AD (n = 17). We focus on three...
Chapter
Computational modeling can help to understand different types of brain connectivity with respect to Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment, for example, by modeling the functional connectivity in resting state networks, focusing on default mode network. In this chapter, an overview of methods of neural network computational modeling usin...
Article
Full-text available
Alzheimer's disease (AD) has its onset many decades before dementia develops, and work is ongoing to characterise individuals at risk of decline on the basis of early detection through biomarker and cognitive testing as well as the presence/absence of identified risk factors. Risk prediction models for AD based on various computational approaches,...
Article
Full-text available
In order to address the oft-cited societal, economic, and health and social care impacts of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease, we must move decisively from reactive to proactive clinical practice and to embed evidence-based brain health education throughout society. Most disease processes can be at least partially prevented, s...
Article
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Background Numerous dementia risk prediction models have been developed in the past, however only a few are recommended for clinical use (Stephan et al., 2015; Tang et al., 2015). This might be due to methodological limitations that hamper their reliability and accuracy. Here we summarize and critically discuss the employed methodological approache...
Article
Objective Depression and trauma are associated with changes in brain regions implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. The present study examined associations between childhood trauma, depression, adult cognitive functioning and risk of dementia. Methods Data from 378 participants in the PREVENT Dementia Study aged 40–59 years. Linear and logistic models...
Preprint
Full-text available
To identify if there are distinguishing mutations in the African SARS-CoV-2 genomes compared to genomes from other countries, including disease hotspots, we conducted in silico analyses and comparisons. Complete African SARS-CoV-2 genomes deposited in GISAID and NCBI databases as of June 2020 were downloaded and aligned with genomes from Wuhan, C...
Article
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Introduction: Numerous dementia risk prediction models have been developed in the past decade. However, methodological limitations of the analytical tools used may hamper their ability to generate reliable dementia risk scores. We aim to review the used methodologies. Methods: We systematically reviewed the literature from March 2014 to Septembe...
Article
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Background: Maternal and perinatal mortality are still unacceptably high in many countries despite steep increases in facility birth. The evidence that childbirth in facilities reduces mortality is weak, mainly because of the scarcity of robust study designs and data. We aimed to assess this link by quantifying the influence of major determinants...
Article
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Introduction Advanced machine learning methods might help to identify dementia risk from neuroimaging, but their accuracy to date is unclear. Methods We systematically reviewed the literature, 2006 to late 2016, for machine learning studies differentiating healthy aging from dementia of various types, assessing study quality, and comparing accurac...
Article
Full-text available
INTRODUCTION: Advanced machine learning methods might help to identify dementia risk from neuroimaging, but their accuracy to date is unclear. METHODS: We systematically reviewed the literature, 2006 to late 2016, for machine learning studies differentiating healthy ageing through to dementia of various types, assessing study quality, and comparing...
Article
Full-text available
A framework for building an infrastructure that semantically integrates, archives, and reuses data for various research purposes in human brain imaging remains critical. In particular, problems of aligning technical, clinical, and professional systems in order to facilitate data sharing are a recurring issue in brain imaging. However, large samples...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To evaluate the impact of Newhints community-based surveillance volunteer (CBSV) assessments and referrals on access to care for sick newborns and on existing inequities in access. Design We evaluated a prospective cohort nested within the Newhints cluster-randomised controlled trial. Setting Community-based intervention involving more t...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The reliability of counts for estimating population dynamics and disease burdens in communities depends on the availability of a common unique identifier for matching general population data with health facility data. Biometric data has been explored as a feasible common identifier between the health data and sociocultural data of resid...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To assess the impact of probable depression in the immediate postnatal period on subsequent infant mortality and morbidity. Design Cohort study nested within 4 weekly surveillance of all women of reproductive age to identify pregnancies and collect data on births and deaths. Setting Rural/periurban communities within the Kintampo Health...
Article
Risk factors for postnatal depression (PND), one of the most pervasive complications of child bearing, are poorly understood in Africa. A recent systematic review of 31 studies found that the strongest predictors are social and economic disadvantage and gender-based factors; only six of these studies were community based, and almost all were in Sou...
Article
Full-text available
A World Health Organization (WHO)/United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) (2009) joint statement recommended home visits by community-based agents as a strategy to improve newborn survival, based on promising results from Asia. This article presents detailed evaluation of community volunteer assessment and referral implemented within the Ghana Newh...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To assess the extent of socio-economic inequity in coverage and timeliness of key childhood immunisations in Ghana.Methods Secondary analysis of vaccination card data collected from babies born between January 2008 and January 2010 who were registered in the surveillance system supporting the ObaapaVita and Newhints Trials was carried ou...
Article
Full-text available
Reference values derived from developed countries are used in many countries in Africa for interpretation of laboratory results obtained during routine healthcare and clinical trials. Use of locally derived reference values has been recommended. The purpose of the study was to establish age- and sex-specific reference values for children in the mid...
Article
This paper describes an on-going project that seeks to develop the first automatic PoS tagger for Scottish Gaelic. Adapting the PAROLE tagset for Irish, we manually re-tagged a preexisting 86k token corpus of Scottish Gaelic. A double-verified subset of 13.5k tokens was used to instantiate eight statistical taggers and verify their accuracy, via a...
Article
Background: In 2009, on the basis of promising evidence from trials in south Asia, WHO and UNICEF issued a joint statement about home visits as a strategy to improve newborn survival. In the Newhints trial, we aimed to test this home-visits strategy in sub-Saharan Africa by assessing the effect on all-cause neonatal mortality rate (NMR) and essent...
Article
Full-text available
A Verbal Autopsy is the record of an interview about the circumstances of an uncertified death. In developing countries, if a death occurs away from health facilities, a field-worker interviews a relative of the deceased about the circumstances of the death; this Verbal Autopsy can be reviewed off-site. We report on a comparative study of the proce...
Article
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To determine the effect of weekly low-dose vitamin A supplementation on cause-specific mortality in women of reproductive age in Ghana. A cluster-randomized, triple-blind, placebo-controlled trial was conducted in seven districts of the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana. Women aged 15-45 years who were capable of giving informed consent and intended to l...
Article
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This paper presents a method employed in building a semantically annotated corpus of 11,741 Verbal Autopsy documents, each annotated with Cause of Death, based on verbal records of deaths of mothers, stillbirths, and infants up to 1 year of age, captured for analysis in Ghana between December 2000 and July 2010. Verbal Autopsy is a technique which...
Conference Paper
Automatic Text Classification (ATC) is an emerging technology with economic importance given the unprecedented growth of text data. This paper reports on work in progress to develop methods for predicting Cause of Death from Verbal Autopsy (VA) documents recommended for use in low-income countries by the World Health Organisation. VA documents cont...
Article
Full-text available
An annotated corpus is essential to the development and evaluation of automatic approaches in corpus linguistics research. The biomedical domain is one area that is witnessing a high growth of corpus based approaches to the development of automatic systems. This paper presents a method employed in building a semantically annotated corpus of 11,741...
Article
Full-text available
Objectives To assess the effect of vitamin A supplementation in women of reproductive age in Ghana on cause- and age-specific infant mortality. In addition, because of recently published studies from Guinea Bissau, effects on infant mortality by sex and season were assessed. Design Double-blind, cluster-randomised, placebo-controlled trial. Setting...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Unregistered deaths account for over 67 percent of global annual deaths. These deaths occur in poor resource countries where no or weak death registration system exists. Verbal Autopsy is a technique recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to determine the causes of deaths in countries with poor death registration systems. Traditional ap...
Article
Full-text available
Background Tackling neonatal mortality is essential for the achievement of the child survival millennium development goal. There are just under 4 million neonatal deaths, accounting for 38% of the 10.8 million deaths among children younger than 5 years of age taking place each year; 99% of these occur in low- and middle-income countries where a lar...
Article
A previous trial in Nepal showed that supplementation with vitamin A or its precursor (betacarotene) in women of reproductive age reduced pregnancy-related mortality by 44% (95% CI 16-63). We assessed the effect of vitamin A supplementation in women in Ghana. ObaapaVitA was a cluster-randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial undertaken in...
Article
In developing countries many stillbirths and neonatal deaths occur at home and cause of death is not recorded by national health information systems. A community‐level verbal autopsy tool was used to obtain data on the aetiology of stillbirths and neonatal deaths in rural Ghana. Objectives were to describe the timing and distribution of causes of s...
Article
This study evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of a verbal autopsy (VA) tool in ascertaining the causes of stillbirths and neonatal deaths in rural Ghana and was nested within a community-based maternal vitamin A supplementation trial (ObaapaVitA trial). All stillbirths and neonatal deaths between 1 January 2003 and 30 June 2004 were prospectively in...
Article
Full-text available
To explore how subjects in a placebo-controlled vitamin A supplementation trial among Ghanaian women aged 15-45 years perceive the trial and whether they know that not all trial capsules are the same, and to identify factors associated with this knowledge. 60 semistructured interviews and 12 focus groups were conducted to explore subjects' percepti...
Thesis
Direct mailing, as a marketing strategy for customer relationship management, faces the challenge of systematic knowledge discovery in the large database of their customers to aggressively achieve operational, tactical and a strategic advantage in this global competitive market. Data mining is the technology that offers the potential means to uncov...
Article
Full-text available
Unregistered deaths account for over 67 percent of global annual deaths. These deaths occur in poor resource countries where no or weak death registration system exists. Verbal Autopsy is a technique recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) to determine the causes of deaths in countries with poor death registration systems. Traditional ap...

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