Abstract

Abstract
Background Quantifying and dealing with lack of consistency in administrative databases (namely, under-coding) requires tracking patients longitudinally without compromising anonymity, which is often a challenging task. Objective This study aimed to (i) assess and compare different hierarchical clustering methods on the identification of individual patients in an administrative database that does not easily allow tracking of episodes from the same patient; (ii) quantify the frequency of potential under-coding; and (iii) identify factors associated with such phenomena. Method We analysed the Portuguese National Hospital Morbidity Dataset, an administrative database registering all hospitalisations occurring in Mainland Portugal between 2011-2015. We applied different approaches of hierarchical clustering methods (either isolated or combined with partitional clustering methods), to identify potential individual patients based on demographic variables and comorbidities. Diagnoses codes were grouped into the Charlson an Elixhauser comorbidity defined groups. The algorithm displaying the best performance was used to quantify potential under-coding. A generalised mixed model (GML) of binomial regression was applied to assess factors associated with such potential under-coding. Results We observed that the hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) + k-means clustering method with comorbidities grouped according to the Charlson defined groups was the algorithm displaying the best performance (with a Rand Index of 0.99997). We identified potential under-coding in all Charlson comorbidity groups, ranging from 3.5% (overall diabetes) to 27.7% (asthma). Overall, being male, having medical admission, dying during hospitalisation or being admitted at more specific and complex hospitals were associated with increased odds of potential under-coding. Discussion We assessed several approaches to identify individual patients in an administrative database and, subsequently, by applying HCA + k-means algorithm, we tracked coding inconsistency and potentially improved data quality. We reported consistent potential under-coding in all defined groups of comorbidities and potential factors associated with such lack of completeness. Conclusion Our proposed methodological framework could both enhance data quality and act as a reference for other studies relying on databases with similar problems.

Abstract
This study addresses the critical need to enhance patient's experience with healthcare mobile applications. With the exponential growth of healthcare apps over the past decade, it is imperative to understand the patients' perceptions of what is lacking and how healthcare mobile applications can be improved in terms of design, features, and communication between patients and providers, such as doctors or hospitals. This research was conducted in four phases: gathering insights into User-Interface (UI) and User-Experience, constructing a patient-focused survey, experimenting with various UI designs, and statistically analyzing survey responses about hospital mobile applications. Key findings from 82 responses highlighted the necessity to redesign both hospital app transaction processes and the apps themselves in terms of functionality and UI. Technological innovations like chatbots were underutilized due to the lack of affective computing in developing these features and a reported lack of user awareness. Regarding UI preferences, respondents favored larger text, less bold text, and blue as the primary color. Future developments should include direct communication with doctors and self-check-in features. Addressing these areas can significantly enhance patient satisfaction and engagement with healthcare mobile applications, particularly hospital apps.

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Abstract
The aim of this work is to introduce a novel digital signal processing method for data acquired using low coherence interferometry (LCI) with a 1-kHz actuator oscillation frequency. Convolution and correlation operations are employed as efficient filters, reducing computational complexity for multilayer filtering. An envelope filtering technique is developed to address discrepancies in peak signal determination caused by nonlinear actuator motion. Additionally, a phase linearization method is presented to normalize the peak position relative to the actuator signal. Experimental results demonstrate a significant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) improvement of 50 dB. Long-term measurements reveal an 11-dB noise reduction for frequencies below 1 mHz. This research enables LCI implementation at sampling rates of at least 1 kHz and expands its applicability to extreme measurement conditions.

Abstract
Event extraction is an NLP task that commonly involves identifying the central word (trigger) for an event and its associated arguments in text. ACE-2005 is widely recognised as the standard corpus in this field. While other corpora, like PropBank, primarily focus on annotating predicate-argument structure, ACE-2005 provides comprehensive information about the overall event structure and semantics. However, its limited language coverage restricts its usability. This paper introduces ACE-2005-PT, a corpus created by translating ACE-2005 into Portuguese, with European and Brazilian variants. To speed up the process of obtaining ACE-2005-PT, we rely on automatic translators. This, however, poses some challenges related to automatically identifying the correct alignments between multi-word annotations in the original text and in the corresponding translated sentence. To achieve this, we developed an alignment pipeline that incorporates several alignment techniques: lemmatization, fuzzy matching, synonym matching, multiple translations and a BERT-based word aligner. To measure the alignment effectiveness, a subset of annotations from the ACE-2005-PT corpus was manually aligned by a linguist expert. This subset was then compared against our pipeline results which achieved exact and relaxed match scores of 70.55% and 87.55% respectively. As a result, we successfully generated a Portuguese version of the ACE-2005 corpus, which has been accepted for publication by LDC.