Background: Hospital discharge summaries offer a potentially rich resource to enhance pharmacovigilance efforts to evaluate drug safety in real-world clinical practice. However, it is infeasible for experts to read through all discharge summaries to find cases of drug-adverse event (AE) relations. Purpose: The objective of this paper is to develop a natural language processing (NLP) framework to detect drug- AE relations from unstructured hospital discharge summaries. Basic procedures: An NLP algorithm was designed using customized dictionaries of drugs, adverse event (AE) terms, and rules based on trigger phrases, negations, fuzzy logic and word distances to recognize drug, AE terms and to detect drug-AE relations. Furthermore, a customized annotation tool was developed to facilitate expert review of discharge summaries from a tertiary hospital in Singapore in 2011. Main findings: A total of 33 trial sets with 50 to 100 records per set were evaluated (1620 discharge summaries) by our algorithm and reviewed by pharmacovigilance experts. After every 6 trial sets, drug and AE dictionaries were updated, and rules were modified to improve the system. Excellent performance was achieved for drug and AE entity recognition with over 92% precision and recall. On the final 6 sets of discharge summaries (600 records), our algorithm achieved 75% precision and 59% recall for identification of valid drug-AE relations. Principal conclusions: Adverse drug reactions are a significant contributor to health care costs and utilization. Our algorithm is not restricted to particular drugs, drug classes or specific medical specialties, which is an important attribute for a national regulatory authority to carry out comprehensive safety monitoring of drug products. Drug and AE dictionaries may be updated periodically to ensure that the tool remains relevant for performing surveillance activities. The development of the algorithm, and the ease of reviewing and correcting the results of the algorithm as part of an iterative machine learning process, is an important step towards use of hospital discharge summaries for an active pharmacovigilance program
Keywords: Pharmacovigilance | Text mining | Electronic medical records | Expert system | Adverse drug reaction

This paper describes GimmeHop, a beer recommender system for Android mobile devices using fuzzy ontologies to represent the relevant knowledge and semantic reasoners to infer implicit knowledge. GimmeHop use fuzzy quantifiers to deal with incomplete data, fuzzy hedges to deal with the user context, and aggregation operators to manage user preferences. The results of our evaluation measure empirically the data traffic and the running time in the case of remote reasoning, the size of the ontologies that can be locally dealt with in a mobile device in the case of local reasoning, and the quality of the automatically computed linguistic values supported in the user queries
Keywords:Fuzzy ontologies | Aggregation | Fuzzy quantifiers | Recommender systems

This essay documents the development of an “Expert System” based on a Fuzzy Logic model, designed to analyze the outcome a number of variables have on the performance of livestock production (milk and meat) in the Huasteca region of Veracruz in order to support the decision-making of a Sustainable Livestock Production Dynamic System (SLPDS). The Expert System takes into consideration the following input variables: Temperature (T), Rain (RA), Breed (B), Health Plan Implementation (HP), Feeding Plan (FP) and Production System (PS). The aforementioned variables then have an impact on three output variables: Lactation Days (LD), Daily Milk Production (DMP) and Intervals between Births (IBB). Once the Fuzzy Logic model has been developed, an assessment of the variables is made through the Response Surface technique, which allows verifying how the variables behave in the system under study, and their impact on the output variables; as well as, testing different scenarios in order to validate the model and to identify the Livestock Production Systeḿs behavioral patterns. Through the application of Fuzzy Logic regarding the modeling of the 6 variables that impact the performance of livestock production, it is possible to capitalize on the knowledge and experience that producers have and what they have learned based on the observation and practice of many years. Therefore, being able to obtain reliable results that can be shared with agricultural producers and technicians for the improvement of the livestock productivity of the Huasteca region in the state of Veracruz. The Expert System is efficient showing an 86.67% reliability by comparing its results with a panel of specialists in livestock production. The test of the different scenarios shows interesting results when exposing the application of good livestock practices in certain conditions (temperature and rainfall) that maximize the milk and meat production of the region under study.
Keyword: Sustainable livestock production | Expert system | Fuzzy logic | Response surface

Management of critical components in manufacturing systems aims at managing components with very low reliability or the highest risk which can cause disruptions in manufacturing. This study presents a method for identifying critical components and a decision support tool for managing maintenance activities of critical components in manufacturing systems. Unlike the traditional reliability function, the proposed method uses the duty cycle, utilization rate of capacity, safety stock effect, and redundancy effect. It also has the ability to calculate some of the costs associated with the reliability and maintenance. In addition to the proposed method, an expert system as a decision support tool has also been proposed to assist in managing maintenance activities of critical components. The proposed method and the developed decision support system have been tested with a real data set taken from an industrial company and a randomly generated data set. The results have shown that the proposed method has a more realistic impact on component reliability compared to the traditional reliability function. The experimental results have validated the credibility of the proposed decision support system to manage maintenance activities of critical components. Besides, two comparison tables have shown that the proposed decision support system outperforms some approaches such as ANN, FMEA, FMECA, and AHP.
Keywords: Critical component management | Maintenance management | Reliability | Fuzzy logic | Decision support sys

Ranking of best possible Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) technics for implementing on a target field is one of the most important questions that should be answered by reservoir engineers. EOR screening can be considered as a tool for recommending the most appropriate EOR methods. Although for each candidate reservoir, the applicability of EOR processes must be investigated specifically, EOR screening can be used as an indicator before economic evaluations or reservoir descriptions are done and executive decisions are made. Implementing an EOR project for predictions that pass this screening is the next step. In this study, the fuzzy decision tree method (with the ability to rank and classify EOR methods simultaneously) is introduced for EOR screening. Basic features for this study are permeability, viscosity, depth, temperature, saturation, and API. Using a fuzzy decision tree enables us to design an expert system which generates EOR rules automatically. This is one of the noticeable features of this study which reduces the importance of a human expert role while designing the system and making it as expert as possible. Here, the fuzzy decision tree method is implemented on a dataset consisting of 548 observations related to 10 different EOR techniques. Predictions made by this method which are ranked from the most applicable EOR method to the least one include the EOR method mentioned in the dataset for every observation in both training and test set. Moreover, using the procedure introduced here for training the trees enables the expert system to be adaptive whenever the dataset is updated
Keywords: Data mining | Expert system | Artificial intelligence algorithms | EOR screening | Fuzzy logic | Fuzzy decision tree | Automatic rule generation