National Disability Authority

Skin cancer (SC) is one of the most common cancers in the world and is a leading cause of death in humans. Melanoma (M) is the most aggressive form of skin cancer and has an increasing incidence rate. Early and accurate diagnosis of M is critical to increase patient survival rates; however, its clinical evaluation is limited by the long timelines, variety of interpretations, and difficulty in distinguishing it from nevi (N) because of striking similarities. To overcome these problems and to support dermatologists, several machine-learning (ML) and deep-learning (DL) approaches have been developed. In the proposed work, melanoma detection, understood as an anomaly detection task with respect to the normal condition consisting of nevi, is performed with the help of a convolutional neural network (CNN) along with the handcrafted texture features of the dermoscopic images as additional input in the training phase. The aim is to evaluate whether the preprocessing and segmentation steps of dermoscopic images can be bypassed while maintaining high classification performance. Network training is performed on the ISIC2018 and ISIC2019 datasets, from which only melanomas and nevi are considered. The proposed network is compared with the most widely used pre-trained networks in the field of dermatology and shows better results in terms of classification and computational cost. It is also tested on the ISIC2016 dataset to provide a comparison with the literature: it achieves high performance in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.

Purpose: How many people with disabilities are in the world? How is disability defined? How can we measure disability in an accurate and comparable way? These are some of the key questions which the recently published World Bank/WHO World Report on Disability (WRD) addresses.Method: Multiple data sources and methods were used by WHO and the World Bank to estimate a global figure, with the ICF as the underlying data standard. Key international data sources were the World Health Survey of 2002–2004 and the 2004 updates from the Global Burden of Disease study. The World Report on Disability also includes a compilation of country-reported prevalence from census and surveys. This paper presents and discusses key findings of the Irish National Disability Survey (2006) to illustrate the value of the ICF framework for disability statistics and most especially the environmental factors component.Results: The World Report estimates that globally one billion people or 15% of the world’s population experience disabilities. Between 110–190 million people (2% of the world’s population) experience severe or extreme difficulties in functioning. Definitions and measures of disability vary widely across countries. The Irish Disability Survey shows the substantial impact of environmental factors on people’s functioning. For example, attitudes, and the presence or absence of facilitating equipment, support services, flexible working arrangements and transport significantly affect participation of people with disabilities in Irish society.Conclusions: To improve the quality of disability information, the World Report recommends the use of a common definition and concepts of disability based on WHO’s International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF). Furthermore, disability measurement needs to apply a multidimensional approach, in particular, measuring disability in terms of the level of difficulty a person is experiencing in multiple areas of life, rather than head counting severe impairment types in a dichotomous way. Environmental factors have significant effects on individual functioning and should be considered as an integral part in disability measurement.Implications for RehabilitationRehabilitation practitioners and researchers can be part of the international work towards an epidemiology of functioning and disability, by using a common language and frame of reference – the ICF – and by gathering and sharing information and statistics as recommended by the World Report on Disability.Better comparability between clinical or case based data and population data will also enable analyses which serve to improve the health of populations globally.Environmental factors – physical, social and attitudinal – must be recorded or measured as part of the context which influences the experience and level of functioning and can offer useful information to guide positive interventions.

MHADIE project (Measuring Health and Disability in Europe: Supporting policy development) aimed at developing realistic, evidence-based and effective national policies for persons with disabilities. A preliminary step towards this goal was the demonstration on the feasibility of employing the ICF in clinical, educational and statistical fields, which corresponds to the recognised need to enhance the European Union's capacity of analysis of disability, as highlighted in its Disability Action Plan 2006–2007. The ultimate outcome of the project is the production of 13 policy recommendations, dealing with statistics clinical and educational areas, and four general policy recommendations focusing on: (a) the need of coordinating and integrating disability conceptualisation at all policy levels and across sectors; (b) the need of conducing longitudinal cohort studies which include children aged 0–6; (c) the need of reviewing transportation policies in light of the requirements of persons with disabilities; (d) the need of reviewing all disability policies to emphasise and support the role of the family, which is a consistent and substantial environmental facilitator in the lives of persons with disabilities.

This paper provides an account of the methodology used to gain consensus around the development of a national set of child well-being indicators in the Republic of Ireland. This development was identified as a key objective in the National Children’s Strategy (2000) to provide the basis for the State of the Nation’s Children report, which will be published in 2006. This objective reflects a growing national and international awareness of the need to understand and represent the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of children’s lives in a way that is easily understood by different stakeholders