A perspective on the Healthgrid initiative

This paper presents a perspective on the Healthgrid initiative which involves European projects deploying pioneering applications of grid technology in the health sector. In the last couple of years, several grid projects have been funded on health related issues at national and European levels. A crucial issue is to maximize their cross fertilization in the context of an environment where data of medical interest can be stored and made easily available to the different actors in healthcare, physicians, healthcare centres and administrations, and of course the citizens. The Healthgrid initiative, represented by the Healthgrid association (http://www.healthgrid.org), was initiated to bring the necessary long term continuity, to reinforce and promote awareness of the possibilities and advantages linked to the deployment of GRID technologies in health. Technologies to address the specific requirements for medical applications are under development. Results from the DataGrid and other projects are given as examples of early applications.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted by the Second International Workshop on Biomedical Computations on the Grid, at the 4th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2004). Chicago USA, April 200

Suicide risk assessment in the emergency department:an investigation of current practice in Scotland

Background: Suicide is a global public health issue. Approximately one third of individuals who complete suicide have attended an emergency department in the year preceding their death. The aim of this study was to investigate current suicide risk assessment practices across emergency department clinicians in Scotland.Methods: A mixed‐methods design was employed. A total of 112 surveys for emergency department clinicians were posted to 23 emergency departments in Scotland between March and September 2016. Follow‐up semi‐structured interviews were also conducted exploring clinician's experiences of suicide risk assessment. Interviews were analysed using thematic analysis.Results: Fifty‐one emergency department clinicians across 17 emergency departments completed the survey. Thirty‐five (68.6%) participants were currently using a suicide risk assessment tool; with most using locally developed tools and proformas (n = 20, 62.5%) or the SAD PERSONS scale (n = 13, 40.6%). Remaining participants (n = 16, 31.4%) did not use suicide risk assessment tools during assessment. Variation in practice was found both across and within emergency departments. Six clinicians participated in follow‐up interviews, which identified four major themes: Clinician Experiences of Suicide Risk Assessment; Components of Suicide Risk Assessment; Clinical Decision‐Making; and Supporting Clinicians.Conclusions: There is substantial variation in current practice, with around two‐thirds of clinicians using a variety of empirically and locally developed tools, and a third using their judgement alone. Clinicians find suicide risk assessment a challenging part of their role and discuss the need for increased training, and appropriate and helpful guidelines to improve practice

XML for Domain Viewpoints

Within research institutions like CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) there are often disparate databases (different in format, type and structure) that users need to access in a domain-specific manner. Users may want to access a simple unit of information without having to understand detail of the underlying schema or they may want to access the same information from several different sources. It is neither desirable nor feasible to require users to have knowledge of these schemas. Instead it would be advantageous if a user could query these sources using his or her own domain models and abstractions of the data. This paper describes the basis of an XML (eXtended Markup Language) framework that provides this functionality and is currently being developed at CERN. The goal of the first prototype was to explore the possibilities of XML for data integration and model management. It shows how XML can be used to integrate data sources. The framework is not only applicable to CERN data sources but other environments too.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, conference report from SCI'2001 Multiconference on Systemics & Informatics, Florid

Database independent Migration of Objects into an Object-Relational Database

This paper reports on the CERN-based WISDOM project which is studying the serialisation and deserialisation of data to/from an object database (objectivity) and ORACLE 9i.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figures; CMS CERN Conference Report cr02_01

Grid Databases for Shared Image Analysis in the MammoGrid Project

The MammoGrid project aims to prove that Grid infrastructures can be used for collaborative clinical analysis of database-resident but geographically distributed medical images. This requires: a) the provision of a clinician-facing front-end workstation and b) the ability to service real-world clinician queries across a distributed and federated database. The MammoGrid project will prove the viability of the Grid by harnessing its power to enable radiologists from geographically dispersed hospitals to share standardized mammograms, to compare diagnoses (with and without computer aided detection of tumours) and to perform sophisticated epidemiological studies across national boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken in MammoGrid to seamlessly connect radiologist workstations across a Grid using an "information infrastructure" and a DICOM-compliant object model residing in multiple distributed data stores in Italy and the UKComment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Plant Selection for Ethnobotanical Uses on the Amalfi Coast (Southern Italy)

Background Many ethnobotanical studies have investigated selection criteria for medicinal and non-medicinal plants. In this paper we test several statistical methods using different ethnobotanical datasets in order to 1) define to which extent the nature of the datasets can affect the interpretation of results; 2) determine if the selection for different plant uses is based on phylogeny, or other selection criteria. Methods We considered three different ethnobotanical datasets: two datasets of medicinal plants and a dataset of non-medicinal plants (handicraft production, domestic and agro-pastoral practices) and two floras of the Amalfi Coast. We performed residual analysis from linear regression, the binomial test and the Bayesian approach for calculating under-used and over-used plant families within ethnobotanical datasets. Percentages of agreement were calculated to compare the results of the analyses. We also analyzed the relationship between plant selection and phylogeny, chorology, life form and habitat using the chi-square test. Pearson’s residuals for each of the significant chi-square analyses were examined for investigating alternative hypotheses of plant selection criteria. Results The three statistical analysis methods differed within the same dataset, and between different datasets and floras, but with some similarities. In the two medicinal datasets, only Lamiaceae was identified in both floras as an over-used family by all three statistical methods. All statistical methods in one flora agreed that Malvaceae was over-used and Poaceae under-used, but this was not found to be consistent with results of the second flora in which one statistical result was non-significant. All other families had some discrepancy in significance across methods, or floras. Significant over- or under-use was observed in only a minority of cases. The chi-square analyses were significant for phylogeny, life form and habitat. Pearson’s residuals indicated a non-random selection of woody species for non-medicinal uses and an under-use of plants of temperate forests for medicinal uses. Conclusions Our study showed that selection criteria for plant uses (including medicinal) are not always based on phylogeny. The comparison of different statistical methods (regression, binomial and Bayesian) under different conditions led to the conclusion that the most conservative results are obtained using regression analysis