INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IMPROVES HEALTHCARE SYSTEM INTEGRATION

Ground-breaking innovative and practical methods are being developed to ease a patient’s journey within healthcare organisation facilities. In a study entitled “Medical Data Integration Using HL7 Standards for Patient’s Early Identification”, Dr. Adi AlQudah, Researcher and PhD graduate from BUiD (British University in Dubai), focused on essential information system integration, particularly in the healthcare sector where patient privacy, safety, and satisfaction are all influenced by interoperability standards. By using the Emirates ID, a patient's early identification solution was proposed to reduce waiting times in outpatient department at healthcare facilities. As a result, a significant outcome of the study was reached, in terms of reducing the "patient's journey time" by approximately 14 minutes.

Such promising results can be beneficial to eliminate long queues and their related stress for both patients and healthcare workers. The proposed solution is crucial to maintaining a patient’s satisfaction and privacy. Moreover, the resolution focuses on prolonged queues that can produce high levels of distraction for healthcare workers, rather than focusing on their primary tasks. Going forward, Dr. AlQudah believes a similar solution can be simulated in other healthcare facilities with different settings. He mentioned a study expansion that can be proposed by redesigning and automating the patient transfer between triage and treatment rooms. For instance, walk-in patients can be routed automatically to less-occupied treatment rooms using the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and without the intervention of nurses.

Dr. Hanada Taha

Reviving education in Arabic has been a research theme for Dr. Hanada Taha, Endowed Chair Professor of Arabic Language at Zayed University. Through her work, the former acting Dean of Bahrain Teachers College aims to build strong future leaders for the Arab region. Her journey began when she witnessed a difference in language proficiency among children, which she deemed as unfair. Dr. Taha’s interest in children’s learning process started to grow, focusing on the requirements needed to build a love for Arabic and a proficiency in the language. She discovered this to be a common issue to all schools, particularly after working on national literacy strategies with many countries, such as Saudi Arabia,

Jordan and Morocco, before reaching the conclusion that children were uninspired and not proficient. It was here that she received her calling to boost Arab proficiency. Dr. Taha’s work kicked off on several fronts:

• research on teaching the language to native learners

• to be able to analyse the challenges, needs and future prospects for effective practices

• adopting a holistic and scientific approach to understand the field in depth.

To ensure her research was not only based in theory, Dr. Taha also delved into hundreds of Arabic language classroom observations across all grade levels in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, the US, Oman and Bahrain. Over the years, such work provided her with the knowledge of mutual issues within classrooms and among teachers, and the specifics by country and school systems – an eyeopening moment in her career. Her work has spanned across several entities, which has allowed her to gain an understanding of the Arabic language on a national, regional and global level. Dr. Taha believes such an effort is collective in nature, although her role is to convince, to demonstrate, and to present the latest, most effective practices for teaching the language, which then affect literacy strategies. Most importantly, the different education and linguistic policies pertaining to the Arabic language across multiple countries are at the forefront of such work. She has also emphasised the significant economic investment as she believes language and the economy go hand in hand. “You will invest in students for 12 to 16 years and, in the end, they should have mastery of the language. If they do not, this is an investment that is lost. There are political and economic implications, and my focus is the educational one. On my side, it is important to flag such issues,” Dr. Taha said. She highlighted the most common concern in the Arab World as one where countries are not able to practice nor implement as much as they intend. Her goal is to align aspirations, dreams and official guidelines that are written about Arabic with excellent on-the-ground implementation. This will involve bringing such awareness to practitioners, raising awareness of the language, and creating more programmes in literary Arabic to increase children’s exposure. The challenge stretches as far as highlighting Arabic in the community at large, further to just being in schools. This includes listening to more Arabic music in malls, as Dr. Taha calls it a hidden curriculum, while focusing on more Arabic writing and calligraphy in schools, as well as Arab

Islamic architecture, which belongs to the culture itself. “We spend our lives unaware of all of these and these are all challenges we need to highlight,” she added. Her current work at Zayed University focuses on establishing the Arabic Language Research Centre, which will be completely dedicated to teaching and learning, while bringing entities and exporting best practices and success stories in Arabic to the community and the region. Dr. Taha is also conducting further research on exploring the possibility of teaching Arabic and English side by side from Grade 1 or to immerse them in Arabic from Grades 1 to 3 followed by the introduction of English. “I believe students should learn Arabic first because of our current context and due to the fact that it is not emphasised as much in the public arena. We need to focus our efforts on it. We are also working with Dr. Haitham Taha, an expert in reading difficulties, to design the first reading difficulties screening tool as an app to help with early detection and intervention for children with reading difficulties in Arabic,” she noted. In parallel, Dr. Taha is also working on a project with the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre to collaborate on a children’s corpus in an aim to find out the first 5,000 words students require to learn in the language. Her work extends to translating key pieces of research as many are currently published in English. “We are a very small group of people, but we need funding and support.

I am very hopeful - there are amazing and promising things happening in the UAE but we need to get all of this into schools, this is where the masses are. If the teachers do not know what to do with the books, then you will lose the children, thus it is about targeting Arabic teacher preparation and training,” she concluded.

Title of published paper: Arabic Language Arts Standards: Revolution or Disruption Published in: Research in Comparative and International Education (4(13(, pp. 569 –551 ( .

Journal metrics:

• Impact factor: Real-Time Journal's Impact Oct, 2022: 3.0

• CiteScore ranking 1.9 :2021-2020

• H-index: 21

Scientific Journal Ranking (SJR(: Q,2 0.472. Ranked 497# over 1,319 related journals in the Education research category. The ranking percentile is around %62 in the field of Education.

Project funded by: Zayed University.

Dr. Reem Khalil

With an interest in brain development, general biology, human anatomy and physiology, as well as neurobiology, Dr. Reem Khalil, an Associate Professor in Neuroscience at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), has been studying the visual cortex, which mediates humans’ ability to see. Her main research interests lie in examining the organisation and development of the mammalian visual cortex, with a specific focus on the developmental refinement of circuits that link different visual areas of the brain. She possesses a strong expertise in performing anatomical tracer injections, as well as immunohistochemical staining methods. A main focus in Dr. Khalil’s laboratory is to study how the different areas which construct the visual cortex are actually interconnected. These connections between the various areas mediate different aspects of visual perception, such as colours and shapes. With the knowledge of neurons – the basic building blocks of the brain, Dr. Khalil and her team have decided to take their research a step further. Dr. Khalil’s most recent interest includes the neuron mapping project, which involves a collaboration with mathematicians at the American University of Sharjah, including Dr. Sadok Kallel, Pawel Dlotko from the Dioscuri Centre in Topological Data Analysis at the Institute of Mathematics at the

Polish Academy of Sciences; and Ahmad Farhat, a computational researcher also affiliated with the Dioscuri Centre with a background in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. “What we have done is examine the actual shape of neurons that give rise to these connections in the brain. The shape of neurons is referred to as morphology. Since we know that there are variations in the 3D shape of neurons in different areas of the brain, we sought to cluster and classify neuronal populations in effort to reveal these differences. Revealing differences in morphology tells us something about the kind of function that a neuron participates in or mediates, as well as what kind of computations the neuron performs. Thus, by looking at the 3D structure or the morphology of neurons in specific areas, we can reveal differences in the morphology. Ultimately the hope is that these differences will also tell us something about the function of each population of neurons in each of these areas,” explained Dr. Khalil, who pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in the Biology Department at City University of New York in the United States. This collaborative project with Dr. Kallel involved the use of topology, which is a branch of geometry, to devise mathematical descriptors to separate these classes of neurons. The team used datasets from an online repository which contained the 3D rendering of actual neurons that exist in brains from various species. Such neurons have been reconstructed in humans, monkeys, cats, and rats, although the initial objective of the work was to conduct such research on a species that Dr. Khalil regularly works with: the ferret. However, the COVID19- pandemic delayed such experiments. As a result, the team hopes to conduct anatomical injections in a ferret’s visual cortex and obtain 3D reconstructions of neurons, specifically in the ferret’s brain specifically. “That is where the next phase of the project is or the continuation of what we have worked on before. Previously, we used datasets already published online and analysed these datasets that comprise different reconstructions from multiple areas. However, we used reconstructions from the mouse brain, from the rat brain, from the human brain, and other datasets as well,” she stated. So far, the team has recently published the ongoing work in a prestigious journal called the “Public Library of Science Computational Biology”, with related projects underway in parallel. Ultimately, the overarching research theme in the laboratory is to essentially map out how the connections among the visual areas develop and mature with normal experience. Such work is paramount as Dr. Khalil used the example of young individuals with visual abnormalities, such as a cataract or a lazy eye, which will inevitably affect visual function as an adult. As such, mapping how these connections develop and mature over time in a normal ferret will hopefully lead to an understanding of when abnormal events happen, and potentially provide therapeutic interventions before these maladaptive events arise. “Ultimately, what we are interested in revealing is – and this is relevant to human visual perception as well – how does the brain develop normally? And how do abnormal events that arise during development affect the brain structurally, leading to visual dysfunction?” The popularity of ferrets as model organisms in visual neuroscience research, and specifically in neurodevelopmental research, has increased because of their long period of brain development and the potential links that can be drawn with human visual development. Ferrets are also widely used by researchers because they are born at an early stage of development, which makes them developmentally immature. As such, scientists can study events that happen in the brain postnatally or after they are born. Otherwise, these events would happen, for instance, with monkeys in utero, while the fetus is still developing inside the uterus, which makes it difficult for researchers to access. Dr. Khalil’s work also extends to other projects. One project involves a team of mechanical engineers from the University of Michigan - Dearborn, as they attempt to 3D print neurons. The 3D printing project will serve as an educational resource in neuroscience education and enhance student comprehension using physical models of scaled neurons. Another project Dr. Khalil is working on involves using computational tools such as principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical clustering analysis to assess the morphology of pyramidal cells in different visual areas of the monkey brain’s development. The researchers discovered that specific morphological features related to the size of neurons require a long period of development to mature. The group used a public repository to acquire the 3D neuronal reconstructions for their analysis. The results help advance our understanding of how the morphology neurons is refined across development. The project, entitled “Developmental Changes in Pyramidal Cell Morphology in Multiple Visual Cortical Areas Using Cluster Analysis”, was published in “Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience”.

Title of published paper: Developmental Changes in Pyramidal Cell Morphology in Multiple Visual Cortical Areas Using Cluster Analysis Published in: Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience

Journal metrics:

•Impact factor: Real-Time Journal's Impact Oct, 2022: 4.8

• CiteScore ranking 2020-2021: 4.7

• H-index: 60

Scientific Journal Ranking (SJR(: Q2, 0.8. Ranked #8 over 24 related journals in the Neuroscience (miscellaneous) research category. The ranking percentile of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience is around 68% in the field of Neuroscience (miscellaneous). Project funded by: Grants from the Faculty Research Grant (FRG) American University of Sharjah (AUS); and Patients Friend’s Committee Fund, Sharjah, UAE.

As the director of the research laboratory for Computer Human Intelligence at New York University – Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), Dr. Tuka Al Hanai, Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering, has a long line of experience in this field. Her journey began during her undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the Abu Dhabi Petroleum Institute. Throughout the years, she amassed a great deal of knowledge through mentorship and professors who guided and encouraged her to continue pursuing excellence. Since then, her work has been featured in major publications, such as The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, and she frequently publishes at top tier research venues, such as AAAI, ACL and IEEE). She has also been the recipient of the MIT Technology Review’s 10 Innovators Under 35 MENA Award in 2018, as well as the UAE Government Excellence Award in 2019. Dr. Al Hanai’s parents encouraged her to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – topics she was thoroughly interested in. With excellence in mind, she undertook a Master’s and PhD in Computer Science at MIT’s graduate school, where she explored research domains through much independent work. At the time, machine learning and AI had started gaining popularity. “I was very lucky to be in the right environment to master some of those skills that are required to do impactful research with machine learning, AI and data sets,” Dr. Al Hanai recalled. Following her PhD, she joined NYUAD’s vibrant research community, which is extremely active in cutting edge research. The open, progressive, and forward-looking environment truly fit Dr. Al Hanai’s personality. As part of a research team of approximately six to eight scientists, their work focuses on applying machine learning to real world application, including detecting depression in conversations based on a speech recording. The team looks for use cases for machine learning where, typically, a human is involved in decision making, such as medical doctors screening their patients for depression. Such technologies can augment their work using an AI algorithm that screens the patients’ speech. Dr. Al Hanai’s work is timely, as AI has been revolutionising the way in which society lives, reshaping several different areas. From voice and facial recognition to medical imaging and decision-making, the technology is serving humanity on a multitude of levels. Dr. Al Hanai’s team has developed previous versions of their current project, continuously building on their learnings. The research has led to the collection of one of the largest data sets for speech and depression analysis and detection, which the team is currently exploring. “The research itself takes 6 to 12 months, but its deployment into the real world is a different process and it takes a different skillset. It takes the greater market and a larger set of institutions to adopt the research, therefore it could take years. However, it is important because, as humans, we make a lot of decisions every day, from doctors and HR managers to parents – there are a lot of micro decisions. Hence, anything that can help enrich the decision-making process is always extremely valuable. Such is the approach we take and our outlook,” Dr. Al Hanai explained. The significance of such research expands to training and mentoring individuals on cutting-edge work, tools, and technologies, as well as critical thinking. “There are three components to our research project: the data, which is about collecting more diverse and representative data, training algorithms, which requires computational systems, and testing, evaluation and deployment – thus, once everything is built, [it is about finding] use cases to deploy these algorithms,” Dr. Al Hanai said. Ultimately, her goals entail improving some of the technological AI and machine learning developments and being a part of such advancements, while deploying more algorithms into the real world and augmenting people’s activities.

“I would love to able to see these algorithms augment what medical doctors do, or other decision-makers engage in, in order to have a richer experience. Mentoring and training junior researchers is another wish, in order for them to conduct similar work in different contexts,” she concluded.