E-infrastructures fostering multi-centre collaborative research into the intensive care management of patients with brain injury

Clinical research is becoming ever more collaborative with multi-centre trials now a common practice. With this in mind, never has it been more important to have secure access to data and, in so doing, tackle the challenges of inter-organisational data access and usage. This is especially the case for research conducted within the brain injury domain due to the complicated multi-trauma nature of the disease with its associated complex collation of time-series data of varying resolution and quality. It is now widely accepted that advances in treatment within this group of patients will only be delivered if the technical infrastructures underpinning the collection and validation of multi-centre research data for clinical trials is improved. In recognition of this need, IT-based multi-centre e-Infrastructures such as the Brain Monitoring with Information Technology group (BrainIT - www.brainit.org) and Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations (COSBID - www.cosbid.de) have been formed. A serious impediment to the effective implementation of these networks is access to the know-how and experience needed to install, deploy and manage security-oriented middleware systems that provide secure access to distributed hospital based datasets and especially the linkage of these data sets across sites. The recently funded EU framework VII ICT project Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network (AVERT-IT) is focused upon tackling these challenges. This chapter describes the problems inherent to data collection within the brain injury medical domain, the current IT-based solutions designed to address these problems and how they perform in practice. We outline how the authors have collaborated towards developing Grid solutions to address the major technical issues. Towards this end we describe a prototype solution which ultimately formed the basis for the AVERT-IT project. We describe the design of the underlying Grid infrastructure for AVERT-IT and how it will be used to produce novel approaches to data collection, data validation and clinical trial design is also presented

The hunt for submarines in classical art: mappings between scientific invention and artistic interpretation

This is a report to the AHRC's ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme. This report stems from a project which aimed to produce a series of mappings between advanced imaging information and communications technologies (ICT) and needs within visual arts research. A secondary aim was to demonstrate the feasibility of a structured approach to establishing such mappings. The project was carried out over 2006, from January to December, by the visual arts centre of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS Visual Arts).1 It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as one of the Strategy Projects run under the aegis of its ICT in Arts and Humanities Research programme. The programme, which runs from October 2003 until September 2008, aims ‘to develop, promote and monitor the AHRC’s ICT strategy, and to build capacity nation-wide in the use of ICT for arts and humanities research’.2 As part of this, the Strategy Projects were intended to contribute to the programme in two ways: knowledge-gathering projects would inform the programme’s Fundamental Strategic Review of ICT, conducted for the AHRC in the second half of 2006, focusing ‘on critical strategic issues such as e-science and peer-review of digital resources’. Resource-development projects would ‘build tools and resources of broad relevance across the range of the AHRC’s academic subject disciplines’.3 This project fell into the knowledge-gathering strand. The project ran under the leadership of Dr Mike Pringle, Director, AHDS Visual Arts, and the day-to-day management of Polly Christie, Projects Manager, AHDS Visual Arts. The research was carried out by Dr Rupert Shepherd

Joining up health and bioinformatics: e-science meets e-health

CLEF (Co-operative Clinical e-Science Framework) is an MRC sponsored project in the e-Science programme that aims to establish methodologies and a technical infrastructure forthe next generation of integrated clinical and bioscience research. It is developing methodsfor managing and using pseudonymised repositories of the long-term patient histories whichcan be linked to genetic, genomic information or used to support patient care. CLEF concentrateson removing key barriers to managing such repositories ? ethical issues, informationcapture, integration of disparate sources into coherent ?chronicles? of events, userorientedmechanisms for querying and displaying the information, and compiling the requiredknowledge resources. This paper describes the overall information flow and technicalapproach designed to meet these aims within a Grid framework

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Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare

User oriented access to secure biomedical resources through the grid

The life science domain is typified by heterogeneous data sets that are evolving at an exponential rate. Numerous post-genomic databases and areas of post-genomic life science research have been established and are being actively explored. Whilst many of these databases are public and freely accessible, it is often the case that researchers have data that is not so freely available and access to this data needs to be strictly controlled when distributed collaborative research is undertaken. Grid technologies provide one mechanism by which access to and integration of federated data sets is possible. Combining such data access and integration technologies with fine grained security infrastructures facilitates the establishment of virtual organisations (VO). However experience has shown that the general research (non-Grid) community are not comfortable with the Grid and its associated security models based upon public key infrastructures (PKIs). The Internet2 Shibboleth technology helps to overcome this through users only having to log in to their home site to gain access to resources across a VO – or in Shibboleth terminology a federation. In this paper we outline how we have applied the combination of Grid technologies, advanced security infrastructures and the Internet2 Shibboleth technology in several biomedical projects to provide a user-oriented model for secure access to and usage of Grid resources. We believe that this model may well become the de facto mechanism for undertaking e-Research on the Grid across numerous domains including the life sciences