Studies in Health Technology and Informatics

Background: Standards have become available to share semantically encoded vital parameters from medical devices, as required for example by personal healthcare records. Standardised sharing of biosignal data largely remains open. Objectives: The goal of this work is to explore available biosignal file format and data exchange standards and profiles, and to conceptualise end-To-end solutions. Methods: The authors reviewed and discussed available biosignal file format standards with other members of international standards development organisations (SDOs). Results: A raw concept for standards based acquisition, storage, archiving and sharing of biosignals was developed. The GDF format may serve for storing biosignals. Signals can then be shared using FHIR resources and may be stored on FHIR servers or in DICOM archives, with DICOM waveforms as one possible format. Conclusion: Currently a group of international SDOs (e.g. HL7, IHE, DICOM, IEEE) is engaged in intensive discussions. This discussion extends existing work that already was adopted by large implementer communities. The concept presented here only reports the current status of the discussion in Austria. The discussion will continue internationally, with results to be expected over the coming years

Soft Skills In Practice And In Education: An Evaluation

The paper measures the soft skills needs of companies and industry to technical oriented academic graduates, especially coming from IT course programs like business informatics, computer science, or information management. Therefore, between March and September 2010, two groups of researchers at the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Vienna analyzed job profiles and the intended denotation of certain keywords. Primarily, one group worked on the statistical content analysis of job offers which could be found in Austrian newspapers or were provided by online job platforms. The other group developed a survey to be sent to several companies in Austria and was addressed to human resources departments. The paper explains the evaluation results in details and discusses its necessary implication on academic curriculum design

Dimensions of data sparseness and their effect on supply chain visibility

Supply chain visibility concerns the ability to track parts, components, or products in transit from supplier to customer. The data that organizations can obtain to establish or improve supply chain visibility is often sparse. This paper presents a classification of the dimensions of data sparseness and quantitatively explores the impact of these dimensions on supply chain visibility. Based on a review of supply chain visibility and data quality literature, this study proposes to characterize data sparseness as a lack of data quality across the entire supply chain, where data sparseness can be classified into three dimensions: noise, bias, and missing values. The quantitative analysis relies on a stylized simulation model of a moderately complex illicit supply chain. Scenarios are used to evaluate the combined effect of the individual dimensions from actors with different perspectives in the supply chain, either supply or demand-oriented. Results show that when a data sparseness of 90% is applied, supply chain visibility reduces to 52% for noise, to 65% for bias, and to 32% for missing values. The scenarios also show that companies with a supply-oriented view typically have a higher supply chain visibility than those with a demand-oriented view. The classification and assessment offer valuable insights for improving data quality and for enhancing supply chain visibility

Alignment of transmembrane regions in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator chloride channel pore

Different transmembrane (TM) α helices are known to line the pore of the cystic fibrosis TM conductance regulator (CFTR) Cl− channel. However, the relative alignment of these TMs in the three-dimensional structure of the pore is not known. We have used patch-clamp recording to investigate the accessibility of cytoplasmically applied cysteine-reactive reagents to cysteines introduced along the length of the pore-lining first TM (TM1) of a cysteine-less variant of CFTR. We find that methanethiosulfonate (MTS) reagents irreversibly modify cysteines substituted for TM1 residues K95, Q98, P99, and L102 when applied to the cytoplasmic side of open channels. Residues closer to the intracellular end of TM1 (Y84–T94) were not apparently modified by MTS reagents, suggesting that this part of TM1 does not line the pore. None of the internal MTS reagent-reactive cysteines was modified by extracellular [2-(trimethylammonium)ethyl] MTS. Only K95C, closest to the putative intracellular end of TM1, was apparently modified by intracellular [2-sulfonatoethyl] MTS before channel activation. Comparison of these results with recent work on CFTR-TM6 suggests a relative alignment of these two important TMs along the axis of the pore. This alignment was tested experimentally by formation of disulfide bridges between pairs of cysteines introduced into these two TMs. Currents carried by the double mutants K95C/I344C and Q98C/I344C, but not by the corresponding single-site mutants, were inhibited by the oxidizing agent copper(II)-o-phenanthroline. This inhibition was irreversible on washing but could be reversed by the reducing agent dithiothreitol, suggesting disulfide bond formation between the introduced cysteine side chains. These results allow us to develop a model of the relative positions, functional contributions, and alignment of two important TMs lining the CFTR pore. Such functional information is necessary to understand and interpret the three-dimensional structure of the pore

NUDT2 Disruption Elevates Diadenosine Tetraphosphate (Ap4A) and Down-Regulates Immune Response and Cancer Promotion Genes.

Regulation of gene expression is one of several roles proposed for the stress-induced nucleotide diadenosine tetraphosphate (Ap4A). We have examined this directly by a comparative RNA-Seq analysis of KBM-7 chronic myelogenous leukemia cells and KBM-7 cells in which the NUDT2 Ap4A hydrolase gene had been disrupted (NuKO cells), causing a 175-fold increase in intracellular Ap4A. 6,288 differentially expressed genes were identified with P < 0.05. Of these, 980 were up-regulated and 705 down-regulated in NuKO cells with a fold-change ≥ 2. Ingenuity® Pathway Analysis (IPA®) was used to assign these genes to known canonical pathways and functional networks. Pathways associated with interferon responses, pattern recognition receptors and inflammation scored highly in the down-regulated set of genes while functions associated with MHC class II antigens were prominent among the up-regulated genes, which otherwise showed little organization into major functional gene sets. Tryptophan catabolism was also strongly down-regulated as were numerous genes known to be involved in tumor promotion in other systems, with roles in the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, proliferation, invasion and metastasis. Conversely, some pro-apoptotic genes were up-regulated. Major upstream factors predicted by IPA® for gene down-regulation included NFκB, STAT1/2, IRF3/4 and SP1 but no major factors controlling gene up-regulation were identified. Potential mechanisms for gene regulation mediated by Ap4A and/or NUDT2 disruption include binding of Ap4A to the HINT1 co-repressor, autocrine activation of purinoceptors by Ap4A, chromatin remodeling, effects of NUDT2 loss on transcript stability, and inhibition of ATP-dependent regulatory factors such as protein kinases by Ap4A. Existing evidence favors the last of these as the most probable mechanism. Regardless, our results suggest that the NUDT2 protein could be a novel cancer chemotherapeutic target, with its inhibition potentially exerting strong anti-tumor effects via multiple pathways involving metastasis, invasion, immunosuppression and apoptosis

Reducing the drop-out rate of a technical oriented course by introducing Problem Based Learning – a first concept

At the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Wien one of the most difficult courses in the Bachelor degree program of Computer Science is “Database Systems and Database Design”. Together with “Advanced Computer Programming”, this course accounts for the high drop-out rate in the degree program. For this reason, this course was chosen for a redesign, in line with the research project QUADRO (Measures to increase quality of teaching and to reduce drop-out rates) promoted by the City of Vienna – MA 27 (EU strategy and promote economic development). As the authors have already gained experience in Problem Based Learning (PBL), they saw an opportunity to improve students’ database knowledge by changing the teaching method to Problem Based Learning (PBL). The proposed paper first explains the current situation, identifies its drawbacks and difficulties. In a second step, it describes the new method, shows the students’ feedback after the first semester and the resulting changes in the concept

Heterogeneous IT Knowledge of Students: the Didactic Approach how to meet it in the Interdisciplinary Course Program Intelligent Transport Systems

At the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Wien, Intelligent Transport System is a highly interdisciplinary Bachelor's degree program. Its curriculum covers several mainly technical oriented disciplines. Especially the IT courses account for the high drop-out rate of the course program. Students come with different IT knowledge depending on the one hand on their previous school education and on the other hand depending on their personal interest in IT topics. Normally, for students, IT is not the number one reason for choosing this program. Nevertheless, IT is extremely important as it interacts with all other disciplines. Especially the heterogeneity of the IT knowledge made it necessary to rethink the way of teaching. The paper describes the new didactic approach of the IT courses in the course program Intelligent Transport Systems. The new approach faces the students' difficulties and tries to overcome the varying pre-knowledge of students. Furthermore, it tries to increase students' motivation by paying particular attention to the students' assumed interests

Simulation–optimization configurations for real-time decision-making in fugitive interception

Simulation–optimization models are well-suited for real-time decision-support to the control room for search and interception of fugitives by Police on a road network, due to their ability to encode complex behavior while still optimizing the interception. The typical simulation–optimization configuration is simulation model optimization, where the simulation model describes the system to be optimized, and the optimizer attempts to find the combination of decision variables that maximizes the interception probability. However, the repeated evaluation of the simulation model leads to high computation time, thus rendering it inadequate for time-constrained decision contexts. To support police interception operations in real-time, timely calculation of the solution is essential. Sequential simulation–optimization, where the simulation model, with its rich behavior, constructs (part of) the constraints of an optimization problem, could decrease the computation time. We compare the computation time for two configurations of simulation–optimization (typical simulation model optimization and sequential simulation–optimization) for various problem instances of the fugitive interception problem. We show that sequential simulation–optimization reduces the computation time of large instances of the fugitive interception case study ten-fold. This result illustrates the potential of sequential simulation–optimization to mitigate the expensive optimization of simulation models

The adolescence of electronic health records: Status and perspectives for large scale implementation

Health informatics started to evolve decades ago with the intention to support healthcare using computers. Since then Electronic health records (EHRs) and personal health records (PHRs) have become available but widespread adoption was limited by lack of interoperability and security issues. This paper discusses the feasibility of interoperable standards based EHRs and PHRs drawing on experience from implementation projects. It outlines challenges and goals in education and implementation for the next years