123 research outputs found
Rights management technologies: A good choice for securing electronic healthrecords?
Advances in healthcare IT bring new concerns with respect to privacy and security. Security critical patient data no longer resides on mainframes physically isolated within an organization, where physical security measures can be taken to defend the data and the system. Modern solutions are heading towards open, interconnected environments where storage outsourcing and operations on untrusted servers happen frequently. In order to allow secure sharing of health records between different healthcare providers, Rights Management Techniques facilitating a datacentric protection model can be employed: data is cryptographically protected and allowed to be outsourced or even freely float on the network. Rather than relying on different networks to provide confidentiality, integrity and authenticity, data is protected at the end points of the communication. In this paper we compare Enterprise/Digital Rights Management with traditional security techniques and discuss how Rights Management can be applied to secure Electronic Health Records
Functional characterization of T2D-associated SNP effects on baseline and ER stress-responsive β cell transcriptional activation.
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have linked single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) at \u3e250 loci in the human genome to type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk. For each locus, identifying the functional variant(s) among multiple SNPs in high linkage disequilibrium is critical to understand molecular mechanisms underlying T2D genetic risk. Using massively parallel reporter assays (MPRA), we test the cis-regulatory effects of SNPs associated with T2D and altered in vivo islet chromatin accessibility in MIN6 β cells under steady state and pathophysiologic endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress conditions. We identify 1,982/6,621 (29.9%) SNP-containing elements that activate transcription in MIN6 and 879 SNP alleles that modulate MPRA activity. Multiple T2D-associated SNPs alter the activity of short interspersed nuclear element (SINE)-containing elements that are strongly induced by ER stress. We identify 220 functional variants at 104 T2D association signals, narrowing 54 signals to a single candidate SNP. Together, this study identifies elements driving β cell steady state and ER stress-responsive transcriptional activation, nominates causal T2D SNPs, and uncovers potential roles for repetitive elements in β cell transcriptional stress response and T2D genetics
One PLOT to Show Them All: Visualization of Efficient Sets in Multi-Objective Landscapes
Visualization techniques for the decision space of continuous multi-objective
optimization problems (MOPs) are rather scarce in research. For long, all
techniques focused on global optimality and even for the few available
landscape visualizations, e.g., cost landscapes, globality is the main
criterion. In contrast, the recently proposed gradient field heatmaps (GFHs)
emphasize the location and attraction basins of local efficient sets, but
ignore the relation of sets in terms of solution quality.
In this paper, we propose a new and hybrid visualization technique, which
combines the advantages of both approaches in order to represent local and
global optimality together within a single visualization. Therefore, we build
on the GFH approach but apply a new technique for approximating the location of
locally efficient points and using the divergence of the multi-objective
gradient vector field as a robust second-order condition. Then, the relative
dominance relationship of the determined locally efficient points is used to
visualize the complete landscape of the MOP. Augmented by information on the
basins of attraction, this Plot of Landscapes with Optimal Trade-offs (PLOT)
becomes one of the most informative multi-objective landscape visualization
techniques available.Comment: This version has been accepted for publication at the 16th
International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN XVI
MAFTIA Conceptual Model and Architecture
This document builds on the work reported in MAFTIA deliverable D1. It contains a refinement of the MAFTIA conceptual model and a discussion of the MAFTIA architecture. It also introduces the work done in WP6 on verification and assessment of security properties, which is reported on in more detail in MAFTIA deliverable D
Conceptual Model and Architecture of MAFTIA
This deliverable builds on the work reported in [MAFTIA 2000] and [Powell and Stroud 2001]. It contains a further refinement of the MAFTIA conceptual model and a revised discussion of the MAFTIA architecture. It also introduces the work done in MAFTIA on verification and assessment of security properties, which is reported on in more detail in [Adelsbach and Creese 2003
Chaste : Cancer, Heart and Soft Tissue Environment
Funding: UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant number EP/N509711/1 (J.K.)].Chaste (Cancer, Heart And Soft Tissue Environment) is an open source simulation package for the numerical solution of mathematical models arising in physiology and biology. To date, Chaste development has been driven primarily by applications that include continuum modelling of cardiac electrophysiology (‘Cardiac Chaste’), discrete cell-based modelling of soft tissues (‘Cell-based Chaste’), and modelling of ventilation in lungs (‘Lung Chaste’). Cardiac Chaste addresses the need for a high-performance, generic, and verified simulation framewor kfor cardiac electrophysiology that is freely available to the scientific community. Cardiac chaste provides a software package capable of realistic heart simulations that is efficient, rigorously tested, and runs on HPC platforms. Cell-based Chaste addresses the need for efficient and verified implementations of cell-based modelling frameworks, providing a set of extensible tools for simulating biological tissues. Computational modelling, along with live imaging techniques, plays an important role in understanding the processes of tissue growth and repair. A wide range of cell-based modelling frameworks have been developed that have each been successfully applied in a range of biological applications. Cell-based Chaste includes implementations of the cellular automaton model, the cellular Potts model, cell-centre models with cell representations as overlapping spheres or Voronoi tessellations, and the vertex model. Lung Chaste addresses the need for a novel, generic and efficient lung modelling software package that is both tested and verified. It aims to couple biophysically-detailed models of airway mechanics with organ-scale ventilation models in a package that is freely available to the scientific community.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Comparing individual-based approaches to modelling the self-organization of multicellular tissues.
The coordinated behaviour of populations of cells plays a central role in tissue growth and renewal. Cells react to their microenvironment by modulating processes such as movement, growth and proliferation, and signalling. Alongside experimental studies, computational models offer a useful means by which to investigate these processes. To this end a variety of cell-based modelling approaches have been developed, ranging from lattice-based cellular automata to lattice-free models that treat cells as point-like particles or extended shapes. However, it remains unclear how these approaches compare when applied to the same biological problem, and what differences in behaviour are due to different model assumptions and abstractions. Here, we exploit the availability of an implementation of five popular cell-based modelling approaches within a consistent computational framework, Chaste (http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/chaste). This framework allows one to easily change constitutive assumptions within these models. In each case we provide full details of all technical aspects of our model implementations. We compare model implementations using four case studies, chosen to reflect the key cellular processes of proliferation, adhesion, and short- and long-range signalling. These case studies demonstrate the applicability of each model and provide a guide for model usage
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