Grid simulation services for the medical community

The first part of this paper presents a selection of medical simulation applications, including image reconstruction, near real-time registration for neuro-surgery, enhanced dose distribution calculation for radio-therapy, inhaled drug delivery prediction, plastic surgery planning and cardio-vascular system simulation. The latter two topics are discussed in some detail. In the second part, we show how such services can be made available to the clinical practitioner using Grid technology. We discuss the developments and experience made during the EU project GEMSS, which provides reliable, efficient, secure and lawful medical Grid services

Pediatric Hand Surgery Training in Nicaragua: A Sustainable Model of Surgical Education in a Resource-Poor Environment.

Recent reports have demonstrated that nearly two-thirds of the world's population do not have access to adequate surgical care, a burden that is borne disproportionately by residents of resource-poor countries. Although the reasons for limited access to surgical care are complex and multi-factorial, among the most substantial barriers is the lack of trained surgical providers. This is particularly true in surgical subspecialties that focus on life-improving, rather than life-saving, treatments, such as pediatric hand and upper extremity surgery, which manages such conditions as congenital malformations, trauma and post-traumatic deformities including burns, and neuromuscular conditions (brachial plexus birth palsy, spinal cord injury, and cerebral palsy). Many models of providing surgical care in resource-limited environments have been described and implemented, but few result in sustainable models of health-care delivery. We present our experience developing a pediatric hand and upper extremity surgery training program in Nicaragua, a resource-limited nation, that grew out of a collaboration of American and Nicaraguan orthopedic surgeons. We compare this experience to that of surgeons undergoing subspecialty training in pediatric upper limb surgery in the US, highlighting the similarities and differences of these training programs. Finally, we assess the results of this training program and identify areas for further growth and development

End-to-End QoS Support for a Medical Grid Service Infrastructure

Quality of Service support is an important prerequisite for the adoption of Grid technologies for medical applications. The GEMSS Grid infrastructure addressed this issue by offering end-to-end QoS in the form of explicit timeliness guarantees for compute-intensive medical simulation services. Within GEMSS, parallel applications installed on clusters or other HPC hardware may be exposed as QoS-aware Grid services for which clients may dynamically negotiate QoS constraints with respect to response time and price using Service Level Agreements. The GEMSS infrastructure and middleware is based on standard Web services technology and relies on a reservation based approach to QoS coupled with application specific performance models. In this paper we present an overview of the GEMSS infrastructure, describe the available QoS and security mechanisms, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods with a Grid-enabled medical imaging service

3D and 4D Simulations for Landscape Reconstruction and Damage Scenarios. GIS Pilot Applications

The project 3D and 4D Simulations for Landscape Reconstruction and Damage Scenarios: GIS Pilot Applications has been devised with the intention to deal with the demand for research, innovation and applicative methodology on the part of the international programme, requiring concrete results to increase the capacity to know, anticipate and respond to a natural disaster. This project therefore sets out to develop an experimental methodology, a wide geodatabase, a connected performant GIS platform and multifunctional scenarios able to profitably relate the added values deriving from different geotechnologies, aimed at a series of crucial steps regarding landscape reconstruction, event simulation, damage evaluation, emergency management, multi-temporal analysis. The Vesuvius area has been chosen for the pilot application owing to such an impressive number of people and buildings subject to volcanic risk that one could speak in terms of a possible national disaster. The steps of the project move around the following core elements: creation of models that reproduce the territorial and anthropic structure of the past periods, and reconstruction of the urbanized area, with temporal distinctions; three-dimensional representation of the Vesuvius area in terms of infrastructuralresidential aspects; GIS simulation of the expected event; first examination of the healthcareepidemiological consequences; educational proposals. This paper represents a proactive contribution which describes the aims of the project, the steps which constitute a set of specific procedures for the methodology which we are experimenting, and some thoughts regarding the geodatabase useful to “package” illustrative elaborations. Since the involvement of the population and adequate hazard preparedness are very important aspects, some educational and communicational considerations are presented in connection with the use of geotechnologies to promote the knowledge of risk

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals

ToScA North America (6 – 8 June 2017, The University of Texas, Austin, TX) Program

ToScA North America will address key areas of science, including Multi-modal Imaging, Geosciences, Forensics, Increasing Contrast, Educational Outreach, Data, Materials Science and Medical and Biological Science.University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility (UTCT); Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin; Natural History Museum (London); Royal Microscopical Society (Oxford, UK)Geological Science