Heterogeneous Healthcare Network Research Articles

Mining Heterogeneous Healthcare Networks Extracted from Health-Consumer-Contributed Contents for Adverse Drug Reaction Detection

Since adverse drug reactions (ADRs) represent a serious world-wide health problem, how to detect ADR signals effectively and efficiently has been of great medical significance. Currently, methods proposed to detect ADRs are mainly based on data sources such as spontaneous reporting data, electronic health record, pharmaceutical databases, and biomedical literature. However, these data sources are either limited by high cost, under-reporting ratio, privacy issues, or long publication cycle. In this work, we propose to explore online health communities, a timely, informative and publicly available data source, for ADR detection. We construct a weighted heterogeneous healthcare network that contains drugs, ADRs, diseases, and users extracted from online health consumer-contributed contents, extract topological features, develop weighted path count to quantify the features, and use supervised learning techniques to detect ADR signals. The experiment results show that weighted heterogeneous healthcare network using leverage and lift as weighting schema are more effective in ADR detection than non-weighted counterpart.

Cognitive antenna selection relay for green heterogeneous healthcare networks

This article presents the latest progress on green healthcare research in heterogeneous networks (HetNet), where devices are capable of switching between multiple radio access technologies (RAT) and each RAT operates on a different frequency channel. After outlining the design features and challenges of a medical service paradigm for green cognitive medical body area networks (MBAN), measurements are made to investigate the turn-on characteristics of a power amplifier (PA) in terms of excess energy consumption and turn-on delay. We then present a multi-mode PA architecture for an MBAN relay system. An energy-efficient PA switch/stay mechanism is also presented. This allows the proposed PA architecture to operate given a transmission outage probability and transmission delay constraint. Antenna selection between two heterogeneous RATs is exploited to improve the transmission reliability. Both measurement and numerical results are provided to corroborate the performance of the proposed architecture and its switch/stay mechanism.