This volume presents the proceedings of the 3rd ICBHI which took place in Thessaloniki on 18-21 November, 2017.The area of biomedical and health informatics is exploding at all scales. The developments in the areas of medical devices, eHealth and personalized health as enabling factors for the evolution of precision medicine are quickly developing and demand the development of new scaling tools, integration frameworks and methodologies.

Volumetric, or three-dimensional, digital imaging now plays a vital role in many areas of research such as medicine and geology. Medical images acquired by tomographic scanners for instance are often given as a stack of cross-sectional image slices. Such images are called ‘volumetric’ because they depict objects in their entire three-dimensional extent rather than just as a projection onto a two-dimensional image plane. Since huge amounts of volumetric data are continually being produced in many places around the world, techniques for their automatic analysis become ever more important. Written by a computer vision specialist, this clear, detailed account of volumetric image analysis techniques provides a practical approach to the field including the following topics:

• preprocessing of volumetric images
• obtaining quantitative measurements in volumetric images
• detection and modelling of objects in volumetric images

Medical Ventilator System Basics: A clinical guide is a user-friendly guide to the basic principles and the technical aspects of mechanical ventilation and modern complex ventilator systems. Designed to be used at the bed side by busy clinicians, this book demystifies the internal workings of ventilators so they can be used with confidence for day-to-day needs, for advanced ventilation, as well as for patients who are difficult to wean off the ventilator. Using clear language, the author guides the reader from pneumatic principles to the anatomy and physiology of respiration. Split into 16 easy to read chapters, this guide discusses the system components such as the ventilator, breathing circuit, and humidifier, and considers the major ventilator functions, including the control parameters and alarms. Including over 200 full-colour illustrations and practical troubleshooting information you can rely on, regardless of ventilator models or brands, this guide is an invaluable quick-reference resource for both experienced and inexperienced users.

This book introduces the field of Health Web Science and presents methods for information gathering from written social media data. It explores the availability and utility of the personal medical information shared on social media platforms and determines ways to apply this largely untapped information source to healthcare systems and public health monitoring. Introducing an innovative concept for integrating social media data with clinical data, it addresses the crucial aspect of combining experiential data from social media with clinical evidence, and explores how the variety of available social media content can be analyzed and implemented. The book tackles a range of topics including social media's role in healthcare, the gathering of shared information, and the integration of clinical and social media data. Application examples of social media for health monitoring, along with its usage in patient treatment are also provided. The book also considers the ethical and legal issues of gathering and utilizing social media data, along with the risks and challenges that must be considered when integrating social media data into healthcare choices. With an increased interest internationally in E-Health, Health 2.0, Medicine 2.0 and the recent birth of the discipline of Web Science, this book will be a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners investigating this emerging topic.

The main message of this book is that people should be on their guard against both scare stories about risks to health, and claims for miracle cures of medical conditions. In the 21st century hardly a day passes without another article appearing in the media about a new treatment for a particular disease, new ways of improving our health by changing our lifestyle or new foodstuffs that claim to increase (or decrease) the risk of heart disease, cancer and the like. But how should the general public react to such claims, given that some of the journalists writing them focus on the sensational rather than the mundane and often have no qualms about sacrificing accuracy and honesty for the sake of a good story? Perhaps the wisest initial response is one of healthy scepticism, followed by an attempt to discover more about the details of the studies behind the reports. But most people are not, and have little desire to become experts in health research. By reading this book, however, these non-experts can, with minimal effort, learn enough about the scientific method to differentiate between those health claims, warnings and lifestyle recommendations that have some merit and those that are unproven or simply dishonest. So if you want to know if ginseng can really help with your erectile dysfunction, if breast cancer screening is all that politicians claim it to be, if ECT for depression is really a horror treatment and should be banned, if using a mobile phone can lead to brain tumours and how to properly evaluate the evidence from health and lifestyle related studies, then this is the book for you.

This book presents the proceedings of the "Innovations in Biomedical Engineering IBE'2016" Conference held on October 16-18, 2016 in Poland, discussing recent research on innovations in biomedical engineering. The past decade has seen the dynamic development of more and more sophisticated technologies, including biotechnologies, and more general technologies applied in the area of life sciences. As such the book covers the broadest possible spectrum of subjects related to biomedical engineering innovations. Divided into four parts, it presents state-of-the-art achievements in: * engineering of biomaterials, * modelling and simulations in biomechanics, * informatics in medicine * signal analysis The book helps bridge the gap between technological and methodological engineering achievements on the one hand and clinical requirements in the three major areas diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation on the other.

Integrative and translational methodologies and frameworks have transformed modern biomedical research and the delivery of clinical care. This shift has been manifested in a number of ways, including the rapid growth and increasing availability of high-throughput bio-molecular instrumentation and analysis platforms, innovative clinical research programs intended to accelerate knowledge translation, and initial efforts to deliver personalized healthcare informed by the genomic profiles of patients. A common theme of reports and publications concerned with such transformative changes in the biomedical and healthcare domains is concerned with the challenges and opportunities related to the collection, management, integration, analysis, and dissemination of large-scale, heterogeneous biomedical data sets. In particular, the absence of well-established and adopted theoretical and practical frameworks intended to address such needs is a major impediment to the realization of translational and knowledge-driven healthcare, in which the best possible scientific evidence is used to inform the care of every patient. In this vacuum, the development of integrative clinical or translational research paradigms is significantly limited by the propagation of both data and expertise silos. This book details for the first time the current state of this extremely potent area of healthcare innovation and policy and defines the interaction between clinical/translational science and biomedical informatics.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the fundamentals of nanotoxicity modeling and its implications for the development of novel nanomedicines. It lays out the fundamentals of nanotoxicity modeling for an array of nanomaterial systems, ranging from carbon-based nanoparticles to noble metals, metal oxides, and quantum dots. The author illustrates how molecular (classical mechanics) and atomic (quantum mechanics) modeling approaches can be applied to bolster our understanding of many important aspects of this critical nanotoxicity issue. Each chapter is organized by types of nanomaterials for practicality, making this an ideal book for senior undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in nanotechnology, chemistry, physics, molecular biology, and computer science. It is also of interest to academic and industry professionals who work on nanodrug delivery and related biomedical applications, and aids readers in their biocompatibility assessment efforts in the coming age of nanotechnology. This book also provides a critical assessment of advanced molecular modeling and other computational techniques to nanosafety, and highlights current and future biomedical applications of nanoparticles in relation to nanosafety.

This book defines the phenomenon of mHealth and its evolution, explaining why an understanding of mHealth is critical for decision makers, entrepreneurs and policy analysts who are pivotal to developing products that meet the collaborative health information needs of consumers and providers in a competitive and rapidly-changing environment. The book examines trends in mHealth and discusses how mHealth technologies offer opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, those who often are industry first-movers with regard to technology advancement. It also explores the changing dynamics and relationships among physicians, patients, insurers, regulators, managers, administrators, caregivers and others involved in the delivery of health services. The primary focus is on the ways in which mHealth technologies are revising and reshaping healthcare delivery systems in the United States and globally and how those changes are expected to change the ways in which the business of healthcare is conducted. mHealth: Transforming Healthcare consists of nine chapters that addresses key content areas, including history (to the extent that dynamic technologies have a history), projection of immediate evolution and consistent issues associated with health technology, such as security and information privacy and government and industry regulation. A major point of discussion addressed is whether mHealth is a transient group of products and a passing patient encounter approach, or if it is the way much of our health care will be delivered in future years with incremental evolution to achieve sustainable innovation of health technologies.

Recent achievements in hardware and software developments have enabled the introduction of a revolutionary technology: in-memory data management. This technology supports the flexible and extremely fast analysis of massive amounts of data, such as diagnoses, therapies, and human genome data. This book shares the latest research results of applying in-memory data management to personalized medicine, changing it from computational possibility to clinical reality. The authors provide details on innovative approaches to enabling the processing, combination, and analysis of relevant data in real-time. The book bridges the gap between medical experts, such as physicians, clinicians, and biological researchers, and technology experts, such as software developers, database specialists, and statisticians. Topics covered in this book include - amongst others - modeling of genome data processing and analysis pipelines, high-throughput data processing, exchange of sensitive data and protection of intellectual property. Beyond that, it shares insights on research prototypes for the analysis of patient cohorts, topology analysis of biological pathways, and combined search in structured and unstructured medical data, and outlines completely new processes that have now become possible due to interactive data analyses. 

This book describes recent radiotherapy technologies including tools for measuring target position during radiotherapy and tracking-based delivery systems.  This book presents a customized prediction of respiratory motion with clustering from multiple patient interactions. The proposed method contributes to the improvement of patient treatments by considering breathing pattern for the accurate dose calculation in radiotherapy systems. Real-time tumor-tracking, where the prediction of irregularities becomes relevant, has yet to be clinically established. The statistical quantitative modeling for irregular breathing classification, in which commercial respiration traces are retrospectively categorized into several classes based on breathing pattern are discussed as well. The proposed statistical classification may provide clinical advantages to adjust the dose rate before and during the external beam radiotherapy for minimizing the safety margin. In the first chapter following the Introduction  to this book, we review three prediction approaches of respiratory motion: model-based methods, model-free heuristic learning algorithms, and hybrid methods. In the following chapter, we present a phantom study—prediction of human motion with distributed body sensors—using a Polhemus Liberty AC magnetic tracker. Next we describe respiratory motion estimation with hybrid implementation of extended Kalman filter. The given method assigns the recurrent neural network the role of the predictor and the extended Kalman filter the role of the corrector. After that, we present customized prediction of respiratory motion with clustering from multiple patient interactions. For the customized prediction, we construct the clustering based on breathing patterns of multiple patients using the feature selection metrics that are composed of a variety of breathing features. We have evaluated the new algorithm by comparing the prediction overshoot and the tracking estimation value. The experimental results of 448 patients’ breathing patterns validated the proposed irregular breathing classifier in the last chapter.

This book introduces approaches that have the potential to transform the daily practice of psychiatrists and psychologists. This includes the asynchronous communication between mental health care providers and clients as well as the automation of assessment and therapy. Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers. The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication). Speech and language are particularly interesting from the viewpoint of psychological assessment. For instance, depression may change the characteristics of voice in individuals and these changes can be detected by a special form of speech analysis. Computational screening methods that utilize speech and language can detect subtle changes and alert clinicians as well as individuals and caregivers. The use of online technologies in mental health, however, poses ethical problems that will occupy concerned individuals, governments and the wider public for some time. Assuming that these ethical problems can be solved, it should be possible to diagnose and treat mental health disorders online (excluding the use of medication).

Recent years have seen the development of two significant trends namely: the adoption of some Traditional Chinese Medicine Practices into mainstream Allopathic Western Medicine and the advent of the internet and broad band networks leading to an increased interest in the use of Telemedicine to deliver medical services. In this book, we see the convergence of these two trends leading to a semantically-based TCM Telemedicine system that utilizes an ontology to provide sharable knowledge in the TCM realm to achieve this. The underpinning research required the development of a three-layer architecture and an Ontology of the TCM knowledge. As TCM knowledge like all medical knowledge is not frozen in time it was important to develop an approach that would allow evolution of the Ontology when new evidence became available. In order for the system to be practically grounded it was important to work with an industry partner PuraPharm Group/HerbMiners Informatics Limited. This partnership was initiated through Professor Allan Wong and the Chairman of PuraPharm Group Mr. Abraham Chan. This led to the system being utilized in more than 20 Mobile Clinics in Hong Kong and 300 Hospitals in China. In order for these different deployments of the system to be coherent with the main core Ontology, it was necessary for us to develop an Ontology Driven Software System Generation approach.

Medical Imaging Informatics provides an overview of this growing discipline, which stems from an intersection of biomedical informatics, medical imaging, computer science and medicine. Supporting two complementary views, this volume explores the fundamental technologies and algorithms that comprise this field, as well as the application of medical imaging informatics to subsequently improve healthcare research. Clearly written in a four part structure, this introduction follows natural healthcare processes, illustrating the roles of data collection and standardization, context extraction and modeling, and medical decision making tools and applications. Medical Imaging Informatics identifies core concepts within the field, explores research challenges that drive development, and includes current state-of-the-art methods and strategies.

This book focuses on the most recent advances in the application of visualization and simulation methods to understand the flow behavior of complex fluids used in biomedical engineering and other related fields. It shows the physiological flow behavior in large arteries, microcirculation, respiratory systems and in biomedical microdevices.

The book presents case studies from Africa, Asia and Latin America addressing global development issues in the fields of health, energy, ICT and urbanism in an interdisciplinary way. The book illustrates key issues at the interface of technology, human, social, and economic development. Bringing together the best papers of the 2014 EPFL-UNESCO Conference on Technologies for Development, this book explores innovative technologies in the global South. It will be a valuable reference for researchers from engineering, natural sciences, information management, quantitative social sciences, and business faculties, as well as for development practitioners and policy makers. It shows the development potential of technologies, and discusses successful processes to develop and deploy them, as well how to evaluate their impact. The introduction to the book begins with a reflection on key issues regarding technologies for development. The following four sections focus on; (i) Innovative Technologies for Development, (ii) Open Source-Open Access-Open Innovation, (iii) Medical Technologies for the Global South, and (iv) Impact Assessment of Technologies for Development. Individual chapters explore issues such as a need for solid standards for newly developed technologies, how to successfully up-scale technology to a larger region, and how to involve private industry in the development of a technology.

During the last years computational methods lead to new approaches that can be applied within medical practice. Based on the tremendous advances in medical imaging and high-performance computing, virtual testing is able to help in medical decision processes or implant designs. Current challenges in medicine and engineering are related to the application of computational methods to clinical medicine and the study of biological systems at different scales. Additionally manufacturers will be able to use computational tools and methods to predict the performance of their medical devices in virtual patients. The physical and animal testing procedures could be reduced by virtual prototyping of medical devices. Here simulations can enhance the performance of alternate device designs for a range of virtual patients. This will lead to a refinement of designs and to safer products. This book summarizes different aspects of approaches to enhance function, production, initialization and complications of different types of implants and related topics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society, WIS 2016, held in Tampere, Finland, in September 2016. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. With the core topic "Building Sustainable Health Ecosystems" WIS 2016 focused on innovations and fresh ideas in the cross-section of urban living, information society and health as understood in a wide sense. The papers presented in this volume are organized along the following seven broad topics: 1. Macro level considerations of e-health and welfare, 2.Welfare issues of children, youth, young elderly and seniors, 3. Analytics issues of eHealth and welfare, 4. National/regional initiatives in eHealth and welfare, and 5. Specific topics of eHealth. The papers in these topics span qualitative and quantitative analysis, empirical surveys, case studies as well as conceptual work.

Over the years, medical informatics has matured into a true scientific discipline. Fundamental and applied aspects are now taught in various fields of health, including medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing and public health. Medical informatics is also often included in the curricula of many other disciplines, including the life sciences, engineering and economics. Medical informatics is a complex and rapidly changing discipline. Relatively few books have been published on the subject, and they rapidly become obsolete. This book is the fruit of a collaborative effort between authors teaching medical informatics in France and others who are conducting research in this field. In addition, an international perspective was pursued, as reflected in the inclusion of various developments and actions in both the USA and Europe. This book is divided into 18 chapters, all of which include learning objectives, recommendations for further reading, exercises and bibliographic references.

A growing, aging population; the rise to epidemic proportions of various chronic diseases; competing, often overlapping medical technologies; and of course, skyrocketing costs compounded by waste and inefficiency - these are just a few of the multifarious challenges currently facing healthcare delivery. An unexpected source of solutions is being imported from the manufacturing sector: lean thinking. Lean Principles for Healthcare presents a conceptual framework, management principles, and practical tools for professionals tasked with designing and implementing modern, streamlined healthcare systems or overhauling faulty ones. Focusing on core components such as knowledge management, e-health, patient-centeredness, and collaborative care, chapters illustrate lean concepts in action across specialties (as diverse as nursing, urology, and emergency care) and around the globe. Extended case examples show health systems responding to consumer needs and provider realities with equal efficiency and effectiveness, and improved quality and patient outcomes. Further, contributors tackle the gamut of technological, medical, cultural, and business issues, among them: Initiatives of service-oriented architecture towards performance improvement Adapted lean thinking for emergency departments Lean thinking in dementia care through smart assistive technology Supporting preventive healthcare with persuasive services Value stream mapping for lean healthcare A technology mediated solution to reduce healthcare disparities Geared toward both how lean ideas can be carried out and how they are being used successfully in the real world, Lean Principles for Healthcare not only brings expert knowledge to healthcare managers and health services researchers but to all who have an interest in superior healthcare delivery.

This Brief provides a comprehensive introduction to the control of blood flow in the brain. Beginning with the basic physiology of autoregulation, the author goes on to discuss measurement techniques, mathematical models, methods of analysis, and relevant clinical conditions, all within this single volume. The author draws together this disparate field, and lays the groundwork for future research directions. The text gives an up-to-date review of the state of the art in cerebral autoregulation, which is particularly relevant as cerebral autoregulation moves from the laboratory to the bedside. Cerebral Autoregulation will be useful to researchers in the physical sciences such as mathematical biology, medical physics, and biomedical engineering whose work is concerned with the brain. Researchers in the medical sciences and clinicians dealing with the brain and blood flow, as well as industry professionals developing techniques such as ultrasound, MRI, and CT will also find this Brief of interest.

Modern Geometrical Machinery; 1 .1 Introduction; 1 .2 Smooth Manifolds; 1.2.1 Intuition Behind a Smooth Manifold; 1.2.2 Definition of a Smooth Manifold; 1.2.3 Smooth Maps Between Manifolds; 1.2.4 (Co)Tangent Bundles of a Smooth Manifold; 1.2.5 Tensor Fields and Bundles of a Smooth Manifold; 1.2.6 Lie Derivative on a Smooth Manifold; 1.2.7 Lie Groups and Associated Lie Algebras; 1.2.8 Lie Symmetries and Prolongations on Manifolds;1.2.9 Riemannian Manifolds; 1.2.10 Finsler Manifolds; 1.2.11 Symplectic Manifolds; 1.2.12 Complex and Kahler Manifolds; 1.2.13 Conformal Killing-Riemannian Geometry; 1.3 Fibre Bundles; 1.3.1 Intuition Behind a Fibre Bundle; 1.3.2 Definition of a Fibre Bundle;1.3.3 Vector and Affine Bundles; 1.3.4 Principal Bundles; 1.3.5 Multivector-Fields and Tangent-Valued Forms; 1.4 Jet Spaces; 1.4.1 Intuition Behind a Jet Space; 1.4.2 Definition of a 1-Jet Space; 1.4.3 Connections as Jet Fields; 1.4.4 Definition of a 2-Jet Space; 1.4.5 Higher-Order Jet Spaces; 1.4.6 Jets in Mechanics;1.4.7 Jets and Action Principle; 1.5 Path Integrals: Extending Smooth Geometrical Machinery; 1.5.1 Intuition Behind a Path Integral; 1.5.2 Path Integral History; 1.5.3 Standard Path-Integral Quantization; 1.5.4 Sum over Geometries/Topologies; 1.5.5 TQFT and Stringy Path Integrals; 2 Dynamics of High-Dimensional Nonlinear Systems; 2.1 Mechanical Systems; 2.1.1 Autonomous Lagrangian/Hamiltonian Mechanics; 2.1.2 Non-Autonomous Lagrangian/Hamiltonian Mechanics; 2.1.3 Semi-Riemannian Geometrical Dynamics; 2.1.4 Relativistic and Multi-Time Rheonomic Dynamics; 2.1.5 Geometrical Quantization; 2.2 Physical Field Systems; 2.2.1 n-Categorical Framework; 2.2.2 Lagrangian Field Theory on Fibre Bundles; 2.2.3 Finsler-Lagrangian Field Theory; 2.2.4 Hamiltonian Field Systems: Path-Integral Quantization; 2.2.5 Gauge Fields on Principal Connections; 2.2.6 Modern Geometrodynamics; 2.2.7 Topological Phase Transitions and Hamiltonian Chaos; 2.2.8 Topological Superstring Theory; 2.2.9 Turbulence and Chaos Field Theory; 2.3 Nonlinear Control Systems; 2.3.1 The Basis of Modern Geometrical Control;2.3.2 Geometrical Control of Mechanical Systems;2.3.3 Hamiltonian Optimal Control and Maximum Principle; 2.3.4 Path-Integral Optimal Control of Stochastic Systems; 2.4 Human-Like Biomechanics; 2.4.1 Lie Groups and Symmetries in Biomechanics; 2.4.2 Muscle-Driven Hamiltonian Biomechanics; 2.4.3 Biomechanical Functors; 2.4.4 Biomechanical Topology; 2.5 Neurodynamics; 2.5.1 Microscopic Neurodynamics and Quantum Brain; 2.5.2 Macroscopic Neurodynamics; 2.5.3 Oscillatory Phase Neurodynamics;2.5.4 Neural Path-Integral Model for the Cerebellum; 2.5.5 Intelligent Robot Control; 2.5.6 Brain-Like Control Functor in Biomechanics; 2.5.7 Concurrent and Weak Functorial Machines; 2.5.8 Brain-Mind Functorial Machines; 26 Psycho-Socio-Economic Dynamics; 2.6.1 Force-Field Psychodynamics; 2.6.2 Geometrical Dynamics of Human Crowd; 2.6.3 Dynamical Games on Lie Groups; 2.6.4 Nonlinear Dynamics of Option Pricing; 2.6.5 Command/Control in Human-Robot Interactions; 2.6.6 Nonlinear Dynamics of Complex Nets; 2.6.7 Complex Adaptive Systems: Common Characteristics; 2.6.8 FAM Functors and Real-Life Games; 2.6.9 Riemann-Finsler Approach to Information Geometry; 3 Appendix: Tensors and Functors; 3.1 Elements of Classical Tensor Analysis; 3.1.1 Transformation of Coordinates and Elementary Tensors; 3.1.2 Euclidean Tensors; 3. 1 .3 Tensor Derivatives on Riemannian Manifolds; 3.1.4 Tensor Mechanics in Brief; 3.1.5 The Covariant Force Law in Robotics and Biomechanics; 3.2 Categories and Functors; 3.2.1 Maps; 3.2.2 Categories; 3.2.3 Functors; 3.2.4 Natural Transformations; 3.2.5 Limits and Colimits; 3.2.6 The Adjunction; 3.2.7 ri-Categories; 3.2.8 Abelian Functorial Algebra; References; Index.

This text focuses on various factors associated with orphan diseases and the influence and role of health information technologies. Orphan diseases have not been adopted by the pharmaceutical industry because they provide little financial incentive to treat or prevent it. It is estimated that 6,000-7,000 orphan diseases exist today; as medical knowledge continues to expand, this number is likely to become much greater. The book highlights the opportunities and challenges in this increasingly important area. The book explores new avenues which are opened by information technologies and Health 2.0, and highlights also economic opportunities of orphan disease medicine. The editors of this new book have international experience and competencies in the key areas of patient empowerment, healthcare and clinical knowledge management, healthcare inequalities and disparities, rare diseases and patient advocacy.

Nanofiber Composite Materials for Biomedical Applications presents new developments and recent advances in nanofiber-reinforced composite materials and their use in biomedical applications, including biomaterial developments, drug delivery, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Unlike more conventional titles on composite materials, this book covers the most innovative new developments in nanofiber-based composites, including polymers, ceramics, and metals, with particular emphasis on their preparation and characterization methodology. Selected case studies illustrate new developments in clinical and preclinical use, making the information critical for the development of new medical materials and systems for use in human health care, and for the exploration of new design spaces based on these nanofibers. This book is essential reading for those working in biomedical science and engineering, materials science, nanoscience, biomedical nanotechnology, and biotechnology.