TRAFFICVIS: Visualizing Organized Activity and Spatio-Temporal Patterns for Detecting and Labeling Human Trafficking.

Law enforcement and domain experts can detect human trafficking (HT) in online escort websites by analyzing suspicious clusters of connected ads. How can we explain clustering results intuitively and interactively, visualizing potential evidence for experts to analyze? We present TRAFFICVIS, the first interface for cluster-level HT detection and labeling. Developed through months of participatory design with domain experts, TRAFFICVIS provides coordinated views in conjunction with carefully chosen backend algorithms to effectively show spatio-temporal and text patterns to a wide variety of anti-HT stakeholders. We build upon state-of-the-art text clustering algorithms by incorporating shared metadata as a signal of connected and possibly suspicious activity, then visualize the results. Domain experts can use TRAFFICVIS to label clusters as HT, or other, suspicious, but non-HT activity such as spam and scam, quickly creating labeled datasets to enable further HT research. Through domain expert feedback and a usage scenario, we demonstrate TRAFFICVIS's efficacy. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with repeated high praises for the usability and explainability of our tool, the latter being vital for indicting possible criminals.

PCR-based Evaluation of Human Papillomavirus Genotypes in Oral Lichen Planus.

Objective: The objective of the study was to use polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to examine and compare the genotype distribution of human papillomavirus (HPV) in oral lichen planus (OLP). Materials and Methods: Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was extracted from 20 OLP biopsy specimens. Conventional PCR assay employing consensus HPV primers was used to identify HPV DNA. Positive PCR samples were then subjected to PCR assay with HPV type-specific primers. Results: Out of the total 20 OLP specimens evaluated, eight samples (40%) were positive for HPV. Females had a 41.7% higher HPV-positive rate than males. The most common type in the HPV type-specific PCR assay was HPV-18 (75%), which is a high-risk type of HPV linked to malignant diseases. The erosive kind of OLP had the greatest percentage of HPV positives (50%). Conclusion: The present study confirms the detection of HPV in OLP lesions, as determined by PCR-coupled HPV gene sequencing, as well as its likely mechanism of malignant transformation.

Mining heterogeneous clinical notes by multi-modal latent topic model.

Latent knowledge can be extracted from the electronic notes that are recorded during patient encounters with the health system. Using these clinical notes to decipher a patient's underlying comorbidites, symptom burdens, and treatment courses is an ongoing challenge. Latent topic model as an efficient Bayesian method can be used to model each patient's clinical notes as "documents" and the words in the notes as "tokens". However, standard latent topic models assume that all of the notes follow the same topic distribution, regardless of the type of note or the domain expertise of the author (such as doctors or nurses). We propose a novel application of latent topic modeling, using multi-note topic model (MNTM) to jointly infer distinct topic distributions of notes of different types. We applied our model to clinical notes from the MIMIC-III dataset to infer distinct topic distributions over the physician and nursing note types. Based on manual assessments made by clinicians, we observed a significant improvement in topic interpretability using MNTM modeling over the baseline single-note topic models that ignore the note types. Moreover, our MNTM model led to a significantly higher prediction accuracy for prolonged mechanical ventilation and mortality using only the first 48 hours of patient data. By correlating the patients' topic mixture with hospital mortality and prolonged mechanical ventilation, we identified several diagnostic topics that are associated with poor outcomes. Because of its elegant and intuitive formation, we envision a broad application of our approach in mining multi-modality text-based healthcare information that goes beyond clinical notes. Code available at https://github.com/li-lab-mcgill/heterogeneous_ehr.

Inferring multimodal latent topics from electronic health records.

Electronic health records (EHR) are rich heterogeneous collections of patient health information, whose broad adoption provides clinicians and researchers unprecedented opportunities for health informatics, disease-risk prediction, actionable clinical recommendations, and precision medicine. However, EHRs present several modeling challenges, including highly sparse data matrices, noisy irregular clinical notes, arbitrary biases in billing code assignment, diagnosis-driven lab tests, and heterogeneous data types. To address these challenges, we present MixEHR, a multi-view Bayesian topic model. We demonstrate MixEHR on MIMIC-III, Mayo Clinic Bipolar Disorder, and Quebec Congenital Heart Disease EHR datasets. Qualitatively, MixEHR disease topics reveal meaningful combinations of clinical features across heterogeneous data types. Quantitatively, we observe superior prediction accuracy of diagnostic codes and lab test imputations compared to the state-of-art methods. We leverage the inferred patient topic mixtures to classify target diseases and predict mortality of patients in critical conditions. In all comparison, MixEHR confers competitive performance and reveals meaningful disease-related topics.