Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding.

OBJECTIVE: The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. BACKGROUND: The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additional information. We have developed a system that provides the consumer terms alongside the original medical terms and also adds consumer explanations. Moreover, differently from other solutions, our system works with multiple languages. METHODS: We have developed the SIMPLE application that is able to automatically: 1) identify medical terms in a medical text by using medical vocabularies; 2) translate the medical terms into consumer terms through medical-consumer thesauri; 3) provide term explanations by using health-consumer dictionaries. SIMPLE can be used as a standalone web application or can it be embedded into common health platforms for real time identification and explanation of medical terms. At present, it works with English and Italian texts but it can be easily extended to other languages. We have run subjective tests with both medical experts and non-experts as well as objective tests to verify the effectiveness of SIMPLE and its simplicity of use. RESULTS: Non-experts found SIMPLE easy to use and responsive. The big majority of respondents confirmed they were helped by SIMPLE in understanding medical texts and declared their willingness to continue using SIMPLE and to recommend it to other people. The subjective tests, conducted with medical experts on a set of Italian radiology reports, showed an agreement between SIMPLE and the experts, on the highlighted medical terms, that ranges between 74.05 % and 81.16 % as well as an agreement of around 60 % on the consumer term translation. The objective tests showed that the consumer terms, provided by SIMPLE, are, on average, eighteen times more familiar than the relative medical terms so proving, once more, the effectiveness of SIMPLE in simplifying the medical terms. CONCLUSIONS: The performed tests demonstrate the effectiveness of SIMPLE, its simplicity of use and the willingness of people in continuing with its use. SIMPLE provides, with a good agreement level, the same information that medical experts would provide. Finally, the consumer terms are 'objectively' more familiar than the related technical terms and as a consequence, much easier to understand.

A focus on the state of the art of food waste/losses issue and suggestions for future researches.

Today, the role of the supply chain (SC) strategies in Food-Waste/Losses (F-W/L) generation is neglected, because F-W/L are generally considered an unavoidable consequence of accidental events. Therefore, only operating plans are today put into practice, which aim at reducing the impact of product losses along the SC. This involves that structured analyses and strategic SC approaches are not available for the prevention/minimization of F-W/L. The paper aims at changing the perspective, and promoting the hypothesis that generation of F-W/L mainly depends on the SC strategies put into practice that are usually optimized on the basis of the market demand. The paper considers the F-W/L an intrinsic characteristic of the SC, which must be put in relation with the market demand and the shelf life of products, for given boundary conditions (legal constraints, politic decisions, climatic and micro macro-economic factors). Thus, the paper aims at reviewing the state of the art of the F-W/L issue, and proposing new research topics in the field of the prevention and minimization of F-W/L, by focusing on: (i) the forecasting of F-W/L, the implementation of adaptive-holistic approaches that model the non-stationary and holistic behaviour of the phenomenon; (ii) the determination of analytical conditions that entail the generation of F-W/L, in relation to the implementation of specific SC strategies; (iii) the study of mathematical models for the assessment of the shelf life, and the evaluation of innovative technologies, which enable the shelf life monitoring; (iv) the study of new shelf life-dependent demand models based on the consumer-utility theory; (v) the redesign of the logistic SC management models, by proposing new SC coordination models, planning and replenishment strategies, and pricing models, for the prevention/minimization of the predictable component of F-W/L; (vi) the design of new risk assessment plans for the management of the accidental component of F-W/L.

Effectiveness of the food recovery at the retailing stage under shelf life uncertainty: An application to Italian food chains.

Food losses represent a significant issue affecting food supply chains. The possibility of recovering such products can be seen as an effective way to reduce such a phenomenon, improve supply chain performances and ameliorate the conditions of undernourished people. The topic has been already investigated by a previous paper enforcing the hypothesis of deterministic and constant Shelf Life (SL) of products. However, such a model cannot be properly extended to products affected by uncertainties of the SL as it does not take into account the deterioration costs and loss of profits due to the overcoming of the SL within the cycle time. Thus the present paper presents an extension of the previous one under stochastic conditions of the food quality. Differently from the previous publication, this work represents a general model applicable to all supply chains, especially to those managing fresh products characterized by uncertain SL such as fruits and vegetables. The deterioration costs and loss of profits are included in the model and the optimal time at which to withdraw the products from the shelves as well as the quantities to be shipped at each alternative destination have been determined. A comparison of the proposed model with that reported in the previous publication has been carried out in order to underline the impact of the SL variability on the optimality conditions. The results show that the food recovery strategy in the presence of uncertainty of the food quality is rewarding, even if the optimal profit is lower than that of the deterministic case.