Current Biomedical Databases are independently administered in geographically distinct locations, lending them almost ideally to adoption of intelligent data management approaches. This book focuses on research issues, problems and opportunities in Biomedical Data Infrastructure identifying new issues and directions for future research in Biomedical Data and Information Retrieval, Semantics in Biomedicine, and Biomedical Data Modeling and Analysis. The book will be a useful guide for researchers, practitioners, and graduate-level students interested in learning state-of-the-art development in biomedical data management.
Like many other industries, health care is increasingly turning to digital information and the use of electronic resources. The Institute of Medicine's Roundtable on Value & Science-Driven Health Care hosted three workshops to explore current efforts and opportunities to accelerate progress in improving health and health care with information technology systems.
The two-volume set LNCS 8258 and 8259 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2013, held in Havana, Cuba, in November 2013. The 137 papers presented, together with two keynotes, were carefully reviewed and selected from 262 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on mathematical theory of PR, supervised and unsupervised classification, feature or instance selection for classification, image analysis and retrieval, signals analysis and processing, applications of pattern recognition, biometrics, video analysis, and data mining.
In 2006 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program, recognizing the need for a new impetus to encourage clinical and translational research. At the time it was very difficult to translate basic and clinical research into clinical and community practice; making it difficult for individual patients and communities to receive its benefits. Since its creation the CTSA Program has expanded, with 61 sites spread across the nation's academic health centers and other institutions, hoping to provide catalysts and test beds for policies and practices that can benefit clinical and translation research organizations throughout the country. The NIH contracted with the Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2012 to conduct a study to assess and provide recommendations on appropriateness of the CTSA Program's mission and strategic goals and whether changes were needed. The study was also address the implementation of the program by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) while exploring the CTSA's contributions in the acceleration of the development of new therapeutics. A 13-member committee was established to head this task; the committee had collective expertise in community outreach and engagement, public health and health policy, bioethics, education and training, pharmaceutical research and development, program evaluation, clinical and biomedical research, and child health research. The CTSA Program at NIH: Opportunities for Advancing Clinical and Translational Research is the result of investigations into previous program evaluations and assessments, open-session meetings and conference class, and the review of scientific literature. Overall, the committee believes that the CTSA Program is significant to the advancement of clinical and translational research through its contributions. The Program would benefit from a variety of revisions, however, to make it more efficient and effective.
The huge volume of multi-modal neuroimaging data across different neuroscience communities has posed a daunting challenge to traditional methods of data sharing, data archiving, data processing and data analysis. Neuroinformatics plays a crucial role in creating advanced methodologies and tools for the handling of varied and heterogeneous datasets in order to better understand the structure and function of the brain. These tools and methodologies not only enhance data collection, analysis, integration, interpretation, modeling, and dissemination of data, but also promote data sharing and collaboration. This Neuroinformatics Research Topic aims to summarize the state-of-art of the current achievements and explores the directions for the future generation of neuroinformatics infrastructure. The publications present solutions for data archiving, data processing and workflow, data mining, and system integration methodologies. Some of the systems presented are large in scale, geographically distributed, and already have a well-established user community. Some discuss opportunities and methodologies that facilitate large-scale parallel data processing tasks under a heterogeneous computational environment. We wish to stimulate on-going discussions at the level of the neuroinformatics infrastructure including the common challenges, new technologies of maximum benefit, key features of next generation infrastructure, etc. We have asked leading research groups from different research areas of neuroscience/neuroimaging to provide their thoughts on the development of a state of the art and highly-efficient neuroinformatics infrastructure. Such discussions will inspire and help guide the development of a state of the art, highly-efficient neuroinformatics infrastructure.
The discipline of Human Factors and Sustainable Infrastructure provides a platform for addressing challenges in human factors and engineering research with the focus on sustainability in the built environment, applications of sustainability assessment, demonstrations and applications that contribute to competitiveness and well-being, quantification and assessment of sustainable infrastructure projects, and the environmental, human, social, and economic dimensions of sustainable infrastructure. A thorough understanding of the characteristics of a wide range of people is essential in the development of sustainable infrastructure and systems and serve as valuable information to designers and help ensure design will fit the targeted population of end users. This book focuses on the advances in the Human Factors And Sustainable Infrastructure, which are a critical aspect in the design of any human-centered technological system. The ideas and practical solutions described in the book are the outcome of dedicated research by academics and practitioners aiming to advance theory and practice in this dynamic and all-encompassing discipline. We hope that this book, which is the international state-of-the-art in Sustainable Infrastructure domain of human factors and ergonomics, will be a valuable source of theoretical and applied knowledge enabling human-centered design for global markets.
Traditionally, medicine has involved therapies chosen according to clinical guidelines, often arrived at through clinical trials which categorized patients into patient groups. Such clinical guidelines would dictate that all patients within a specific group should be treated in exactly the same way. More recently, the paradigm has shifted towards personalized medicine, and in future, individual treatment plans will depend more on the specific characteristics of individual patients, including genomic data. This book presents the proceedings of the 9th scientific eHealth conference, the eHealth Summit Austria, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2015. Among the main topics addressed at the conference were: active and ambient assisted living (AAL); eHealth education; electronic patient and health records; ethical legal and economic aspects of eHealth; ICT for integrated treatment, research and personalized medicine; patient portals and personal health records; semantic interoperability of information systems; and visualization of clinical or epidemiological data. One of the first fields of application for personalized medicine has been oncology, with current diagnostic tools including molecular risk factors, biomarkers and individual genomes. The next step in personalized medicine will be to extend these to a more general, personalized health approach. Such individual risk assessment and preventive strategies promise to have a huge impact on our healthcare systems, and this book will be of interest to all those involved in healthcare research, provision and practice.
This book introduces the latest international research in the fields of bioinformatics and computational biology. It includes various studies in the area of machine learning in bioinformatics, systems biology, omics data analysis and mining, biomedical applications and sequences, which were selected by an international committee and presented at the 12th International Conference on Practical Applications of Computational Biology & Bioinformatics held in Toledo in June 2018.
The outbreak of global health issues due to rapid urbanization, industrialization, and changing climatic conditions are severely impacting health and lifestyle. Yet, healthcare and medical services continue to increase in cost in developed nations. This can result in medical tourism, wherein patients travel across countries in order to benefit from medical treatment that might not be accessible in the traveler’s nation of origin. Developing countries are prepared to capitalize on this growing industry by offering multi-specialty healthcare hospitals, cost-effective treatments, and the promotion of online medical consultancy. Global Developments in Healthcare and Medical Tourism provides innovative insights into issues impacting healthcare services, healthcare service providers, government policies, and initiatives for health reforms and explores low-cost medical tourism destinations and practices. The book additionally seeks to deliver high-quality, cost-efficient smart healthcare applications. The content within this publication examines global health, wellness tourism, and global business and is designed for students, researchers, academicians, policymakers, government officials, medical practitioners, and industry professionals.
