Dioxin Exposure Initiative Publications

EPA Science Inventory

Following is a listing of published articles that have come out of EPA's Dioxin Exposure Initiative

SOURCES:

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1. Guide to Current Literature on Exposure Factors

   EPA Science Inventory

   In an effort to keep the Exposure Factors Handbook up-to-date, the National Center for Environmental Assessment (NCEA) conducted a literature search and summarized recent data on exposure factor...

2. Recent Additions for 1998

   EPA Science Inventory

   December 22, 1998

   Benchmark Dose Software

   
   

   December 16, 1998

   Recent Additions for 1997

   EPA Science Inventory

   December 15, 1997

   Minutes of the Stakeholder Meetings on the Report of the JSA Shrimp Virus Work Group

   
   November 21, 1997

3. Recent Additions for 1999

   EPA Science Inventory

   December 8, 1999

   Summary Of The U.S. EPA Colloquium On a Framework for Human Health Risk Assessment
   EPA/600/R-99/001 and EPA/600/R-98/155
   The U.S. ...

4. Provisional assessment of recent studies on health and ecological effects of ozone exposure

   EPA Science Inventory

   A reconsideration of the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for O₃ is currently underway. The last Air Quality Criteria Document for Ozone and Related Photochemical Oxidants (O_...

5. A de-identifier for medical discharge summaries.

   PubMed

   Uzuner, Ozlem; Sibanda, Tawanda C; Luo, Yuan; Szolovits, Peter

   2008-01-01

   Clinical records contain significant medical information that can be useful to researchers in various disciplines. However, these records also contain personal health information (PHI) whose presence limits the use of the records outside of hospitals. The goal of de-identification is to remove all PHI from clinical records. This is a challenging task because many records contain foreign and misspelled PHI; they also contain PHI that are ambiguous with non-PHI. These complications are compounded by the linguistic characteristics of clinical records. For example, medical discharge summaries, which are studied in this paper, are characterized by fragmented, incomplete utterances and domain-specific language; they cannot be fully processed by tools designed for lay language. In this paper, we show that we can de-identify medical discharge summaries using a de-identifier, Stat De-id, based on support vector machines and local context (F-measure=97% on PHI). Our representation of local context aids de-identification even when PHI include out-of-vocabulary words and even when PHI are ambiguous with non-PHI within the same corpus. Comparison of Stat De-id with a rule-based approach shows that local context contributes more to de-identification than dictionaries combined with hand-tailored heuristics (F-measure=85%). Comparison with two well-known named entity recognition (NER) systems, SNoW (F-measure=94%) and IdentiFinder (F-measure=36%), on five representative corpora show that when the language of documents is fragmented, a system with a relatively thorough representation of local context can be a more effective de-identifier than systems that combine (relatively simpler) local context with global context. Comparison with a Conditional Random Field De-identifier (CRFD), which utilizes global context in addition to the local context of Stat De-id, confirms this finding (F-measure=88%) and establishes that strengthening the representation of local context may be more beneficial for de-identification than complementing local with global context.

6. A De-identifier for Medical Discharge Summaries1

   PubMed Central

   Uzuner, Özlem; Sibanda, Tawanda C.; Luo, Yuan; Szolovits, Peter

   2008-01-01

   Objective Clinical records contain significant medical information that can be useful to researchers in various disciplines. However, these records also contain personal health information (PHI) whose presence limits the use of the records outside of hospitals. The goal of de-identification is to remove all PHI from clinical records. This is a challenging task because many records contain foreign and misspelled PHI; they also contain PHI that are ambiguous with non-PHI. These complications are compounded by the linguistic characteristics of clinical records. For example, medical discharge summaries, which are studied in this paper, are characterized by fragmented, incomplete utterances and domain-specific language; they cannot be fully processed by tools designed for lay language. Methods and Results In this paper, we show that we can de-identify medical discharge summaries using a de-identifier, Stat De-id, based on support vector machines and local context (F-measure = 97% on PHI). Our representation of local context aids de-identification even when PHI include out-of-vocabulary words and even when PHI are ambiguous with non-PHI within the same corpus. Comparison of Stat De-id with a rule-based approach shows that local context contributes more to de-identification than dictionaries combined with hand-tailored heuristics (F-measure = 85%). Comparison with two well-known named entity recognition (NER) systems, SNoW (F-measure = 94%) and IdentiFinder (F-measure = 36%), on five representative corpora show that when the language of documents is fragmented, a system with a relatively thorough representation of local context can be a more effective de-identifier than systems that combine (relatively simpler) local context with global context. Comparison with a Conditional Random Field De-identifier (CRFD), which utilizes global context in addition to the local context of Stat De-id, confirms this finding (F-measure = 88%) and establishes that strengthening the representation of local context may be more beneficial for de-identification than complementing local with global context. PMID:18053696

7. Scheduling and Coordination of Multiple Dynamic Systems.

   DTIC Science & Technology

   1979-12-01

   Lemna 9. For C (.) defined in (39), .im C (D) -C (D ) exists V DE(.,D) (42) D-D and him4 C(D) C*(D+) exists V DE[D,D). (43) D-D Proof. For any DEi(,D] a...0[t0 ,1 ] where -to - [t,..., tK ’ (151) With this minor abuse of notation, the gradient of C[(t,V1 is to be K found with respect to t ER This

8. High-Bandwidth Tactical-Network Data Analysis in a High-Performance-Computing (HPC) Environment: Transport Protocol (Transmission Control Protocol/User Datagram Protocol [TCP/UDP]) Analysis

   DTIC Science & Technology

   2015-09-01

   the network Mac8 Medium Access Control ( Mac ) (Ethernet) address observed as destination for outgoing packets subsessionid8 Zero-based index of...15. SUBJECT TERMS tactical networks, data reduction, high-performance computing, data analysis, big data 16. SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF: 17...Integer index of row cts_deid Device (instrument) Identifier where observation took place cts_collpt Collection point or logical observation point on

9. Evaluation of a deidentification (De-Id) software engine to share pathology reports and clinical documents for research.

   PubMed

   Gupta, Dilip; Saul, Melissa; Gilbertson, John

   2004-02-01

   We evaluated a comprehensive deidentification engine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Pittsburgh, PA, that uses a complex set of rules, dictionaries, pattern-matching algorithms, and the Unified Medical Language System to identify and replace identifying text in clinical reports while preserving medical information for sharing in research. In our initial data set of 967 surgical pathology reports, the software did not suppress outside (103), UPMC (47), and non-UPMC (56) accession numbers; dates (7); names (9) or initials (25) of case pathologists; or hospital or laboratory names (46). In 150 reports, some clinical information was suppressed inadvertently (overmarking). The engine retained eponymic patient names, eg, Barrett and Gleason. In the second evaluation (1,000 reports), the software did not suppress outside (90) or UPMC (6) accession numbers or names (4) or initials (2) of case pathologists. In the third evaluation, the software removed names of patients, hospitals (297/300), pathologists (297/300), transcriptionists, residents and physicians, dates of procedures, and accession numbers (298/300). By the end of the evaluation, the system was reliably and specifically removing safe-harbor identifiers and producing highly readable deidentified text without removing important clinical information. Collaboration between pathology domain experts and system developers and continuous quality assurance are needed to optimize ongoing deidentification processes.

10. Development of a biomarkers database for the National Children's Study

    DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

    Lobdell, Danelle T.; Mendola, Pauline

    The National Children's Study (NCS) is a federally-sponsored, longitudinal study of environmental influences on the health and development of children across the United States (www.nationalchildrensstudy.gov). Current plans are to study approximately 100,000 children and their families beginning before birth up to age 21 years. To explore potential biomarkers that could be important measurements in the NCS, we compiled the relevant scientific literature to identify both routine or standardized biological markers as well as new and emerging biological markers. Although the search criteria encouraged examination of factors that influence the breadth of child health and development, attention was primarily focused onmore » exposure, susceptibility, and outcome biomarkers associated with four important child health outcomes: autism and neurobehavioral disorders, injury, cancer, and asthma. The Biomarkers Database was designed to allow users to: (1) search the biomarker records compiled by type of marker (susceptibility, exposure or effect), sampling media (e.g., blood, urine, etc.), and specific marker name; (2) search the citations file; and (3) read the abstract evaluations relative to our search criteria. A searchable, user-friendly database of over 2000 articles was created and is publicly available at: http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/cfm/recordisplay.cfm?deid=85844. PubMed was the primary source of references with some additional searches of Toxline, NTIS, and other reference databases. Our initial focus was on review articles, beginning as early as 1996, supplemented with searches of the recent primary research literature from 2001 to 2003. We anticipate this database will have applicability for the NCS as well as other studies of children's environmental health.« less