120,067 research outputs found
The impact of resources on decision making
Decision making is a significant activity within industry and although much attention has been paid to the manner in which goals impact on how decision making is executed, there has been less focus on the impact decision making resources can have. This article describes an experiment that sought to provide greater insight into the impact that resources can have on how decision making is executed. Investigated variables included the experience levels of decision makers and the quality and availability of information resources. The experiment provided insights into the variety of impacts that resources can have upon decision making, manifested through the evolution of the approaches, methods, and processes used within it. The findings illustrated that there could be an impact on the decision-making process but not on the method or approach, the method and process but not the approach, or the approach, method, and process. In addition, resources were observed to have multiple impacts, which can emerge in different timescales. Given these findings, research is suggested into the development of resource-impact models that would describe the relationships existing between the decision-making activity and resources, together with the development of techniques for reasoning using these models. This would enhance the development of systems that could offer improved levels of decision support through managing the impact of resources on decision making
London SynEx Demonstrator Site: Impact Assessment Report
The key ingredients of the SynEx-UCL software components are:
1. A comprehensive and federated electronic healthcare record that can be used to
reference or to store all of the necessary healthcare information acquired from a
diverse range of clinical databases and patient-held devices.
2. A directory service component to provide a core persons demographic database to
search for and authenticate staff users of the system and to anchor patient
identification and connection to their federated healthcare record.
3. A clinical record schema management tool (Object Dictionary Client) that enables
clinicians or engineers to define and export the data sets mapping to individual
feeder systems.
4. An expansible set of clinical management algorithms that provide prompts to the
patient or clinician to assist in the management of patient care.
CHIME has built up over a decade of experience within Europe on the requirements
and information models that are needed to underpin comprehensive multiprofessional
electronic healthcare records. The resulting architecture models have
influenced new European standards in this area, and CHIME has designed and built
prototype EHCR components based on these models. The demonstrator systems
described here utilise a directory service and object-oriented engineering approach,
and support the secure, mobile and distributed access to federated healthcare
records via web-based services.
The design and implementation of these software components has been founded on
a thorough analysis of the clinical, technical and ethico-legal requirements for
comprehensive EHCR systems, published through previous project deliverables and
in future planned papers.
The clinical demonstrator site described in this report has provided the solid basis
from which to establish "proof of concept" verification of the design approach, and a
valuable opportunity to install, test and evaluate the results of the component
engineering undertaken during the EC funded project. Inevitably, a number of
practical implementation and deployment obstacles have been overcome through
this journey, each of those having contributed to the time taken to deliver the
components but also to the richness of the end products.
UCL is fortunate that the Whittington Hospital, and the department of cardiovascular
medicine in particular, is committed to a long-term vision built around this work. That
vision, outlined within this report, is shared by the Camden and Islington Health
Authority and by many other purchaser and provider organisations in the area, and
by a number of industrial parties. They are collectively determined to support the
Demonstrator Site as an ongoing project well beyond the life of the EC SynEx
Project.
This report, although a final report as far as the EC project is concerned, is really a
description of the first phase in establishing a centre of healthcare excellence. New
EC Fifth Framework project funding has already been approved to enable new and
innovative technology solutions to be added to the work already established in north
London
Engineering simulations for cancer systems biology
Computer simulation can be used to inform in vivo and in vitro experimentation, enabling rapid, low-cost hypothesis generation and directing experimental design in order to test those hypotheses. In this way, in silico models become a scientific instrument for investigation, and so should be developed to high standards, be carefully calibrated and their findings presented in such that they may be reproduced. Here, we outline a framework that supports developing simulations as scientific instruments, and we select cancer systems biology as an exemplar domain, with a particular focus on cellular signalling models. We consider the challenges of lack of data, incomplete knowledge and modelling in the context of a rapidly changing knowledge base. Our framework comprises a process to clearly separate scientific and engineering concerns in model and simulation development, and an argumentation approach to documenting models for rigorous way of recording assumptions and knowledge gaps. We propose interactive, dynamic visualisation tools to enable the biological community to interact with cellular signalling models directly for experimental design. There is a mismatch in scale between these cellular models and tissue structures that are affected by tumours, and bridging this gap requires substantial computational resource. We present concurrent programming as a technology to link scales without losing important details through model simplification. We discuss the value of combining this technology, interactive visualisation, argumentation and model separation to support development of multi-scale models that represent biologically plausible cells arranged in biologically plausible structures that model cell behaviour, interactions and response to therapeutic interventions
Do you see what I mean?
Visualizers, like logicians, have long been concerned with meaning. Generalizing from MacEachren's overview of cartography, visualizers have to think about how people extract meaning from pictures (psychophysics), what people understand from a picture (cognition), how pictures are imbued with meaning (semiotics), and how in some cases that meaning arises within a social and/or cultural context. If we think of the communication acts carried out in the visualization process further levels of meaning are suggested. Visualization begins when someone has data that they wish to explore and interpret; the data are encoded as input to a visualization system, which may in its turn interact with other systems to produce a representation. This is communicated back to the user(s), who have to assess this against their goals and knowledge, possibly leading to further cycles of activity. Each phase of this process involves communication between two parties. For this to succeed, those parties must share a common language with an agreed meaning. We offer the following three steps, in increasing order of formality: terminology (jargon), taxonomy (vocabulary), and ontology. Our argument in this article is that it's time to begin synthesizing the fragments and views into a level 3 model, an ontology of visualization. We also address why this should happen, what is already in place, how such an ontology might be constructed, and why now
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