Leveraging internet-98 technology for computer healthcare networks: to its limits and its limitations

To what extent can current Internet technology be leveraged to fulfill the vision of the electronic patient record (EPR) as a multimedia object and the healthcare information system as a secure distributed computing network? We explore provision of reliable, secure, intuitive, and inexpensive medical Intranets through simple scripting and configuration – avoiding the need for large programming teams. By prototyping the EPR as a secure newsgroup we demonstrate the feasibility of a basic workflow system that: preserves a signed-paper style visibility of patient data at all times; enriches presentation with multimedia online image exam viewing and user controlled animation; whilst protecting confidential patient data via encrypted data transmission, digital signatures, and authenticated user-access control. In the process several limitation of this technology are uncovered

Sustaining the paper metaphor with dynamic HTML

We describe prototypes that sustain the paper metaphor in two new on-line scenarios: (1) reading annotated works of foreign literature, and (2) paperless medical reporting [Brelstaff & Chessa, “D-HTML paper metaphors”, submitted to Demo’s at HCI’98]

A distributed heterogeneous image server

Digital image transmission is now ubiquitous across computer networks and thus there is increasing pressure to allow access to medical image data at sites remote from PACS locations. In fact, it may soon make economic sense to outsource medical image services - to dedicated service providers at geographical locations outside of the traditional radiology department or HIS’s. The technical challenge faced by system developers is to produce client-Viewer/server-PACS configurations that can realistically span the network. In particular, the systems must provide the performance usually expected by client medics and it must be flexible to the needs of the service providers. At CRS4 - BioMedical Applications - we are integrating various technologies derived from the www-intranet field, and object-oriented middleware to prototype technological solutions that address both the issues of performance and flexibility. These are discussed in turn below; then we provide an overview of our system

Role of transportin-1 in the pathogenesis of FTLD-FUS: a pathological, biochemical and cellular study

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is the second most common form of pre-senile dementia. Recent discoveries have identified the proteins present in the pathological ubiquitinated inclusions of previously undifferentiated subtypes of FTLD. Fused in Sarcoma (FUS) is the primary pathological marker of a subtype now called FTLD-FUS. This normally nuclear protein is seen within the cytoplasmic and intranuclear aggregates of FTLD-FUS. FUS, together with Ewing’s Sarcoma (EWS) and TATA box binding associated factor 68kDa (TAF15), forms the FET family. These related proteins are predominately nuclear owing to the action of the nuclear importin Transportin1 (TRN1). Investigations by other authors have implicated TRN1 in the cytoplasmic aggregation of ALS-associated mutant FUS. Since ALS and FTLD represent different ends of a disease spectrum, the role of TRN1 in the pathology and biochemistry of FTLD-FUS was investigated. Extensive TRN1, TAF15 and EWS cytoplasmic and intranuclear inclusions were seen throughout the frontal cortex, hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, medulla, XIIth cranial nerve nucleus and spinal cord. Double-label immunofluorescence revealed TRN1 and FUS pathology co-localised. Immunoblotting of solubility fractions demonstrated that highly insoluble, likely highly aggregated TRN1 is present in FTLD-FUS, and not in healthy controls. Stress granules are transient cytoplasmic foci consisting of stalled translation initiation complexes and associated proteins produced by the cell in response to various stressors. Cellular investigations revealed that the same antibodies used to detect TRN1 pathology in FTLD-FUS labelled cytoplasmic stress granules induced after oxidative or osmotic stress. The re-localisation of wild type endogenous FET proteins was investigated under various pharmacological agents as well as TRN1 knockdown and overexpression. Evidence is presented that the pathology of FTLD-FUS is more complex than previously thought. Cellular studies investigate the implication of stress granules in aggregate formation and find that there is evidence to support oxidative stress in protein re-localisation and aggregation

Bag of Peaks

Abstract Motivation: The analysis of high-resolution proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometry can assist human experts to implicate metabolites expressed by diseased biofluids. Here, we explore an intermediate representation, between spectral trace and classifier, able to furnish a communicative interface between expert and machine. This representation permits equivalent, or better, classification accuracies than either principal component analysis (PCA) or multi-dimensional scaling (MDS). In the training phase, the peaks in each trace are detected and clustered in order to compile a common dictionary, which could be visualized and adjusted by an expert. The dictionary is used to characterize each trace with a fixed-length feature vector, termed Bag of Peaks, ready to be classified with classical supervised methods. Results: Our small-scale study, concerning Type I diabetes in Sardinian children, provides a preliminary indication of the effectiveness of the Bag of Peaks approach over standard PCA and MDS. Consistently, higher classification accuracies are obtained once a sufficient number of peaks (>10) are included in the dictionary. A large-scale simulation of noisy spectra further confirms this advantage. Finally, suggestions for metabolite-peak loci that may be implicated in the disease are obtained by applying standard feature selection techniques. Availability: Matlab code to compute the Bag of Peaks representation may be found at http://economia.uniss.it/docenti/bicego/BagOfPeaks/BagOfPeaks.zip Contact: [email protected]

Going Beyond Google Translate?

Ciclo 2012 di seminari interni CRS4, Number 20120229.We motivate and describe the design and implementation of a web-based system for the alignment of parallel texts. It builds on the interactive color-highlight interface now deployed at Google Translate. By a series of simple point and click operations translators can mark up equivalent text-ranges in their own translation and in the original. When successful, the visual cues created by this activity should benefit the understanding of readers of limited degrees of bilingualism -- and may also capture aspects of semantic context not readily available to algorithmic statistical machine translation. We provide a working demonstration that treats poetic texts.Statistical machine translation (SMT) delivers texts unacceptable for literary or academic purposes since generally, it cannot assimilate adequate context: Yet how might one ever articulate such context? Here rather than taking a theoretical perspective we adopt an spatio-visual approach made possible by recent advances in the electronic presentation of multilingual texts:– we allow the translator supply the colour higlights... But how? Semantic units don't respect lexical boundaries and they occur at different scales. Any translator, committed to provide a definitive version of a text, eventually arrives at irreversible order of words – and may actually wish to justify their choices by documenting the correspondence between their version and the original. We focus on verse – an extreme challenge for SMT – with the eventual aim of expressing elusive aspects of semantic communication in order to differentiate those that can be articulated via spatio-visual cues. In verse a deviation from a literal correspondence is essential to reestablish in the translation a "decorum" appropriate to the original so that readers are encouraged to achieve an equivalent respect for its author also from the translated works. We use jQuery to provide an interface that lets the human translator mark up what they consider a correct alignment between words, or groups of words, in the original and their own translation – with a view to articulating context that may not be readily available to SMT. We detail below how the interface runs off a web-page and allows the alignment of equivalent ranges in parallel texts via a simple point-and-click action. Alignments created by the user are instantaneously made visible using a variant of the interactive color-highlight system mentioned above. Key to reducing the complexity of the implementation of the interface is our systematic deployment of open-standard, non-proprietary, web technologies.2011-09-15AlgheroCHItaly2011, 13-16 settembre 2011, Algher

The presence of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins in frontotemporal lobar degeneration with FUS positive inclusions

Frontotemporal lobar degeneration with fused in sarcoma–positive inclusions (FTLD-FUS) is a disease with unknown cause. Transportin 1 is abundantly found in FUS-positive inclusions and responsible for the nuclear import of the FET proteins of which FUS is a member. The presence of all FET proteins in pathological inclusions suggests a disturbance of transportin 1–mediated nuclear import. FUS also belongs to the heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein (hnRNP) protein family. We investigated whether hnRNP proteins are associated with FUS pathology implicating dysfunctional nuclear export in the pathogenesis of FTLD-FUS. hnRNP proteins were investigated in affected brain regions in FTLD-FUS using immunohistochemistry, biochemical analysis, and the expression analysis. We demonstrated the presence of several hnRNP proteins in pathological inclusions including neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions and dystrophic neurites. The biochemical analysis revealed a shift in the location of hnRNP A1 from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. The expression analysis revealed an increase in several hnRNP proteins in FTLD-FUS. These results implicate a wider dysregulation of movement between intracellular compartments, than mechanisms only affecting the nuclear import of FUS proteins

Comparing faces: a computational and perceptual study

The problem of extracting distinctive parts from a face is addressed. Rather than examining a priori specified features such as nose, eyes, month or others, the aim here is to extract from a face the most distinguishing or dissimilar parts with respect to another given face, i.e. finding differences between faces. A computational approach, based on log polar patch sampling and evaluation, has been compared with results obtained from a newly designed perceptual test involving 45 people. The results of the comparison confirm the potential of the proposed computational method

Towards a psychophysical evaluation of a surgical simulator for bone-burring

The CRS4 experimental bone-burr simulator implements visual and haptic effects through the incorporation of a physics-based contact model and patient-specific data. Psychophysical tests demonstrate that, despite its simplified model and its inherent technological constraints, the simulator can articulate material differences, and that its users can learn to associate virtual bone with real bone material. Tests addressed both surface probing and interior drilling task. We also explore a haptic contrast sensitivity function based on the model s two main parameters: an elastic constant and an erosion factor. Both parameters manifest power-law-like sensitivity with respective exponents of around two and three. Further tests may reveal how well simulator users perceive fine differences in bone material, like those encountered while drilling through real volume boundaries.139-14