Nafees Qamar

Yilong Yang, Nafees Qamar, Peng Liu et al.

Automated service classification plays a crucial role in service discovery, selection, and composition. Machine learning has been widely used for service classification in recent years. However, the performance of conventional machine learning methods highly depends on the quality of manual feature engineering. In this paper, we present a novel deep neural network to automatically abstract low-level representation of both service name and service description to high-level merged features without feature engineering and the length limitation, and then predict service classification on 50 service categories. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study by comparing 10 machine learning methods on 10,000 real-world web services. The result shows that the proposed deep neural network can achieve higher accuracy in classification and more robust than other machine learning methods.

Yilong Yang, Xiaoshan Li, Nafees Qamar et al.

Legacy Electronic Health Records (EHRs) systems were not developed with the level of connectivity expected from them nowadays. Therefore, interoperability weakness inherent in the legacy systems can result in poor patient care and waste of financial resources. Large hospitals are less likely to share their data with external hospitals due to economic and political reasons. Motivated by these facts, we aim to provide a set of software implementation guidelines, i.e., MedShare to deal with interoperability issues among disconnected healthcare systems. The proposed integrated architecture includes: 1) a data extractor to fetch legacy medical data from a hemodialysis center, 2) converting it to a common data model, 3) indexing patient information using the HashMap technique, and 4) a set of services and tools that can be installed as a coherent environment on top of stand-alone EHRs systems. Our work enabled three cooperating but autonomous hospitals to mutually exchange medical data and helped them develop a common reference architecture. It lets stakeholders retain control over their patient data, winning the trust and confidence much needed towards a successful deployment of MedShare. Security concerns were effectively addressed that also included patient consent in the data exchange process. Thereby, the implemented toolset offered a collaborative environment to share EHRs by the healthcare providers.

Nafees Qamar, Yilong Yang, Andras Nadas et al.

This paper takes on the problem of automatically identifying clinically-relevant patterns in medical datasets without compromising patient privacy. To achieve this goal, we treat datasets as a black box for both internal and external users of data that lets us handle clinical data queries directly and far more efficiently. The novelty of the approach lies in avoiding the data de-identification process often used as a means of preserving patient privacy. The implemented toolkit combines software engineering technologies such as Java EE and RESTful web services, to allow exchanging medical data in an unidentifiable XML format as well as restricting users to the need-to-know principle. Our technique also inhibits retrospective processing of data, such as attacks by an adversary on a medical dataset using advanced computational methods to reveal Protected Health Information (PHI). The approach is validated on an endoscopic reporting application based on openEHR and MST standards. From the usability perspective, the approach can be used to query datasets by clinical researchers, governmental or non-governmental organizations in monitoring health care services to improve quality of care.