Team Manifold (Ted Hains, Dr. Yawen Xu and Dr. Zhen Mei) presented at the Second International Conference on Big Data and Analytics in Changsha, China, October 19-23, 2016.
Ted gave a plenary talk on a New Approach for Chronic Disease Management. He introduced the current state of Chronic Diseases: composition, prevalence and trend. He showed impact of chronic diseases on individual and health care system, particularly, in China and Canada. Furthermore, he described why chronic disease management is important, its pathway and the shift of resource from acute care to chronic care. Ted discussed how big data and analytics can help improve efficiency of chronic disease management; what data are available and should be collected; and promise of the big data analytics. He showed some preliminary results of Manifold current work on patient segmentation and gradient analysis.
Dr. Yawen Xu presented her research results on “Big Data Analytical Framework for Chronic Disease Self-Management and Well-Being”. She started with the strategic imperative to better understand and manage chronic diseases. For examples, three out five Canadians older than 20 have a chronic disease, four out five are at risk. Chronic diseases account for about 70% of health care cost and are on the rise. Significantly, the WHO reports that 80% of premature heart disease, type-2 diabetes and 40% of cancer is preventable. Thereafter, Dr. Xu discussed innovative analysis of a big Canadian public health care survey data and reported very interesting results and a systematic approach to address the following questions:
- Why do some people with chronic condition(s) thrive while others only survive?
- What are the success factors for living well/better with a chronic condition(s)?
- How can we measure and communicate/promote improvement of well-being?
Dr. Zhen Mei organized and chaired a session on the application of big data and analytics to public health. Speakers in his session talked about the rapid growth of cancer incidence and challenges to big data research; aggregation and multi-dimensional analysis of big healthcare data of the integrated Canadian stroke care system; a Bayesian network model for predicting type 2 diabetes risk based on electronic health records, scalable clustering by truncated Fuzzy K-means and supervised discretization algorithms for grouping continuous variables in high dimensional data.
The 4-day Conference of Big Data and Analytics was held in the beautiful Chinese City, Changsha. Speakers are invited top international scientists and experts on big data and analytics. They discussed theory of big data analytics, algorithms, applications and future developments.
Next year the conference will be held in the summer at York University, Toronto, Canada. If you are interested in presenting or attending, please contact Dr. Zhen Mei ([email protected]) for details.