Performance prediction of an image management and communication system for cardiac ultrasound

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-157).by Dhananjay Rammohan Ragade.M.S

Digital imaging technology assessment: Digital document storage project

An ongoing technical assessment and requirements definition project is examining the potential role of digital imaging technology at NASA's STI facility. The focus is on the basic components of imaging technology in today's marketplace as well as the components anticipated in the near future. Presented is a requirement specification for a prototype project, an initial examination of current image processing at the STI facility, and an initial summary of image processing projects at other sites. Operational imaging systems incorporate scanners, optical storage, high resolution monitors, processing nodes, magnetic storage, jukeboxes, specialized boards, optical character recognition gear, pixel addressable printers, communications, and complex software processes

Sixth Annual Users' Conference

Conference papers and presentation outlines which address the use of the Transportable Applications Executive (TAE) and its various applications programs are compiled. Emphasis is given to the design of the user interface and image processing workstation in general. Alternate ports of TAE and TAE subsystems are also covered

Applications of satellite technology to broadband ISDN networks

Two satellite architectures for delivering broadband integrated services digital network (B-ISDN) service are evaluated. The first is assumed integral to an existing terrestrial network, and provides complementary services such as interconnects to remote nodes as well as high-rate multicast and broadcast service. The interconnects are at a 155 Mbs rate and are shown as being met with a nonregenerative multibeam satellite having 10-1.5 degree spots. The second satellite architecture focuses on providing private B-ISDN networks as well as acting as a gateway to the public network. This is conceived as being provided by a regenerative multibeam satellite with on-board ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) processing payload. With up to 800 Mbs offered, higher satellite EIRP is required. This is accomplished with 12-0.4 degree hopping beams, covering a total of 110 dwell positions. It is estimated the space segment capital cost for architecture one would be about $190M whereas the second architecture would be about$250M. The net user cost is given for a variety of scenarios, but the cost for 155 Mbs services is shown to be about $15-22/minute for 25 percent system utilization

Business Intelligence systems development in hospitals using an Agile Project Management approach

"Measure to manage" is a widely used expression to demonstrate that good governance must necessarily go through obtaining good data and information. These will allow managers to know the past and the momentum of the business and also to predict, estimate and take the best-informed decisions. The greater the complexity of the business, the greater this need. Healthcare units, specifically hospitals, are organizations that, due to their function and diversity of areas, are considered one of the most complex. In this context, projects for the development of business intelligence solutions, with huge impact and scope, undergo the need for continuous improvement and incremental evolution. Agile methods, by their nature and principles, are suitable to fulfil this need. The purpose of this dissertation is to support future research towards better models with agile tools to develop business intelligence system in hospitals and, manly, to understand how can Agile methodology improve a Business Intelligence System Implementation. This will be done mainly through bibliographical research on the covered topics, namely, Hospitals, Business Intelligence, Agile and Project Management. The expect results will be some clear practical guidelines, that any IT Project Manager could use for an efficient Business Intelligence System implementation using an Agile methodology. This will be done with the presentation of two use cases, from implementations in two hospitals in Portugal, where the Agile proposed model could be used to improve the outcomes of the projects. For that a deep analysis of the various phases of Business Intelligence development was carried out on the basis of information obtained in the literature and on the basis of information obtained in the practical development of Business Intelligence implementation projects. In the end it can be seen that the application of Agile can bring enormous benefits to the development of this kind of project, as, in addition to the advantages listed and widely known about Agile, it can help intensively to bring together and involve all the stakeholders of a project in a common goal of success and effectiveness

A Holonic Human Cyber-Physical System in Healthcare.

Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineerin

Securing clouds using cryptography and traffic classification

Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Over the last decade, cloud computing has gained popularity and wide acceptance, especially within the health sector where it offers several advantages such as low costs, flexible processes, and access from anywhere. Although cloud computing is widely used in the health sector, numerous issues remain unresolved. Several studies have attempted to review the state of the art in eHealth cloud privacy and security however, some of these studies are outdated or do not cover certain vital features of cloud security and privacy such as access control, revocation and data recovery plans. This study targets some of these problems and proposes protocols, algorithms and approaches to enhance the security and privacy of cloud computing with particular reference to eHealth clouds. Chapter 2 presents an overview and evaluation of the state of the art in eHealth security and privacy. Chapter 3 introduces different research methods and describes the research design methodology and processes used to carry out the research objectives. Of particular importance are authenticated key exchange and block cipher modes. In Chapter 4, a three-party password-based authenticated key exchange (TPAKE) protocol is presented and its security analysed. The proposed TPAKE protocol shares no plaintext data; all data shared between the parties are either hashed or encrypted. Using the random oracle model (ROM), the security of the proposed TPAKE protocol is formally proven based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. Furthermore, the analysis included in this chapter shows that the proposed protocol can ensure perfect forward secrecy and resist many kinds of common attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, online and offline dictionary attacks, replay attacks and known key attacks. Chapter 5 proposes a parallel block cipher (PBC) mode in which blocks of cipher are processed in parallel. The results of speed performance tests for this PBC mode in various settings are presented and compared with the standard CBC mode. Compared to the CBC mode, the PBC mode is shown to give execution time savings of 60%. Furthermore, in addition to encryption based on AES 128, the hash value of the data file can be utilised to provide an integrity check. As a result, the PBC mode has a better speed performance while retaining the confidentiality and security provided by the CBC mode. Chapter 6 applies TPAKE and PBC to eHealth clouds. Related work on security, privacy preservation and disaster recovery are reviewed. Next, two approaches focusing on security preservation and privacy preservation, and a disaster recovery plan are proposed. The security preservation approach is a robust means of ensuring the security and integrity of electronic health records and is based on the PBC mode, while the privacy preservation approach is an efficient authentication method which protects the privacy of personal health records and is based on the TPAKE protocol. A discussion about how these integrated approaches and the disaster recovery plan can ensure the reliability and security of cloud projects follows. Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the second most common cybercrime attacks after information theft. The timely detection and prevention of such attacks in cloud projects are therefore vital, especially for eHealth clouds. Chapter 7 presents a new classification system for detecting and preventing DDoS TCP flood attacks (CS_DDoS) for public clouds, particularly in an eHealth cloud environment. The proposed CS_DDoS system offers a solution for securing stored records by classifying incoming packets and making a decision based on these classification results. During the detection phase, CS_DDOS identifies and determines whether a packet is normal or from an attacker. During the prevention phase, packets classified as malicious are denied access to the cloud service, and the source IP is blacklisted. The performance of the CS_DDoS system is compared using four different classifiers: a least-squares support vector machine (LS-SVM), naïve Bayes, K-nearest-neighbour, and multilayer perceptron. The results show that CS_DDoS yields the best performance when the LS-SVM classifier is used. This combination can detect DDoS TCP flood attacks with an accuracy of approximately 97% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.89 when under attack from a single source, and 94% accuracy and a Kappa coefficient of 0.9 when under attack from multiple attackers. These results are then discussed in terms of the accuracy and time complexity, and are validated using a k-fold cross-validation model. Finally, a method to mitigate DoS attacks in the cloud and reduce excessive energy consumption through managing and limiting certain flows of packets is proposed. Instead of a system shutdown, the proposed method ensures the availability of service. The proposed method manages the incoming packets more effectively by dropping packets from the most frequent requesting sources. This method can process 98.4% of the accepted packets during an attack. Practicality and effectiveness are essential requirements of methods for preserving the privacy and security of data in clouds. The proposed methods successfully secure cloud projects and ensure the availability of services in an efficient way

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

“Access denied”? Barriers for staff accessing, using and sharing published information online within the National Health Service (NHS) in England: technology, risk, culture, policy and practice

The overall aim of the study was to investigate barriers to online professional information seeking, use and sharing occurring within the NHS in England, their possible effects (upon education, working practices, working lives and clinical and organisational effectiveness), and possible explanatory or causative factors. The investigation adopted a qualitative case study approach, using semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis as its methods, with three NHS Trusts of different types (acute - district general hospital, mental health / community, acute – teaching) as the nested sites of data collection. It aimed to be both exploratory and explanatory. A stratified sample of participants, including representatives of professions whose perspectives were deemed to be relevant, and clinicians with educational or staff development responsibilities, was recruited for each Trust. Three non-Trust specialists (the product manager of a secure web gateway vendor, an academic e-learning specialist, and the senior manager at NICE responsible for the NHS Evidence electronic content and web platform) were also interviewed. Policy documents, statistics, strategies, reports and quality accounts for the Trusts were obtained via public websites, from participants or via Freedom of Information requests. Thematic analysis following the approach of Braun and Clarke (2006) was adopted as the analytic method for both interviews and documents. The key themes of the results that emerged are presented: barriers to accessing and using information, education and training, professional cultures and norms, information governance and security, and communications policy. The findings are discussed under three main headings: power, culture, trust and risk in information security; use and regulation of Web 2.0 and social media, and the system of professions. It became evident that the roots of problems with access to and use of such information lay deep within the culture and organisational characteristics of the NHS and its use of IT. A possible model is presented to explain the interaction of the various technical and organisational factors that were identified as relevant. A number of policy recommendations are put forward to improve access to published information at Trust level, as well as recommendations for further research

SuperB: A High-Luminosity Heavy Flavour Factory. Conceptual Design Report.

479 páginas.-- INFN/AE - 07/2, SLAC-R-856, LAL 07-15.-- et al.Work supported in part by US department of Energy contract DE-AC02-7 6SF00515. SuperB project.Peer reviewe