Modern medicine generates, almost daily, huge amounts of heterogeneous data. For example, medical data may contain SPECT images, signals like ECG, clinical information like temperature, cholesterol levels, etc., as well as the physician's interpretation. Those who deal with such data understand that there is a widening gap between data collection and data comprehension. Computerized techniques are needed to help humans address this problem. This volume is devoted to the relatively young and growing field of medical data mining and knowledge discovery. As more and more medical procedures employ imaging as a preferred diagnostic tool, there is a need to develop methods for efficient mining in databases of images. Other significant features are security and confidentiality concerns. Moreover, the physician's interpretation of images, signals, or other technical data, is written in unstructured English which is very difficult to mine. This book addresses all these specific features.

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are expected to promote new applications for the ambulatory health monitoring of chronic patients and elderly population, aiming to improve their quality of life and independence. These networks are composed by wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) used for measuring physiological variables (e.g., glucose level in blood or body temperature) or controlling therapeutic devices (e.g., implanted insulin pumps). These nodes should exhibit a high degree of energy autonomy in order to extend their battery lifetime or even make the node supply to rely on harvesting techniques. Typically, the power budget of WSNs is dominated by the wireless link and, hence, many efforts have been directed during the last years toward the implementation of power efficient transceivers. Because of the short range (typically no more than a few meters) and low data rate (typically in between 10 kb/s and 1 Mb/s), simple communication protocols can be employed. One of these protocols, specifically tailored for WBAN applications, is the Bluetooth low energy (BLE) standard. This book describes the challenges and solutions for the design of ultra-low power transceivers for WBANs applications and presents the implementation details of a BLE transceiver prototype. Coverage includes not only the main concepts and architectures for achieving low power consumption, but also the details of the circuit design and its implementation in a standard CMOS technology.

This volume is a result of the fruitful and vivid discussions during the MedDecSup'2012 International Workshop bringing together a relevant body of knowledge, and new developments in the increasingly important field of medical informatics. This carefully edited book presents new ideas aimed at the development of intelligent processing of various kinds of medical information and the perfection of the contemporary computer systems for medical decision support. The book presents advances of the medical information systems for intelligent archiving, processing, analysis and search-by-content which will improve the quality of the medical services for every patient and of the global healthcare system. The book combines in a synergistic way theoretical developments with the practicability of the approaches developed and presents the last developments and achievements in medical informatics to a broad range of readers: engineers, mathematicians, physicians, and PhD students.

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 will be a terrific introduction to the field of clinical IT and clinical informatics" -- Kevin Johnson "Dr. Braunstein has done a wonderful job of exploring a number of key trends in technology in the context of the transformations that are occurring in our health care system" -- Bob Greenes "This insightful book is a perfect primer for technologists entering the health tech field." -- Deb Estrin "This book should be read by everyone.​" -- David Kibbe This book provides care providers and other non-technical readers with a broad, practical overview of the changing US healthcare system and the contemporary health informatics systems and tools that are increasingly critical to its new financial and clinical care paradigms. US healthcare delivery is dramatically transforming and informatics is at the center of the changes. Increasingly care providers must be skilled users of informatics tools to meet federal mandates and succeed under value-based contracts that demand higher quality and increased patient satisfaction but at lower cost. Yet, most have little formal training in these systems and technologies. Providers face system selection issues with little unbiased and insightful information to guide them. Patient engagement to promote wellness, prevention and improved outcomes is a requirement of Meaningful Use Stage 2 and is increasingly supported by mobile devices, apps, sensors and other technologies. Care providers need to provide guidance and advice to their patients and know how to incorporated as they generate into their care. The one-patient-at-a-time care model is being rapidly supplemented by new team-, population- and public health-based models of care. As digital data becomes ubiquitous, medicine is changing as research based on that data reveals new methods for earlier diagnosis, improved treatment and disease management and prevention. This book is clearly written, up-to-date and uses real world examples extensively to explain the tools and technologies and illustrate their practical role and potential impact on providers, patients, researchers, and society as a whole. 

The challenge of population aging requires innovative approaches to meet the needs of increasing numbers of older people. Emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as pervasive computing and ambient assistive technology, have considerable potential for enhancing the quality of life of many older people by providing additional safety and security while also supporting mobility, independent living, and social participation. The proposed book will be a landmark publication in the area of technology and aging that will serve as a statement of the current state-of-the-art and as a pointer to directions for future research and emerging technologies, products, and services.

This volume presents the proceedings of the first European Biomedical Engineering Conference for Young Investigators ENCY2015. It was in Budapest, from 28th to 30th May, 2015. The papers were assembled under the motto "Understanding complex living systems" and cover the topics sensors, image processing, bioinformatics, biomechanics, and modeling.

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.

ITiB'2016 is the 5th Conference on Information Technologies in Biomedicine organized by the Department of Informatics & Medical Equipment of Silesian University of Technology every other year. The Conference is under the auspices of the Committee on Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The meeting has become a recognized event that helps to bridge the gap between methodological achievements in engineering and clinical requirements in medical diagnosis, therapy, and rehabilitation. Mathematical information analysis, computer applications together with medical equipment and instruments have become standard tools underpinning the current rapid progress with developing Computational Intelligence. Members of academic societies of technical and medical background present their research results and clinical implementations. This proceedings (divided in 2 volumes) include the following sections: O Image Processing O Signal Processing O Medical Information System & Database O Ambient Assisted Living O Bioinformatics O Modeling & Simulation O Biomechatronics O Biomaterials

Advances in medicine have brought us the stethoscope, artificial kidneys, and computerized health records. They have also changed the doctor-patient relationship. This book explores how the technologies of medicine are created and how we respond to the problems and successes of their use. Stanley Joel Reiser, MD, walks us through the ways medical innovations exert their influence by discussing a number of selected technologies, including the X-ray, ultrasound, and respirator. Reiser creates a new understanding of thinking about how health care is practiced in the United States and thereby suggests new methods to effectively meet the challenges of living with technological medicine. As healthcare reform continues to be an intensely debated topic in America, Technological Medicine shows us the pros and cons of applying technological solutions health and illness.

Advances in the biomedical sciences, especially genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, taken together with the expanding use of electronic health records, are radically changing the IT infrastructure and software applications needed to support the transfer of knowledge from bench to bedside. Pediatric Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Pediatric Research describes the core resources in informatics necessary to support biomedical research programs and how these can best be integrated with hospital systems to receive clinical information that is necessary to conduct translational research.The focus is on the authors' recent practical experiences in establishing an informatics infrastructure in a large research-intensive children's hospital. This book is intended for translational researchers and informaticians in pediatrics, but can also serve as a guide to all institutions facing the challenges of developing and strengthening informatics support for biomedical research. The first section of the book discusses important technical challenges underlying computer-based pediatric research, while subsequent sections discuss informatics applications that support biobanking and a broad range of research programs. Pediatric Biomedical Informatics provides practical insights into the design, implementation, and utilization of informatics infrastructures to optimize care and research to benefit children. Dr. John Hutton is the Vice President and Director of Biomedical Informatics at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA. He is also Professor of Pediatrics and Associate Dean for Information Services at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive yet concise overview of the challenges and opportunities presented by the use of big data in healthcare. The respective chapters address a range of aspects: from health management to patient safety; from the human factor perspective to ethical and economic considerations, and many more. By providing a historical background on the use of big data, and critically analyzing current approaches together with issues and challenges related to their applications, the book not only sheds light on the problems entailed by big data, but also paves the way for possible solutions and future research directions. Accordingly, it offers an insightful reference guide for health information technology professionals, healthcare managers, healthcare practitioners, and patients alike, aiding them in their decision-making processes; and for students and researchers whose work involves data science-related research issues in healthcare.

CAR is a symposium and exhibition covering the impact of computer and communication systems applied to radiology and other medical disciplines, which use digital imaging for diagnosis and therapy planning. CAR '93 also provides tutorials, but more emphasis is given to a broad variety of specific problems related to medical/technical issues in digital imaging. This is achieved through in-depth presentations of results of current medical imaging projects on a worldwide basis.

Network Science is the emerging field concerned with the study of large, realistic networks. This interdisciplinary endeavor, focusing on the patterns of interactions that arise between individual components of natural and engineered systems, has been applied to data sets from activities as diverse as high-throughput biological experiments, online trading information, smart-meter utility supplies, and pervasive telecommunications and surveillance technologies. This unique text/reference provides a fascinating insight into the state of the art in network science, highlighting the commonality across very different areas of application and the ways in which each area can be advanced by injecting ideas and techniques from another. The book includes contributions from an international selection of experts, providing viewpoints from a broad range of disciplines. It emphasizes networks that arise in nature-such as food webs, protein interactions, gene expression, and neural connections-and in technology-such as finance, airline transport, urban development and global trade. Topics and Features: begins with a clear overview chapter to introduce this interdisciplinary field; discusses the classic network science of fixed connectivity structures, including empirical studies, mathematical models and computational algorithms; examines time-dependent processes that take place over networks, covering topics such as synchronisation, and message passing algorithms; investigates time-evolving networks, such as the World Wide Web and shifts in topological properties (connectivity, spectrum, percolation); explores applications of complex networks in the physical and engineering sciences, looking ahead to new developments in the field. Researchers and professionals from disciplines as varied as computer science, mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, neuroscience, epidemiology, and the social sciences will all benefit from this topical and broad overview of current activities and grand challenges in the unfolding field of network science.

Medical Informatics (MI) is an emerging interdisciplinary science. This book deals with the application of computational intelligence in MI. Addressing the various issues of medical informatics using different computational intelligence approaches is the novelty of this edited volume. This volume comprises of 15 chapters selected on the basis of fundamental ideas/concepts including an introductory chapter giving the fundamental definitions and some important research challenges.

Improving Healthcare: A Dose of Competition systematically examines the American health care system from a competition-oriented perspective. The volume surveys the performance of each major sector of the health care system, and identifies impediments to more effective competition. Improving Healthcare examines such issues as competition v. regulation, public and private sector approaches to health care financing, cross-subsidies, licensure, provider market concentration, financial and clinical integration, payment for performance, quality, pharmacy benefit managers, direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals, certificates of need, mandates, unionization, the significance of organizational status (nonprofit v. for-profit), and the role of antitrust and consumer protection in health care. It offers concrete recommendations to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of the American health care marketplace.

Gabriel Waksman Institute of Structural Molecular Biology, Birkbeck and University College London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom Address for correspondence: Professor Gabriel Waksman Institute of Structural Molecular Biology Birkbeck and University College London Malet Street London WC1E 7H United Kingdom Email: g. waksman@bbk. ac. uk and g. waksman@ucl. ac. uk Phone: (+44) (0) 207 631 6833 Fax: (+44) (0) 207 631 6833 URL: http://people. cryst. bbk. ac. uk/?ubcg54a Gabriel Waksman is Professor of Structural Molecular Biology at the Institute of Structural Molecular Biology at UCL/Birkbeck, of which he is also the director. Before joining the faculty of UCL and Birkbeck, he was the Roy and Diana Vagelos Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis (USA). The rapidly evolving ?eld of protein science has now come to realize the ubiquity and importance of protein-protein interactions. It had been known for some time that proteins may interact with each other to form functional complexes, but it was thought to be the property of only a handful of key proteins. However, with the advent of hi- throughput proteomics to monitor protein-protein interactions at an organism level, we can now safely state that protein-protein interactions are the norm and not the exception.

The pervasive healthcare system focus towards achieving two specific goals: the availability of eHealth applications and medical information anywhere and anytime and the invisibility of computing. Furthermore, pervasive health system encompasses new types of sensing and communication of health information as well as new type of interactions among health providers and people, among patients, among patients and researchers and patients and corporations. This book aims at promoting the discussion on current trends in technologies and concepts that help integrate health monitoring and healthcare more seamlessly to our everyday lives, regardless of space and time, but also present cutting edge perspectives and visions to highlight future development. The book presents not only the state of the art technologies and solutions to tackle the critical challenges faced by the building and development of the pervasive health system but also potential impact on society at social, medical and technological level.

This is the first book to cover every angle in the clinical application of biologics. Readers will not only find that all of the biologics currently approved for clinical use are delineated in a standardized way, but also the "differential therapy" with biologics in fields including dermatology and neurology is described in detail and summarized in treatment algorithms. Shorter sections on biologic biotechnology as well as safety and regulatory issues complement the more clinically-oriented central chapters.

This volumes presents the proceedings of ICIBEL 2015, organized by the Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME) under Innovative Technology Research Cluster, University of Malaya. It was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 6-8 December 2015. The ICIBEL 2015 conference promotes the latest researches and developments related to the integration of the Engineering technology in medical fields and life sciences. This includes the latest innovations, research trends and concerns, challenges and adopted solution in the field of medical engineering and life sciences.

IT in Pharmacy: An Integrated Approach aims to describe and discuss the major areas of pharmacy IT innovation (e-prescribing, drug databases, electronic patient records, clinical decision support, pharmacy management systems, robots and automation etc) from a systems and a professional perspective. It will also consider how the areas of pharmacy IT link together and can be used to enable and develop pharmacy professional practice. The book will examine pharmacy IT from an international perspective, taking into account all parts of the world where IT systems are used in pharmacy practice - namely - North America, the UK, Western Europe and Australia - and will compare pharmacy IT in the different regions. This book is from the author of Principles of Electronic Prescribing (Springer, 2008)

This volume covers some of the topics that are related to the rapidly growing field of biomedical informatics. In June 11-12, 2010 a workshop entitled 'Optimization and Data Analysis in Biomedical Informatics' was organized at The Fields Institute. Following this event invited contributions were gathered based on the talks presented at the workshop, and additional invited chapters were chosen from world's leading experts. In this publication, the authors share their expertise in the form of state-of-the-art research and review chapters, bringing together researchers from different disciplines and emphasizing the value of mathematical methods in the areas of clinical sciences. This work is targeted to applied mathematicians, computer scientists, industrial engineers, and clinical scientists who are interested in exploring emerging and fascinating interdisciplinary topics of research. It is designed to further stimulate and enhance fruitful collaborations between scientists from different disciplines.

This volume presents the latest research in Virtual Reality (VR), as it is being applied in psychotherapy, rehabilitation, and the analysis of behaviour for neurological assessment. This book will be of value to anyone already in the field and to those who are interested in the development of VR systems for therapeutic purposes. The contents include: * The latest literature reviews on VR in psychotherapy, psychological wellbeing, and rehabilitation * VR and cognitive behavior therapy * Increasing presence in VR for effective exposure therapy and treatment of anxiety disorders * VR military training for managing combat stress and preventing post traumatic stress * VR, mixed reality systems, and games for stroke rehabilitation * VR systems for improving vision in children with amblyopia * Therapeutic play in virtual environments * Healing potential of online virtual worlds such as Second Life * Neuropsychological assessment using virtual environments * Detailed accounts on how VR systems are designed, implemented, and best evaluated * Discussions of limitations, problems, and ethical concerns using VR in mental and physical therapy

The international symposium CAR '89 (the third in a row), held in Berlin in June 1989, was again focused on the fundamental principles of applying Computer Assisted Radiology (CAR) in health care. The book contains all the presentations of the symposium and this provides an up-to-date, complete state-of-the-art-report of this interdisciplinary subject, in which physicians, engineers, physicists and computer scientists cooperate.

The book, to the best of the editor's knowledge, is the first text of its kind that presents both the traditional and the modern aspects of 'dialysis modeling and control' in a clear, insightful and highly comprehensive writing style. It provides an in-depth analysis of the mathematical models and algorithms, and demonstrates their applications in real world problems of significant complexity. The material of this book can be useful to advanced undergraduate and graduate biomedical engineering students. This text provides an important focus on helping students understand how new concepts are related to and rely upon concepts previously presented. Also, researchers and practitioners in the field of dialysis, control systems, soft computing may benefit from it. The material is organized into 32 chapters. This book explains concepts in a clear, matter-of-fact style. In order to make the reader aware of the applied side of the subject, the book includes: Chapter openers with a chapter outline, chapter objectives, key terms list, and abstract. Solved numerical examples to illustrate the application of a particular concept, and also to encourage good problem-solving skills. More than 1000 questions to give the readers a better insight to the subject. Case studies to understand the significance of the joint usage of the dialysis modeling and control techniques in interesting problems of the real world. Summation and deepening of authors' works in recent years in the fields related. So the readers can get latest information, including latest research surveys and references related to the subjects through this book. It is hoped that through this book the reader will: Understand the fundamentals of dialysis systems and recognize when it is advantageous to use them. Gain an understanding of the wide range of dialysis modeling techniques Be able to use soft computing techniques in dialysis applications. Gain familiarity with online systems of dialysis and their applications. Recognize the relationship between conceptual understanding and problem-solving approaches. The editors would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors for their contributions to this textbook. Without the hard work of our contributors, this book would have not been possible. The encouragement and patience of series Editor, Thomas Ditzinger is very much appreciated. Without his continuous help and assistance during the entire course of this project, the production of the book would have taken a great deal longer.