Collaborative telemedicine for interactive multiuser segmentation of volumetric medical images

Telemedicine has evolved rapidly in recent years to enable unprecedented access to digital medical data, such as with networked image distribution/sharing and online (distant) collaborative diagnosis, largely due to the advances in telecommunication and multimedia technologies. However, interactive collaboration systems which control editing of an object among multiple users are often limited to a simple "locking” mechanism based on a conventional client/server architecture, where only one user edits the object which is located in a specific server, while all other users become viewers. Such systems fail to provide the needs of a modern day telemedicine applications that demand simultaneous editing of the medical data distributed in diverse local sites. In this study, we introduce a novel system for telemedicine applications, with its application to an interactive segmentation of volumetric medical images. We innovate by proposing a collaborative mechanism with a scalable data sharing architecture which makes users interactively edit on a single shared image scattered in local sites, thus enabling collaborative editing for, e.g., collaborative diagnosis, teaching, and training. We demonstrate our collaborative telemedicine mechanism with a prototype image editing system developed and evaluated with a user case study. Our result suggests that the ability for collaborative editing in a telemedicine context can be of great benefit and hold promising potential for further researc

Collaborative and Adaptive Framework for Telediagnosis and Prescriptions in Herbal Medicine

Herbal medicine has been an age long tradition for the treatment and cure of diseases globally. Previous researches on telediagnosis and prescriptions in orthodox medicine studied applications of modern technological devices which could improve health care services. However, there is yet to be an exhaustive study on the audio-visual technological framework for telediagnosis and prescription in herbal medicine.  Hence, the research developed a collaborative and adaptive framework for telediagnosis and prescriptions in herbal medicine. The framework and its system were developed consisting of multimedia features for videoconferencing; ability to record, capture and replay consultations; and capacity for editing, data compression and short message service amongst herbal tele-consultants. The system was experimented on Ladoke Akintola University of Technology hotspot network for a period of twenty one days in order to determine the system’s average packet loss rate and packet transmitted with five herbal tele-consultant nodes (node-1, node2, node3, node4 and node5). All nodes were allotted Internet Protocol addresses through which the intending herbal tele-consultant(s) could be connected to the telediagnosis videoconference session. Three performance metrics, System Reliability Index (SRI), System Degree of Relevance (SDR), and System Ease of Usage (SEU) were used to carry out subject to the evaluation of the system by administering one hundred questionnaires herbal consultants to harvest users’ perception of the system based on a Likert rating scale. The results obtained from telediagnosis session showed that the system recorded packet loss rates of 3.46, 3.13, 3.42, 3.61 and 3.36% at node1, node2, node3, node4 and node5, respectively. Also, the average packets of 3123.2, 5017.6, 5683.2, 4454.4 and 4249.6 bits were obtained at node1, node2, node3, node4 and node5, respectively. The summary of the subjected evaluation of the system indicate that the respondent’s response means of 3.20, 2.88. and 3.42 were obtained for the SRI, SDR and SEU, respectively on a rating scale of 1 to 5

VIRTUAL REALITY IN BIOMEDICAL

Virtual reality (VR) encompasses a number of surgical research topics, including computer graphics, imaging, visualization, simulation, data fusion and telemedicine. In this paper we define virtual reality and each of these areas, focusing on a state-of-the-art review of the research and recent accomplishments. .Virtual reality is a powerful technology for solving today’s real-world problems. Virtual reality refers to computer-generated, interactive, three-dimensional (3-D) environments into which patients are immersed. It provides a way for surgeon to visualize, manipulate and interact with simulated environments through the use of computers and extremely complex data

Review of three-dimensional human-computer interaction with focus on the leap motion controller

Modern hardware and software development has led to an evolution of user interfaces from command-line to natural user interfaces for virtual immersive environments. Gestures imitating real-world interaction tasks increasingly replace classical two-dimensional interfaces based on Windows/Icons/Menus/Pointers (WIMP) or touch metaphors. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to survey the state-of-the-art Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques with a focus on the special field of three-dimensional interaction. This includes an overview of currently available interaction devices, their applications of usage and underlying methods for gesture design and recognition. Focus is on interfaces based on the Leap Motion Controller (LMC) and corresponding methods of gesture design and recognition. Further, a review of evaluation methods for the proposed natural user interfaces is given

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a natural development from virtual reality (VR), which was developed several decades earlier. AR complements VR in many ways. Due to the advantages of the user being able to see both the real and virtual objects simultaneously, AR is far more intuitive, but it's not completely detached from human factors and other restrictions. AR doesn't consume as much time and effort in the applications because it's not required to construct the entire virtual scene and the environment. In this book, several new and emerging application areas of AR are presented and divided into three sections. The first section contains applications in outdoor and mobile AR, such as construction, restoration, security and surveillance. The second section deals with AR in medical, biological, and human bodies. The third and final section contains a number of new and useful applications in daily living and learning

Políticas de Copyright de Publicações Científicas em Repositórios Institucionais: O Caso do INESC TEC

A progressiva transformação das práticas científicas, impulsionada pelo desenvolvimento das novas Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação (TIC), têm possibilitado aumentar o acesso à informação, caminhando gradualmente para uma abertura do ciclo de pesquisa. Isto permitirá resolver a longo prazo uma adversidade que se tem colocado aos investigadores, que passa pela existência de barreiras que limitam as condições de acesso, sejam estas geográficas ou financeiras. Apesar da produção científica ser dominada, maioritariamente, por grandes editoras comerciais, estando sujeita às regras por estas impostas, o Movimento do Acesso Aberto cuja primeira declaração pública, a Declaração de Budapeste (BOAI), é de 2002, vem propor alterações significativas que beneficiam os autores e os leitores. Este Movimento vem a ganhar importância em Portugal desde 2003, com a constituição do primeiro repositório institucional a nível nacional. Os repositórios institucionais surgiram como uma ferramenta de divulgação da produção científica de uma instituição, com o intuito de permitir abrir aos resultados da investigação, quer antes da publicação e do próprio processo de arbitragem (preprint), quer depois (postprint), e, consequentemente, aumentar a visibilidade do trabalho desenvolvido por um investigador e a respetiva instituição. O estudo apresentado, que passou por uma análise das políticas de copyright das publicações científicas mais relevantes do INESC TEC, permitiu não só perceber que as editoras adotam cada vez mais políticas que possibilitam o auto-arquivo das publicações em repositórios institucionais, como também que existe todo um trabalho de sensibilização a percorrer, não só para os investigadores, como para a instituição e toda a sociedade. A produção de um conjunto de recomendações, que passam pela implementação de uma política institucional que incentive o auto-arquivo das publicações desenvolvidas no âmbito institucional no repositório, serve como mote para uma maior valorização da produção científica do INESC TEC.The progressive transformation of scientific practices, driven by the development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which made it possible to increase access to information, gradually moving towards an opening of the research cycle. This opening makes it possible to resolve, in the long term, the adversity that has been placed on researchers, which involves the existence of barriers that limit access conditions, whether geographical or financial. Although large commercial publishers predominantly dominate scientific production and subject it to the rules imposed by them, the Open Access movement whose first public declaration, the Budapest Declaration (BOAI), was in 2002, proposes significant changes that benefit the authors and the readers. This Movement has gained importance in Portugal since 2003, with the constitution of the first institutional repository at the national level. Institutional repositories have emerged as a tool for disseminating the scientific production of an institution to open the results of the research, both before publication and the preprint process and postprint, increase the visibility of work done by an investigator and his or her institution. The present study, which underwent an analysis of the copyright policies of INESC TEC most relevant scientific publications, allowed not only to realize that publishers are increasingly adopting policies that make it possible to self-archive publications in institutional repositories, all the work of raising awareness, not only for researchers but also for the institution and the whole society. The production of a set of recommendations, which go through the implementation of an institutional policy that encourages the self-archiving of the publications developed in the institutional scope in the repository, serves as a motto for a greater appreciation of the scientific production of INESC TEC

Bioinspired metaheuristic algorithms for global optimization

This paper presents concise comparison study of newly developed bioinspired algorithms for global optimization problems. Three different metaheuristic techniques, namely Accelerated Particle Swarm Optimization (APSO), Firefly Algorithm (FA), and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) are investigated and implemented in Matlab environment. These methods are compared on four unimodal and multimodal nonlinear functions in order to find global optimum values. Computational results indicate that GWO outperforms other intelligent techniques, and that all aforementioned algorithms can be successfully used for optimization of continuous functions

Experimental Evaluation of Growing and Pruning Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks Trained with Extended Information Filter

In this paper we test Extended Information Filter (EIF) for sequential training of Hyper Basis Function Neural Networks with growing and pruning ability (HBF-GP). The HBF neuron allows different scaling of input dimensions to provide better generalization property when dealing with complex nonlinear problems in engineering practice. The main intuition behind HBF is in generalization of Gaussian type of neuron that applies Mahalanobis-like distance as a distance metrics between input training sample and prototype vector. We exploit concept of neuron’s significance and allow growing and pruning of HBF neurons during sequential learning process. From engineer’s perspective, EIF is attractive for training of neural networks because it allows a designer to have scarce initial knowledge of the system/problem. Extensive experimental study shows that HBF neural network trained with EIF achieves same prediction error and compactness of network topology when compared to EKF, but without the need to know initial state uncertainty, which is its main advantage over EKF