Potential Research Collaborations Research Articles

Analyzing the Trends and Global Growth of Energy Harvesting for Implantable Medical Devices (IMDs) Research—A Bibliometric Approach

Implantable medical devices (IMDs) play a crucial role in improving individuals’ well-being and ensuring their safety by providing real-time health data monitoring for recovery. The use of energy harvesting (EH) technology has become increasingly popular among researchers because it offers the potential to extend the battery life of IMDs and reduce their weight. This study successfully examined the expansion of EH in the field of IMDs, the distribution of publications across different countries, and the identification of the most influential authors for potential research collaborations. A bibliometric analysis was conducted to evaluate two metrics: performance and science mapping. Data was collected from the Scopus database from the initial publications until October 2023, encompassing 250 articles published in Englishlanguage journals. The titles, keywords, and abstracts of these publications were analyzed and interpreted using VOS Viewer (version 1.6.19). Furthermore, network analysis using VOS Viewer enabled the identification of key research clusters. The findings reveal a continuous increase in EH for research on infectious and parasitic diseases over the 15-year period from 2008 to 2023. The United States and the University of Bern are recognized as the leading contributors to this field, based on their country and institutional contributions, respectively. The author with the most published papers and citations hails from China. Additionally, this study identifies several opportunities for collaboration with countries, institutions, authors, and research hotspots in EH for IMDs that benefit the reader.

Mapping the intellectual structure and evolution of information technology and auditing: a bibliometric review

Purpose- The goal of this study is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of papers relevant to information technology (IT) and auditing that were published in the Web of Science Core Collection database between 1978 and 2022. Methodology- This study does a bibliometric analysis of 2991 audit and information technology publications from a pool of 7738. It works in two steps: descriptive performance metrics and co-word analysis. The descriptive metrics include publishing patterns, productive nations and authors, effect on certain areas and journals, number of citations by country, and publications with the highest citations. The co-occurrence analysis maps the ties between concepts by utilizing social network analysis methods to investigate the field's interconnections. Findings- This study identifies six major trends in IT and auditing: increased technology use in internal auditing, the demand for information security expertise, transparency in the digital age, technology for ethical auditing, cloud-based auditing with blockchain, and post-COVID IT continuous auditing standards. These trends highlight the need for auditors to adapt to evolving technology and ethical considerations, prioritizing data security and privacy. Additionally, the survey reveals key authors, publications, and countries in this field, offering valuable insights for industry leaders and potential research collaborations. Conclusion- This study provides a complete overview of the topic of IT and auditing by integrating several methodological techniques. This study provides direction for future research in addition to offering significant insight into the main research trends, issues, and problems in this subject. Keywords: Information technology, auditing, co-occurrence analysis, bibliometric analysis. JEL Codes: M41, M42

Rice Husk Silica Research in Indonesia: A Blibiometric Analysis Based on Scopus

To gain deeper and more understanding the research on rice husk SiO2 in Indonesia, in this study, a bibliometric software VOSViewer was used to analysis relevant literature in the field. Scientific documents were retrieved from Scopus database between 1 January 2000 to 25 April 2023. Bibliometric indicators, including growth of publications, most prolific authors and institutions, most productive document sources, most cited papers, and cluster analysis were used and were presented using general statistic. Analyse results indicate that the number of documents on rice husk SiO2 in Indonesia have increased significantly, especially during the last seven years. Professor Wasinton and Lampung University were ranked first as the most prolific author and institution, respectively. Many documents have been published the IOP Conference Series Earth and Environmental Science and a document published in s. In addition, network analysis can be used to identify potential research collaboration among institute to address gaps and challenges, and to avoid unnecessary research overlap.

Global research trends of infantile hemangioma: A bibliometric and visualization analysis from 2000 to 2022

BackgroundInfantile hemangioma (IH) has received global attention, resulting in a significant volume of literature. However, there is a lack of bibliometric analyses specifically focusing on IH publications. This study aims to fill this gap by conducting a comprehensive analysis of IH publications, investigating their characteristics, contribution distribution, and developmental trends. By enhancing our understanding of IH and identifying potential research topics and collaborators, this study will contribute to the advancement of the field. MethodsA total of 4333 articles and reviews on IH were collected from the Web of Science (WoS) database, spanning the years 2000–2022. The study encompassed a comprehensive analysis of IH publications, evaluating their quantity and quality. Additionally, we profiled publishing groups based on country, institution, author publication records, and collaboration networks. Lastly, we identified and summarized the prominent research topics. ResultsAnnual publications on IH have increased over the past 20 years. The United States has the highest number of publications and the highest total number of citations. Pediatric Dermatology was the most influential journal in the IH field. The citation analysis indicated that the articles published by Léauté-Labrèze in 2008 had the highest number of citations. The articles published by North PE in 2000 and Boye E in 2001 laid a certain research foundation for this field. Concerning institutions, most of the cooperative relationships were established in the same country/region. The United States has the largest number of scientific research institutions and IH researchers, leading most of the cross-country collaboration. The University of California, San Francisco, Medical College of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and Shanghai Jiaotong University were the research centers that published the most IH-related research. Frieden IJ, Mulliken JB, and Drolet BA were the top three most influential authors. Frieden IJ, Garzon MC, and Mulliken JB were the top three authors with the most cited frequency. In addition, keywords and keyword co-occurrence networks prompted that the pathological mechanism of IH, clinical analysis, and other vascular anomalies are research hotspots. Analysis of trending topics suggests that research on IH has evolved from treatment-focused studies towards investigations of other vascular diseases and a series of clinical case studies. Currently, clinical case studies receive the most attention in the field. ConclusionsThis comprehensive bibliometric study provides a thorough analysis of post-2000 publications in the field of IH, offering insights into current research trends for the first time. The findings suggest that future investigations will continue to prioritize understanding IH mechanisms, treatment approaches, and treatment evaluation. Furthermore, the exploration of other vascular diseases and the inclusion of clinical case studies are expected to contribute to advancements in IH clinical practice. By identifying potential collaborators, partner institutions, and new research avenues, this study offers valuable guidance for future in-depth research on IH.

One decade of big data for firms' competitiveness: insights and a conceptual model from bibliometrics

PurposeUsing analytics for firms' competitiveness is a vital component of a company's strategic planning and management process. In recent years, organizations have started to capitalize on the significant use of big data for analyses to gain valuable insights to improve decision-making processes. In this regard, leveraging and unleashing the potential of big data has become a significant success factor for steering firms' competitiveness, and the related literature is increasing at a very high pace. Thus, the authors propose a bibliometric study to understand the most important insights from these studies and enrich existing conceptual models.Design/methodology/approachIn this study, the authors use a bibliometric review on articles related to the use of big data for firms' competitiveness. The authors examine the contributions of research constituents (authors, institutions, countries and journals) and their structural and thematic relationships (collaborations, co-citations networks, co-word networks, thematic trends and thematic map). The most important insights are used to enrich a conceptual model.FindingsBased on the performance analysis results, the authors found that China is by far the most productive country in this research field. However, in terms of influence (by the number of citations per article), the most influential countries are the UK, Australia and the USA, respectively. Based on the science mapping analysis results, the most important findings are projected in the common phases of competitive intelligence processes and include planning and directions concepts, data collection concepts, data analysis concepts, dissemination concepts and feedback concepts. This projection is supplemented by cross-cutting themes such as digital transformation, cloud computing, privacy, data science and competition law. Three main future research directions are identified: the broadening of the scope of application fields, the specific case of managing or anticipating the consequences of pandemics or high disruptive events such as COVID-19 and the improvement of connection between firms' competitiveness and innovation practices in a big data context.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings of this study show that the most important research axis in the existing literature on big data and firms' competitiveness are mostly related to common phases of competitive intelligence processes. However, concepts in these phases are strongly related to the most important dimensions intrinsic to big data. The use of a single database (Scopus) or the selected keywords can lead to bias in this study. Therefore, to address these limitations, future studies could combine different databases (i.e. Web of Science and Scopus) or different sets of keywords.Practical implicationsThis study can provide to practitioners the most important concepts and future directions to deal with for using big data analytics to improve their competitiveness.Social implicationsThis study can help researchers or practitioners to identify potential research collaborators or identify suitable sources of publications in the context of big data for firms' competitiveness.Originality/valueThe authors propose a conceptual model related to big data and firms' competitiveness from the outputs of a bibliometric study.

Top 50 cited articles on cardiac rehabilitation: A bibliometric and altmetric analysis study

Background/Aim: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally, with an estimated 18.6 million deaths each year. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) has positive effects on reducing the mortality and morbidity of CVD, so there is a growing interest in this field. The aim of this study was to analyze the top 50 cited articles in the field of CR. Methods: The Web of Science (WoS) database was searched for articles published between 1986 and 2021. A record was made of the following information for the bibliometric analysis: article title, year of publication, number of authors and their names, number of citations, citation index, journal of publication, impact factor, type of article, and source of funding. The altmetric attention score (AAS) was recorded using automatic software calculation. Results: The majority of articles were published in the journal “Circulation” (n=14) and the “Journal of the American College of Cardiology” (n=8). The country with the highest number of articles was the US (n=27), and the most cited author was P.A. Ades. Studies evaluating exercise-based rehabilitation, key components of CR, and secondary prevention were among the top cited articles. In terms of AAS, in addition to the titles mentioned, mobile health services that rely on communication technologies have also received attention. Conclusion: This study provides useful information for researchers interested in CR, including trends, topics of interest in the field, and potential research collaborations. It is intended to guide future, more comprehensive, and in-depth studies on CR.

Practical guidance on bibliometric analysis and mapping knowledge domains methodology – A summary

: Bibliometric analysis and mapping knowledge domains (MKD) are emerging methods used to synthesize research and widely used in biomedicine. Traditional, complementary and integrative medicine (TCIM) can benefit from these advanced research methods to efficiently process multi-disciplinary knowledge and capture the latest development trends to direct future research. : This article introduces and summarizes some of the methodologies used in bibliometric and MKD analyses. Practical methodological guidance for selecting databases, using available software for pre-processing, data processing, visualization and analysis is provided, and their research utility, advantages and disadvantages for TCIM research are discussed. : Bibliometric analysis focuses on the bibliographic information, whilst MKD is also interested in the content inside the article. Common methods include citation analysis, co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling analysis, co-word analysis, and co-authorship analysis. Of the two most commonly used databases, Scopus should be considered for a for a TCIM analysis of research trends as it contains a wider range of literature than Web of Science. Both databases will miss most non-English language publications. The China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database is recommended for traditional Chinese medicine research, as this is the most comprehensive Chinese language database and can be processed by the available bibliometric and MKD software. : Synthesizing large quantities of published literature from different disciplines can help to identify and focus research on new topics, as well as identify potential research collaborations for future study. Depending on the TCIM topic, databases in languages other than English should be included the analysis.

Bibliometric Network Analysis of Trends in Cyclone Separator Research: Research Gaps and Future Direction

Cyclone separators are used extensively in diverse applications and research domains to collect particle-laden flows. Despite the technological advances in this field, no bibliometric reports on this topic have been documented. Understanding the state of the art in this field is crucial for future research. Using bibliometric mapping techniques, this study examined the quality, quantity, and development of research on cyclone separators. Relevant data were extracted in plain text formats through search queries refined by publication year (2000–2021) and document type (article and review articles). A sample of 487 publications, limited to the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database was used for the bibliometric analysis. Data analysis was performed using RStudio software package (R Bibliometrix tool). Of the 487 publications that appeared during this period, China had the highest number, followed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, whereas chemical engineering journals dominated the cyclone separator research publications. Collaboration among the researchers was low (MCPR < 0.5000). Furthermore, the pattern of single-author publications was found to outstrip that of the multiple-author publications. The findings suggest that researchers in various parts of the world, particularly Africa and the Middle East, should route their research efforts towards this field, in light of the lack of publications from these regions on this subject. The aim of this study was to serve as a seminal reference for potential technological research directions and collaboration among researchers in this and other related fields.

A comprehensive bibliometric analysis on opinion mining and sentiment analysis global research output

The rise of the Internet and social media (i.e. reviews, forum discussions, blogs and social networks) constituted an interesting source to detect user opinion trends. This study examines the global publication output on opinion mining and sentiment analysis from documents published in 2000 to 2020. Bibliometric indicators on the trends, most cited papers, authors, institutions, countries, funding agencies and research subject areas were independently screened and analysed using bibliometrix package in R. A total of 7603 eligible documents were identified from 2000 to 2020. The total number of citations for all publications was 129,251, with an average of 17.0 citations per publication. About 14,629 authors wrote those documents with 1.93 authors per document and a collaboration index of 1.98. The most prolific author was Cambria Erik, with 47 publications and h-index of 42. The leading countries for research were China with n = 824, India with n = 576 and the United States with n = 244 publications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science proceedings was the top-ranked venue for publications with n = 434, h-index of 32 and 4598 total citation scores. National Natural Science Foundation of China was the top-ranked funding agency for research, and most of the publications were computer science ( n = 6320) documents. The study provides an in-depth assessment of the landmark of the hot research topic and acknowledges the contribution of the most productive and active authors across different countries in the world. In addition, the findings could support the younger scholars in their future research direction and improve the efficiency in potential future research collaborations and projects.

Preface

Preface

Needs and Strengths Assessment for Radiotherapy Centers in Africa Transitioning to IMRT

Multiple centers globally are interested in implementing intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) programs, however little data exists comparing granular center-specific needs and strengths of radiotherapy (RT) centers interested in establishing an IMRT program, in low-resource countries in this position. In conjunction with up-scaling training, methods are needed to assess multiple centers efficiently. Using a novel approach, we assess centers' needs and strengths to tailor a multi-institutional remote training program.To assess strengths and needs of centers interested in establishing an IMRT program. Core RT leaders from 16 RT centers in 7 African countries (Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Morocco, Zambia and one sister center in Pakistan) were individually invited to complete a 30-minute, 55-question electronic survey followed by 60-75-minute video conference with 2-4 lead members of a non-profit global health radiation oncology organization prior to participating in a remote IMRT training program.14 centers responded and were surveyed, and interviewed, including 11 public, 3 private and 1 hybrid institutions. Among centers 4 (28.6%) and 1 (7.1%) are currently treating patients with IMRT and both, IMRT and VMAT, respectively. In terms of strengths all 14 (100%) centers emphasized high energy and commitment to learning potential research collaboration, 1 (7.1%) center is a designated International Atomic Energy Agency training center and 1 (7.1%) is the only center in East Africa with Joint Commission International Accreditation. All 14 (100%) centers emphasized the need for education and training in advanced treatment planning procedures and techniques, 4 (28.6%) centers reported major gaps (including CT simulators, linear accelerator) in equipment, 5 (35.5%) minor gaps (including in-room image guidance, multi-leaf collimator) in equipment, and 5 (35.7%) gaps in physics QA devices (including film/array detectors, dose calculation software, phantoms for machine output checks). Using benchmark recommended staffing levels from Health Economics in Radiation Oncology data (HERO), 14 (100%) centers were well-staffed with physicists, 8 (57%) well-staffed with radiation oncologists and 8 (57%) well-staffed with radiation therapists.Among a motivated group of African RT centers with demonstrated interest in commissioning an IMRT program, we noted gaps in equipment for safe IMRT treatment delivery. Staffing met recommendation for physicists but not radiation oncologists and therapists. Combined survey and video interview assessment can help guide curriculum design for training programs and other areas for improvement.

Consumer Horticulture Advancement: Identifying Critical Research Areas and Cultivating Collaborations

Many fields of research converge to assess the impact of plants on human health, well-being, and nutrition. However, even with a recent history of horticulturists contributing to human–plant interaction work, much of the current research is conducted outside the context of horticulture and specifically outside of consumer horticulture (CH). To connect CH to research being conducted by other disciplines that explore the role of plants in improving human quality of life, a workshop was held on 1 Aug. 2018 in Washington, DC, at the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) annual conference. The workshop focused on current food science, nutrition, and crop-breeding efforts to enhance nutrition and flavor, and human health and well-being research related to nature and plant interactions in an increasingly urban population. Following these presentations regarding potential research linkages and collaboration opportunities, a facilitated discussion identified ways to improve future CH research and foster collaborative work. Action items identified included connecting research and vocabulary to help cultivate an interest in plants in younger generations; supporting awareness of collaborative opportunities with health, nutrition, urban planning, and public health practitioners; ensuring CH is known to administrators; and taking responsibility for initiating communication with colleagues in these areas.

Trends of puffery in advertising – a bibliometric analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to quantitatively assess the essential trends of existing research on “puffery in advertising” through bibliometric analysis.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses citation data collected through Scopus and Google Scholar for the research area “puffery in advertising” to investigate the most productive journals, top countries of affiliation and prominent years with maximum citations. The study analyses the 87 articles related to “puffery in advertising,” published during 1840 to 2018. Moreover, this study also presents graphical analysis through network maps.Findings“Puffery in advertising” has remained an under-researched area. However, records of past ten years indicate marginal growth in the number of publications. USA dominates this research area with most numbers of articles published till date. Through clustering of subject areas, it is found that majority of articles have been published under the subject area of “Business, Management and Accounting.” Interestingly, the results of the network maps slightly differ from that of citation table.Practical implicationsThis paper is useful for any reader or researcher who wants to understand the trends of “puffery in advertising” in terms of citation analysis, authors and affiliation countries, and prominent years with maximum citations, which would further enable them to discover emerging research areas, potential research collaborations and publications.Originality/valueTo the knowledge of the authors, this is the first ever bilbiometric study on “puffery in advertising” providing a bird’s-eye view of the essential trends.

The Cara Syria programme – combining teaching of English for Academic Purposes and academic and research skills development

AbstractThe Cara Syria Programme has been developed to support Syrian academics who have had abandon their academic positions due to the conflict in Syria and who have seen their careers compromised as a result. The Programme offers a means to re-establish their academic identities and develop new skills through participation in the learning activities and workshops provided on the Programme itself and through potential research collaborations with academics in universities in the UK. A key element is the training in English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which is delivered in weekly online lessons and intensive language workshops in Turkey. Both the online teaching and the workshops are staffed by volunteers working in language teaching and specifically in English for Academic Purposes. One of the core principles of this teaching is to pitch content in a way that is intellectually motivating and relevant in terms of the participants’ academic identities, but scaffolded to take into account language proficiency levels, which can be as low as CEFR A1. Over the last eighteen months the technology, administrative structures, and language materials suitable for learners at all levels between A1 and C1 have been developed, and the process mapped to ensure sustainability.

A Pattern-Based Academic Reviewer Recommendation Combining Author-Paper and Diversity Metrics

With the rapid increase of publishable research articles and manuscripts, the pressure to find reviewers often overwhelms the journal editors. This paper incorporates the major entity level metrics found in the heterogeneous publication networks into a pattern mining process in order to recommend academic reviewers and potential research collaborators. In essence, the paper integrates authors’ h-index and papers’ citation count and proposes a quantification to account for the author diversity into one formula duped impact to measure the real influence of a scientific paper. Thereafter, this paper formulates two kinds of target patterns and mines them harnessing the high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) framework. The first pattern, researcher-general topic patterns (RGP), is a pattern that includes only researchers; whereas, the researcher-specific topic patterns (RSP) is comprised of combinations of researchers and keywords that summarize their niche of expertise. The HUI algorithms of Two Phase, IHUP, UP-Growth, FHM, FHN, HUINIV-Mine, D2HUP, and EFIM were compared on two real-world citation datasets related to Deep Learning and HUIM, in addition to the open source mushroom dataset. The EFIM algorithm showed good performance in terms of run time and memory usage. Consequently, it was then used to mine the patterns within the proposed framework. The discovered patterns of RGP and RSP showed high coverage, proving the efficiency of the proposed framework.

Advances in Oral Mucosal Immunity and the Microbiome.

The 1st International Conference on Oral Mucosal Immunity and the Microbiome (OMIM) took place at the Avra Imperial Hotel, Chania, Crete, Greece, between 26th and 30th September 2018, under the auspices of the Aegean Conferences. This was the first Aegean Conference of its kind in thematic oral research, and a unique blend of immunological and microbiological perspectives, which attracted leading scientists from around the world to discuss the latest advances in the field. The Conference was divided into eight sessions that spanned across 4 days and included the following topics: (a) mucosal barrier immunity; (b) host response and inflammation; (c) microbiome in homeostasis and dysbiosis; (d) fungal and viral pathogenesis; (e) oral microbiome and proteome; (f) microbial virulence and biofilms; (g) microbiome, cancer, and systemic disease; and (h) microbiota and inflammation. There was substantial thematic overlap among all sessions, which promoted constant involvement of the participating scientists. An important hallmark was the active debate between oral microbiologists and oral immunologists, who explored new ideas and potential research collaborations, a crucial aspect for bridging our understanding of oral diseases in the context of the whole body. Key findings are highlighted and thematically presented in the following sections.

Increasing Residency Research Output While Cultivating Community Research Collaborations.

Having a research curriculum in addition to hosting a resident research day stimulates research activity in residency programs. Research collaborations outside an individual residency program may also promote research in residency. This paper describes a community-wide health research forum that engages faculty and residents in research while bringing together potential research collaborators from the community. A yearly research forum has been held at a large community-based family medicine residency program for the past 10 years. This forum invites both residency faculty and residents to present scholarly works, and also invites researchers from the community to present health-related research. Presenters outside the residency come from hospital systems, the local university, other residency programs, and community private physicians. Peer-reviewed research publications have increased greatly since the advent of the research forum in 2006, with six publications from 1997-2006 and 26 from 2007-2016. Greater increases in numbers of peer reviewed presentations were also seen. Collaborative research has occurred between residency faculty and multiple departments at the local university including the business school, social work, public health, physiology, and statistics. There are now 28 collaborative projects completed or in progress. Development and implementation of a regional health research event has been a success in increasing faculty and resident research productivity. The even greater success however, is the progress made in advancing research collaborations between the local university and the residency program.

Variations in Treatment Delivery for Patients with Neovascular AMD in the UK: Results from an Ophthalmology Trainee Clinical Research Network Study.

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to determine treatment delivery patterns for patients with neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) across the UK through an ophthalmology trainee research network delivered observational study.MethodsData were collected via an online tool by potential research collaborators identified by the Ophthalmology Trainee Clinical Trial Network (OCTN). Collaborators were asked to comment on periprocedural practices of treatment of nAMD in their eye unit including treatment location and injectors, clinical assessment and routine observation in patients undergoing intravitreal treatment.ResultsData were available from 26 units around the United Kingdom. Survey methodology refinement was approximately 3 months, and the average response time was 4.9 ± 2.4 days. The majority of responders confirmed that treatment was undertaken as a “one-stop” service (n = 15, 58%), delivered in a clean room (n = 23, 88%). In the majority of units, doctors administered injections (n = 24, 92%), but significant treatment was also given by nurse injectors (n = 21, 81%). All collaborators reported that patients underwent visual acuity testing and optical coherence tomography imaging at all visits, but other imaging including fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) did not take place in all cases (n = 17, 65%) and only at baseline visit.ConclusionsThese results demonstrate the feasibility of conducting ophthalmology trainee led and delivered observational studies. Our results show that FFA is not routinely used in the diagnosis of nAMD in the units sampled; most injections are carried out in a clean room, and ophthalmic nurses delivering injections is a highly prevalent model of care in the UK.

Practical papers, articles and application notes

Happy New Year! In this first issue of 2017, I would like to share with you three excellent papers. Validation of a computational electromagnetic model (CEM) forms an important part of electromagnetic simulation, especially for EMC design. Chuan Zhang, Bowen Li and Hongliang You from China Defense Science and Technology Information Center and Yijing Liu from Beijing Institute of Electronic System Engineering, China took great effort to carry out a comprehensive literature review on CEM validation work done between 1985 and 2014. They present their findings in the first paper, "Visualizing the Research Profile of CEM Model Validation: A Bibliometric Study." For those of you who are looking for potential CEM research collaborators in various countries and regions, this paper will serve as an informative guide.

Innovation Lab Winner Uses Speech Analysis to Diagnose Psychosis

Back to table of contents Next article Association NewsFull AccessInnovation Lab Winner Uses Speech Analysis to Diagnose PsychosisNick ZagorskiNick ZagorskiSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:14 Jul 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.7b13AbstractEngineer Jim Schwoebel has taken inspiration from his brother’s experience with psychosis to design apps that can analyze verbal and written language for abnormalities.A simple, reliable, and objective tool to help identify patients experiencing prodromal psychotic symptoms would be invaluable not only to psychiatrists but also to primary care providers, and biomedical engineer Jim Schwoebel thinks he may have found that tool. He was the winner of the Innovation Laboratory at APA’s 2016 Annual Meeting in Atlanta.Innovation Lab winner Jim Schwoebel has developed language processing applications that might reliably, rapidly, and objectively identify psychosis in its earliest stages.Cody Rall, M.D.Schwoebel is developing a diagnostic speech test, which analyzes both the recorded speech and a transcript of that speech for details like maximum phrase length, word coherence, and use of determiner words (such as a, an, the, this). Combining these semantic and syntactic elements can reveal a risk score that identifies the likelihood that someone is experiencing a psychotic episode.The seeds of this idea started a few years back after Schwoebel’s brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia.“I had been sensing that something was off about my brother’s speech, so after he was officially diagnosed, I looked more closely at his text messages before his psychotic break and saw noticeable abnormalities,” said Schwoebel.Schwoebel, a 2013 graduate of Georgia Tech with a degree in biomedical engineering, has long been fascinated by natural language processing but saw an opportunity to apply it in a way that could help others going through mental difficulties like his brother.He began developing some simple models but had a significant breakthrough when he read an intriguing study by researchers at Columbia University and Brazil on using automated speech processing to distinguish at-risk individuals who later did or did not transition to psychosis (Psychiatric News, November 6, 2015).“As soon as I read it, I said, ‘This model is so simple and elegant. A company needs to get this technology out there.’ ”That’s where the business side of Schwoebel kicked in—he’s also a founder of NeuroLaunch, whose website describes the company’s goal as “removing barriers for the most promising neuro-startups [to] sustain the world’s most robust community of neuroscience innovators, investors, and thought leaders.” Schwoebel has developed apps for multiple platforms, including iOS devices and the new Alexa device from Amazon, and he is raising seed money to spearhead some pilot studies. In that regard, receiving the $2,500 prize for winning the Innovation Lab was a boost, though even without that, attending the APA meeting was a wonderful opportunity to get his idea out to potential investors and research collaborators, he said.“It was also great to gain clinical insight on what the problems are in psychiatry, and other people at the meeting brought up cases where our apps could be used that I would not have thought of,” he said. “While we were aiming for primary care, one great example brought up was emergency rooms, where our speech test might help distinguish if a psychotic episode was due to an illness or drug use.”Schwoebel also got details on places that would have databanks of oral and written speech that might help him test, refine, and expand the power of the processing software. “I imagine doing this lab for the first time was challenging, but I applaud APA for getting involved in startups,” Schwoebel told Psychiatric News. “To transform psychiatry, we need to adopt these new forms of technology.” ■ ISSUES NewArchived