The virtual hospital: the emergence of telemedicine

The current practice of medicine, while utilizing the advances in biological and physical science, still takes place in the physician office or hospital. Unfortunately, traditional practice as integrated into the current Healthcare system is unsustainable. Accommodating the increase demand for medical services with the attendant rising costs has caused a crisis in healthcare. Telemedicine, the practice of medicine by means of mobile/internet is a transformative process that will impact healthcare globally. Already, teleradiology (diagnostic radiology remotely by means of digital images that are electronically exported) and electronic medical records are gaining wide acceptance. The ability to distribute medical services by means of mobile and internet technology is a natural and almost irresistible direction for the field of Medicine. The healthcare crisis has created an opportunity for new solutions and mobile/Internet technology has laid the infrastructure upon which one can build a powerful, innovative and badly needed platform for health services: The Global Virtual Hospital (GVH). The GVH will be a group of connected centers around the world that overlap (in time zones) throughout the working day. Patients will have access through the Internet or mobile phones. Medical records will be electronically stored, shared among authorized personal and updated with each medical interaction. The GVH, will serve as a platform and laboratory for the creation of innovative devices and technology that will improve the remote interaction.The Global Virtual Hospital System will exemplify the convergence of technology and medicine and will be integrated into standard practice in the next 5-10 years

The virtual hospital: the emergence of telemedicine

The current practice of medicine, while utilizing the advances in biological and physical science, still takes place in the physician office or hospital. Unfortunately, traditional practice as integrated into the current Healthcare system is unsustainable. Accommodating the increase demand for medical services with the attendant rising costs has caused a crisis in healthcare. Telemedicine, the practice of medicine by means of mobile/internet is a transformative process that will impact healthcare globally. Already, teleradiology (diagnostic radiology remotely by means of digital images that are electronically exported) and electronic medical records are gaining wide acceptance. The ability to distribute medical services by means of mobile and internet technology is a natural and almost irresistible direction for the field of Medicine. The healthcare crisis has created an opportunity for new solutions and mobile/Internet technology has laid the infrastructure upon which one can build a powerful, innovative and badly needed platform for health services: The Global Virtual Hospital (GVH). The GVH will be a group of connected centers around the world that overlap (in time zones) throughout the working day. Patients will have access through the Internet or mobile phones. Medical records will be electronically stored, shared among authorized personal and updated with each medical interaction. The GVH, will serve as a platform and laboratory for the creation of innovative devices and technology that will improve the remote interaction.The Global Virtual Hospital System will exemplify the convergence of technology and medicine and will be integrated into standard practice in the next 5-10 years

Algorithmic Foundations of Inexact Computing

Inexact computing also referred to as approximate computing is a style of designing algorithms and computing systems wherein the accuracy of correctness of algorithms executing on them is deliberately traded for significant resource savings. Significant progress has been reported in this regard both in terms of hardware as well as software or custom algorithms that exploited this approach resulting in some loss in solution quality (accuracy) while garnering disproportionately high savings. However, these approaches tended to be ad-hoc and were tied to specific algorithms and technologies. Consequently, a principled approach to designing and analyzing algorithms was lacking. In this paper, we provide a novel model which allows us to characterize the behavior of algorithms designed to be inexact, as well as characterize opportunities and benefits that this approach offers. Our methods therefore are amenable to standard asymptotic analysis and provides a clean unified abstraction through which an algorithm's design and analysis can be conducted. With this as a backdrop, we show that inexactness can be significantly beneficial for some fundamental problems in that the quality of a solution can be exponentially better if one exploits inexactness when compared to approaches that are agnostic and are unable to exploit this approach. We show that such gains are possible in the context of evaluating Boolean functions rooted in the theory of Boolean functions and their spectra, PAC learning, and sorting. Formally, this is accomplished by introducing the twin concepts of inexactness aware and inexactness oblivious approaches to designing algorithms and the exponential gains are shown in the context of taking the ratio of the quality of the solution using the "aware" approach to the "oblivious" approach

Design and Applications of Approximate Circuits by Gate-Level Pruning

Energy-efficiency is a critical concern for many systems, ranging from Internet of things objects and mobile devices to high-performance computers. Moreover, after 40 years of prosperity, Moore's law is starting to show its economic and technical limits. Noticing that many circuits are over-engineered and that many applications are error-resilient or require less precision than offered by the existing hardware, approximate computing has emerged as a potential solution to pursue improvements of digital circuits. In this regard, a technique to systematically tradeoff accuracy in exchange for area, power, and delay savings in digital circuits is proposed: gate-level pruning (GLP). A CAD tool is build and integrated into a standard digital flow to offer a wide range of cost-accuracy tradeoffs for any conventional design. The methodology is first demonstrated on adders, achieving up to 78% energy-delay-area reduction for 10% mean relative error. It is then detailed how this methodology can be applied on a more complex system composed of a multitude of arithmetic blocks and memory: the discrete cosine transform (DCT), which is a key building block for image and video processing applications. Even though arithmetic circuits represent less than 4% of the entire DCT area, it is shown that the GLP technique can lead to 21% energy-delay-area savings over the entire system for a reasonable image quality loss of 24 dB. This significant saving is achieved thanks to the pruned arithmetic circuits, which sets some nodes at constant values, enabling the synthesis tool to further simplify the circuit and memory

Automatic Generation of Inexact Digital Circuits by Gate-level Pruning

Inexact or approximate circuits show great ability to reduce power consumption at the cost of occasional errors in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Even though the benefits of such circuits have been proven for many applications, they are not wide spread owing to the absence of a clear design methodology and the required CAD tools. In this regard, this paper presents a methodology to automatically generate inexact circuits starting from a conventional design by adding only one small step in the digital design flow. Further, this paper also demonstrates that achieving pruning at gate-level can lead to substantial savings in terms of power consumption, critical path delay and silicon area. An order of magnitude area and power savings is demonstrated for a 64-bit gate level pruned high-speed adder for a 10% relative error magnitude

A Fast Pruning Technique for Low-Power Inexact Circuit Design

Inexact Circuits are circuits in which the accuracy of the output can be traded for cost savings (energy, area and/or delay). In the context of advanced technology scaling and power density increase, inexact circuits appear to be very promising as a solution. In this paper, we present a novel pruning technique developed as a logic level method to select and prune parts of a digital circuit. The error is computed at each pruning step using probabilistic error propagation and Hamming distance computation, making the evaluation possible at runtime. The technique was validated on several parallel adder architectures. Experimental results proved the efficiency of the technique with Energy-Delay-Area product reduction of 1.8× for less than 10−4% of relative error on the considered benchmarks at 45-nm technology node