مژگان تنهاپور

Chronic hepatitis B (CHB) leads to liver fibrosis, its failure, and death in the long term. The stage of fibrosis in CHB patients can also be detected based on the biochemical markers. The aim of this study was to predict the state of liver fibrosis in CHB patients and determine the possibility of patients shifting from a given state to another one.

This study is a cross-sectional study conducted in 2021. Age, blood platelet count, AST, and ALT enzymes were used as the input variable to create predictive models. Predictive models were Decision Tree (DT), Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Neural Network (NN). The probability of a patient shifting from a given stage of fibrosis to another was calculated using the transition matrix. The 10-fold cross-validation was used to ensure the generalization of predictive models.

The DT had the best precision, recall, and accuracy (100%) among developed algorithms to predict the stage of fibrosis in CHB patients. The NN was the second most efficient algorithm. Its accuracy and mean square error was 99.35±0.60 and 0.058±0.025, respectively. Besides, SVM had the lowest recall, precision, and accuracy values. Based on the transition matrix results, there is a very low probability that the patients with non-significant fibrosis state shifted to the cirrhosis state.

Computational approaches like machine learning algorithms are the non-invasive way to predict the fibrosis state in CHB patients efficiently.

 Telemedicine provides medical services remotely. There are some problems with implementing telemedicine projects. The purpose of this study was to investigate the most common telemedicine services in Iran and other developed countries as well as examine the legal, financial and privacy challenges of telemedicine services in these countries, especially in the era of the COVID-19 epidemic.  

 In this study, the status of telemedicine in Iran and developed countries was reviewed. Thus, related papers and grey literature were retrieved from PubMed, Scopus, SID and Magiran scientific databases. Also, related websites including the Ministry of Health and Medical Education of the Islamic Republic of Iran were examined. According to the study’s purposes, the relevant resources were selected and summarized by researchers.       

 Radiology, psychiatry and cardiology are the most widely used telemedicine services for interaction with patients as well as emergency, pathology and radiology for healthcare professional communication. Teleconsulting is the most widely used telemedicine service in Iran. There are some laws such as article 74 from section 14 in the Iran development plan to support the provision of e-health and telemedicine services. Also, there are some limited laws for patients’ privacy. In Europe, there is a set of guidelines for health websites, mobile health and cross-border exchange of health information, etc. although there are no uniform laws about telemedicine. HIPAA in the United States and GDPR in Europe are some privacy laws in developed countries. There are some restrictions on telemedicine reimbursement in the United States including the fee-for-service payment model; however, the costs of telemedicine in the United States are usually less than face-to-face treatment. 

 In the present era using telemedicine services become a requirement due to the outbreaks of epidemics such as COVID-19. Concerning the experience of developed countries, telemedicine services development in Iran requires some considerations in terms of legal, financial and privacy aspects including the creation of explicit laws on patients and healthcare provider’s rights, providing the telemedicine guidelines in different clinical fields such as structured formats for teleconsultation as well as the explicit laws for preserving the patient’s privacy.

Personal Health Record (PHR) systems play a key role in employing patient-centered care. Besides, the inclination to use Internet services has increased in recent years. The goal of this study is to describe the needed requirements for developing the proposed hybrid PHR model in a social network.
Using a descriptive study, a hybrid PHR model was designed in this paper to be implemented in the social health network. Then, by using observation, introspection and questionnaire methods, the requirements of the proposed social network were listed. The elicited requirements were then analyzed by SPSS 16 using descriptive statistics (absolute frequency). Finally, the proposed system was described in the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) standard format.
The proposed hybrid PHR model has benefits of all existing PHR models and is most consistent with PHR definition (individuals control and manage their PHR). It is also applicable and reliable both for individuals and physicians. The results indicated that the proposed system had PHR capabilities as well as social network functionalities. So, the possibility of creating relations between individuals provided more benefits in comparison to other PHR models.
By providing reliable information, the social health network can improve patient-physician relationships. As a result, the proposed social health network can make possible the utilization of web 2.0 and social network capabilities in the healthcare field as well as the benefits of PHR records and patient-centered care.

Patient-centered care is one of the six major aims to achieve high quality healthcare. Personal health records can improve patient-centered cares. Also, there is growing desire to use internet and its services in healthcare. The purpose of this study was to design the architecture of personal health record system in the health social network platform.
In this descriptive study, designing the architecture of the proposed system was done by Unified Modeling Language (UML). First, system components and their relationships were modeled by class diagram. Then, the use-case diagram showed how the proposed system interacts with its environment. Ultimately, the activities in the main process of the proposed system were modeled by the activity diagram.Finally, the designed architecture was evaluated by scenario-based assessment (ARID) method.
The scenario-based assessment (ARID) showed that the designed architecture by UML and determined relationships between components, systems and users from the structural and behavioral perspective could meet all expected scenarios from the proposed system.
The modeling of the proposed system showed that a social network can meet the features of personal health record and the expectations of its users. The use of web 2.0 and its services lead to better and faster information exchange and dissemination, training, emotional support and etc.

Disaster has caused great fatality and damages in the word. Statistics show that compared to the past, the occurrence of disasters has increased in the world. Iran is one of the ten disaster-prone countries in the world that is located on the earthquake-pron belt of the Alps-Himalaya mountains. On the other hand, crisis management is the one of the important factors to confront with the consequences of disasters.
In this article, according to distribution of partner organizations and members of crisis management organization, we examine how to choose the right organizational architecture for the deployment of rescue forces, data collection bases, and decision making and directional bases. Also, by using social network analysis, we examine the intraction and cooperation between different parts of crisis management organization. We use several simple comparative criteria to quantify the network aspects of organizational architectures. For this purpose, three criteria including information flow coefficient, collaboration coefficient, and information coefficient is introduced. The first two criteria examined different organizational architectures in terms of latency and the third criteria examined those in terms of amount of using information. These criteria provide the possibility of quantitave comparing of different architectures, so we can choose the efficient architecture in an understandable and obvious way for crisis management organization.

Patient-centered care improves the quality of life and health care، and reduces the costs of care. The advent of new technologies such as health social networks، and personal health records (PHR)، have significant impact on the patient-centered care. The aim of this article is to analyze and provide a set of features and requirements needed by the users of health social network serving as a PHR (Personal Health Record) system. The combination of capabilities offered by PHRs and social networks providing better delivery of patient-centered care. In this paper، after a brief study of capabilities and features of existing health social networks and based on a comparative study، a set of requirements which are necessary to create a comprehensive health social network as a PHR system are proposed. Identification of such a systems stakeholders and users e. g. healthcare professionals، patients، and healthcare organizations is important for categorizing the requirements. Also، classifying relatively vast range of existing systems is needed to have a better analyze and design. The proposed health social network can be used by different user groups in healthcare e. g. healthcare professionals، patients، and healthcare organizations. According to the each user group’s requirements، it provides separate facilities for them. The users of this integrated health social network can optionally share some of their information with other users in their group or with users in the other groups and interact with them. Studies show that the proposal requirements and capabilities for health social network not only cover the capabilities of similar systems but also satisfactory provide the requirements of a PHR system to deliver the patient-centered care. The proposed set of requirements are qualitatively compared with the other similar systems. Using the proposed health social network that provides PHR capabilities for its users will have an irrefutable impact on quality and efficiency of patient-centered care، and play an important role in improving the health of society.