Biomedical Terminologies and Ontologies: Enabling Biomedical Semantic Interoperability and Standards in Europe

In the management of biomedical data, vocabularies such as ontologies and terminologies (O/Ts) are used for (i) domain knowledge representation and (ii) interoperability. The knowledge representation role supports the automated reasoning on, and analysis of, data annotated with O/Ts. At an interoperability level, the use of a communal vocabulary standard for a particular domain is essential for large data repositories and information management systems to communicate consistently with one other. Consequently, the interoperability benefit of selecting a particular O/T as a standard for data exchange purposes is often seen by the end-user as a function of the number of applications using that vocabulary (and, by extension, the size of the user base). Furthermore, the adoption of an O/T as an interoperability standard requires confidence in its stability and guaranteed continuity as a resource

Telemonitoring systems interoperability challenge: an updated review of the applicability of ISO/IEEE 11073 standards for Interoperability in telemonitoring

Proceeding of: 29th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. EMBS 2007, Lyon, France, 22-26 August, 2007.Advances in Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, are bringing new opportunities and use cases in the field of systems and Personal Health Devices used for the telemonitoring of citizens in Home or Mobile scenarios. At a time of such challenges, this review arises from the need to identify robust technical telemonitoring solutions that are both open and interoperable. These systems demand standardized solutions to be cost effective and to take advantage of standardized operation and interoperability. Thus, the fundamental challenge is to design plug-&-play devices that, either as individual elements or as components, can be incorporated in a simple way into different Telecare systems, perhaps configuring a personal user network. Moreover, there is an increasing market pressure from companies not traditionally involved in medical markets, asking for a standard for Personal Health Devices, which foresee a vast demand for telemonitoring, wellness, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and ehealth applications. However, the newly emerging situations imply very strict requirements for the protocols involved in the communication. The ISO/IEEE 11073 family of standards is adapting and moving in order to face the challenge and might appear the best positioned international standards to reach this goal. This work presents an updated survey of these standards, trying to track the changes that are being fulfilled, and tries to serve as a starting-point for those who want to familiarize themselves with them.This research work has been partially supported by projects TSI2005-07068-C02-01 and TSI2004-04940-C02-01 from Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spanish Government), and a personal grant to M. Galarraga from Navarre Regional Government

Modelling and verifying IEEE Std 11073-20601 session setup using mCRL2

In this paper we advocate that formal verification should be a part of the development of a communication standard; in a short period of time issues are uncovered that have been in the standard for a number of years, and all subtleties in the correctness of the protocol are understood. We model and verify the session setup protocol that is part of the IEEE 11073-20601:2008 standard for communication between personal health devices. We identify a number of issues present in the standards document. Discussion with a member of the standards committee unveiled that most, but not all, of the identified issues are fixed in the IEEE 11073-20601:2010 version of the standard. In addition, the correctness of the protocol, including the fixes, is assessed. For this, properties of the session setup protocol are formulated, and using the model checker mCRL2 it is verified whether the model satisfies these properties. We show that the session setup protocol is flawed, and propose a straightforward way to fix this issue

Cloud security: A case study in telemedicine

Security as part of requirements engineering is now seen as an essential part of systems development in several modern methodologies. Unfortunately, medical systems are one domain where security is seen as an impediment to patient care and not as an essential part of a system. Cloud computing may offer a seamless way to allow medical data to be transferred from patient to medical practitioners, whilst maintaining security requirements. This paper uses a case study to investigate the use of cloud computing in a mobile application for Parkinson Disease. It was found that functionality took precedence over security requirements and standards

New intelligent network approach for monitoring physiological parameters : the case of Benin

Benin health system is facing many challenges as: (i) affordable high-quality health care to a growing population providing need, (ii) patients’ hospitalization time reduction, (iii) and presence time of the nursing staff optimization. Such challenges can be solved by remote monitoring of patients. To achieve this, five steps were followed. 1) Identification of the Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) systems’ characteristics and the patient physiological parameters’ monitoring. 2) The national Integrated Patient Monitoring Network (RIMP) architecture modeling in a cloud of Technocenters. 3) Cross-analysis between the characteristics and the functional requirements identified. 4) Each Technocenter’s functionality simulation through: a) the design approach choice inspired by the life cycle of V systems; b) functional modeling through SysML Language; c) the communication technology and different architectures of sensor networks choice studying. 5) An estimate of the material resources of the national RIMP according to physiological parameters. A National Integrated Network for Patient Monitoring (RNIMP) remotely, ambulatory or not, was designed for Beninese health system. The implementation of the RNIMP will contribute to improve patients’ care in Benin. The proposed network is supported by a repository that can be used for its implementation, monitoring and evaluation. It is a table of 36 characteristic elements each of which must satisfy 5 requirements relating to: medical application, design factors, safety, performance indicators and materiovigilance

Prediction of highly cited papers

In an article written five years ago [arXiv:0809.0522], we described a method for predicting which scientific papers will be highly cited in the future, even if they are currently not highly cited. Applying the method to real citation data we made predictions about papers we believed would end up being well cited. Here we revisit those predictions, five years on, to see how well we did. Among the over 2000 papers in our original data set, we examine the fifty that, by the measures of our previous study, were predicted to do best and we find that they have indeed received substantially more citations in the intervening years than other papers, even after controlling for the number of prior citations. On average these top fifty papers have received 23 times as many citations in the last five years as the average paper in the data set as a whole, and 15 times as many as the average paper in a randomly drawn control group that started out with the same number of citations. Applying our prediction technique to current data, we also make new predictions of papers that we believe will be well cited in the next few years.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 2 table

Integration of IEEE 1451 and HL7 Exchanging Information for Patients’ Sensor Data

HL7 (Health Level 7) is a standard developed for exchanging incompatible healthcare information generated from programs or devices among heterogenous medical information systems. At present, HL7 is growing as a global standard. However, the HL7 standard does not support effective methods for treating data from various medical sensors, especially from mobile sensors. As ubiquitous systems are growing, HL7 must communicate with various medical transducers. In the area of sensor fields, IEEE 1451 is a group of standards for controlling transducers and for communicating data from/to various transducers. In this paper, we present the possibility of interoperability between the two standards, i.e., HL7 and IEEE 1451. After we present a method to integrate them and show the preliminary results of this approach