Next generation assisting clinical applications by using semantic-aware electronic health records

The health care sector is no longer imaginable without electronic health records. However; since the original idea of electronic health records was focused on data storage and not on data processing, a lot of current implementations do not take full advantage of the opportunities provided by computerization. This paper introduces the Patient Summary Ontology for the representation of electronic health records and demonstrates the possibility to create next generation assisting clinical applications based on these semantic-aware electronic health records. Also, an architecture to interoperate with electronic health records formatted using other standards is presented

Format-independent media delivery, applied to RTP, MP4, and Ogg

The current multimedia landscape is characterized by a significant heterogeneity in terms of coding and delivery formats, usage environments, and user preferences. This paper introduces a transparent multimedia content adaptation and delivery approach, i.e., model-driven content adaptation and delivery. It is based on a model that takes into account the structural metadata, semantic metadata, and scalability information of media bitstreams. Further, a format-independent multimedia packaging method is proposed based on this model for media bitstreams and MPEG-B BSDL. Thus, multimedia packaging is obtained by encapsulating the selected and adapted structural metadata within a specific delivery format. This packaging process is implemented using XML transformation filters and MPEG-B BSDL. To illustrate this format-independent packaging technique, we apply it to three packaging formats: RTP, MP4, and Ogg

Performance of scalable video coding for a TV broadcast network with constant video quality and heterogeneous receivers

Video broadcasters currently envision to target a variety of receiving devices of different resolutions. In such a heterogeneous TV network the transport resource consumption is likely to increase as the types and number of receiving devices increase. We estimate the required capacity for an IPTV and mobile TV network taking into account parameters as currently proposed in standardization bodies. The consumed transport capacity fluctuates over time for two reasons. First, as we target constant video quality as much as possible, the video is encoded in variable bit rate. In order to characterize the fluctuations of the bit rate associated with one channel we have encoded a representative set of video clips. Second, the user behavior causes the transport capacity demand to fluctuate because we consider a multicast-based transport system where only the requested channels are transported. We compare two modes for transporting TV channels in multiple resolutions: a mode based on the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) where all video resolutions are embedded in one stream and a simulcast (SIM) mode where all resolutions are offered in parallel. We evaluate in some realistic examples which of the two effects is dominant, i.e., the bit rate penalty of SVC or the fact that SIM transports the video streams in parallel rather than embedding them in one stream as SVC does

Multimedia information seeking through search and hyperlinking

Searching for relevant webpages and following hyperlinks to related content is a widely accepted and effective approach to information seeking on the textual web. Existing work on multimedia information retrieval has focused on search for individual relevant items or on content linking without specific attention to search results. We describe our research exploring integrated multimodal search and hyperlinking for multimedia data. Our investigation is based on the MediaEval 2012 Search and Hyperlinking task. This includes a known-item search task using the Blip10000 internet video collection, where automatically created hyperlinks link each relevant item to related items within the collection. The search test queries and link assessment for this task was generated using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform. Our investigation examines a range of alternative methods which seek to address the challenges of search and hyperlinking using multimodal approaches. The results of our experiments are used to propose a research agenda for developing eective techniques for search and hyperlinking of multimedia content

Optimizing IPTV video delivery using SVC spatial scalability

This paper focuses on two typical constraints present in current video delivery platforms such as IPTV: accommodating the diversity of consumer end-devices and coping with various bandwidth constraints of the deployed network access technologies. We propose the Use Of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC to cope with these two constraints: three different techniques to combine SD and HD versions of a video sequence in one SVC stream are presented and we assess how quality scalability compares to spatial scalability in producing video streams that can be tailored to various bandwidth constraints. The results show that the three proposed techniques for combining SD and HD perform equally good and that, under certain conditions, spatial scalability outperforms quality scalability to cope with various bandwidth constraints

Leveraging existing tools for named entity recognition in microposts

Abstract. With the increasing popularity of microblogging services, new research challenges arise in the area of text processing. In this paper, we hypothesize that already existing services for Named Entity Recognition (NER), or a combination thereof, perform well on microposts, despite the fact that these NER services have been developed for processing long-form text documents that are well-structured and well-spelled. We test our hypothesis by applying four already existing NER services to the set of microposts of the MSM2013 IE Challenge