Abstract: Environment today is featured with aging population,
increasing prevalence of chronic disease and complex of medical
treatment. Safe use of pharmaceutics relied very much on the efforts
made by both the health- related organizations and as well as the
government agencies. As far as the specialization concern in providing
health services to the patients, the government actively issued and
implemented the divisions of medical treatment and pharmaceutical to
improve the quality of care and to reduce medication errors and ensure
public health. Pharmaceutical sub-sector policy has been implemented
for 13 years. This study attempts to explore the factors that affect the
patients- behavior intention of refilling a prescription from a NHIB
pharmacy. Samples were those patients refilling their prescriptions
with the case NHIB pharmacies. A self-administered questionnaire
was used to collect respondents- information while the patients or
family members visit the pharmacy for the refilling. 1,200
questionnaires were dispatched in 37 pharmacies that randomly
selected from Pingtung City, Dongkang, Chaozhou, Hengchun areas.
732 responses were gained with 604 valid samples for further analyses.
Results of data analyses indicated that respondents- attitude,
subjective norm, perceived behavior control and behavior intentions
toward refilling behavior varied from some demographic variables to
another. This research also suggested adding actual behavior, either by
a self-report or observed, into the research.
Abstract: Privacy issues commonly discussed among
researchers, practitioners, and end-users in pervasive healthcare.
Pervasive healthcare systems are applications that can support
patient-s need anytime and anywhere. However, pervasive healthcare
raises privacy concerns since it can lead to situations where patients
may not be aware that their private information is being shared and
becomes vulnerable to threat. We have systematically analyzed the
privacy issues and present a summary in tabular form to show the
relationship among the issues. The six issues identified are medical
information misuse, prescription leakage, medical information
eavesdropping, social implications for the patient, patient difficulties
in managing privacy settings, and lack of support in designing
privacy-sensitive applications. We narrow down the issues and chose
to focus on the issue of 'lack of support in designing privacysensitive
applications' by proposing a privacy-sensitive architecture
specifically designed for pervasive healthcare monitoring systems.
Abstract: This paper presents an application of level sets for the segmentation of abdominal and thoracic aortic aneurysms in CTA
datasets. An important challenge in reliably detecting aortic is the
need to overcome problems associated with intensity
inhomogeneities. Level sets are part of an important class of methods
that utilize partial differential equations (PDEs) and have been extensively applied in image segmentation. A kernel function in the
level set formulation aids the suppression of noise in the extracted
regions of interest and then guides the motion of the evolving contour
for the detection of weak boundaries. The speed of curve evolution
has been significantly improved with a resulting decrease in segmentation time compared with previous implementations of level
sets, and are shown to be more effective than other approaches in
coping with intensity inhomogeneities. We have applied the Courant
Friedrichs Levy (CFL) condition as stability criterion for our algorithm.
Abstract: The need for multilingual communication in Japan has
increased due to an increase in the number of foreigners in the
country. When people communicate in their nonnative language,
the differences in language prevent mutual understanding among
the communicating individuals. In the medical field, communication
between the hospital staff and patients is a serious problem. Currently,
medical translators accompany patients to medical care facilities, and
the demand for medical translators is increasing. However, medical
translators cannot necessarily provide support, especially in cases in
which round-the-clock support is required or in case of emergencies.
The medical field has high expectations from information technology.
Hence, a system that supports accurate multilingual communication is
required. Despite recent advances in machine translation technology,
it is very difficult to obtain highly accurate translations. We have
developed a support system called M3 for multilingual medical
reception. M3 provides support functions that aid foreign patients in
the following respects: conversation, questionnaires, reception procedures,
and hospital navigation; it also has a Q&A function. Users
can operate M3 using a touch screen and receive text-based support.
In addition, M3 uses accurate translation tools called parallel texts
to facilitate reliable communication through conversations between
the hospital staff and the patients. However, if there is no parallel
text that expresses what users want to communicate, the users cannot
communicate. In this study, we have developed a circulating support
environment for multilingual medical communication using parallel
texts. The proposed environment can circulate necessary parallel texts
through the following procedure: (1) a user provides feedback about
the necessary parallel texts, following which (2) these parallel texts
are created and evaluated.
Abstract: Data Mining aims at discovering knowledge out of
data and presenting it in a form that is easily comprehensible to
humans. One of the useful applications in Egypt is the Cancer
management, especially the management of Acute Lymphoblastic
Leukemia or ALL, which is the most common type of cancer in
children.
This paper discusses the process of designing a prototype that can
help in the management of childhood ALL, which has a great
significance in the health care field. Besides, it has a social impact
on decreasing the rate of infection in children in Egypt. It also
provides valubale information about the distribution and
segmentation of ALL in Egypt, which may be linked to the possible
risk factors.
Undirected Knowledge Discovery is used since, in the case of this
research project, there is no target field as the data provided is
mainly subjective. This is done in order to quantify the subjective
variables. Therefore, the computer will be asked to identify
significant patterns in the provided medical data about ALL. This
may be achieved through collecting the data necessary for the
system, determimng the data mining technique to be used for the
system, and choosing the most suitable implementation tool for the
domain.
The research makes use of a data mining tool, Clementine, so as to
apply Decision Trees technique. We feed it with data extracted from
real-life cases taken from specialized Cancer Institutes. Relevant
medical cases details such as patient medical history and diagnosis
are analyzed, classified, and clustered in order to improve the disease
management.
Abstract: Medical Surgical Nursing is one of the major subjects
in nursing. This study examined the validity and reliability of the
achievement examination utilizing the Classical Test Theory and
Item Response Theory. The study answered the following objectives
specifically : ( a) To establish the validity and reliability of the
achievement examination utilizing Classical Test Theory and Item
Response Theory ; ( b ) To determine the dimensionality measure of
items and ( c ) to compare the item difficulty and item discrimination
of the Medical Surgical Nursing Achievement examination using
Classical Test Theory ( CTT ) and Item Response Theory ( IRT ).
The developed instrument was administered to fourth year nursing
students (N= 136) of a private university in Manila. The findings
yielded the following results: The achievement examination is
reliable both using CTT and IRT. The findings indicate person and
item statistics from two frameworks are quite alike. The achievement
examination formed a unidimensional construct.
Abstract: Chest pain is one of the most prevalent complaints
among adults that cause the people to attend to medical centers. The
aim was to determine the prevalence and risk factors of chest pain
among over 30 years old people in Tehran. In this cross-sectional
study, 787 adults took part from Apr 2005 until Apr 2006. The
sampling method was random cluster sampling and there were 25
clusters. In each cluster, interviews were performed with 32 over 30
years old, people lived in those houses. In cases with chest pain, extra
questions asked. The prevalence of CP was 9% (71 cases). Of them
21 cases (6.5%) were in 41-60 year age ranges and the remainders
were over 61 year old. 19 cases (26.8%) mentioned CP in resting
state and all of the cases had exertion onset CP. The CP duration was
10 minutes or less in all of the cases and in most of them (84.5%), the
location of pain mentioned left anterior part of chest, left anterior part
of sternum and or left arm. There was positive history of myocardial
infarction in 12 cases (17%). There was significant relation between
CP and age, sex and between history of myocardial infarction and
marital state of study people. Our results are similar to other studies-
results in most parts, however it is necessary to perform
supplementary tests and follow up studies to differentiate between
cardiac and non-cardiac CP exactly.
Abstract: Medical image data hiding has strict constrains such
as high imperceptibility, high capacity and high robustness.
Achieving these three requirements simultaneously is highly
cumbersome. Some works have been reported in the literature on
data hiding, watermarking and stegnography which are suitable for
telemedicine applications. None is reliable in all aspects. Electronic
Patient Report (EPR) data hiding for telemedicine demand it blind
and reversible. This paper proposes a novel approach to blind
reversible data hiding based on integer wavelet transform.
Experimental results shows that this scheme outperforms the prior
arts in terms of zero BER (Bit Error Rate), higher PSNR (Peak Signal
to Noise Ratio), and large EPR data embedding capacity with
WPSNR (Weighted Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) around 53 dB,
compared with the existing reversible data hiding schemes.
Abstract: TELMES project aims to develop a securized
multimedia system devoted to medical consultation teleservices. It
will be finalized with a pilot system for a regional telecenters
network that connects local telecenters, having as support
multimedia platforms. This network will enable the implementation
of complex medical teleservices (teleconsulations, telemonitoring,
homecare, urgency medicine, etc.) for a broader range of patients
and medical professionals, mainly for family doctors and those
people living in rural or isolated regions. Thus, a multimedia,
scalable network, based on modern IT&C paradigms, will result. It
will gather two inter-connected regional telecenters, in Iaşi and
Piteşti, Romania, each of them also permitting local connections of
hospitals, diagnostic and treatment centers, as well as local networks
of family doctors, patients, even educational entities. As
communications infrastructure, we aim to develop a combined fixmobile-
internet (broadband) links. Other possible communication
environments will be GSM/GPRS/3G and radio waves. The
electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition, internet transmission and
local analysis, using embedded technologies, was already
successfully done for patients- telemonitoring.
Abstract: In the paper the study of synthetic transmit aperture
method applying the Golay coded transmission for medical
ultrasound imaging is presented. Longer coded excitation allows to
increase the total energy of the transmitted signal without increasing
the peak pressure. Moreover signal-to-noise ratio and penetration
depth are improved while maintaining high ultrasound image
resolution. In the work the 128-element linear transducer array with
0.3 mm inter-element spacing excited by one cycle and the 8 and 16-
bit Golay coded sequences at nominal frequency 4 MHz was used. To
generate a spherical wave covering the full image region a single
element transmission aperture was used and all the elements received
the echo signals. The comparison of 2D ultrasound images of the
tissue mimicking phantom and in vitro measurements of the beef liver
is presented to illustrate the benefits of the coded transmission. The
results were obtained using the synthetic aperture algorithm with
transmit and receive signals correction based on a single element
directivity function.
Abstract: The paper presents an investigation into the role of virtual reality and web technologies in the field of distance education. Within this frame, special emphasis is given on the building of web-based virtual learning environments so as to successfully fulfill their educational objectives. In particular, basic pedagogical methods are studied, focusing mainly on the efficient preparation, approach and presentation of learning content, and specific designing rules are presented considering the hypermedia, virtual and educational nature of this kind of applications. The paper also aims to highlight the educational benefits arising from the use of virtual reality technology in medicine and study the emerging area of web-based medical simulations. Finally, an innovative virtual reality environment for distance education in medicine is demonstrated. The proposed environment reproduces conditions of the real learning process and enhances learning through a real-time interactive simulator.
Abstract: The hospital and the health-care center of a
community, as a place for people-s life-care and health-care settings,
must provide more and better services for patients or residents. After
Establishing Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system -which is a
necessity- in the hospital, providing pervasive services is a further
step. Our objective in this paper is to use pervasive computing in a
case study of healthcare, based on EMR database that coordinates
application services over network to form a service environment for
medical and health-care. Our method also categorizes the hospital
spaces into 3 spaces: Public spaces, Private spaces and Isolated
spaces. Although, there are many projects about using pervasive
computing in healthcare, but all of them concentrate on the disease
recognition, designing smart cloths, or provide services only for
patient. The proposed method is implemented in a hospital. The
obtained results show that it is suitable for our purpose.
Abstract: Brain ArterioVenous Malformation (BAVM) is an abnormal tangle of brain blood vessels where arteries shunt directly into veins with no intervening capillary bed which causes high pressure and hemorrhage risk. The success of treatment by embolization in interventional neuroradiology is highly dependent on the accuracy of the vessels visualization. In this paper the performance of clustering techniques on vessel segmentation from 3- D rotational angiography (3DRA) images is investigated and a new technique of segmentation is proposed. This method consists in: preprocessing step of image enhancement, then K-Means (KM), Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) and Expectation Maximization (EM) clustering are used to separate vessel pixels from background and artery pixels from vein pixels when possible. A post processing step of removing false-alarm components is applied before constructing a three-dimensional volume of the vessels. The proposed method was tested on six datasets along with a medical assessment of an expert. Obtained results showed encouraging segmentations.
Abstract: Segmentation techniques based on Active Contour
Models have been strongly benefited from the use of prior information
during their evolution. Shape prior information is captured from
a training set and is introduced in the optimization procedure to
restrict the evolution into allowable shapes. In this way, the evolution
converges onto regions even with weak boundaries. Although
significant effort has been devoted on different ways of capturing
and analyzing prior information, very little thought has been devoted
on the way of combining image information with prior information.
This paper focuses on a more natural way of incorporating the
prior information in the level set framework. For proof of concept
the method is applied on hippocampus segmentation in T1-MR
images. Hippocampus segmentation is a very challenging task, due
to the multivariate surrounding region and the missing boundary
with the neighboring amygdala, whose intensities are identical. The
proposed method, mimics the human segmentation way and thus
shows enhancements in the segmentation accuracy.
Abstract: Medical negligence disputes in Malaysia are mainly resolved through litigation by using the tort system. The tort system, being adversarial in nature has subjected parties to litigation hazards such as delay, excessive costs and uncertainty of outcome. The dissatisfaction of the tort system in compensating medically injured victims has created various alternatives to litigation. Amongst them is the implementation of a no-fault compensation system which would allow compensation to be given without the need of proving fault on the medical personnel. Instead, the community now bears the burden of compensating and at the end, promotes collective responsibility. For Malaysia, introducing a no-fault system would provide a tempting solution and may ultimately, achieve justice for the medical injured victims. Nevertheless, such drastic change requires a great deal of consideration to determine the suitability of the system and whether or not it will eventually cater for the needs of the Malaysian population
Abstract: Most of the image watermarking methods, using the properties of the human visual system (HVS), have been proposed in literature. The component of the visual threshold is usually related to either the spatial contrast sensitivity function (CSF) or the visual masking. Especially on the contrast masking, most methods have not mention to the effect near to the edge region. Since the HVS is sensitive what happens on the edge area. This paper proposes ultrasound image watermarking using the visual threshold corresponding to the HVS in which the coefficients in a DCT-block have been classified based on the texture, edge, and plain area. This classification method enables not only useful for imperceptibility when the watermark is insert into an image but also achievable a robustness of watermark detection. A comparison of the proposed method with other methods has been carried out which shown that the proposed method robusts to blockwise memoryless manipulations, and also robust against noise addition.
Abstract: Medical imaging uses the advantage of digital
technology in imaging and teleradiology. In teleradiology systems
large amount of data is acquired, stored and transmitted. A major
technology that may help to solve the problems associated with the
massive data storage and data transfer capacity is data compression
and decompression. There are many methods of image compression
available. They are classified as lossless and lossy compression
methods. In lossy compression method the decompressed image
contains some distortion. Fractal image compression (FIC) is a lossy
compression method. In fractal image compression an image is
coded as a set of contractive transformations in a complete metric
space. The set of contractive transformations is guaranteed to
produce an approximation to the original image. In this paper FIC is
achieved by PIFS using quadtree partitioning. PIFS is applied on
different images like , Ultrasound, CT Scan, Angiogram, X-ray,
Mammograms. In each modality approximately twenty images are
considered and the average values of compression ratio and PSNR
values are arrived. In this method of fractal encoding, the
parameter, tolerance factor Tmax, is varied from 1 to 10, keeping the
other standard parameters constant. For all modalities of images the
compression ratio and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) are
computed and studied. The quality of the decompressed image is
arrived by PSNR values. From the results it is observed that the
compression ratio increases with the tolerance factor and
mammogram has the highest compression ratio. The quality of the
image is not degraded upto an optimum value of tolerance factor,
Tmax, equal to 8, because of the properties of fractal compression.
Abstract: 2D/3D registration is a special case of medical image
registration which is of particular interest to surgeons. Applications
of 2D/3D registration are [1] radiotherapy planning and treatment
verification, spinal surgery, hip replacement, neurointerventions and
aortic stenting. The purpose of this paper is to provide a literature
review of the main methods for image registration for the 2D/3D
case. At the end of the paper an algorithm is proposed for 2D/3D
registration based on the Chebyssev polynomials iteration loop.
Abstract: Ultra-low-power (ULP) circuits have received
widespread attention due to the rapid growth of biomedical
applications and Battery-less Electronics. Subthreshold region of
transistor operation is used in ULP circuits. Major research challenge
in the subthreshold operating region is to extract the ULP benefits
with minimal degradation in speed and robustness. Process, Voltage
and Temperature (PVT) variations significantly affect the
performance of subthreshold circuits. Designed performance
parameters of ULP circuits may vary largely due to temperature
variations. Hence, this paper investigates the effect of temperature
variation on device and circuit performance parameters at different
biasing voltages in the subthreshold region. Simulation results clearly
demonstrate that in deep subthreshold and near threshold voltage
regions, performance parameters are significantly affected whereas in
moderate subthreshold region, subthreshold circuits are more
immune to temperature variations. This establishes that moderate
subthreshold region is ideal for temperature immune circuits.
Abstract: With increasing utilization of the wireless devices in
different fields such as medical devices and industrial fields, the
paper presents a method for simplify the Bluetooth packets with
throughput enhancing. The paper studies a vital issue in wireless
communications, which is the throughput of data over wireless
networks. In fact, the Bluetooth and ZigBee are a Wireless Personal
Area Network (WPAN). With taking these two systems competition
consideration, the paper proposes different schemes for improve the
throughput of Bluetooth network over a reliable channel. The
proposition depends on the Channel Quality Driven Data Rate
(CQDDR) rules, which determines the suitable packet in the
transmission process according to the channel conditions. The
proposed packet is studied over additive White Gaussian Noise
(AWGN) and fading channels. The Experimental results reveal the
capability of extension of the PL length by 8, 16, 24 bytes for classic
and EDR packets, respectively. Also, the proposed method is suitable
for the low throughput Bluetooth.