Browsing by Subject "Healthcare"

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Changes in vaccination practices in Turkey
(Bilkent University, 2025) Saleem, Umayma Binte; Mukhtarov, Nijat; Nasibli, Nazim; Yusifli, Roya; Garayeva, Nuriya
This article outlines the history of vaccination in Turkey—from the initial use of variolation in the Ottoman Empire to the mass public health applications during the Republic, and now, the privatization of vaccine supply. One can consider the first use of vaccination in Ottoman hands as a state initiative that was supported from the very institutional level: the Vaccine Production Institute (1892), and the Constantinople Imperial Bacteriology Institute (1893). The Turkish government continued this emphasis when it established the Hifzissihha in 1928, an organization dedicated to providing widespread vaccinations with the goal of catching up to European standards in preventing infectious diseases. However, starting in the 1980s, neoliberal economic policies and international financial organizations forced the government to step back from its leading role in healthcare and eventually privatized vaccine development and distribution. The paper discusses the political, social, and economic factors that brought such changes in policies and the negative effects on public trust. The paper is a call for revision of current health policies to achieve sustainable vaccination strategies in Turkey.
Open Access
Multi-armed bandit algorithms for communication networks and healthcare
(2022-06) Demirel, İlker
Multi-armed bandits (MAB) is a well-established sequential decision-making framework. While the simplest MAB framework is useful in modeling a wide range of real-world applications ranging from adaptive clinical trial design to financial portfolio management, it requires further extensions for other problems. We propose three novel MAB algorithms that are useful in optimizing bolus-insulin dose recommendation in type-1 diabetes, best channel identification in cognitive radio networks, and online recommender systems. First, we introduce and study the “safe leveling” problem, where the learner's objective is to keep the arm outcomes close to a target level rather than maximize them. We propose a novel algorithm, ESCADA, with cumulative regret and safety guarantees. We demonstrate its effectiveness against the straightforward adaptations of standard MAB algorithms to the “leveling task”. Next, we study the “federated multi-armed bandit” (FMAB) problem, where a cohort of clients play the same MAB game to learn the globally best arm. We consider adversarial “Byzantine” clients disturbing the learning process with false model updates and propose a robust algorithm, Fed-MoM-UCB. We provide theoretical guarantees on Fed-MoM-UCB while identifying the certain performance sacrifices that robustness requires. Finally, we study the “combinatorial multi-armed bandits with probabilistically triggered arms” (CMAB-PTA), where the learner chooses a set of arms at each round that may trigger other arms. CMAB-PTA is useful in modeling various problems such as influence maximization on graphs and online recommendation systems. We propose a Gaussian process-based algorithm, ComGP-UCB. We provide upper bounds on its regret and demonstrate its effectiveness against the state-of-the-art baselines when arm outcomes are correlated.
Open Access
A qualitative analysis of Turkish stakeholders perspective for improving medical tourism
(John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2022-06) Collins, Ayşe; Medhekar, A.; Göknil Şanal, Z.
This qualitative study explores from Turkish medical tourism stakeholders' perspective the supply-side driving factors for improving medical tourism services in Turkey and provides positive healthcare experience to medical travelers. Five groups of stakeholders (27 participants) were interviewed: hospitals/medical centers, medical travel-agencies, medical-legal regulators, government, and non-government organizations. Findings show that Turkey has a dual-sector public and private model of medical tourism service providers. Four interrelated themes with policy implications were generated: medical tourism promotion, logistics and development initiatives, medical cost, hospital quality accreditation, and other issues related to medical-legal, government incentives for Turkish diaspora, and promoting Turkish medical tourism overseas.
Open Access
Whole genome sequencing: revolutionary medicine or privacy nightmare?
(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2015) Ayday, E.; Cristofaro, Emiliano De; Hubaux, Jean-Pierre; Tsudik, G.
Whole genome sequencing will soon become affordable for many individuals, but thorny privacy and ethical issues could jeopardize its popularity and thwart the large-scale adoption of genomics in healthcare and slow potential medical advances. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/As3J9NYsbbY is an audio recording of Alf Weaver interviewing Bradley Malin and Jacques Fellay about the possibilities and challenges of whole genome sequencing. © 1970-2012 IEEE.