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The healthcare system (HCS) is one of the most crucial and essential systems for humanity. Currently, supplying the patients' safety and preventing the medical adverse events (MAEs) in HCS is a global issue. Human and organizational factors (HOFs) are the primary causes of MAEs. However, there are limited analytical methods to investigate the role of these factors in medical errors (MEs). The aim of present study was to introduce a new and applicable framework for the causation of MAEs based on the original HFACS. In this descriptive-analytical study, HOFs related to MEs were initially extracted through a comprehensive literature review. Subsequently, a Delphi study was employed to develop a new human factors analysis and classification system for medical errors (HFACS-MEs) framework. To validate this framework in the causation and analysis of MEs, 180 MAEs were analyzed by using HFACS-MEs. The results showed that the new HFACS-MEs model comprised 5 causal levels and 25 causal categories. The most significant changes in HFACS-MEs compared to the original HFACS included adding a fifth causal level, named "extra-organizational issues", adding the causal categories "management of change" (MOC) and "patient safety culture" (PSC) to fourth causal level", adding "patient-related factors (PRF)" and "task elements" to second causal level and finally, appending "situational violations" to first causal level. Causality analyses among categories in the HFACS-MEs framework showed that the new added causal level (extra-organizational issues) have statistically significant relationships with causal factors of lower levels (Φc≤0.41, p-value≤0.038). Other new causal category including MOC, PSC, PRF and situational violations significantly influenced by the causal categories of higher levels and had an statistically significant effect on the lower-level causal categories (Φc>0.2, p-value

Sensitive data, such as financial, personal, or classified governmental information, must be protected throughout its cycle. This paper studies the problem of safeguarding transmitted data based on data categorization techniques. This research aims to use a novel routine as a new meta-heuristic to enhance a novel data categorization based-traffic classification technique where private data is classified into multiple confidential levels. As a result, two packets belonging to the same confidentiality level cannot be transmitted through two routers simultaneously, ensuring a high data protection level. Such a problem is determined by a non-deterministic polynomial-time hardness (NP-hard) problem; therefore, a scheduling algorithm is applied to minimize the total transmission time over the two considered routers. To measure the proposed scheme's performance, two types of distribution, uniform and binomial distributions used to generate packets transmission time datasets. The experimental result shows that the most efficient algorithm is the Best-Random Algorithm ([Formula: see text]), recording 0.028 s with an average gap of less than 0.001 in 95.1% of cases compared to all proposed algorithms. In addition, [Formula: see text] is compared to the best-proposed algorithm in the literature which is the Modified decreasing Estimated-Transmission Time algorithm (MDETA). The results show that [Formula: see text] is the best one in 100% of cases where MDETA reaches the best results in only 48%.

Private networks have become popular for secure data sharing and anonymous communication in many domains: enterprise environments, military, journalism, telecommunication, healthcare, to name a few. It has been used with or without internet connection. Its primary purpose is to provide confidentiality, bypass unlawful activities, and protect against common threats such as interception, modification, and censorship. In addition, several private network technologies exist to support secure communications. However, they mostly rely on encryption only. The transmitted data is classified into different confidentiality levels. This research presents a smart private network architecture scheme that transmits constraint-based classified packets. The main directive of this work is the proposed constraint. This constraint is meant to enforce that if two packets belong to the same confidentiality level, they can’t be transmitted through the two routers simultaneously. Therefore, the studied problem is an NP-hard problem. This paper presents the following contributions: (i) proposes a new architecture paradigm for outsourcing a constraint-based multi-classified data sharing securely and transmitted through two routers; (ii) introduces several algorithms to prove the feasibility for this NP-Hard problem; and (iii) implements the algorithms solutions using C++ and compares their performance. Different metrics are used to measure the performance of the proposed algorithms. Randomized Longest Transmission time first algorithm

Private networks have become popular for secure data sharing and anonymous communication in many domains: enterprise environments, military, journalism, telecommunication, healthcare, to name a few. It has been used with or without internet connection. Its primary purpose is to provide confidentiality, bypass unlawful activities, and protect against common threats such as interception, modification, and censorship. In addition, several private network technologies exist to support secure communications. However, they mostly rely on encryption only. The transmitted data is classified into different confidentiality levels. This research presents a smart private network architecture scheme that transmits constraint-based classified packets. The main directive of this work is the proposed constraint. This constraint is meant to enforce that if two packets belong to the same confidentiality level, they can't be transmitted through the two routers simultaneously. Therefore, the studied problem is an NP-hard problem. This paper presents the following contributions: (i) proposes a new architecture paradigm for outsourcing a constraint-based multi-classified data sharing securely and transmitted through two routers; (ii) introduces several algorithms to prove the feasibility for this NP-Hard problem; and (iii) implements the algorithms solutions using C++ and compares their performance. Different metrics are used to measure the performance of the proposed algorithms. Randomized Longest Transmission time first algorithm [Formula: see text] scored the best algorithm with a percentage of 73.5% and an average gap of 0.002 according to the experimental results. It is remarkable worthy to note that the execution time of all the algorithms is less than 0.001 s.

Preparing for intensifying threats of emergencies in unexpected, dangerous, and serious natural or man-made events, and consequent management of the situation, is highly demanding in terms of coordinating the personnel and resources to support human lives and the environment. This necessitates prompt action to manage the uncertainties and risks imposed by such extreme events, which requires collaborative operation among different stakeholders (i.e., the personnel from both the state and local communities). This research aims to find a way to enhance the coordination of multi-organizational response operations. To do so, this manuscript investigates the role of participants in the formed coordination response network and also the emergence and temporal dynamics of the network. By analyzing an inter-personal response coordination operation to an extreme bushfire event, the networks' and participants' structural change is evaluated during the evolution of the operation network over four time durations. The results reveal that the coordination response network becomes more decentralized over time due to the high volume of communication required to exchange information. New emerging communication structures often do not fit the developed plans, which stress the need for coordination by feedback in addition to by plan. In addition, we find that the participant's brokering role in the response operation network identifies a formal and informal coordination role. This is useful for comparison of network structures to examine whether what really happens during response operations complies with the initial policy.

Applying tools available in network science and graph theory to study brain networks has opened a new era in understanding brain mechanisms. Brain functional networks extracted from EEG time series have been frequently studied in health and diseases. In this manuscript, we studied failure resiliency of EEG-based brain functional networks. The network structures were extracted by analysing EEG time series obtained from 30 healthy subjects in resting state eyes-closed conditions. As the network structure was extracted, we measured a number of metrics related to their resiliency. In general, the brain networks showed worse resilient behaviour as compared to corresponding random networks with the same degree sequences. Brain networks had higher vulnerability than the random ones (P < 0.05), indicating that their global efficiency (i.e., communicability between the regions) is more affected by removing the important nodes. Furthermore, the breakdown happened as a result of cascaded failures in brain networks was severer (i.e., less nodes survived) as compared to randomized versions (P < 0.05). These results suggest that real EEG-based networks have not been evolved to possess optimal resiliency against failures.

Various disciplines are trying to solve one of the most noteworthy queries and broadly used concepts in biology, essentiality. Centrality is a primary index and a promising method for identifying essential nodes, particularly in biological networks. The newly created CentiServer is a comprehensive online resource that provides over 110 definitions of different centrality indices, their computational methods, and algorithms in the form of an encyclopedia. In addition, CentiServer allows users to calculate 55 centralities with the help of an interactive web-based application tool and provides a numerical result as a comma separated value (csv) file format or a mapped graphical format as a graph modeling language (GML) file. The standalone version of this application has been developed in the form of an R package. The web-based application (CentiServer) and R package (centiserve) are freely available at http://www.centiserver.org/.

Functional connectivity in human brain can be represented as a network using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. These networks--whose nodes can vary from tens to hundreds--are characterized by neurobiologically meaningful graph theory metrics. This study investigates the degree to which various graph metrics depend upon the network size. To this end, EEGs from 32 normal subjects were recorded and functional networks of three different sizes were extracted. A state-space based method was used to calculate cross-correlation matrices between different brain regions. These correlation matrices were used to construct binary adjacency connectomes, which were assessed with regards to a number of graph metrics such as clustering coefficient, modularity, efficiency, economic efficiency, and assortativity. We showed that the estimates of these metrics significantly differ depending on the network size. Larger networks had higher efficiency, higher assortativity and lower modularity compared to those with smaller size and the same density. These findings indicate that the network size should be considered in any comparison of networks across studies.

Simulating signal transduction in cellular signaling networks provides predictions of network dynamics by quantifying the changes in concentration and activity-level of the individual proteins. Since numerical values of kinetic parameters might be difficult to obtain, it is imperative to develop non-parametric approaches that combine the connectivity of a network with the response of individual proteins to signals which travel through the network. The activity levels of signaling proteins computed through existing non-parametric modeling tools do not show significant correlations with the observed values in experimental results. In this work we developed a non-parametric computational framework to describe the profile of the evolving process and the time course of the proportion of active form of molecules in the signal transduction networks. The model is also capable of incorporating perturbations. The model was validated on four signaling networks showing that it can effectively uncover the activity levels and trends of response during signal transduction process.

Complex networks serve as generic models for many biological systems that have been shown to share a number of common structural properties such as power-law degree distribution and small-worldness. Real-world networks are composed of building blocks called motifs that are indeed specific subgraphs of (usually) small number of nodes. Network motifs are important in the functionality of complex networks, and the role of some motifs such as feed-forward loop in many biological networks has been heavily studied. On the other hand, many biological networks have shown some degrees of robustness in terms of their efficiency and connectedness against failures in their components. In this paper we investigated how random and systematic failures in the edges of biological networks influenced their motif structure. We considered two biological networks, namely, protein structure network and human brain functional network. Furthermore, we considered random failures as well as systematic failures based on different strategies for choosing candidate edges for removal. Failure in the edges tipping to high degree nodes had the most destructive role in the motif structure of the networks by decreasing their significance level, while removing edges that were connected to nodes with high values of betweenness centrality had the least effect on the significance profiles. In some cases, the latter caused increase in the significance levels of the motifs.

BackgroundThe dysconnection hypothesis has been proposed to account for pathophysiological mechanisms underlying schizophrenia. Widespread structural changes suggesting abnormal connectivity in schizophrenia have been imaged. A functional counterpart of the structural maps would be the EEG synchronization maps. However, due to the limits of currently used bivariate methods, functional correlates of dysconnection are limited to the isolated measurements of synchronization between preselected pairs of EEG signals.Methods/resultsTo reveal a whole-head synchronization topography in schizophrenia, we applied a new method of multivariate synchronization analysis called S-estimator to the resting dense-array (128 channels) EEG obtained from 14 patients and 14 controls. This method determines synchronization from the embedding dimension in a state-space domain based on the theoretical consequence of the cooperative behavior of simultaneous time series-the shrinking of the state-space embedding dimension. The S-estimator imaging revealed a specific synchronization landscape in schizophrenia patients. Its main features included bilaterally increased synchronization over temporal brain regions and decreased synchronization over the postcentral/parietal region neighboring the midline. The synchronization topography was stable over the course of several months and correlated with the severity of schizophrenia symptoms. In particular, direct correlations linked positive, negative, and general psychopathological symptoms to the hyper-synchronized temporal clusters over both hemispheres. Along with these correlations, general psychopathological symptoms inversely correlated within the hypo-synchronized postcentral midline region. While being similar to the structural maps of cortical changes in schizophrenia, the S-maps go beyond the topography limits, demonstrating a novel aspect of the abnormalities of functional cooperation: namely, regionally reduced or enhanced connectivity.Conclusion/significanceThe new method of multivariate synchronization significantly boosts the potential of EEG as an imaging technique compatible with other imaging modalities. Its application to schizophrenia research shows that schizophrenia can be explained within the concept of neural dysconnection across and within large-scale brain networks.