Semi-structured Data Extraction Research Articles

Using Human-Centered Design to Explore Potential Users' and Men's Views of New Injectable Contraceptives in Kampala and Lagos.

Injectable contraceptives are the most used method in sub-Saharan Africa. We conducted market research to assess potential user attitudes toward 4- and 6-month injectables. We also present user suggestions for marketing these new injectables once they are available. We implemented a 2-phase market research study from October through December 2021 in Kampala, Uganda, and Lagos, Nigeria. We conducted 11 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 51 participants in Kampala and 12 FGDs with 67 participants in Lagos. FGDs included current and potential injectable users and men stratified by marital status and age. Next, 23 women in Kampala and 24 in Lagos participated in cocreation workshops using human-centered design methods to explore marketing and communications strategies for each injectable. Data collection teams completed semistructured data extraction tables that were then analyzed thematically. Participants liked both injectable options due to the reduced number of facility visits that would save time and money and increase privacy. Primary concerns included side effects, delayed return to fertility, cost, self-efficacy to self-inject, and stock-outs. Participants in Kampala preferred a shorter reinjection window (or "grace period") because it is easier to remember and they assumed it meant a quicker return to fertility, but participants in Lagos preferred a longer window because it provides extra time for reinjection. Citing norms around women needing to get pregnant quickly after marriage, participants in both sites felt that the 4-month injectable would benefit young people with busy lifestyles or limited access to facilities, whereas the 6-month injectable would benefit women who already had children. We found that participants in Kampala and Lagos would prefer additional injectable options to meet the wide-ranging needs of users in different stages of their reproductive lives. Family planning program planners can apply the marketing insights we identified when these new injectables become available.

"PrEP should be available all the time and everywhere": A qualitative assessment of family planning and PrEP integration in Lesotho.

BackgroundLesotho has a high HIV burden, with women disproportionately affected. Increased access points for HIV prevention services, including oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), should be considered. Using family planning (FP) settings for PrEP services may contribute to greater uptake of HIV prevention methods.MethodologyThis formative qualitative assessment was conducted in Maseru District, Lesotho and included in-depth interviews with 15 key informants, 10 FP providers in public facilities and community sites, and 15 FP and PrEP clients from facility and community sites. Interviews were audio recorded and in lieu of producing transcripts, teams completed semi-structured data extraction tables after each interview. Findings were compiled and synthesized by participant group into matrices and themes identified through deductive and inductive analysis.ResultsPolicy makers were generally supportive of integration but felt hampered by lack of integration policies and separation of HIV and FP departments at Ministry of Health. Funders stressed the need for coordination among partners to avoid duplication of efforts. Partners felt clients would be interested in PrEP/FP integration and that PrEP demand creation and education were crucial needs. Most providers supported integration, stressing the potential benefit to clients. Barriers discussed included heavy workloads, staff shortages, training needs, separate registers for FP and PrEP, and commodity stock-outs. Providers discussed strengthening integrated services through training, increasing staffing, having job aids and guidelines, merging the FP and PrEP registers, and marketing services together to create demand for both. Clients were overwhelmingly willing to have longer visits to receive comprehensive services and were supportive of receiving PrEP services from FP providers. Clients not using PrEP expressed willingness and interest to use. Clients' suggestions for successful integration included consulting with youth, conducting community outreaches, and improving provider availability.ConclusionsExisting FP platforms are established and well-utilized; thus providing opportunities for integrating PrEP. This assessment found support across all groups of respondents for providing PrEP within FP settings and identified a number of facilitators and barriers to integration. As PrEP rollout is relatively nascent in many countries, deepening the evidence base early will enable the utilization of findings to build stronger integrated programs with wider coverage.

How the Suboxone Education Programme presented as a solution to risks in the Canadian opioid crisis: a critical discourse analysis

ObjectivesPharmaceutical industry involvement in medical education, research and clinical practice can lead to conflicts of interest. Within this context, this study examined how the ‘Suboxone Education Programme’, developed and delivered...

An approach for metadata extraction and transformation for various data sources using R programming language

The metadata system is the key system for sharing and transforming data between various information systems (ISs), and each database system has its own structure for storing and retrieving metadata information. Metadata information must be extracted for data transformation. Furthermore, these procedures were required to communicate with each type of database system and retrieve the stored metadata; these processes required much information and effort. To overcome the challenge of accessing and extracting metadata from any type of data source, a unifomed method must be developed and integrated into any organization's information systems. The semi-structured data extraction method (SeDEM) is a developed method that includes three main operations: logical structure operation, unique key operation, and relationships operation. Finally, the accurate information obtained using the SeDEM addressed data quality issues concerning the integrity and completeness of the data transformation.

CLINICOPATHOLOGIC FEATURES OF CERVICAL CANCER PATIENTS SEEN IN A COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTRE IN NORTH-WESTERN NIGERIA

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the socio-demographic and clinicopathological features of patients with cervical cancer seen in a comprehensive cancer center in North-western Nigeria. It was a six years retrospective study of patients with cervical cancer treated in the Department of Radiotherapy and Oncology, UDUTH, Sokoto. Data was obtained from the patients’ case notes using a semi-structured data extraction form. A total of 220 cases were reviewed for patients whose mean age was 49.9 years (SD ± 11.9); with the age range of 24-87 years. Results show that squamous cell carcinoma was the most common histological type seen in 182(82.7%) of the patients, followed by adenocarcinoma 22(10%) and clear cell carcinoma 9(4.1%). Vaginal bleeding 110(50%), foul-smelling vaginal discharge103 (46.8%), fatigue 67(30.5%), lower abdominal pain 65(20.5%) and weight loss 30(13.6%) were the commonest clinical features. 176(80%) patients presented late stages (IIB – IVB) of cervical cancer. Concluding, most of the women with cervical cancer presented with features of vaginal bleeding or foul-smelling vaginal discharge, weight loss, fatigue and lower abdominal pain, with commonest histological categorization being squamous cell carcinoma. Late presentation of the disease was obviously observed in most of the cases diagnosed. The clinical features of cervical cancer identified in the cases reviewed are indicators of advanced disease. Thus, it is imperative that advocacy for cervical cancer screening should be stepped up in order to ensure early detection and prevent the progression of the disease to advanced stages.

EFFECT OF RADIOTHERAPY ON RENAL FUNCTION IN CERVICAL CANCER PATIENTS TREATED AT A COMPREHENSIVE CANCER CENTRE IN NIGERIA

Cervical cancer (CC) has been identified as a leading cause of cancer-related death of women in Nigeria. Unfortunately, treatment for CC induces renal function injury due to nephrotoxicity of commonly used cytotoxic medications and radiotherapy. The aim of this study was to determine whether radiotherapy consistently impairs the renal function of cervical cancer patients after treatment as claimed by literature. The study was an ex post facto research, for retrospective evaluation of documented information on 220 cervical cancer patients treated in the Department of Radiotherapy, Usman Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital (UDUTH), Sokoto, Nigeria. The study covered a six-year period from January, 2010 to December, 2015. Data were obtained from the patients’ case notes using a semi-structured data extraction form. Independent t-test and chi-square statistics were used to obtain and interpret results from the analysis of the data. The study hypothesis one states that there would be both positive and negative effects of radiotherapy on the renal function of patients with cervical cancer. But no significant difference was found regarding the effect of radiotherapy on renal function of the patients with cervical cancer at χ2 (1, N=220) = .284, P = 288. Hypothesis two states that there was no statistically significant difference in the Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) of the patients, measured before and after treatment (t (219) = -0.66, P> 0.5). Extrapolating from the study results revealed that radiotherapy does not only cause renal function impairment, but also enhances renal function among patients with cervical cancer. The study however recommends that there should be a constant monitoring of the GFR for every patient with cervical cancer underdoing radiotherapy.

Mother to Child Transmission of HIV and Associated Factors Among HIV Exposed Infants at Public Health Facilities, Dessie Town, Ethiopia.

BackgroundVertical transmission of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is the primary route of infection among children. Ethiopia is among the top ten countries in the world with the highest burden of HIV infections among children. Therefore we aimed to assess mother to child transmission (MTCT) of HIV and associated factors among HIV exposed infants (HEIs).MethodsA cross-sectional study was conducted using retrospective data collected from HEIs paired with their mothers who had received the services in prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) programs from January 2014 to December 2017 in public health facilities in Dessie town. Data of a total of 313 HEIs paired with their mothers were obtained by using semi-structured data extraction proforma from their medical records. The data were processed in Epi-info version 7.1.2.0 and analyzed using SPSS version 22. Crude and adjusted odds ratios with their 95% confidence intervals and p-value were used to identify significant factors.ResultsThe prevalence of HIV among exposed infants was 3.8%. Absence of maternal antenatal care visit (AOR = 4.6, 95% CI: 1.17–17.99), home delivery (AOR = 4.2, 95% CI: 1.04 −16.76), absence of antiretroviral intervention to the mother (AOR= 5.7, 95% CI: 1.10–29.36), and failure to initiate nevirapine prophylaxis for the infant (AOR = 5.3, 95% CI: 1.11 −25.44) were significant factors of MTCT of HIV.ConclusionPrevalence of MTCT of HIV was low (3.8%) in Dessie town public health facilities. Having ANC visit, delivery at health facility, maternal ARV drug intake, and infant ARV prophylaxis were the significant protective factors against MTCT of HIV. Promoting ANC service utilization among pregnant women and providing counseling as well as setting up linkage with PMTCT and giving ARV intervention to all HIV positive pregnant women and timely initiation of NVP prophylaxis to all HEIs should be recommended by the minister of health and health facilities.

Web Data Extraction Approach for Deep Web using WEIDJ

Data extraction is one of the most prominent areas in data mining analysis that is been extensively studied especially in the field of data requirements and reservoir. The main aim of data extraction with regards to semi-structured data is to retrieve beneficial information from the World Wide Web. The data from large web data also known as deep web is retrievable but it requires request through form submission because it cannot be performed by any search engines. Data mining applications and automatic data extraction are very cumbersome due to the diverse structure of web pages. Most of the previous data extraction techniques were dealing with various data types such as text, audio, video and etc. but research works that are focusing on image as data are still lacking. Document Object Model (DOM) is an example of the state of the art of data extraction technique that is related to research work in mining image data. DOM was the method used to solve semi-structured data extraction from web. However, as the HTML documents start to grow larger, it has been found that the process of data extraction has been plagued with lengthy processing time and noisy information. In this research work, we propose an improved model namely Wrapper Extraction of Image using DOM and JSON (WEIDJ) in response to the promising results of mining in a higher volume of web data from a various types of image format and taking the consideration of web data extraction from deep web. To observe the efficiency of the proposed model, we compare the performance of data extraction by different level of page extraction with existing methods such as VIBS, MDR, DEPTA and VIDE. It has yielded the best results in Precision with 100, Recall with 97.93103 and F-measure with 98.9547.

Improving Performance of DOM in Semi-structured Data Extraction using WEIDJ Model

<p>Web data extraction is the process of extracting user required information from web page. The information consists of semi-structured data not in structured format. The extraction data involves the web documents in html format. Nowadays, most people uses web data extractors because the extraction involve large information which makes the process of manual information extraction takes time and complicated. We present in this paper WEIDJ approach to extract images from the web, whose goal is to harvest images as object from template-based html pages. The WEIDJ (Web Extraction Image using DOM (Document Object Model) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)) applies DOM theory in order to build the structure and JSON as environment of programming. The extraction process leverages both the input of web address and the structure of extraction. Then, WEIDJ splits DOM tree into small subtrees and applies searching algorithm by visual blocks for each web page to find images. Our approach focus on three level of extraction; single web page, multiple web page and the whole web page. Extensive experiments on several biodiversity web pages has been done to show the comparison time performance between image extraction using DOM, JSON and WEIDJ for single web page. The experimental results advocate via our model, WEIDJ image extraction can be done fast and effectively.</p>

Possible misdiagnosis of HIV associated lymphoma as tuberculosis among patients attending Uganda Cancer Institute

BackgroundEarly diagnosis of HIV associated lymphoma is challenging because the definitive diagnostic procedure of biopsy, requires skills and equipment that are not readily available. As a consequence, diagnosis may be delayed increasing the risk of mortality. We set out to determine the frequency and risk factors associated with the misdiagnosis of HIV associated lymphoma as tuberculosis (TB) among patients attending the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI).MethodsA retrospective cohort study design was used among HIV patients with associated lymphoma patients attending the UCI, Kampala, Uganda between February and March 2015. Eligible patient charts were reviewed for information on TB treatment, socio-demographics, laboratory parameters (Hemoglobin, CD4cells count and lactate dehydrogenase) and clinical presentation using a semi structured data extraction form.ResultsA total of 183 charts were reviewed; 106/183 were males (57.9%), the median age was 35 (IQR, 28–45). Fifty six (30.6%) patients had a possible misdiagnosis as TB and their median time on TB treatment was 3.5 (1–5.3) months. In multivariate analysis the presence of chest pain had an odd ratio (OR) of 4.4 (95% CI 1.89–10.58, p < 0.001) and stage III and IV lymphoma disease had an OR of 3.22 (95% CI 1.08–9.63, p < 0.037) for possible misdiagnosis of lymphoma as TB.ConclusionA high proportion of patients with HIV associated lymphoma attending UCI are misdiagnosed and treated as TB. Chest pain and stage III and IV of lymphoma were associated with an increased risk of a possible misdiagnosis of lymphoma as TB.

Semi-structured data extraction and modelling: the WIA Project

Over the last decades, the amount of data of all kinds available electronically has increased dramatically. Data are accessible through a range of interfaces including Web browsers, database query languages, application-specific interfaces, built on top of a number of different data exchange formats. All these data span from un-structured to highly structured data. Very often, some of them have structure even if the structure is implicit, and not as rigid or regular as that found in standard database systems. Spreadsheet documents are prototypical in this respect. Spreadsheets are the lightweight technology able to supply companies with easy to build business management and business intelligence applications, and business people largely adopt spreadsheets as smart vehicles for data files generation and sharing. Actually, the more spreadsheets grow in complexity (e.g., their use in product development plans and quoting), the more their arrangement, maintenance, and analysis appear as a knowledge-driven activity. The algorithmic approach to the problem of automatic data structure extraction from spreadsheet documents (i.e., grid-structured and free topological-related data) emerges from the WIA project: Worksheets Intelligent Analyser. The WIA-algorithm shows how to provide a description of spreadsheet contents in terms of higher level of abstractions or conceptualisations. In particular, the WIA-algorithm target is about the extraction of i) the calculus work-flow implemented in the spreadsheets formulas and ii) the logical role played by the data which take part into the calculus. The aim of the resulting conceptualisations is to provide spreadsheets with abstract representations useful for further model refinements and optimizations through evolutionary algorithms computations.

Generating finite-state transducers for semi-structured data extraction from the Web

Generating finite-state transducers for semi-structured data extraction from the Web

Generating finite-state transducers for semi-structured data extraction from the Web

Integrating a large number of Web information sources may significantly increase the utility of the World-Wide Web. A promising solution to the integration is through the use of a Web Information mediator that provides seamless, transparent access for the clients. Information mediators need wrappers to access a Web source as a structured database, but building wrappers by hand is impractical. Previous work on wrapper induction is too restrictive to handle a large number of Web pages that contain tuples with missing attributes, multiple values, variant attribute permutations, exceptions and typos. This paper presents SoftMealy, a novel wrapper representation formalism. This representation is based on a finite-state transducer (FST) and contextual rules. This approach can wrap a wide range of semistructured Web pages because FSTs can encode each different attribute permutation as a path. A SoftMealy wrapper can be induced from a handful of labeled examples using our generalization algorithm. We have implemented this approach into a prototype system and tested it on real Web pages. The performance statistics shows that the sizes of the induced wrappers as well as the required training effort are linear with regard to the structural variance of the test pages. Our experiment also shows that the induced wrappers can generalize over unseen pages.