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Thyroidkeeper: a healthcare management system for patients with thyroid diseases

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Abstract

Thyroid diseases, especially thyroid tumors, have a huge population in China. The postoperative patients, under China’s incomplete tertiary diagnosis and treatment system, will frequently go to tertiary hospitals for follow-up and medication adjustment, resulting in heavy burdens on both specialists and patients. To help postoperative patients recover better against the above adverse conditions, a novel mobile application ThyroidKeeper is proposed as a collaborative AI-based platform that benefits both patients and doctors. In addition to routine health records and management functions, ThyroidKeeper has achieved several innovative points. First, it can automatically adjust medication dosage for patients during their rehabilitation based on their medical history, laboratory indicators, physical health status, and current medication. Second, it can comprehensively predict the possible complications based on the patient’s health status and the health status of similar groups utilizing graph neural networks. Finally, the employing of graph neural network models can improve the efficiency of online communication between doctors and patients, help doctors obtain medical information for patients more quickly and precisely, and make more accurate diagnoses. The preliminary evaluation in both laboratory and real-world environments shows the advantages of the proposed ThyroidKeeper system.

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Notes

  1. Although the terms mHealth and telemedicine overlap in content, they emphasize different points: mHealth emphasizes that the medium for obtaining and managing health resources is mobile devices, while telemedicine emphasizes the participation of professional medical staff in the process (mHealth does not necessarily require the participation of medical staff). In this paper, we use both terms depending on the context.

  2. https://www.boostthyroid.com/.

  3. http://ai.baidu.com/tech/ocr (In Chinese)

  4. https://github.com/wildfirechat/ (In Chinese)

  5. For those undifferentiated cancers that are in advanced stages, surgical treatment may have been ineffective, and other therapies such as radiation therapy might be chosen.

  6. The T refers to the size and extent of the main tumor. The main tumor is usually called the primary tumor. The N refers to the the number of nearby lymph nodes that have cancer. The M refers to whether the cancer has metastasized. This means that the cancer has spread from the primary tumor to other parts of the body.

  7. https://www.umeng.com/ (In Chinese)

  8. https://square.github.io/retrofit/.

  9. https://square.github.io/okhttp/.

  10. https://spring.io/projects/spring-boot.

  11. https://ai.baidu.com/easydl/ocr/ (In Chinese)

  12. https://github.com/JakeWharton/butterknife.

  13. https://pub.dev/packages/image_picker.

  14. We did not conducted rigorous clinical trials. Therefore, for those patients who used the software to adjust the medication dosage, their doctors eventually contacted them to determine the medication dosage.

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Acknowlegements

This work was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 62076130 and 91846104), the Start-up Research Fund of Southeast University (Grant No. RF1028623059), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2242023K30034), and the Hospital Research Fund of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine (Grant Nos. SEZ202121 and SEZJY2023018).

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Author notes

  1. Jing Zhang and Jianhua Li contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, No. 2 SEU Road, Nanjing, 211189, China

    Jing Zhang

  2. Engineering Research Center of Blockchain Application, Supervision and Management (Southeast University), Ministry of Education, No. 2 SEU Road, Nanjing, 211189, China

    Jing Zhang

  3. The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, No.1 Jianshe East Road, Zhengzhou, 450052, China

    Jianhua Li

  4. School of Information Engineering, Yangzhou University, No. 196 Huayang West Road, Yangzhou, 225127, China

    Yi Zhu

  5. Department of Radiology, Shenzhen Children’s Hospital, No. 7019 Yitain Road, Shenzhen, 518034, China

    Yu Fu

  6. Department of Nursing, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, No. 23 Nanhu Road, Nanjing, 210017, China

    Lixia Chen

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  1. Jing Zhang
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Correspondence to Jing Zhang.

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Zhang, J., Li, J., Zhu, Y. et al. Thyroidkeeper: a healthcare management system for patients with thyroid diseases. Health Inf Sci Syst 11, 49 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13755-023-00251-w

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