This book highlights the applications of soft computing techniques in medical bioinformatics. It reflects the state-of-the-art research in soft computing and bioinformatics, including theory, algorithms, numerical simulations, and error and uncertainty analysis. It also deals with novel applications of new processing techniques in computer science. This book is useful to both students and researchers from computer science and engineering fields.

This volume presents the proceedings of the International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (ICBHI). The conference was a new special topic conference and a common initiative by the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE) and IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE- EMBS). BHI2015 was held in Haikou, China, 8-10 October 2015. The main theme of the BHI2015 is "The Convergence: Integrating Information and Communication Technologies with Biomedicine for Global Health". The ICBHI2015 proceedings examine enabling technologies of sensors, devices and systems that optimize the acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, retrieval, use of biomedical and health information as well as to report novel clinical applications of health information systems and the deployment of m-Health, e-Health, u-Health, p-Health and Telemedicine.

This clear-sighted volume introduces the concept of "disruptive cooperation"- transformative partnerships between the health and technology sectors to eliminate widespread healthcare problems such as inequities, waste, and inappropriate care. Emphasizing the most pressing issues of a world growing older with long-term chronic illness, it unveils a new framework for personalized, integrative service based in mobile technologies. Coverage analyzes social aspects of illness and health, clinically robust uses of health data, and wireless and wearable applications in intervention, prevention, and health promotion. And case studies from digital health innovators illustrate opportunities for coordinating the service delivery, business, research/science, and policy sectors to promote healthier aging worldwide. Included among the topics: Cooperation in aging services technologies The quantified self, wearables, and the tracking revolution Smart healthy cities: public-private partnerships Beyond silos to data analytics for population health Cooperation for building secure standards for health data Peer-to-peer platforms for physicians in underserved areas: a human rights approach to social media in medicine Disruptive Cooperation in Digital Health will energize digital health and healthcare professionals in both non-profit and for-profit settings. Policymakers and public health professionals with an interest in innovation policy should find it an inspiring ideabook.

Since its inception 14 years ago, CAPRISA has conducted numerous clinical studies that have influenced international TB-HIV treatment guidelines as well as HIV prevention through innovations in the microbicide and vaccine fields. This book provides a historical account of how each of CAPRISA's high impact studies was created, developed, implemented, analysed and communicated. In doing so, the reader is taken on a journey that provides glimpses into the genesis of research ideas and how this ultimately leads to a range of HIV prevention and treatment studies that have impacted the global response to the HIV and TB epidemics. Comprised of 5 sections, the book details the following: HIV epidemic in South Africa and the establishment of a research centre to undertake clinical, epidemiological and laboratory research on HIV. CAPRISA's clinical trials on HIV and HSV-2 prevention. These studies investigated the impact of tenofovir gel as topical antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), implementation of topical PrEP through family planning clinics, conditional cash incentives for HIV prevention, HIV vaccines, and passive immunisation with broadly neutralising antibodies. CAPRISA's research on the treatment of HIV and TB co-infection. A review of the major scientific findings from the CAPRISA studies on acute infection and genital mucosal immunology. Essential support activities for the conduct of clinical trials, including research laboratories and pharmacies, as well as establishing effective communication and sustainable structures for community engagement to maintain effective and respectful partnerships with participating communities. The book concludes with a chapter about the challenges facing future HIV prevention and treatment trials. The CAPRISA Clinical Trials: HIV Treatment and Prevention is a resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, health care providers, doctors, decision-makers and researchers who are seeking guidance and insights on clinical trials - their creation, conduct and impact.

This book highlights the interdisciplinary study of cognition, mind and behavior from an information processing perspective, and describes related applications to health informatics. The respective chapters address health problem-solving and education, decision support systems, user-centered interfaces, and the design and use of controlled medical terminologies. Reflecting cutting-edge research on computational methods - including theory, algorithms, numerical simulation, error and uncertainty analysis, and their applications - the book offers a valuable resource for doctoral students and researchers in the fields of Computer Science and Engineering.

Bioinformatics Algorithms: Design and Implementation in Python provides a comprehensive book on many of the most important bioinformatics problems, putting forward the best algorithms and showing how to implement them. The book focuses on the use of the Python programming language and its algorithms, which is quickly becoming the most popular language in the bioinformatics field. Readers will find the tools they need to improve their knowledge and skills with regard to algorithm development and implementation, and will also uncover prototypes of bioinformatics applications that demonstrate the main principles underlying real world applications.

This unique collection of chapters from world experts on person-centered outcome (PCO) measures addresses the following critical questions: Can individual experiences be represented in measurements that do not reduce unique differences to meaningless uniformity? How person-centric are PCO measures? Are PCO measurements capable of delivering the kind of quality assured quantification required for high-stakes decision making? Are PCO measures likely to support improved health care delivery? Have pivotal clinical studies failed to deliver treatments for diseases because of shortcomings in the PCO measures used? Are these shortcomings primarily matters of precision and meaningfulness? Or is the lack of common languages for communicating outcomes also debilitating to quality improvement, research, and the health care economy? Three key issues form an urgent basis for further investigation. First, the numbers generated by PCO measures are increasingly used as the central dependent variables upon which high stakes decisions are made. The rising profile of PCO measures places new demands for higher quality information from scale and test construction, evaluation, selection, and interpretation. Second, PCO measurement science has well-established lessons to be learned from those who have built and established the science over many decades. Finally, the goal in making a PCO measurement is to inform outcome management. As such, it is vitally important that key stakeholders understand that, over the last half century, developments in psychometrics have refocused measurement on illuminating clinically important individual differences in the context of widely reproduced patterns of variation in health and functioning, comparable scale values for quality improvement, and practical explanatory models. This book's audience includes anyone interested in person-centered care, including healthcare researchers and practitioners, policy makers, pharmaceutical industry representatives, clinicians, patient advocates, and metrologists. This is an open access book.

Computer Vision for Assistive Healthcare describes how advanced computer vision techniques provide tools to support common human needs, such as mental functioning, personal mobility, sensory functions, daily living activities, image processing, pattern recognition, machine learning and how language processing and computer graphics cooperate with robotics to provide such tools. Users will learn about the emerging computer vision techniques for supporting mental functioning, algorithms for analyzing human behavior, and how smart interfaces and virtual reality tools lead to the development of advanced rehabilitation systems able to perform human action and activity recognition. In addition, the book covers the technology behind intelligent wheelchairs, how computer vision technologies have the potential to assist blind people, and about the computer vision-based solutions recently employed for safety and health monitoring.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Health Information Science, HIS 2017, held in Moscow, Russia, in October 2017. The 11 full papers and 7 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers feature multidisciplinary research results in health information science and systems that support health information management and health service delivery. They relate to all aspects of the conference scope, such as medical/health/biomedicine information resources such as patient medical records, devices and equipments, software and tools to capture, store, retrieve, process, analyze, and optimize the use of information in the health domain; data management, data mining, and knowledge discovery, management of publichealth, examination of standards, privacy and security issues; computer visualization and artificial intelligence for computer aided diagnosis; development of new architectures and applications for health information systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the International Conference for Smart Health, ICSH 2017, held in Hong Kong, China,in June 2017.The 18 full papers and 13 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selectedfrom 38 submissions. They focus on studies on the principles, approaches, models, frameworks, new applications, and effects of using novel information technology to address healthcare problems and improve social welfare.

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of the First International Workshop on Graphs in Biomedical Image Analysis, GRAIL 2017, the 6th International Workshop on Mathematical Foundations of Computational Anatomy, MFCA 2017, and the Third International Workshop on Imaging Genetics, MICGen 2017, held in conjunction with the 20th International Conference on Medical Imaging and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2017, in Quebec City, QC, Canada, in September 2017. The 7 full papers presented at GRAIL 2017, the 10 full papers presented at MFCA 2017, and the 5 full papers presented at MICGen 2017 were carefully reviewed and selected. The GRAIL papers cover a wide range of graph based medical image analysis methods and applications, including probabilistic graphical models, neuroimaging using graph representations, machine learning for diagnosis prediction, and shape modeling. The MFCA papers deal with theoretical developments in non-linear image and surface registration in the context of computational anatomy. The MICGen papers cover topics in the field of medical genetics, computational biology and medical imaging.

This book provides a review of essential research on urinary tract infections (UTIs), as well as a broader perspective on methodologies adopted for the isolation and identification of the bacteria from urine samples of pregnant and non-pregnant women on the basis of their cultural, morphological and biochemical characteristics. The identification is extended to the strain level by means of molecular identification involving BLAST as a bioinformatics tool. The book also addresses the roles of various other bioinformatics tools for tracing the phylogenetic tree and conservation studies among the bacteriocin of the identified bacteria. Lastly, it assesses the antibiotics resistance patterns of these isolates.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in signal quality assessment techniques for physiological signals, and chiefly focuses on ECG (electrocardiography) and PPG (photoplethysmography) signals obtained from wearable sensors in ambulatory clinical settings. It presents the techniques currently proposed by leading researchers, as well as examples using data from clinical trials on wearable sensors for inpatient and outpatient settings. In addition, the book assesses current approaches through a practical lens by discussing the implications of deploying the various proposed systems for clinical practices and health outcomes. As such, it will be of considerable interest to both graduate students and researchers working to develop personalized healthcare applications, as well as physiological sensor software and hardware developers.

This book reviews a number of issues including: Why data generated from POC machines are considered as Big Data. What are the challenges in storing, managing, extracting knowledge from data from POC devices? Why is it inefficient to use traditional data analysis with big data? What are the solutions for the mentioned issues and challenges? What type of analytics skills are required in health care? What big data technologies and tools can be used efficiently with data generated from POC devices? This book shows how it is feasible to store vast numbers of anonymous data and ask highly specific questions that can be performed in real-time to give precise and meaningful evidence to guide public health policy.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Technology in Bio- and Medical Informatics, ITBAM 2017, held in Lyon, France, in August 2017. The 3 revised full papers and 6 poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions. The papers address a broad range of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engineering and medical informatics.

In this book, a new approach for diagnosis and risk evaluation of ar-terial hypertension is introduced. The new approach was implement-ed as a hybrid intelligent system combining modular neural net-works and fuzzy systems. The different responses of the hybrid system are combined using fuzzy logic. Finally, two genetic algo-rithms are used to perform the optimization of the modular neural networks parameters and fuzzy inference system parameters. The experimental results obtained using the proposed method on real pa-tient data show that when the optimization is used, the results can be better than without optimization. This book is intended to be a refer-ence for scientists and physicians interested in applying soft compu-ting techniques, such as neural networks, fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms, in medical diagnosis, but also in general to classification and pattern recognition and similar problems.

This book examines the potential to deploy low-cost, three-dimensional printers known as RepRaps in developing countries to fabricate surgical instruments and medical supplies to combat the "global surgical burden of disease." Approximately two billion people in developing countries around the world lack access to essential surgical services, resulting in the avoidable deaths of millions of individuals each year. A fundamental barrier that inhibits access to surgical care in these locations is the lack of basic surgical instruments and supplies in healthcare facilities. RepRap printers are highly versatile 3D printers assembled from basic, domestically sourced materials that can fabricate low-cost surgical instruments on-site, ultimately enhancing the interventional capacity of healthcare facilities to treat patients. Rather than focusing on one specific field of interest, this book takes an integrative approach that incorporates topics and methods from multiple disciplines ranging from global health and development economics to materials science and applied engineering. These topics include the feasibility of using bio-based plastics to fabricate surgical instruments via 3D printing sustainably, the application of "frugal innovation and engineering" in resource-poor settings, and analyses related to the social returns on investment, barriers to entry, and current and future medical device supply-chain paradigms. In taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the reader can gain a holistic understanding of the multiple facets related to implementing medical device innovations in developing countries.

Computational Optical Biomedical Spectroscopy and Imaging covers recent discoveries and research in the field by some of the best inventors and researchers in the world. It also presents useful computational methods and applications used in optical biomedical spectroscopy and imaging. Topics covered include: New trends in immunohistochemical, genome, and metabolomics imaging Computer-aided diagnosis of interstitial lung diseases based on CT image analysis Functional near-infrared spectroscopy and its applications in neurosciences Applications of vibrational spectroscopic imaging in personal care studies Induced optical natural fluorescence spectroscopy for Giardia lamblia cysts Nanoimaging and polarimetric exploratory data analysis Fluorescence bioimaging with applications to chemistry Medical imaging instrumentation and techniques The book also discusses future applications, directions, opportunities, and challenges of optical biomedical spectroscopy and imaging in technical industry, academia, and government. This valuable resource introduces key concepts of computational methods used in optical biomedical spectroscopy and imaging in a manner that is easily understandable to beginners and experts alike.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computer Assisted and Robotic Endoscopy, CARE 2016, held in conjunction with MICCAI 2016, in Athens, Greece, in October 2016. The 11 revised full papers were carefully selected out of 13 initial submissions. The papers are organized on topical secttion such as computer vision, graphics, robotics, medical imaging, external tracking systems, medical device controls systems, information processing techniques, endoscopy planning and simulation.

By 2030, diabetes will be the 7th leading cause of premature mortality worldwide, according to the World Health Organisation. The application of nanotechnology in medicine holds many possible advantages and over the past few decades, there has been huge progress in its utilisation. Nanotechnology is widely applied for cancer treatment and other diseases but, the use of it for diabetes treatment is now starting to flourish. This book presents the latest developments of nanomedicine for the treatment of different facets of diabetes and related disorders. With a multidisciplinary approach, chapters focus on previously overlooked topics in glucose sensing, insulin delivery and secretion, bioimaging and transplantation of islets. This book is suitable for researchers of nanomedicine, nanotechnology and diabetes looking into the emergence of new approaches for the treatment of this life-threatening disease.

This book provides an introduction to decision analytic cost-effectiveness modelling, giving the theoretical and practical knowledge required to design and implement analyses that meet the methodological standards of health technology assessment organisations. The book guides you through building a decision tree and Markov model and, importantly, shows how the results of cost-effectiveness analyses are interpreted. Given the complex nature of cost-effectiveness modelling and the often unfamiliar language that runs alongside it, we wanted to make this book as accessible as possible whilst still providing a comprehensive, in-depth, practical guide that reflects the state of the art - that includes the most recent developments in cost-effectiveness modelling. Although the nature of cost effectiveness modelling means that some parts are inevitably quite technical, across the 13 chapters we have broken down explanations of theory and methods into bite-sized pieces that you can work through at your own pace; we have provided explanations of terms and methods as we use them. Importantly, the exercises and online workbooks allow you to test your skills and understanding as you go along.

The debate over eHealth is alive as never before. Supporters suggest that it will result in dramatic innovations in healthcare, including a giant leap towards patient-centered care, new opportunities to improve effectiveness, and enhanced wellness and quality of life. In addition, the growing market value of investments in health IT suggests that eHealth can offer at least a partial cure for the current economic stagnation.  Detractors counter these arguments by claiming that eHealth has already failed: the UK Department of Health has shut down the NHS National Program for IT, Google has discontinued its Health flagship, and doubts have arisen over privacy safeguards for both patients and medical professionals. This book briefly explains why caregivers, professionals, technicians, patients, politicians, and others should all consider themselves stakeholders in eHealth. It offers myth-busting responses to some ill-considered arguments from both sides of the trench, in the process allowing a fresh look at eHealth. In addition, it describes how the technical failures of previous eHealth systems can be avoided, examines the legal basis of eHealth, and discusses associated ethical issues.​  

Translational Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Methods for Personalized Medicine introduces integrative approaches in translational bioinformatics and systems biology to support the practice of personalized, precision, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine. Through the description of important cutting-edge technologies in bioinformatics and systems biology, readers may gain an essential understanding of state-of-the-art methodologies. The book discusses topics such as the challenges and tasks in translational bioinformatics; pharmacogenomics, systems biology, and personalized medicine; and the applicability of translational bioinformatics for biomarker discovery, epigenomics, and molecular dynamics. It also discusses data integration and mining, immunoinformatics, and neuroinformatics. With broad coverage of both basic scientific and clinical applications, this book is suitable for a wide range of readers who may not be scientists but who are also interested in the practice of personalized medicine.