No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Hypertensive disorders are the most common problems during pregnancy. They cause about 10% of maternal deaths. The world mortality rate has decreased but many women are still dying every day from pregnancy complications. Various technic resources are being used in an integrated manner in order to minimize even more the death of both mothers and babies. Mobile devices with Internet access have a great potential to expand actions of health professionals. These devices facilitate care with people that are living in remote areas, assisting in patient monitoring. Information exchange anywhere and anytime between experts and patients could be an important way to improve the pregnancy monitoring. This paper presents a mobile monitoring solution using body sensors to identify worsens in the health status of pregnant women suffering hypertensive disorders. This mobile application uses Naïve Bayes classifier to better identify hypertension severity helping experts in decisionmaking process. Results show that the proposed mobile system is promising for monitoring blood pressure disorders in pregnancy.

No abstract

No abstract

Nature presents an infinite source of inspiration for computational models and paradigms, in particular for researchers associated with the area known as natural computing. The simultaneous optimization of the architectures and weights of artificial neural networks (ANNs) through biologically inspired algorithms is an interesting approach for obtaining efficient networks with relatively good generalization capabilities. This methodology constitutes a concordance between a low structural complexity model and low training error rates. Currently, complexity and high error rates are the leading issues faced in the development of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) for pregnancy care. Hence, in this paper the use of a biologically inspired technique, known as particle swarm optimization (PSO), is proposed for reducing the computational cost of the ANN-based method referred to as the multilayer perceptron (MLP), without reducing its precision rate. The results show that the PSO algorithm is able to improve computational model performance, showing lower validation error rates than the conventional approach. This technique can select the best parameters and provide an efficient solution for training the MLP algorithm. The proposed nature-inspired algorithm and its parameter adjustment method improve the performance and precision of CDSSs. This technique can be applied in electronic health (e-health) systems as a useful tool for handling uncertainty in the decision-making process related to high-risk pregnancy. The proposed method outperformed, on average, other approaches by 26.4% in terms of precision and 14.9% in terms of the true positive ratio (TPR), and showed a reduction of 35.4% in the false positive ratio (FPR). Furthermore, this method was superior to the MLP algorithm in terms of precision and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve by 2.3 and 10.2%, respectively, when applied to the delivery outcome for pregnant women.

Summary The exchange of information among health professionals is a common practice among clinics, laboratories, and hospitals. Cloud‐based clinical data exchange platforms enable valuable information to be available in real time and in a secure and private manner. The increasing availability of data in health information systems allows specialists to extract knowledge using pattern recognition techniques for the identification and prediction of risk situations that could lead to severe complications for a patient. Hence, this paper proposes the use of a neuro‐fuzzy machine learning technique for predicting the most complex hypertensive disorder in pregnancy called HELLP syndrome. This classifier serves as an inference mechanism for cloud‐based mobile applications, for effective monitoring through the analysis of symptoms presented by pregnant women. Results show that the proposed model achieves excellent results regarding several indicators, such as precision (0.685), recall (0.756), the F‐measure (0.705), and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.829). This technique can accurately predict situations that could lead to the death of both a mother and fetus, at any location and time.