Food safety: proactive identification of Emerging Issues Food Informatics

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Food safety pro-active identification of
Emerging IssuesFood Informatics
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Sudan Red becomes an issue in 2005 and the number
of news items explodes gt we are too late!
Friday, 18 February 2005 The Food Standards
Agency is today advising people not to eat foods
that have been inadvertently contaminated with an
illegal dye, Sudan I.
FI !!
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Aim

• To develop a system that supports TNO in the
  early identification of emerging issues in and
  outside the human food chain.

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Food
Tunnel incident
1953 Acrylamide poisoning in man Effects of
acrylamide on CNS in cats.
1950 Acrylamide grouts were introduced.
1997, August 4 Full scale injections of grouting
agent in tunnel.
1993 Acrylamidefound in blood of non- exposed
Chinese controls.
1997 High acrylamide levels found in non-exposed,
non smoking humans.
1997, 30 september Stop of grout injections. Cows
with neural paralyses. Fish died in creek.
no publications
2000, June First scientific publication on
acrylamide in fried rat feed
1997, September/October Blood analysis workers
and controls startedgtgt controls had acrylamide in
blood
no publications
2002, April 24 Press release Sweden Acrylamide
formed during the preparation of food.
1997, 2 October First announcement of tunnel
incident in local newspapers
1997, 17 October International announcement
tunnel incident Sweden
2002, April 24-26 TNO is informed by Dutch
companie and sets up a test.
2002, July Publication on acrylamide formation in
heated foodstuffs.
2005, January TNO developed a cooking technique
that results in less acrylamide.
2005, January 26 Press release. TNO researchers
have developed a cooking technique using steam
that results in lower acrylamide concentrations
in food.
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Acrylamide timeline
Acrylamide in food
Acrylamide and smoking work
Time
1997
2000
2002
Emerging risk gtgtgt issue
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From risk concepts to the facts
Document 1
Document 2
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What FI could have done in the Dioxin crisis in
2004
Food industry 2004 Change of production
process sorting of potatoes using marl clay.
FDA press release 1997 the source of dioxin
in feed was ball clay, which is added as
anti-caking agent.
Purchasing information Production processes
TNO notifies the company about dioxin containing
marl clay.
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The objective of the ontology

• Provide the searcher (or search engine) with
  appropriate terms.
• Improve the text mining process.
• Use TNO knowledge in the above mentioned tasks.

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Workflow high level
1 Searching for potential issues (new)
3 Managing the issues (existing)
1 Searching for potential issues (new)
2 Analysing potential issues (new)
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Workflow 1. Searching for potential issues
(new)

• Develop, test and maintain the search algorithm.
• Save the search algorithm as search engine.
• The search engine automatically selects and
  retrieves raw information.
• A text mining tool processes the raw
  information into e.g. clusters which may reflect
  potential issues.
• New issues are automatically presented on screen.
• Existing issues are updated, also visible on
  screen.

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Workflow 2. Analysing potential issues (new)

• Additional analysis of the potential issues.
• Clustering,
• Filtering,
• Timeline,
• Impact analysis,
• Describe the issue,
• Additional ad-hoc searching,
• Edit the ontology,
• Update the issue,
• Ranking (priority),
• Summarisation.
• Add comments or analytical results to the issue.
• Forward the issue to expert or customer.

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Workflow 3. Management of issues (existing)

• Open a project.
• Assessment is an iterative process.
• Define more specific risk questions.
• Do additional information searching and analysis.
• Risk assessment
• What is the risk (hazard characterization)?
• Who is at risk (exposure assessment)?
• Risk characterization (integrating the above)).

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Overview
? W O R K F L O W ?
Export tools summarisation, publication,
alerting etc.
Tool Timeline
FILTERING..
Tool Reliability Society impact
Clustering of information in multiple topics
QUERY 1 Xerox Concept Matching tool 2 AID
search tool 3 Food Ontology 4 Relevance ranking
DATAWAREHOUSE
ACCESS 1 WWW, PubMed, ScienceDirect 2 Convert
PDF, MS Office 3 Multiple languages
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2008 on the result page
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Extra slides
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