Fat and water signals in nuclear magnetic resonance imaging

This thesis is intended to explore fat and water differentiation in nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. The need to create separate fat and water images is discussed and a critical review of current practices in the field is presented. These techniques include chemical shift imaging, coupled spin mapping and methods based on relaxation time differences. As an extension of this review, alternative slice cycling procedures are proposed that afford an improvement in the conventional chemical shift selective presaturation sequence. A new, hybrid fat or water suppression sequence is studied in detail, including a theoretical description of the role of the sequence parameters, as well as direct experimental comparison with its most closely related conventional fat and water differentiation techniques. The proposed scheme is shown to be robust in normal use and more tolerant than the conventional methods to mis-settings of experimental parameters. In vivo demonstration of the method is also performed. Further work involves the generation of differential fat and water relaxation time maps. A critical review of current, conventional techniques that allow production of longitudinal relaxation calculated images is presented. Novel pulse sequence schemes for the measurement of fat and water longitudinal relaxation times are described, and the accuracy of these measurements is evaluated using phantoms. The results obtained are also being compared with conventional spectroscopic and imaging methods

MetaMorphosis+ - A social network of educational Web resources based on semantic integration of services and data

Past research aiming at interoperability within the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) field has led to a fragmented landscape of competing metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. So far, Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing data on the Web. We propose MetaMorphosis+, a social educational application which adopts a general approach to exploit existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain

Capturing Scientific Knowledge on Medical Risk Factors

In this paper, we describe a model for representing scientific knowledge of risk factors in medicine in an explicit format which enables its use for automated reasoning. The resulting model supports linking the conclusions of up-to-date clinical research with data relating to individual patients. This model, which we have implemented as an ontology-based system using Linked Data, enables the capture of risk factor knowledge and serves as a translational research tool to apply that knowledge to assist with patient treatment, lifestyle, and education. Knowledge captured using this model can be disseminated for other intelligent systems to use for a variety of purposes, for example, to explore the state of the available medical knowledge

Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources

Visual Analytics for Health Monitoring and Risk Management in CARRE

With the rise of wearable sensor technologies, an increasing number of wearable health and medical sensors are available on the market, which enables not only people but also doctors to utilise them to monitor people’s health in such a consistent way that the sensors may become people’s lifetime companion. The consistent measurements from a variety of wearable sensors implies that a huge amount of data needs to be processed, which cannot be achieved by traditional processing methods. Visual analytics is designed to promote knowledge discovery and utilisation of big data via mature visual paradigms with well-designed user interactions and has become indispensable in big data analysis. In this paper we introduce the role of visual analytics for health monitoring and risk management in the European Commission funded project CARRE which aims to provide innovative means for the management of cardiorenal diseases with the assistance of wearable sensors. The visual analytics components of timeline and parallel coordinates for health monitoring and of node-link diagrams, chord diagrams and sankey diagrams for risk analysis are presented to achieve ubiquitous and lifelong health and risk monitoring to promote people’s health

MyHealthAvatar and CARRE: case studies of interactive visualisation for Internet-enabled sensor-assisted health monitoring and risk analysis

With the progress of wearable sensor technologies, more wearable health sensors have been made available on the market, which enables not only people to monitor their health and lifestyle in a continuous way but also doctors to utilise them to make better diagnoses. Continuous measurement from a variety of wearable sensors implies that a huge amount of data needs to be collected, stored, processed and presented, which cannot be achieved by traditional data processing methods. Visualisation is designed to promote knowledge discovery and utilisation via mature visual paradigms with well-designed user interactions and has become indispensable in data analysis. In this paper we introduce the role of visualisation in wearable sensor-assisted health analysis platforms by case studies of two projects funded by the European Commission: MyHealthAvatar and CARRE. The former focuses on health sensor data collection and lifestyle tracking while the latter aims to provide innovative means for the management of cardiorenal diseases with the assistance of wearable sensors. The roles of visualisation components including timeline, parallel coordinates, map, node-link diagrams, Sankey diagrams, etc. are introduced and discussed

An Ontology Based Scheme for Formal Care Plan Meta-Description

Contemporary healthcare delivery is based on state-of-the-art scientific best practices captured in systematically developed formal care plans which include guidelines, clinical protocols, integrated care pathways, etc. Research so far has addressed the computerized execution of formal care plans by developing a number of related representation languages, execution engines and integrated platforms to support real time care plan execution. However, much less effort has been put into organizing available formal care plans. In this paper we propose a conceptual model and an ontology for a meta-description of the formal care plan. The proposed conceptual model and ontology allows semantic tagging and enrichment of clinical protocols so that they can be used and reused across platforms and also be linked directly to other relevant scientific information, e.g. published works in Pub-Med or personal health records, and other clinical information systems. It also allows modelling of the provenance and justifications for modifications or alterations to care plans