CORTEX: A COMPUTER-BASED SYSTEM FOR AIDING DECISION MAKING. ESD-TDR-64-677.

Novel technology has made dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of lung motion and lung tumour mobility during continuous respiration feasible. This might be beneficial for planning of radiotherapy of lung tumours, especially when using high precision techniques. This paper describes the recent developments to analyze and visualize pulmonary nodules during continuous respiration using MRI. Besides recent dynamic two-dimensional approaches to quantify motion of pulmonary nodules during respiration novel three-dimensional techniques are presented. Beyond good correlation to pulmonary function tests MRI also provides regional information about differences between tumour-bearing and non-tumour bearing lung and the restrictive effects of radiotherapy as well as the compensation by the contralateral lung.

Computer Systems↗

PubMed2006

Proof-of-concept design and development of an EN13606-based electronic health care record service.

OBJECTIVE: The authors present an Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) server, designed and developed as a proof of concept of the revised prEN13606:2005 European standard concerning EHR communications. METHODS: The development of the server includes five modules: the libraries for the management of the standard reference model, for the demographic package and for the data types; the permanent storage module, built on a relational database; two communication interfaces through which the clients can send information or make queries; the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) process module; and the tools for the validation of the extracts managed, implemented on a defined XML-Schema. RESULTS: The server was subjected to four phases of trials, the first three with ad hoc test data and processes to ensure that each of the modules complied with its specifications and that the interaction between them provided the expected functionalities. The fourth used real extracts generated by other research groups for the additional purpose of testing the validity of the standard in real-world scenarios. CONCLUSION: The acceptable performance of the server has made it possible to include it as a middleware service in a platform for the out-of-hospital follow-up and monitoring of patients with chronic heart disease which, at the present time, supports pilot projects and clinical trials for the evaluation of eHealth services.

Computer Systems↗

PubMed2006

Endoscopic, rapid near-infrared optical tomography.

This is believed to be the first demonstration of near-infrared (NIR) optical tomography employed at the endoscope scale and at a rapid sampling speed that allows translation to in vivo use. A spread-spectral-encoding technique based on a broadband light source and linear-to-circular fiber bundling was used to provide endoscopic probing of many source-detector fibers for tomography as well as parallel sampling of all source-detector pairs for rapid imaging. Endoscopic NIR tomography at an 8 Hz frame rate was achieved in phantoms and tissue specimens with a 12 mm probe housing eight sources and eight detectors. This novel approach provides the key feasibility studies to allow this blood-based contrast imaging technology to be attempted in detection of cancer in internal organs via endoscopic interrogation.

Computer Systems↗