Toine Pieters

Toine Pieters
Utrecht University | UU · Department of Mathematics

prof. dr.

About

154
Publications
30,633
Reads
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1,231
Citations
Introduction
My current research interests include history of pharmacy, neuropharmacology, digital humanities, leprosy research and educational research
Additional affiliations
December 2009 - present
Utrecht University
Position
  • Fellow

Publications

Publications (154)
Article
Full-text available
Objective The global incidence and burden of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) are increasing annually, with current antidepressant treatments proving ineffective for 30-40% of patients. Biomolecular mechanisms within the microbiota-gut-brain axis (MGBA) may significantly contribute to MDD, potentially paving the way for novel treatment approaches. H...
Article
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In this article, we present research findings from a participatory media production project. The project is part of a transdisciplinary AI Lab and a citizen-science initiative, intended to test the transformative potential of new platforms to mediate political deliberation about contentious issues like religion, sexuality, and migration. We aimed t...
Article
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Student Assistants (SAs) are generally regarded as support to the instructor's teaching agency in a course. This case study assesses SAs taking on the more autonomous role of mentor-participants in student teams during an advanced bachelor's co-design course, advancing our understanding of distributing leadership within such open-ended educational...
Article
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The Living Library is a novel tool for opening the scientific process of literature reviewing. We here present its core features, set-up and workflow, and provide the open-source code via GitHub (https://github.com/Simon-Dirks/living-library). The Living Library allows researchers to sort articles thematically and temporally, has a built-in open lo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper introduces an innovative methodology developed within the Homo Medicinalis (HoMed) project for adapting automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to handle sensitive audio data domains, specifically focusing on privacy-sensitive patient-provider medical consultations. By utilizing AI and deep learning algorithms, the project successfully...
Conference Paper
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This study addresses the need for accurate transcriptions of medical consultations using state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Efficient and secure speech-to-text conversion is crucial in healthcare for improved medical documentation, research facilitation, and patient confidentiality. The research compares...
Article
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The new world was considered free of leprosy before the arrival of Europeans. In Suriname, historical migration routes suggest that leprosy could have been introduced from West Africa by the slave trade, from Asia by indentured workers, from Europe by the colonizers, and more recently by Brazilian gold miners. Previous molecular studies on environm...
Article
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The ravaging COVID-19 pandemic has almost pushed into oblivion the fact that the United States is still struggling with an immense addiction crisis. Drug overdose deaths rose from 16,849 in 1999 to nearly 110,000—of which an estimated 75,000 involved opioids—in 2022. On a yearly basis, the opioid casualty rate is higher than the combined number of...
Article
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Background: Cannabis is one of the most popular drugs of the 21st century, especially among adolescents and young adults. Evidence of a variety of lasting neuropsychological deficits as a result of chronic cannabis use has increased. Furthermore, regular cannabis use is found to be a predictor of mental health problems, less motivation in school, a...
Article
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We adapt previous literature on search tasks for developing a domain-specific search engine that supports the search tasks of policy workers. To characterise the search tasks we conducted two rounds of interviews with policy workers at the municipality of Utrecht, and found that they face different challenges depending on the complexity of the task...
Chapter
Hallucinogens have a long history as therapeutic agents. After the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, the popularity of classical hallucinogens with psychedelic properties increased among scientists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychotherapists. Research in the 1950s and 1960s showed great promise for the...
Article
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As the global COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden transition to emergency online education in early 2020, academic discourse quickly shifted to focus on the new situation and what could be learned from it. The present study gives an overview of the discourse on education during the pandemic in publications that appeared in the top-50 journals on the...
Article
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Introduction 1.Introduction MDD is a heterogeneous disorder, with a wide variety of symptoms and inconsistent treatment response, and is not completely understood. A dysregulated stress system is a consistent finding, however, and exhaustion is a consistent trait in adolescent patients. In order to open up our thinking about MDD we take up the chal...
Conference Paper
In this paper we present the currently running PDI-SSH project Homo Medicinalis (HoMed), in which we use machine learning to build an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) infrastructure for disclosing privacy-sensitive doctor-patient consultation recordings.
Article
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In 1926, a mycobacterial skin disease was observed in water buffaloes by researchers in Indonesia. The disease was designated as skin tuberculosis, though it was hypothesized that it might be a form of leprosy or a leprosy-like disease. In a follow-up study (Ph.D. thesis Lobel, 1934 , Utrecht University, Netherlands) a similar nodular skin disease...
Article
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During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a 26-min documentary entitled Plandemic was released online and fanatically shared via Twitter and other major social media platforms. The producers of the documentary sought to spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and to discredit scientific experts using a sophisticated disinformation...
Preprint
We explore how to generate effective queries based on search tasks. Our approach has three main steps: 1) identify search tasks based on research goals, 2) manually classify search queries according to those tasks, and 3) compare three methods to improve search rankings based on the task context. The most promising approach is based on expanding th...
Article
Full-text available
Adolescent depression is a heterogenous disorder, with a wide variety of symptoms and inconsistent treatment response, and is not completely understood. A dysregulated stress system is a consistent finding, however, and exhaustion is a consistent trait in adolescent patients. The aim of this paper is to critically assess current hypotheses in adole...
Article
Full-text available
Objective Adolescent depression is a heterogeneous disorder, with a wide variety of symptoms and inconsistent treatment response, and is not completely understood. A dysregulated stress system is a consistent finding, however, and exhaustion is a consistent trait in adolescent patients. The aim of this paper is to critically assess current hypothes...
Article
Full-text available
Leprosy is a chronic infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae) and the more recently discovered Mycobacterium lepromatosis (M. lepromatosis). The two leprosy bacilli cause similar pathologic conditions. They primarily target the skin and the peripheral nervous system. Currently it is considered a Neglected Tropical Disease, bein...
Article
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According to the Dutch colonizers in Suriname, leprosy (or Hansen’s disease) was highly contagious and transmitted from human-to-human. A “cordon sanitaire” was constructed around the patients, mainly African slaves and Asian indentured laborers and their descendants. They were tracked down and incarcerated in remote leprosy settlements located in...
Article
Background: lsd and other hallucinogens or psychedelics have been therapeutically used in psychiatry in the period between the Second World War and the late 1980s. In the past years renewed interest in the medical sciences for research and therapeutic use of these substances has evolved. AIM: A discussion of contemporary lsd research in the contex...
Article
Leprosy is a human infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae or Mycobacterium lepromatosis that can also occur in animals and even manifest as zoonosis. Recently, both mycobacteria were detected in red squirrels (Sciurus vulgaris) from the British Isles. To further explore the presence of leprosy‐bacilli in North‐West Europe, we screened Be...
Article
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Objective: We assessed whether Petrus Donders (died 1887), a Dutch priest who for 27 years cared for people with leprosy in the leprosarium Batavia, Suriname, had evidence of Mycobacterium (M.) leprae infection. A positive finding of M. leprae ancient (a)DNA would contribute to the origin of leprosy in Suriname. Materials: Skeletal remains of Fa...
Article
Full-text available
Leprosy is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae affecting the skin and nerves. Despite decades of availability of adequate treatment, transmission is unabated and transmission routes are not completely understood. Despite the general assumption that untreated M. leprae infected humans represent the major source of transmission, scar...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Leprosy is an infectious disease caused by Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis affecting the skin and nerves. Despite decades of availability of adequate treatment, transmission is unabated and routes of transmission are not completely understood. Notwithstanding the general assumption that untreated M. leprae infected h...
Chapter
In this chapter, I historically analyze the multidimensional and dynamic role of drugs as poisons and vice versa, shedding light on prototypic trajectories of medical, criminal and social poisoning from the early modern period (15th century) to the current era of modern scientific medicine. I argue that there is a remarkable continuity in the blurr...
Conference Paper
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Introduction A multicenter study was performed in Belgium to establish an optimal workflow for liquid biopsy, consisting of circulating cell-free tumour DNA (ctDNA) analysis. Material and methods EGFR ctDNA mutational analysis was performed on 549 plasma samples from 234 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. The influence of (pre-) analytic...
Article
To the Editor In their Original Investigation published in a recent issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Prasad and Mailankody¹ examine the costs of bringing a single drug with an oncological indication to the market. They conclude that 10 selected companies had a median investment cost of $648 million for the development of their drug, whereas the med...
Chapter
Human language technology developed and used in CLARIN demonstrator projects WAHSPand BILAND supports advanced forms of (multi-lingual) text mining of large datasets of newspapers. We argue that the combination of exploratory search and text mining o􀀀ers an innovative research approach to systematically set up search trails in the historical scienc...
Chapter
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Historians argue that tracing early exchange, trade and uses of plant medicines (materia medica) can elucidate dynamics of drug trajectories in the early modern period. However, information on how these drug trajectories have evolved is hidden in large amounts of heterogeneous historical data. These data are in different formats, languages, genres...
Chapter
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In this book chapter we underline the potential of big data for historical public debate research by introducing our research approach. We demonstrate our approach with research conducted on public debates of amphetamine in Dutch newspapers between 1945 and 1990. We combine distant reading (Moretti 2013) techniques with close reading (actual readin...
Article
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Context Recent public outcry has highlighted the rising cost of prescription drugs worldwide, which in several disease areas outpaces other health care expenditures and results in a suboptimal global availability of essential medicines. Method A systematic review of Pubmed, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the G...
Data
PRISMA 2009 checklist—Jun2017.docx. (DOCX)
Chapter
Full-text available
Regardless of the official zero-tolerance doping rules of the International Olympic Committee, and the ban of 118 Russian athletes (for their ties to the Kremlin’s state-sponsored doping program) the number of doped athletes at the Rio de Janeiro 2016 games was far higher than official statistics made it seem. We are waiting for new detection techn...
Chapter
The genomics revolution of the early twenty-first century has stimulated the need for new appraisals of the risks of genetic discrimination in health care. Historical memories of genetic discrimination have raised serious concerns of the misuse of genetic information in the doctoring of patients. This has led to political action such as federal leg...
Chapter
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According to many, the genetic technology used in cancer is a promising test case of twenty-first century ‘genomic medicine’. However, it is important to realize that accounting for the genetic or hereditary factors in cancer medicine is not new. Since at least the eighteenth century, medical doctors and patients have tried to establish links betwe...
Chapter
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In 1997, during the heyday of what has been labelled the “business of selling mental disease and psychotropic drugs”, David Healy published his book, “The Antidepressant Era”. In the postscript, Healy argued that the majority of people who meet diagnostic criteria for depression or anxiety seek treatment for a condition, which in principle cannot s...
Article
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We introduce our explorative historical leveled approach that we use to understand drug debates in the Royal Dutch Library's digital newspaper archive. In this approach we alternate between distant reading and close reading. Furthermore, we use this approach to evaluate two text mining tools: AVResearcherXL and Texcavator.
Article
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Dutch colony of the Netherlands Indies dominated the worldwide supply of antifebrifuge (to reduce fever) cinchona bark, the raw material for quinine, an antimalarial medicine. Over the next four decades, the high-quality and laboratory-conditioned cultivation of cinchona became the backbone of a Dutch trans...
Article
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The history of the introduction of exotic therapeutic drugs in early modern Europe is usually rife with legend and obscurity and Peruvian bark is a case in point. The famous antimalarial drug entered the European medical market around 1640, yet it took decades before the bark was firmly established in pharmaceutical practice. This article argues th...
Article
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Background: Developments in neurosciences and genetics are relevant for forensic psychiatry. AIM: To find out whether and how genetic and neuroscientific applications are being used in forensic psychiatric assessments, and, if they are, to estimate to what extent new applications will fit in with these uses. METHOD: We analysed 60 forensic psychia...
Article
This study shows how control over delicately balanced supply chains from raw material to the final product shifted from one national industry to another. By 1920, Dutch cinchona producers and quinine manufacturers dominated the international cartel that controlled the worldwide production and distribution of quinine (an antimalarial), quinine sulph...
Article
In this study, we will show how a Dutch pharmaceutical consortium of cinchona producers and quinine manufacturers was able to capitalize on one of the first international public health campaigns to fight malaria, thereby promoting the sale of quinine, an antimalarial medicine. During the 1920s and 1930s, the international markets for quinine were c...
Article
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De preventie van criminaliteit staat hoog op de maatschappelijke en politieke agenda. Naast een juridisch speelt hierbij ook een psychiatrisch kader een belangrijke rol. De laatste jaren gaat veel aandacht uit naar de neurofysiologie, neurobiologie en genetica. Sommigen hopen dat op inzichten uit deze vakgebieden gebaseerde detectie-, interven‐ tie...
Article
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Background: With the increased knowledge of biological risk factors, interest in including this information in forensic assessments is growing. Currently, forensic assessments are predominantly focused on psychosocial factors. A better understanding of the neurobiology of violent criminal behaviour and biological risk factors could improve forensi...
Article
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In this article, Jaap Verheul, Toine Pieters, and Joris van Eijatten (Utrecht University) discuss the text mining tool Texcavator that they use in the Translantis research project, in order to map the emergence of the United States as a reference culture in the Netherlands between 1895 and 1995. Texcavator enables a fine grained analysis of large-s...
Article
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The isolation of quinine from cinchona bark in 1820 opened new possibilities for the mass-production and consumption of a popular medicine that was suitable for the treatment of intermittent (malarial) fevers and other diseases. As the 19th century European empires expanded in Africa and Asia, control of tropical diseases such as malaria was seen a...
Article
Full-text available
The isolation of quinine from cinchona bark, in 1820, opened new possibilities for the mass-production and consumption of a popular medicine that was suitable for the treatment of intermittent (malarial) fevers and other diseases. As the 19th century European empires expanded in Africa and Asia, control of tropical diseases such as malaria was seen...
Article
Full-text available
Aan de hand van de ontwikkeling en invloed van een zogenaamd ‘West-Indisch lepra-conta- gionisme’ zullen wij in dit artikel laten zien dat de vertaalslag van medisch-wetenschappelijke noties en concepten naar beleid en voorschriften (mede) bepaald wordt door andere dan medisch inhoudelijke factoren. Volgens de Amerikaanse historicus Baldwin bestaat...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Comparative historical research on the the intensity, diversity and fluidity of public discourses has been severely hampered by the extraordinary task of manually gathering and processing large sets of opinionated data in news media in different countries. At most 50,000 documents have been systematically studied in a single comparative historical...
Article
Full-text available
This article discusses the promises and challenges of digital humanities methodologies for historical inquiry. In order to address the great outstanding question whether big data will re-invigorate macro-history, a number of research projects are described that use cultural text mining to explore big data repositories of digitised newspapers. The a...
Article
Teaser: The present article demonstrates that the restoration of public trust should rely on reinforcing the competence of the industry and authorities instead of increasing or intensifying regulations. The lack of public trust in the pharmaceutical sector (i.e. industry, authorities and doctors) could compromise the future of drug development and...
Conference Paper
Comparative historical research on the the intensity, diversity and fluidity of public discourses has been severely hampered by the extraordinary task of manually gathering and processing large sets of opinionated data in news media in different countries. At most 50.000 documents have been systematically studied in a single comparative historical...
Article
- Physicians should possess specific diagnostic and pharmacotherapeutic skills in order to recognize symptoms associated with doping use.- It is important to be on the alert in athletes and fitness enthusiasts for physical and psychological changes due to use of anabolic steroids such as acne, stretch marks, gynecomastia, signs of acromegaly, irasc...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose: This study provides an analysis of bodily experiences of a man with a lower leg amputation who used a virtual rehabilitation program. Method: The study reports data from semi-structured interviews with a 32-year veteran who used a virtual environment during rehabilitation. The interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenologic...
Article
Full-text available
The possibility of gene doping, defined as the transfer of nucleic acid sequences and/or the use of normal or genetically modified cells to enhance sport performance, is a real concern in sports medicine. The abuse of knowledge and techniques gained in the area of gene therapy is a form of doping, and is prohibited for competitive athletes. As yet...
Article
In 1875 the Botanical Garden of Buitenzorg introduced two coca plants on the island of Java, which was then part of the Netherlands East Indies. Within a thirty-year period, starting in 1892, Java succeeded in becoming the world's leading exporter of coca leaves, surpassing the traditional coca producers in Peru and Bolivia. How and why did this oc...
Chapter
The epidemic of serious drug safety problems (e.g., Seroxat/Paxil [paroxetine], Vioxx [rofecoxib], Redux [dexfenfluramide] or Ambien [zolpidem]) in the first decade of the twenty-first century has led to public debate on the integrity of the pharmaceutical industry and the effectiveness of drug regulation (Healy, 2004; Moynihan & Cassels, 2005; Ano...
Conference Paper
The availability of digitized collections of historical data, such as newspapers, increases every day. With that, so does the wish for historians to explore these collections. Methods that are traditionally used to examine a collection do not scale up to today’s collection sizes. We propose a method that combines text mining with exploratory search...
Article
Full-text available
In 2003-2004 and 2007-2008, the regulatory banning of SSRI use in pediatrics and young adults due to concerns regarding suicidality risk coincided with negative media coverage. SSRI use trends were analyzed from 2000-2010 in the Netherlands (NL) and the UK, and whether trend changes might be associated with media coverage of regulatory warnings. Mo...
Data
Segmentation of antidepressants in NL and the UK (TCAs, SSRIs, and other antidepressants). (EPS)
Data
Segmentation of SSRI use in NL through specialists (SSRIs, citalopram, escitalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, paroxetine, and sertraline). (EPS)
Data
The SSRIs and suicidality controversy and regulatory decisions. (DOCX)