Iconic Visualization of Sickle Cell Patients Current and Past Health Status.

Rapid access to patient overall health status is essential for a physician during a medical consultation. The use of a HIS for the management of neonatal screening and follow-up of sickle cell disease patients at CERPAD in the Saint-Louis region of Senegal leads the patient electronic records growing in volume and complexity. To facilitate access to relevant information and shortens the time required to analyze and understand these clinical data, an original solution is to set up a data visualization system. In this article, we propose the integration of two iconic visualization tools into the SIMENS-CERPAD module designed for sickle cell screening and healthcare. The two tools use the VCM iconic language and consist of a simplified anatomical schema showing the current health status of the patient and a timeline to visualize its temporal evolution.

Visual Representation of African Traditional Medicine Recipes Using Icons and a Formal Ontology, ontoMEDTRAD.

In traditional West African medicine, most practitioners are illiterate for official languages. 1127 local languages exist in this region. The transmission of knowledge in this traditional medicine is notoriously oral. In order to enable practitioners to communicate and preserve this knowledge, we are building SysMEDTRAD, a traditional medicine management system, based on a formal ontology of traditional medicine called ontoMEDTRAD. To overcome the language and illiteracy barriers, we propose to combine realistic photographs of plants with formal iconic descriptions of plants and recipes. This paper presents the formal and automatized representation of traditional African medicine recipes.

SIMENS-LIS4SC, a Laboratory Information System for Biological Tests of Sickle Cell Screening and Healthcare.

Neonatal screening and ongoing follow-up of children with sickle cell disease are essential to reduce the mortality caused by this disease. To ensure care continuity, it is essential to include in the patient's record the history and details of biological tests. Thus, it is necessary to provide a Laboratory Information System for electronic management of biological test prescription and results, and the laboratory system must integrate well with Health Information Systems. In this paper, we propose a Laboratory Information System for the management of biological tests for the neonatal screening and healthcare of sickle cell disease in Senegal.

IDOMEN: An Extension of Infectious Disease Ontology for MENingitis.

In sub-Saharan African countries the prevention and control of epidemic diseases requires the improvement of the surveillance system for these diseases. Biomedical ontologies are a growing field that can improve health information systems. Indeed biomedical ontologies allow semantic support, data integration, automated reasoning. We are building a meningitis ontology to assist filtering messages relevant to meningitis domain on social media in order to predict a possible epidemic. Indeed, the messages filtered are used for data and event extraction that serve as input for a meningitis surveillance system. In this paper we focused on the modeling and formalization of different perspectives of the meningitis disease such as biological perspective, clinical perspective, epidemiological and public health perspective. This paper presents the three modules in the global Infection Disease Ontology for Meningitis (IDOMEN) and at the end, we illustrate a case of reasoning with our ontology.

Towards an Information System for Sickle Cell Neonatal Screening in Senegal.

Sickle cell disease is a major public health problem in Senegal. It is an inherited disease that affects about 300,000 births worldwide each year. There are 70 million people affected worldwide, 80% of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa. In Senegal, 1 in 10 people carries the sickle cell disease gene. This disease requires follow-up from birth and for life. The patient care requires the integration and the analysis of biological, clinical, social, economic data., etc. In this paper, we propose a health information system for data management of the blood sampling from the newborn at the maternity wards and the disease screening at the Center for Research and Ambulatory Care of the Sickle Cell Disease (CERPAD).

A National Medical Information System for Senegal: Architecture and Services.

In Senegal, great amounts of data are daily generated by medical activities such as consultation, hospitalization, blood test, x-ray, birth, death, etc. These data are still recorded in register, printed images, audios and movies which are manually processed. However, some medical organizations have their own software for non-standardized patient record management, appointment, wages, etc. without any possibility of sharing these data or communicating with other medical structures. This leads to lots of limitations in reusing or sharing these data because of their possible structural and semantic heterogeneity. To overcome these problems we have proposed a National Medical Information System for Senegal (SIMENS). As an integrated platform, SIMENS provides an EHR system that supports healthcare activities, a mobile version and a web portal. The SIMENS architecture proposes also a data and application integration services for supporting interoperability and decision making.

Design of schistosomiasis ontology (IDOSCHISTO) extending the infectious disease ontology.

Epidemiological monitoring of the schistosomiasis' spreading brings together many practitioners working at different levels of granularity (biology, host individual, host population), who have different perspectives (biology, clinic and epidemiology) on the same phenomenon. Biological perspective deals with pathogens (e.g. life cycle) or physiopathology while clinical perspective deals with hosts (e.g. healthy or infected host, diagnosis, treatment, etc.). In an epidemiological perspective corresponding to the host population level of granularity, the schistosomiasis disease is characterized according to the way (causes, risk factors, etc.) it spreads in this population over space and time. In this paper we provide an ontological analysis and design for the Schistosomiasis domain knowledge and spreading dynamics. IDOSCHISTO - the schistosomiasis ontology - is designed as an extension of the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO). This ontology aims at supporting the schistosomiasis monitoring process during a spreading crisis by enabling data integration, semantic interoperability, for collaborative work on one hand and for risk analysis and decision making on the other hand.