Eosinophilic Esophagitis (EoE) is an inflammatory esophageal disease which is increasing in prevalence. The diagnostic gold-standard involves manual review of a patient's biopsy tissue sample by a clinical pathologist for the presence of 15 or greater eosinophils within a single high-power field (400× magnification). Diagnosing EoE can be a cumbersome process with added difficulty for assessing the severity and progression of disease. We propose an automated approach for quantifying eosinophils using deep image segmentation. A U-Net model and post-processing system are applied to generate eosinophil-based statistics that can diagnose EoE as well as describe disease severity and progression. These statistics are captured in biopsies at the initial EoE diagnosis and are then compared with patient metadata: clinical and treatment phenotypes. The goal is to find linkages that could potentially guide treatment plans for new patients at their initial disease diagnosis. A deep image classification model is further applied to discover features other than eosinophils that can be used to diagnose EoE. This is the first study to utilize a deep learning computer vision approach for EoE diagnosis and to provide an automated process for tracking disease severity and progression.
Health disparities and inequities are explained by the conditions of places where people live, learn, work and play. In fact, the health of an individual is partially related to access and quality of health care and mainly associated to his behaviours, socioeconomic conditions and other community related factors that are often challenging to address by health care organizations. To meet the need for information about local social services organizations and the ability to offer resource referrals, a number of platforms have been proposed that provide electronic social resource directories and facilitate referrals to social service agencies. However, these platforms show limitations with regards to their dependancy to health care organizations, application portability, service availability, and user engaging interactions such as tracking, monitoring and notification. Moreover, existing social resource referral platforms suffer from a fragmentation of services and a disconnection between individuals in need and service providers. In this paper, we introduce Smart Community Health (SCH), a novel independent platform that prioritizes connecting people in need with local community resources. SCH is a full-service, end-to-end community service provider recommendation platform designed to help address pressing social, environmental, and health needs within our communities. The platform is composed of a mobile application for individuals looking for services and a web application dashboard for the management of community service providers and health care organizations.