Academic literature on the topic 'Drum language'

Abstract The ‘Witoto’ people from Northwest Amazonia practised long distance drum communication, used for relaying messages among their villages. The messages were encoded on a pair of hollowed-out wooden drums, and appear to have been ‘drummed codes’, with only some iconic relation to the sound structure of the spoken language. The practice of drum communication appears to be easily diffusible in contact situations. The Caquetá-Putumayo (C-P) cultural area is a case in point, as the Witoto drums were shared with other C-P groups including the Ocaina, Nonuya, Bora, Muinane, Resígaro, and Andoque. Today, the practice of long distance drum communication among the Witoto has been long gone, with just a handful of elders who are still able to recall some of the (once extensive) drummed signal repertoire.

Dùndún drum language is a practice of speech surrogacy employed by dùndún drummers in Yoruba culture. The dùndún drummers play sequences of melo-rhythmic patterns; a form of communication that employs musical and linguistic elements, comprehensible to listeners knowledgeable in the Yoruba language. Although these sequenced patterns are sourced from Yoruba everyday sentences and oral genres (proverbs, poetry, praise-chants, and idiomatic phrases), the drummers also embrace other social narratives. These include the popular linguistic expressions in public spaces referred to as “street language.” This is because the streets serve as spaces for social life, musical and cultural imaginaries, musical and language expressions, and identity. This street language, referred to as “ohùn ìgboro” in Yoruba, include slang (saje), slurs (òtè), neologies (ènà), satire (èfè), dance-drum patterns (àlùjó), and socio-political slogans (àtúnlò-èdè). This article explores the influence of street language on dùndún music. This article follows an ethnographic model, with an analysis of the content of the dùndún music and its associated texts. The article’s findings include the extent to which the two cultures have overlapped, and the various socio-cultural benefits of adopting the language of each other’s cultural practices. In the process, the article contributes to the debate on authenticity and social structure in Yoruba culture. The article emphasises the need for an integrated research approach of music and language and their interrelationship to street cultures in Nigeria.

This article explores the instrumentality of traditional African drums in influencing human behavior, and debunks view-points held by some critics that these drums are mere instruments for entertainment, voodoo, or rituals. It argues that as cultural artifacts, the drums are a primal symbol (a speech surrogate form qualified as drum language) used for rhetorical purposes to influence social behavior, to generate awareness, and to prompt responses for the realization of personhood and the formation of group identity. This ascription of rhetorical functionality to the African drum-dance culture provides interesting insights into the nature of rhetorical performance in the non-Western world.

The paper examines surrogate language in Dagbani, a Mabia language spoken in Northern Region of Ghana. The objectives of the paper are in two folds: it pays attention to its functions and its transformation from traditional to the contemporary sociocultural issues. Premised on participant-observation, the paper supports the multi-toned language represented on a pressure drum capable of many pitches. It attests that the lundaa „pressure drum‟ is a speech surrogate used among Dagbani speakers. The lundaa has a wide distribution of functions but this paper is focused on the core functions of drum language that include molo „announcement‟, salima „Panegyric‟, ց iŋցaani „invocation‟ and ŋaha „proverbs‟ as examples of drum literature and transformation. The paper suggests that the communication potential of the lundaa rhythms and its interpretation leads to an understanding of the sociocultural life of the people.

Kò séní m’èdè Àyàn Bí ení mú kò ̣ ̣ǹgó ̣ è ̣ lówọ́ No one understands the language of Àyàn Better than the drummer who holds the gong in his hand Yorùbá maxim From the Yorùbá oral historical, mythological, and ontological, abstract lines of reasoning, Àyàn is believed to be the first Yorùbá drum maker and drummer, who, after his death, was deified as the god of Drumming (Òrìsà ̣ Àyàn, or simply Àyàn). Hence, when an experienced Yorùbá drummer plays his drum masterfully, the elders with the drum speech discernable ears (òmò ̣ ràn) that hear the drumming, even from afar commend, “may Àyàn, ̣ the god of drumming prosper/ protect you!” (Àyàn ó gbè ó!). As among other Yorùbá deities (òrìsạ̀) that live in the spiritual realm in certain but uncommon natural environments (forests, trees, rivers, streams, and mountains, among others), Òrìsà Àyàn is thought to reside in wood (Vil ̣ - lepastour 2015, 3). For this reason, Òrìsà Àyàn is emblematized by the wood ̣ with which the body of the drum (ìlù) is carved. Similarly, this deity is eulogized as “the spirit who speaks out from inside his wooded abode” (Òrìsà ̣ gbé’nú igi fohùn), in reference to the log of wood with which the drums (ìlù) are carved. It is said that Òrìsà Àyàn particularly prefers that ìlù be carved ̣ with Cordia millenii (igi òmò ̣ ), a belief that gave birth to the Yorùbá saying, ̣ “out of the entire wood species of the forests is the preferred Cordia millenii, with which gbèdụ drum is carved” (Igi gbogbo ní ńbe ̣ ní’gbó, k’átó fi’gi òmò ̣ ̣ gbé ̣ gbèdụ). Because of his position as the patron deity of drumming, which 2 Oláwọlé Fámúlẹ̀ by extension is used to accompanying sacred rites in honor of virtually all the Yorùbá òrìsạ̀, Òrìsà Àyàn is thought to be their mouthpiece, as they all speak ̣ through the drums that he emblematizes. Another emblem of Òrìsà Àyàn that ̣ is even worshipped is a shallow hemispherical drum with a single fixed head, which is worn on the chest with a strap around the neck and beaten with leather straps held in each hand (gúdúgúdú ) (Bascom 1952, 4). The gúdúgúdú symbol of Òrìsà Àyàn also goes by the praise name (oríkì) “gúdúgúdú with its distinctive uneven and undulated back shape” (Gúdúgúdú, ab’è yìn jákan- ̣ jàkan). The component parts that formed this uneven and surged-back shape [of gúdúgúdú] include kúseré and apìràn. Kúseré is a circular metal object affixed onto the drum’s wooded base, and apìràn is an array of wooden pegs that hold the kúseré securely onto the base of the instrument. At the exoteric and practical level, Àyàn also refers to any Yorùbá traditional and professional drummer, who plays the drum (ìlù), often with the use of a gong (kòṇ̀ gó).̣ The Yorùbá professional drummers share the name àyàn with Òrìsà Àyàn since they are the human agents who play the drums (ìlù), ̣ emblem of Òrìsà Àyàn, and through which the deity speaks. The ̣ Yorùbá incantation “the day that the drummer drums with his gong/drumstick is the very moment that the Àyàn god of drumming speaks out that which is in his mouth” (Òòjó ̣ tí kòṇ̀ gó ̣ Àyàn bá f’ojú ba ìlù ni Òrìsà Àyàn ̣ ńpo ̣ t’enu rè ̣ ̣ sí’lè) ̣ best illustrates the interconnection of the drummers (àyàn) with god of drumming, Òrìsà Àyàn. As succinctly corroborated by Amanda Villepastour, “the ̣ drummer in action becomes Àyàn.” Another Yorùbá term for a drummer (àyàn) is onílù. 1 With their drumming (or drum music) that mimic the human speech, the Àyàn or Onílù verbalize words/speeches (òrọ̀ ) that is or are intelligible to the ears of their ̣ patrons, often the dance performers (oníjó). For that reason, ìlù, to the Yorùbá, is an instrument that acts as a speech surrogate (i.e., substitute). That the Yorùbá refer to ìlù as “the talking drum” underscores this assertion. In fact, they strongly believed that if handled by a skillful drummer (àyàn/onílù), ìlù, just like humans, can speak words or communicate effectively to those who understand the language of the drum. The Yorùbá phrase “a lifeless goat that speaks just like a human” (òkú-ewúré tíí fo ̣ ’hùn bí ènìyàn ̣ ), a euphemism for the goatskin fixed single- or double-headed hourglass drums that mimic human speech when drummed, is a testimony to ìlù as a true “talking drum.” Another Yorùbá saying that illustrates that ìlù is an instrument of language substitution is “that the gángan drum could speak in a human nasal tone of 1 Onílù is formed from two Yorùbá words oní and ìlù (literally, “owner of the drum” or “one who plays the drum”), a euphemism for the drummer. Thus, anybody that plays drum is an onílù. But those Yorùbá traditional professional onílù, like the dùndún and bàtá drummers, are specifically referred to as àyàn. Èdè Àyàn: The Language of Àyàn in Yorùbá Art and Ritual of Egúngún 3 voice is not without the help of the drummer’s own tip of the fingernails” (àti rán’mú gángan kò s’ẹ̀ yìn èékáná ̣ ). In Yorùbá traditional festivals, ritual performances, and religious practices in general, the role of àyàn whose drumming or drum music imitate and code the natural language (Yorùbá), cannot be overemphasized. The Yorùbá aphorism “without drum music, there is no way to celebrate” (láì sí’lù, taní jé ̣ s’eré òkúrùgbe!̣) is a testimony to the indispensable role of ìlù in the context of traditional Yorùbá visual and performance arts. A clear example is the Yorùbá art and ritual of Egúngún, the theme of this study. Paradoxically, many Yorùbá art scholars often make very little or no effort to explore the relevance of ìlù in their studies on Yorùbá visual culture, such as Egúngún. This has continued to make it become virtually impossible for a deeper understanding of Yorùbá art in particular and African art as a whole. Ironically, the same scholars prefer to invest their energy, searching outside of the art’s cultural origin to fulfil their primary goal of “appreciating” the African art, rather than searching within African culture, language and values, the very driving forces that gave rise to this art, and thus a catalyst to understanding it.2 It is on that note that I believe the question that scholars of African art should begin to ask themselves is: when will African art scholarship––unlike Western art studies that often demand intellectual rigor and professional thoroughness––rise above its present art “appreciating” status vis-à-vis African art? In my opinion, as this present study is aimed at confirming, the understanding of African art critically requires that scholars be fluent or at least confident in the reading, writing, and speaking of the language of the people whose art they study. Also heightening the problem of the lack of “understanding” of Yorùbá art is the very unique nature of it (as with other African art), in which an isolated work of art in context is a rarity. Thus, the present study examines the very indispensable roles of Àyàn drummers in the performance context of the annual Egúngún festival (odún Egúngún) in a Yorùbá community in Òkèigbó in Nigeria’s Ondo State. As a native speaker with access to Yorùbá philosophy, values and history, and who is fully aware of the fundamental importance of language in African art studies, I aim in this study to examine the mutual relationship existing between the Àyàn and Egúngún from the vantage point of the Yorùbá language, the medium through which the said Yorùbá philosophy, values and history are stored and expressed. It delves into the very root of Egúngún within the Yorùbá cultural context, where traditions and history are preserved and recorded not in the western-type of writing, but rather in the Yorùbá language, ritual performance and ceremonies. It is hoped that this study will facilitate a deeper understanding of Egúngún along with the 2 Personal communication with Professor Rowland Abíodún on April 2, 2017. 4 Oláwọlé Fámúlẹ̀ àyàn within the art and ritual performance context of the Odún Egúngún. The study illustrates the interconnection of the àyàn and Egúngún by first providing an overview of Yorùbá drums and their ritual contexts. This is followed by a close study of the Yorùbá ontological concept of Egúngún, one of the most valued patrons of Àyàn (the drummers), as an important form of Yorùbá religious beliefs and practices. Using the Egbé ̣ ̣ Òjẹ̀ ̣ (Cult of Egúngún) of the ancient Yorùbá town of Òkèigbó as a case study, the study concludes with an in-depth analysis of the role of Àyàn (Drummers) in Yorùbá art and ritual of Egúngún.

Many drum communication systems around the world transmit information by emulating tonal and rhythmic patterns of spoken languages in sequences of drumbeats. Their rhythmic characteristics, in particular, have not been systematically studied so far, although understanding them represents a rare occasion for providing an original insight into the basic units of speech rhythm as selected by natural speech practices directly based on beats. Here, we analyse a corpus of Bora drum communication from the northwest Amazon, which is nowadays endangered with extinction. We show that four rhythmic units are encoded in the length of pauses between beats. We argue that these units correspond to vowel-to-vowel intervals with different numbers of consonants and vowel lengths. By contrast, aligning beats with syllables, mora or only vowel length yields inconsistent results. Moreover, we also show that Bora drummed messages conventionally select rhythmically distinct markers to further distinguish words. The two phonological tones represented in drummed speech encode only few lexical contrasts. Rhythm thus appears to crucially contribute to the intelligibility of drummed Bora. Our study provides novel evidence for the role of rhythmic structures composed of vowel-to-vowel intervals in the complex puzzle concerning the redundancy and distinctiveness of acoustic features embedded in speech.

Using the APDL (ANSYS Parametric Design Language) and combining the object-oriented visual design interface of VB, the parametric analysis and modeling system of belt conveyor driving drum is established. With the system, the designers only need to enter the right design parameters to generate the driving drum model and the corresponding post-processing results instead of the repetitive work. It improves efficiency and provides a basis for designing the suitable driving drum. The correctness and feasibility of the system was verified by analyzing examples.

In archival footage uploaded online of a concert at the University of the Western Cape in 1988 musician Robbie Jansen declared that the next composition to be performed was named 'Freedom Where Have You Been'.1 Before counting the band in, Jansen offered a short discourse on the meaning of the phrase hoya chibongo. Hearing the Afrikaans hoorie (meaning listen here) in the expression hoya, Jansen proceeded to split up the word chibongo to accentuate chi- as aurally reminiscent of the suffix -tjie that is used in Afrikaans to mark the diminutive. bongo, in this context as Jansen remarked, is the drum, leading Jansen to exclaim that the phrase hoya chibongo means to 'listen to the (small) drum', the drum that is, according to Jansen, 'the truth'. In Jansen's exact words, 'the drum speaks the truth and the drum has always been our language before these funny words that we are speaking now'. Jansen's translation was markedly oral, not only in its expression of speech and languaging but also in its invocation of a historicity through the oral; an oral tradition, for all intents and purposes. In its locatedness in a musically expressive and performative moment, Jansen expressed a duality of sound that exceeds the oral itself: calling attention to how language might be a conduit for the instrument, and how in some sense the drum might speak across time and space. It usefully deepens the often cliché proclamation rehearsed in and out of music studies in particular that music is universal, or that sound might be thought of as a kind of connective tissue that allows a specific sense-making of the social.2 In Jansens invocation of 'before' in his statement about the drum as language, and in debates around the meaning of sound to the social, it is history - or, a representation of pastness - that is called upon to bring about a set of futures where sound mediates the experience of a temporal matrix where truth, or freedom, might be found. What Jansen does/did was not necessarily an act of translation into a local vernacular as it is the blurring of the oral and the aural in a moment that might express the relation between sound, its interpretation, and its social life, obliquely. The truth for Jansen was what the drum expressed; but it was also the drum itself. The oral is aural, as the aural is oral.

This research project is a documentation of a developmental journey centered on the incorporation of rhythmic elements from South Indian Carnatic music into an existing musical practice. The research provides an insight into the creative process of learning, adaptation and recontextualization of new musical elements into an existing musical practice that may provide a model and transferable methodology for musicians endeavouring to undertake similar research journeys of musical development. The Adaptation of Indian Carnatic Rhythmic Structures and Improvisation Methods into Drum Set Language and Performance explores the transformation process that occurs as a result of incorporating Carnatic rhythmic elements into the author’s drum set playing style. Through learning Carnatic rhythms, adapting the rhythms to the drum set and then applying the rhythms to musical situations, the research aims to observe the influence of this process on the author’s drum set playing within a performance context. The research focuses on examining the drum set playing on two different recordings. The recordings are presented as the creative works of the research, emphasizing audio-as-research which places listening as the central method of transmission. The creative works can be considered the primary vehicles through which the investigation of the performance practice occurs, with the exegesis serving to place the recordings within a written research context. The exegesis also provides the necessary background and contextual framework for the creative works.
Thesis (Professional Doctorate)
Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA)
Queensland Conservatorium of Music
Arts, Education and Law
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Pharamacovigilance relates to activities involving drug safety monitoring in the post-marketing phase of the drug development life-cycle. Despite rigorous trials and experiments that drugs undergo before they are available in the market, they can still cause previously unobserved side-effects (also known as adverse events) due to drug–drug interaction, genetic, physiological or demographic reasons. The Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) is the custodian of the global reporting system, VigiBase, for adverse drug reactions in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO). VigiBase houses over 20 million case reports of suspected adverse drug reactions from all around the world. However, not all case reports that the UMC receives pertains to adverse reactions that are novel in the safety profile of the drugs. In fact, many of the reported reactions found in the database are known adverse events for the reported drugs. With more than 3 million potential associations between all possible drugs and all possible adverse events present in the database, identifying associations that are likely to represent previously unknown safety concerns requires powerful statistical methods and knowledge of the known safety profiles of the drugs. Therefore, there is a need for a knowledge base with mappings of drugs to their known adverse reactions. To-date, such a knowledge base does not exist. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a deep-learning model that learns to extract adverse reactions from product labels — regulatory documents providing the current state of knowledge of the safety profile of a given product — and map them to a standardized terminology with high precision. To achieve this, I propose a two-phase algorithm, with a first scanning phase aimed at finding regions of the text representing adverse reactions, and a second mapping phase aiming at normalizing the detected text fragments into Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) terms, the terminology used at the UMC to represent adverse reactions. A previous dictionary-based algorithm developed at the UMC achieved a scanning F1 of 0.42 (0.31 precision, 0.66 recall) and mapping macro-averaged F1 of 0.43 (0.39 macro-averaged precision, 0.64 macro-averaged recall). State-of-the-art methods achieve F1 above 0.8 and above 0.7 for the scanning and mapping problems respectively. To develop algorithms for adverse reaction extraction, I use the 2019 ADE Evaluation Challenge data, a dataset made by the FDA with 100 product labels annotated for adverse events and their mappings to MedDRA. This thesis explores three architectures for the scanning problem: 1) a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) encoder followed by a softmax classifier, 2) a BiLSTM encoder with Conditional Random Field (CRF) classifier and finally, 3) a BiLSTM encoder with CRF classifier with Embeddings from Language Model (ELMo) embeddings. For the mapping problem, I explore Information Retrieval techniques using the search engines whoosh and Solr, as well as a Learning to Rank algorithm. The BiLSTM encoder with CRF gave the highest performance on finding the adverse events in the texts, with an F1 of 0.67 (0.75 precision, 0.61 recall), representing a 0.06 absolute increase in F1 over the simpler BiLSTM encoder with softmax. Using the ELMo embeddings was proven detrimental and lowered the F1 to 0.62. Error analysis revealed the adopted Inside, Beginning, Outside (IOB2) labelling scheme to be poorly adapted for denoting discontinuous and compound spans while introducing ambiguity in the training data. Based on the gold standard annotated mappings, I also evaluated the whoosh and Solr search engines, with and without Learning to Rank. The best performing search engine on this data was Solr, with a macro-averaged F1 of 0.49 compared to the macro-averaged F1 of 0.47 for the whoosh search engine. Adding a Learning to Rank algorithm on top of each engine did not improve mapping performance, as both macro-averaged F1 dropped by over 0.1 when using the re-ranking approach. Finally, the best performing scanning and mapping algorithms beat the aforementioned dictionary-based baseline F1 by 0.25 in the scanning phase and 0.06 in the mapping phase. A large source of error for the Solr search engine came from tokenisation issues, which had a detrimental impact on the performance of the entire pipeline. In conclusion, modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can significantly improve the performance of adverse event detection from free-formtext compared to dictionary-based approaches, especially in cases where context is important.
Farmakovigilans berör de aktiviteter som förbättrar förståelsen av biverkningar av läkemedel. Trots de stränga prövningar som behövs för läkemedelsutvecklingen finns ändå en del biverkningar som är okända p.g.a. genetik, fysiologiska eller demografiska faktorer. Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC), i samarbete med World Health Organization (WHO) är vårdnadshavare till den globala databasen av rapporter på medicinska biverkningar, VigiBase. VigiBase innehåller över 20 miljoner misstänkta rapporter från hela världen. Dock, en andel av dessa rapporter beskriver biverkningar som är redan kända. Egentligen finns det över 3 miljoner potentiella samband mellan alla läkemedel och biverkningar i databasen. Att hitta den riktiga och okända biverkningar behövs kraftfulla statistiska metoder samt kunskap om det kända säkerhetsprofil av läkemedlet. Det finns ett behöv för ett databas som kartlägger läkemedel med alla kända biverkningar men, inget sådant databas finns idag. Syftet med detta examensarbete är att utveckla en djup-lärandemodell som kan läsa av texter på läkemedels etiketter — tillsynsdokument som beskriver säkerhetsprofil av läkemedel — och kartlägga dem till ett standardiserat terminologi med hög precision. Problemet kan brytas in i två fas, den första scanning och den andra mapping. Scanning handlar om att kartlägga position av text-fragmentet i etiketter. Mapping handlar om att kartlägga de detekterade text-fragmentet till Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA), den terminologi som används i UMC för biverkningar. Tidigare försök, s.k. dictionary-based approach på UMC uppnådde scanning F1 i 0,42 (0,31 precision; 0,64 recall) och mapping macro-averaged F1 i 0,43 (0,39 macro-averaged precision; 0,64 macro-averaged recall). De bästa systemen (s.k. state-of-the-art) uppnådde scanning F1 över 0,8 och 0,7 för den scanning respektive mapping problemet. Jag använder den 2019 ADE Evaluation Challenge dataset att utveckla algoritmerna i projektet. Detta dataset innehåller 100 läkemedels etiketter annoterad med biverkningar och deras kartläggning i MedDRA. Denna avhandling utforskar tre arkitekturer till scanning problemet: 1) Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) och softmax för klassificering, 2) BiLSTM med Conditional Random Field (CRF) klassificering och, till sist, 3) BiLSTM med CRF klassificering och Embeddings from Language Model (ELMo) embeddings. Med avseende till mapping problematiken utforskar jag metoder inom Information Retrieval genom användning av sökmotorerna whoosh och Solr. För att förbättra prestandan i mapping utforskar jag Learning to Rank metoder. BiLSTM med CRF presterade bäst inom scanning problematiken med F1 i 0,67 (0,75 precision; 0,61 recall) som är ett 0,06 absolut ökning över den BiLSTM encoder med softmax klassificering. Med ELMo försämrade F1 till 0,62. Analys av felet visade att Inside, Beginning, Outside (IOB2) märkning som jag har valt att använda passar inte till att beteckna diskontinuerliga och sammansatta spans, och tillför betydande osäkerhet i träningsdata. Med avseende till mapping problematiken har jag kollat på sökmotorn Solr och whoosh, med, och utan Learning to Rank. Solr visade sig som den bäst presterande sökmotorn med macro-averaged F1 i 0,49 jämfört med whoosh som visade macro-averaged F1 i 0,47. Learning to Rank algoritmerna försämrade F1 med över 0,1 för båda sökmotorer. Den bäst presterande scanning och mapping algoritmer slog den baseline systemets F1 med 0,25 i scanning faset, och 0,06 i mapping fasen. Ett stor källa av fel för den Solr sökmotorn har kommit från tokeniserings-fel, som hade en försämringseffekt i prestanda genom hela pipelinen. I slutsats, moderna Natural Language Processing (NLP) tekniker kan kraftigt öka prestanda inom detektering av biverkningar från etiketter och texter, jämfört med gamla dictionary metoder, särskilt när kontexten är viktigt.

Zbog visoke stope morbiditeta i mortaliteta od kardiovaskularnih bolesti, udeo lekova za terapiju kardiovaskularnih bolesti značajno učestvuje u ukupno utrošenoj količini lekova u svetu. Evidentan je porast potrošnje lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti. Radi postizanja što je moguće višeg stepena racionalizacije terapije u većini zemalja stručna tela donose farmakoterapijske smernice kako bi se mogućnost pogrešnog lečenja svela na najmanju moguću meru. Na ovaj način lekaru-praktičaru pružena je sigurnost pravilnog izbora i najadekvatnijeg postupka u datim okolnostima. Ciljevi ovog istraživanja bili su: 1) izračunavanje ukupne vanbolničke potrošnje lekova za lečenje kardiovaskularnih bolesti na teritoriji Novog Sada i njeno poređenje sa propisivanjem u Republici Srbiji i u zemljama sa razvijenom farmakoterapijskom praksom; 2) analiza strukture propisanih lekova za lečenje kardiovaskularnih bolesti (grupa C prema ATC klasifikaciji) po grupama i njeno poređenje sa propisivanjem u Republici Srbiji i u zemljama sa razvijenom farmakoterapijskom praksom; 3) analiza strukture propisanih lekova po dijagnozama i provera usklađenosti sa farmakoterapijskim smernicama; 4) komparacija propisanih lekova sa morbiditetnom statistikom kardiovaskularnih bolesti; 5) analiza farmakoekonomskih aspekata propisivanja lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti. Sprovedeno istraživanje spada u IV fazu kliničkih ispitivanja-farmakoepidemiološko, retrospektivno, opservaciono. Podaci su prikupljeni na osnovu izveštaja iz elektronske baze podataka za period od 6 meseci (01. 01. 2012 − 01. 07. 2012), na teritoriji grada Novog Sada. Na osnovu ovih podataka na teritoriji grada Novog Sada analizirana je upotreba lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti na 100% uzorku stanovnika. Ispitivanje se sastojalo iz dva dela. Prvi deo obuhvata prikupljanje, obradu i analizu podataka o ukupno propisanoj količni lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti na teritoriji grada Novog Sada. U drugom delu istraživanja korišćenjem podataka dobijenih iz državne „Apoteke Novi Sad“ detaljnije je analizirana upotreba lekova za lečenje kardiovaskularnih bolesti izdatih na recept. Upotreba lekova analizirana je: prema uzrastu i polu pacijenata, prema dijagnozama za koje su lekovi propisani i prema ceni. Sruktura upotrebe lekova po indikacijama za dijagnoze kod kojih je ukupna upotreba propisanih lekova bila veća od 1 DDD/1000stanovnika/dan upoređena je sa postojećim nacionalnim vodičima i sa upotrebom u zemljama sa razvijenom farmakoterapijskom praksom, odnosno sa međunarodnim vodičima. Ovi podaci upoređeni su sa morbiditetnom statistikom na teritoriji grada Novog Sada. Ukupno propisana količina lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti u posmatranom periodu iznosila je 399,79 DDD/1000st/dan. Od te količine, preko polovine (201,11DDD/1000st/dan) propisivanih lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti su lekovi koji deluju na sistem renin-angiotenzin, slede blokatori kalcijumskih kanala, zatim blokatori beta-adrenergičkih receptora, a na četvrtom mestu po ukupno propisanoj količini su lekovi za terapiju bolesti srca. Od najčešćih dijagnoza za koje su propisivani lekovi za kardiovaskularne bolesti, najzastupljenije su bile arterijska hipertenzija, a potom ishemijska bolest srca. Upotreba lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti u vanbolničkoj sredini na teritoriji grada Novog Sada (399,79 DDD/1000st/dan) viša je u odnosu na zemlje u okruženju (Hrvatsku, Crnu Goru), a niža u odnosu na zemlje sa razvijenom farmakoterapijskom praksom. U odnosu na zemlje sa razvijenom farmakoterapijskom praksom postoje odstupanja u pogledu strukture propisivanja. Struktura propisivanja lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti odstupa od važećih nacionalnih vodiča o racionalnoj upotrebi lekova za kardiovaskularne bolesti u Republici Srbiji. Istovremeno struktura propisanih lekova nije u skladu sa morbiditetnom statistikom kardiovaskularnih bolesti prema zvaničnim podacima. Među 10 najčešće propisanih lekova nalaze se i skupi lekovi, koji imaju adekvatne, a mnogo jeftinije paralele. Nedovoljno i neracionalno lečenje kardiovaskularnih bolesti verovatno su jedan od značajnih razloga za visoku smrtnost od kardiovaskularnih bolesti u Srbiji.
Due to high rates of morbidity and mortality from cardiovascular diseases, the share drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases significantly contributes to a total utilization among drugs in the world. There is an evident increase in the consumption of drugs for cardiovascular diseases. In order to achieve as much as possible a higher level of rationalization of therapy in most countries the professional bodies making pharmacotherapeutic guidelines to the possibility of the wrong treatment was reduced to a minimum. In this way, the physician-practitioner provided the security proper selection and the most appropriate procedure in the circumstances. The objectives of this study were: 1) the calculation of the total outpatient consumption of drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases on the territory of Novi Sad and its comparison with the prescribing in the Republic of Serbia and the countries with developed pharmacotherapeutical practice; 2) analysis of the structure of prescribed drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases (group C according to the ATC classification) by the groups and its comparison with the prescribing in the Republic of Serbia and the countries with developed pharmacotherapeutical practice 3) analysis of the structure of prescribed drugs per diagnosis and verification of compliance with pharmacotherapeutic guidelines; 4) comparison of prescribed drugs with morbidity statistics cardiovascular diseases; 5) analysis of pharmacoeconomic aspects of prescribing drugs for cardiovascular diseases. A research conducted among the phase IV clinical trials-pharmacoepidemiological, retrospective observational. Data were collected on the basis of a report from the electronic database for the period of 6 months (01. 01. 2012 - 01. 07. 2012), on the territory of the city of Novi Sad. Based on these data on the territory of the city of Novi Sad analyzed the use of drugs for cardiovascular diseases at 100% sample of the population. The research consisted of two parts. The first part comprises the collection, processing and analysis of data on the total quantity of the prescribed cardiovascular drugs on the territory of the city of Novi Sad. In the second part of this research using data from the public "Pharmacy Novi Sad" is a more detailed analysis of the utilization of drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases of prescription. The utilization of drugs is analyzed: according to the age and sex of patients, in diagnosis for which the drugs prescribed and to the cost. Structure of the use of drugs by indications for diagnosis in which the total utilization of prescribed drugs was greater than 1 DDD/1000inhabitants/day was compared with the existing national guidelines and use in countries with developed pharmacotherapeutical practice, and with international guidelines. These data were compared with morbidity statistics on the territory of the city of Novi Sad. Total amount of prescribed drugs for cardiovascular diseases in the examined period was 399.79 DDD/1000inh/day. Of this amount, more than half (201.11 DDD/1000inh/day) were drugs acting on the renin-angiotensin system, followed by calcium channel blockers, beta adrenergic receptor blockers, and fourth in total prescribed quantity drugs for treatment of heart diseases. Of the most common diagnosis for which drugs for cardiovascular diseases were prescribed, the most common were arterial hypertension, and then ischemic heart disease. The use of drugs for cardiovascular diseases in outpatient environment on the territory of the city of Novi Sad (399.79 DDD/1000inh/day) is higher compared to neighboring countries (Croatia, Montenegro), and lower than in countries with developed pharmacotherapeutical practice. Compared to countries with developed pharmacotherapeutical practice there are variations in terms of the structure of prescribing. Structure of prescribing of drugs for cardiovascular diseases deviates from the existing national guidelines on rational use of drugs for cardiovascular diseases in the Republic of Serbia. At the same time the structure of prescribed drugs is not in compliance with morbidity statistics cardiovascular diseases according to official data. Among the 10 most commonly prescribed drugs are costly drugs, that have adequate, and much cheaper parallels. Insufficient and irrational treatment of cardiovascular diseases are probably one of the major reasons for the high mortality from cardiovascular diseases in Serbia.

This thesis evaluates if and how drug name recognition can be used to find drug names in verbatims from reports on concomitant medication in clinical trial studies. In clinical trials, reports on concomitant medication are written if a trial participant takes other drugs than the studied drug. This information needs to be coded to a drug reference dictionary. Coded verbatims were used to create the data needed to train the drug name recognition models in this thesis. Labels for where in each verbatim the coded drugs name was, were created using a Levensthein distance. The drug name recognition models were trained and tested on verbatims with labels. Drug name recognition was performed using a logistic regression model and a bidirectional long short-term memory model. The bidirectional long short-term memory model performed the best result with an F1 score of 82.5% on classifying which words in the verbatims that were drug names. When the results were studied from case to case, they showed that the bidirectional long short-term memory classifications sometimes outperformed labels it was trained on in single word verbatims. The model was also tested on manually labelled golden standard data where it performed an F1-score of 46.4%. The results indicate that a bidirectional long short-term memory model can be implemented for drug name recognition, but that label reliability is an issue in this thesis.

Uvod: Antimikrobna rezistencija bakterija predstavlja globalni problem. Najvažniji faktor za njen nastanak je neadekvatna primena antibiotika, koja podrazumeva: Upotrebu antibiotika bez odgovarajuće dijagnoze, neadekvatan izbor leka, dužinuprimene i doziranje. Zbog specifičnosti populacije vitalno ugroženih bolesnika u jedinicama intenzivne terapije (JIT) i bolničkih infekcija uzrokovanih multirezistentnim bakterijama, primena antibiotika je na ovim odeljenjima učestala. Pokazana je povezanost između razvoja antimikrobne rezistencije i veličine potrošnje antibiotika u JIT. Cilj: Analiza primene antibiotika prema indikacijama na Klinici za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju, KC Vojvodine, zatim analiza stanja antimikrobne rezistencijenajčešćih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i analiza korelacije između navedenih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i empirijski primenjivane antibiotske terapije na Klinici za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju. Materijal i metode: Prospektivna, opservaciona studija, sprovedena u jednogodišnjem period, u JIT, Klinike za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju, uključila je 856 ispitanika, oba pola, starijih od 18 godina kod kojih je tokom hospitalizacije u JIT bio primenjen antibiotik. Ispitanici su, radi prikupljanja podataka, bili podeljeni u dve grupe u zavisnosti od toga da li su imali bolničku infekciju ili ne. Adekvatnost primene antibiotika je analizirana prema indikacijama (hirurška profilaksa, bolničke infekcije, vanbolničke infekcije i drugo), a u odnosu na izbor antibiotika, dužinu primene, režim doziranja, veličinu pojedinačne doze i način promene terapije (prema preporukama farmakoterapijskog vodiča The Sanford guide to antimicrobial therapy i antimikrobnoj osetljivosti bakterijskih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija u JIT. Za izračunavanje potrošnje antibiotika u JIT korišćena je ATC/DDD metodologija. Podaci o antimikrobnoj osetljivosti dobijeni su iz rezultata mikrobiološke obrade uzorkovanog materijala. Statistička analiza je izvršena pomoću statističkog paketa IBM SPSS 21 Statistics. Podaci su predstavljeni tabelarno i grafički, obrađeni su standardnim statističkim testovima, a statistička značajnost određivanja je bila na nivou p< 0,05. Ispitivanje povezanosti između potrošnje anibiotika i antimikrobne rezistencije urađeno je primenom Pirsonovog koeficijenta korelacije. Rezultati: Izbor antibiotika kod bolesnika u JIT nije bio adekvatan u 52,19% preskripcija. Izbor empirijski indikovanih antibiotika za lečenje bolničkih infekcija nije bio u skladu antimikrobnom osetljivošću izolovanog uzročnika u 78,44% preskripcija. Izbor antibiotika za hiruršku profilaksu nije bio adekvatan u 55,6% preskripcija. Antimikrobna rezistencija Acinetobacter spp.na karbapeneme, fluorohinolone i cefalosporine bila je preko 90%, na aminoglikozide preko 70%. Klebsiella pneumoniae bila je rezistentna na fluorohinolone i cefalosporine 80%, dok je na grupu karbapenema bila 18%. Pseudomonas aeruginosa je bio rezistentan na karbapeneme i aminoglikozide preko 50%, na antipseudomonasne cefalosporine preko 40%. Na kolistin nije zabeležena rezistencija ni jedne izolovane bakterijske vrste. Značajna pozitivna korelacija zabeležena je između potrošnje empirijski indikovanog meropenema i rezistencije Acinetobacter spp. Zaključak: U vise od 50% slučajeva primena antibiotika u JIT nije bila u skladu sa stanjem antimikrobne rezistencije bakterijskih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i savremenim farmakoterapijskim protokolima. Antimikrobna rezistencija Acinetobacter spp, Klebsiellae pneumoniae и Pseudomonas aeruginosae je iznosila preko 20% na antibiotike preporučene savremenim farmakoterapijskim smernicama, osim u slučaju rezistencije Klebsiellaе pneumoniae na grupu karbapenema. Između pojave rezistencije Acinetobacter spp. i potrošnje empirijski indikovanog meropenema utvrđena je statistički značajna pozitivna povezanost, dok za druge dve navedene bakterijske vrste ova povezanost nije bila statistički značajna. Na osnovu podataka o najčešćim bakterijskim uzročnicima i njihovoj antimikrobnoj osetljivosti za empirijskuterapiju pneumonija mogao bi biti preporučen jedino kolistin, dok bi za lečenje urinarnih infekcija mogao biti preporučen imipenem ili meropenem. Potrebno je promeniti farmakoterapijski pristup u primeni antibiotika u JIT.
Uvod: Antimikrobna rezistencija bakterija predstavlja globalni problem. Najvažniji faktor za njen nastanak je neadekvatna primena antibiotika, koja podrazumeva: Upotrebu antibiotika bez odgovarajuće dijagnoze, neadekvatan izbor leka, dužinuprimene i doziranje. Zbog specifičnosti populacije vitalno ugroženih bolesnika u jedinicama intenzivne terapije (JIT) i bolničkih infekcija uzrokovanih multirezistentnim bakterijama, primena antibiotika je na ovim odeljenjima učestala. Pokazana je povezanost između razvoja antimikrobne rezistencije i veličine potrošnje antibiotika u JIT. Cilj: Analiza primene antibiotika prema indikacijama na Klinici za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju, KC Vojvodine, zatim analiza stanja antimikrobne rezistencijenajčešćih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i analiza korelacije između navedenih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i empirijski primenjivane antibiotske terapije na Klinici za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju. Materijal i metode: Prospektivna, opservaciona studija, sprovedena u jednogodišnjem period, u JIT, Klinike za anesteziju i intenzivnu terapiju, uključila je 856 ispitanika, oba pola, starijih od 18 godina kod kojih je tokom hospitalizacije u JIT bio primenjen antibiotik. Ispitanici su, radi prikupljanja podataka, bili podeljeni u dve grupe u zavisnosti od toga da li su imali bolničku infekciju ili ne. Adekvatnost primene antibiotika je analizirana prema indikacijama (hirurška profilaksa, bolničke infekcije, vanbolničke infekcije i drugo), a u odnosu na izbor antibiotika, dužinu primene, režim doziranja, veličinu pojedinačne doze i način promene terapije (prema preporukama farmakoterapijskog vodiča The Sanford guide to antimicrobial therapy i antimikrobnoj osetljivosti bakterijskih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija u JIT. Za izračunavanje potrošnje antibiotika u JIT korišćena je ATC/DDD metodologija. Podaci o antimikrobnoj osetljivosti dobijeni su iz rezultata mikrobiološke obrade uzorkovanog materijala. Statistička analiza je izvršena pomoću statističkog paketa IBM SPSS 21 Statistics. Podaci su predstavljeni tabelarno i grafički, obrađeni su standardnim statističkim testovima, a statistička značajnost određivanja je bila na nivou p< 0,05. Ispitivanje povezanosti između potrošnje anibiotika i antimikrobne rezistencije urađeno je primenom Pirsonovog koeficijenta korelacije. Rezultati: Izbor antibiotika kod bolesnika u JIT nije bio adekvatan u 52,19% preskripcija. Izbor empirijski indikovanih antibiotika za lečenje bolničkih infekcija nije bio u skladu antimikrobnom osetljivošću izolovanog uzročnika u 78,44% preskripcija. Izbor antibiotika za hiruršku profilaksu nije bio adekvatan u 55,6% preskripcija. Antimikrobna rezistencija Acinetobacter spp.na karbapeneme, fluorohinolone i cefalosporine bila je preko 90%, na aminoglikozide preko 70%. Klebsiella pneumoniae bila je rezistentna na fluorohinolone i cefalosporine 80%, dok je na grupu karbapenema bila 18%. Pseudomonas aeruginosa je bio rezistentan na karbapeneme i aminoglikozide preko 50%, na antipseudomonasne cefalosporine preko 40%. Na kolistin nije zabeležena rezistencija ni jedne izolovane bakterijske vrste. Značajna pozitivna korelacija zabeležena je između potrošnje empirijski indikovanog meropenema i rezistencije Acinetobacter spp. Zaključak: U vise od 50% slučajeva primena antibiotika u JIT nije bila u skladu sa stanjem antimikrobne rezistencije bakterijskih uzročnika bolničkih infekcija i savremenim farmakoterapijskim protokolima. Antimikrobna rezistencija Acinetobacter spp, Klebsiellae pneumoniae i Pseudomonas aeruginosae je iznosila preko 20% na antibiotike preporučene savremenim farmakoterapijskim smernicama, osim u slučaju rezistencije Klebsiellae pneumoniae na grupu karbapenema. Između pojave rezistencije Acinetobacter spp. i potrošnje empirijski indikovanog meropenema utvrđena je statistički značajna pozitivna povezanost, dok za druge dve navedene bakterijske vrste ova povezanost nije bila statistički značajna. Na osnovu podataka o najčešćim bakterijskim uzročnicima i njihovoj antimikrobnoj osetljivosti za empirijskuterapiju pneumonija mogao bi biti preporučen jedino kolistin, dok bi za lečenje urinarnih infekcija mogao biti preporučen imipenem ili meropenem. Potrebno je promeniti farmakoterapijski pristup u primeni antibiotika u JIT.
Introduction: Antimicrobial resistance is a global health problem.The most important factor in the development of antimicrobial resistance is inadequate use of antibiotics, which means: inadequate diagnosis of bacterial infection, inadequate antibiotic choice, dosage and duration of therapy. Specificities of critically ill patients and nosocomial infections caused by multidrug-resistant pathogens are important reasons for large antibiotic consumption in ICU settings. Many studies have confirmed a positive correlation between antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance. Aims: The aims of this study were: to analyze the use of antibiotics at the ICU of the Clinic for anesthesia and intensive care at the Clinical Centre of Vojvodina, according to indications for antibiotic treatment; to analyze the pattern of antimicrobial resistance ofthe most common bacteria causing hospital acquired infections in our participants and to analyze the correlation between the consumption of empirically indicated antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance pattern. Methodology: Prospective observational study was conducted during a one-year period at the Clinic for anesthesia and intensive care, Clinical Centre of Vojvodina. The study included 856 participatns, aged over 18 years and of both genders. The participants were divided into two cohorts, depending on whether they showed symptoms of hospital-acquired infection or not. Adequacy of antibiotic use was analyzed with regard to indication for antibiotic treatment (surgical prophylaxis, treatment of hospital acquired infection, outpatient infection or other) and with regard to antibiotic choice, dosage and duration of treatment. An adequate antibiotic choice was compared to the resistance pattern of positive bacterial isolates as outlined by The Sanford guide to antimicrobial therapy). To calculate the consumption of antibiotics in ICU we used ATC/DDD methodology. Data on antibacterial sensitivity was obtained from the results of microbiological analysis of sample materials. IBM SPSS version 21 was used for statistical analysis, standard statistical tests were applied. The results were presented in tables and graphs. Statistically significant correlation was set at the value of p˂0.05. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to measure the strength between variables. Results: Antibiotic choice was inadequate in 52,19% of all antibiotic prescriptions for all indications. Antibiotic choice in surgical prophylaxis was inadequate in 55,59% of prescriptions for this indication. Inadequate choice of empirically indicated antibiotics (for treatment of hospital-acquired infections) according to antimicrobial resistance pattern occurred in 78,44% of all prescription for this indication. The three the most important bacterial causative agents of hospital acquired infections in ICU were: Acinetobacter spp, Klebsiella pneumonia and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The resistance of Acinetobacter spp. to antibiotic groups was as follows: to carbapenems, fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins over 90% and to aminoglycosides over 70%. The antimicrobial resistance of Klebsiella pneumoniae was: to fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins over 80% and to carbapenems up to 20%. The resistance pattern of Pseudomonas aeruginosa was as follows: to carbapenems and aminoglykozides over 50%, and to antipseudomonal cephalosporins over 40%. Statistically significant correlation was found between the consumption of empirically prescribed meropenem and antimicrobial resistance of Acinetobacter spp. Conclusion:In more than 50% of antibiotic prescriptions at ICU, regardless of indication, the choice of prescribed antibiotics was inadequate. Antimicrobial resistance pattern of Acinetobacter spp, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa to antibiotics recomennded by contemporary guidelines for antimicrobial therapy was over 20%, except in the case of the resistance of Klebsiellae peneumoniae to carbapenems. Statistically significant correlation was found between the consumption of empirically prescribed meropenem and antimicrobial resistance of Acinetobacter spp. No statistically significant correlation was observed in the other two bacterial strains. Initial, empiric therapy for nosocomial pneumonia in our ICU, should be colistin, and for urinary tract infection imipenem or meropenem. It is important to change antibiotic prescribing praxis in ICU.

AbstractAn adverse drug event (ADE) is defined as an adverse reaction resulting from improper drug use, reported in various documents such as biomedical literature, drug reviews, and user posts on social media. The recent advances in natural language processing techniques have facilitated automated ADE detection from documents. However, the contextualized information and relations among text pieces are less explored. This paper investigates contextualized language models and heterogeneous graph representations. It builds a contextualized graph embedding model for adverse drug event detection. We employ different convolutional graph neural networks and pre-trained contextualized embeddings as the building blocks. Experimental results show that our methods can improve the performance by comparing recent ADE detection models, suggesting that a text graph can capture causal relationships and dependency between different entities in a document.

One-phase model have been reported to describing the simultaneous heat and mass transfer in a horizontal drum partially filled by sugarcane bagasse with attention to the loss of water promoted by the increase of temperature. Mass and energy balances were written in MatLab language and solved by finite difference method. Predicted temporal and spatial profiles of moisture content and temperature are shown. Experimental tests were carried out in a horizontal drum and the temporal profiles were obtained. Great adjustments between experimental and predicted data were observed, indicating that the model is able to describe the transport phenomena in this system. Keywords: horizontal drum; heat and mass balances; sugarcane bagasse; solid-state fermentation process

HMusic is a domain specific language based on music patterns that can be used to write music and live coding. The main abstractions provided by the language are patterns and tracks. Code written in HMusic looks like patterns and multi-tracks available in music sequencers, drum machines and DAWs. HMusic provides primitives to design and combine patterns generating new patterns. The objective of this paper is to extend the original design of HMusic to allow effects on tracks. We describe new abstractions to add effects on individual tracks and in groups of tracks, and how they influence the combinators for track composition and multiplication. HMusic allows the live coding of music and, as it is embedded in the Haskell functional programming language, programmers can write functions to manipulate effects on the fly. The current implementation of the language is compiled into Sonic Pi [1], and we describe how the compiler’s back-end was modified to support the new abstractions for effects. HMusic can be and can be downloaded from [2].

The article analyzes the work by Snejana Pîslari „Cine merge tot pe drum” for flute, violin, cello and vibraphone. The compositional task was formulated by S. Pîslari as the synthesis of folklore material with the principles of building a minimalist composition, since one of the impulses for the creation of the named work became the musical controversy with the Russian composer V. Martynov and his book „The End of the Composer's Time”. Therefore, the use of a folkloric quotation was a fundamental condition for the author. The second musical impulse for the appearance of this work was born after S. Pîslari's journey through the Moldovan villages. The work is written in simple multipart form with features of triple variations, the basic principles of intonational and thematic development are variational and variable. The structure, according to the composer's plan, does not imply completeness, therefore the moment of the end of the work takes on a philosophical significance, testifying to the infinity of the path.

This paper presents a method to automatically extract structure knowledge of mechanical systems from natural language text. The current work extends our prior work on extracting function knowledge from text, which was presented at last year’s conference. The method uses rules based on a combination of syntactic, lexical, and redundancy information to identify structure knowledge from parsed text. Three case studies were conducted to evaluate the method. The case studies involved extracting physical connections among a known set of components of a bicycle frame, an internal combustion engine, and a drum brake from Wikipedia. The current work makes progress toward addressing the challenge of knowledge acquisition for knowledge-based CAD systems.

Errors in medication intake among elderly people are very common. One of the main causes for this is their loss of ability to retain information. The high amount of medicine intake required by the advanced age is another limiting factor. Thence, the design of an interactive aid system, preferably using natural language, to help the older population with medication is in demand. A chatbot based on a subtractive cluster algorithm, included in unsupervised learned models, is the chosen solution since the processing of natural languages is a necessary step in view to construct a chatbot able to answer questions that older people may pose upon themselves concerning a particular drug. In this work, the subtractive mountain clustering algorithm has been adapted to the problem of natural languages processing. This algorithm version allows for the association of a set of words into clusters. After finding the centre of every cluster — the most relevant word, all the others are aggregated according to a defined metric adapted to the language processing realm. All the relevant stored information is processed, as well as the questions, by the algorithm. The correct processing of the text enables the chatbot to produce answers that relate to the posed queries. To validate the method, we use the package insert of a drug as the available information and formulate associated questions.

Now-a-days, people around the world are infected by many new diseases. The cost of developing or discovering a new drug for the newly discovered disease is very high and prolonged process. These could be eliminated with the help of already existing resources. To identify the candidates from the existing drugs, we need to extract the relation between the drug, target and disease by textming a large-scale literature. Recently, computational approaches which is used for identifying the relationships between the entities in biomedical domain are appearing as an active area of research for drug discovery as it needs more man power. Due to the limited computational approaches, the relation extraction between drug-gene and genedisease association from the unstructured biomedical documents is very hard. In this work, we proposed a semi-supervised approach named pattern based bootstrapping method to extract the direct relations between drug, gene and disease from the biomedical literature. These direct relationships are used to infer indirect relationships between entities such as drug and disease. Now these indirect relationships are used to determine the new candidates for drug repositioning which in turn will reduce the time and the patient’s risk.

Deep learning-based drug response prediction (DRP) methods can accelerate the drug discovery process and reduce research and development costs. Despite their high accuracy, generating regression-aware representations remains challenging for mainstream approaches. For instance, the representations are often disordered, aggregated, and overlapping, and they fail to characterize distinct samples effectively. This results in poor representation during the DRP task, diminishing generalizability and potentially leading to substantial costs during the drug discovery. In this paper, we propose CLDR, a contrastive learning framework with natural language supervision for the DRP. The CLDR converts regression labels into text, which is merged with the drug response caption as a second sample modality instead of the traditional modes, i.e., graphs and sequences. Simultaneously, a common-sense numerical knowledge graph is introduced to improve the continuous text representation. Our framework is validated using the genomics of drug sensitivity in cancer dataset with average performance increases ranging from 7.8% to 31.4%. Furthermore, experiments demonstrate that the proposed CLDR effectively maps samples with distinct label values into a high-dimensional space. In this space, the sample representations are scattered, significantly alleviating feature overlap. The code is available at: https://github.com/DrugD/CLDR.

Review question / Objective: 2.1.1 type of research SRs/MAs of RCT (randomized controlled trial) of Xinmailong injection for the treatment of heart failure. 2.1.2 Subject investigated All included patients met internationally recognized diagnostic criteria for heart failure.There are no limitations on age, gender, ethnicity, time of onset, source of cases and language of publication. 2.1.3 Type of Intervention The control group was treated with conventional basic Western medicine recommended by the guidelines related to heart failure[1, 11], including antiplatelet drugs, anticoagulants, vasodilators, beta-blockers,ACEI (angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors), lipid-lowering drugs, and diuretic agents. and other drug treatment. The intervention group was given Xinmailong injection on the basis of the control group.

Review question / Objective: At present, many clinical studies have been reported on the treatment of KOA by injecting sinomenine hydrochloride into the knee cavity. However, no systematic evaluation has been published on this issue, and it is not clear whether sinomenine hydrochloride injection is effective and safe in the treatment of KOA.Therefore, it is important to conduct systematic evaluation to obtain relatively convincing conclusions as to whether sinomenine hydrochloride injection can be a good choice as a complementary and alternative drug (CAM) for KOA. Condition being studied: The RCTs are eligible, whether or not the blind method is specifically described. There are no restrictions on languages. Moreover, systemic evaluation, review literature and the full article cannot be obtained will be excluded.

Review question / Objective: Effectiveness of acupuncture in the treatment of neurodermatitis: a systematic review and Meta-Analysis. Condition being studied: Neurodermatitis is a skin disease with severe itching and recurring episodes. This study explores the clinical efficacy of acupuncture and moxibustion in the treatment of neurodermatitisNeurodermatitis is a severe itching and recurring skin disease. Eligibility criteria: Inclusion criteria: (1) Participants: The subject is a clinically diagnosed neurodermatitis patient. There are no restrictions on language, age, gender, country, or race. (2) Research type: randomized controlled experiment. (3) Intervention: mainly acupuncture and moxibustion. And compared with the control group. (4) Control group: with drug treatment or no treatment. (5) Results: No itching, the symptoms disappeared, and the skin lesions returned to normal. Exclusion criteria: (1) Other traditional Chinese methods. (2) Exclude duplicate publications and research with incomplete data. (3) Use acupuncture plus other drugs. (4) Discussion on the exclusion theory.

Review question / Objective: Population：Patients diagnosed as obesity with insulin resistance. Obesity reference: Consensus of experts on the Prevention and treatment of adult obesity in China in 2011 and Consensus of Chinese experts on medical nutrition therapy for overweight/obesity in 2016 were developed by the Obesity Group of Chinese Society of Endocrinology(CSE); BMI≥28. IR reference: According to the Expert opinions on insulin resistance evaluation published by Chinese Diabetes Society, HOMA-IR≥2.68 is regarded as the standard for the diagnosis of IR. Regardless of age, gender and course of disease. Patients diagnosed as obesity with insulin resistance. Intervention：Any kind of acupuncture, moxibustion, acupuncture+moxibustion, warm acupuncture, electropuncture, auricular point, acupoint application and acupoint catgut embedding. Comparison：Other acupuncture treatments, Drug therapy or blank control. Outcome：Primary outcomes: ①Fasting blood-glucose (FBG); ②Fasting serum insulin (FINS); ③Homeostasis model assessment-IR (HOMA-IR); ④Body Mass Index (BMI). Secondary outcomes: ①Waistline; ②Waist-hip ratio;③Triglyceride (TG); ④Total cholesterol (TC); ⑤High-density lipoprotein (HDL); ⑥Low-density lipoprotein (LDL). Study: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of different acupuncture methods in the treatment on obesity with insulin resistance, blind method and language are not limited. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

Review question / Objective: 2.2.1 Type of studies SRs/MAs of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) of GTLP for IS in any language. 2.2.2 Type of Participants Included patients were diagnosed with IS according to international or national standards, regardless of race, age, gender, time of onset, and source of cases. 2.2.3 Type of Intervention The intervention method in the control group was routine treatment, and the intervention method in the intervention group was GTLP treatment or GTLP combined with the treatment of the control group. 2.2.4 Types of outcomes Conclusions at least need to include clinical efficacy analysis and National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS). Condition being studied: Stroke is the second leading cause of death and third leading cause of disability globally.Among them, ischemic stroke (IS) accounts for 70% of all stroke types. It is a central nervous system disease caused by cerebral blood circulation disorder, ischemia and hypoxia .The incidence rate is high and increasing year by year, the age of onset is younger, the disability rate is high, and most patients have different degrees of limb motor dysfunction.In order to reduce the burden of stroke on the society and the patient's family, many articles proposed to strengthen the primary stroke prevention - behavior change and drug intervention.