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.

The three-volume set LNCS 8673, 8674, and 8675 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2014, held in Boston, MA, USA, in September 2014. Based on rigorous peer reviews, the program committee carefully selected 253 revised papers from 862 submissions for presentation in three volumes. The 53 papers included in the third volume have been organized in the following topical sections: shape and population analysis; brain; diffusion MRI; and machine learning.

This publication identifies and discusses important challenges affecting eHealth in the EU and North America in the three areas of law, ethics and governance. It makes meaningful contributions to the eHealth discourse by suggesting solutions and making recommendations for good practice and potential ways forward. Legal challenges discussed include issues related to electronic medical records, telemedicine, the Internet and pharmaceutical drugs, healthcare information systems and medical liability. Ethical challenges focus on telehealth and service delivery in the home, Web 2.0 and the Internet, patient perceptions and ethical frameworks. Governance challenges focus on IT governance in healthcare, governance and decision-making in acute care hospitals, and different models of eHealth governance. The publication provides useful support materials and readings for persons active in developing current understandings of the legal, ethical and governance challenges involved in the eHealth context.

The three-volume set LNCS 8673, 8674, and 8675 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention, MICCAI 2014, held in Boston, MA, USA, in September 2014. Based on rigorous peer reviews, the program committee carefully selected 253 revised papers from 862 submissions for presentation in three volumes. The 100 papers included in the first volume have been organized in the following topical sections: microstructure imaging; image reconstruction and enhancement; registration; segmentation; intervention planning and guidance; oncology; and optical imaging.

Rapid progress in health research has led to generation of new knowledge and innovative practices in management of illness. This has resulted in a significant challenge for health professionals: if today we discovered a new therapy through research, when will this discovery be regularly prescribed or utilized to treat all patients suffering from this condition? Knowledge translation is the non-linear and often complicated process of translating knowledge into routine health practices. Technology enabled knowledge translation (TEKT) is the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to accelerate knowledge translation. With the ubiquity of the internet, the proliferation of different approaches in communication and social networking, and the continuously improving technologies from netbooks to smartphones, there are rich opportunities for TEKT in health education, service delivery, and research.

New computerized approaches to various problems have become critically important in healthcare. Computer assisted diagnosis has been extended towards a support of the clinical treatment. Mathematical information analysis, computer applications together with medical equipment and instruments have become standard tools underpinning the current rapid progress with developing Computational Intelligence. We are witnessing a radical change as technologies have been integrated into systems that address the core of medicine, including patient care in ambulatory and in-patient setting, disease prevention, health promotion, rehabilitation and home care. Computer aided diagnosis and treatment systems increase the objectivity of the analysis and speed up the response to pathological changes.

This book presents a variety of state-of-the-art information technology and its applications to the networked environment to allow robust computerized approaches to be introduced throughout the healthcare enterprise. Patient's safety and shortening of the rehabilitation time requires a more rapid development of minimally invasive surgery supported by image navigation techniques. Home care, remote rehabilitation assistance, safety of the elderly requires new areas to be explored in telemedicine and telegeriatrics.

This book is a great reference tool for scientists who deal with problems of designing and implementing processing tools employed in systems that assist clinicians in patient diagnosis and treatment."

New computerized approaches to various problems have become critically important in healthcare. Computer assisted diagnosis has been extended towards a support of the clinical treatment. Mathematical information analysis, computer applications have become standard tools underpinning the current rapid progress with developing Computational Intelligence. A computerized support in the analysis of patient information and implementation of a computer aided diagnosis and treatment systems, increases the objectivity of the analysis and speeds up the response to pathological changes.

This book presents a variety of state-of-the-art information technology and its applications to the networked environment to allow robust computerized approaches to be introduced throughout the healthcare enterprise. Image analysis and its application is the traditional part that deals with the problem of data processing, recognition and classification. Bioinformatics has become a dynamically developed field of computer assisted biological data analysis.

This book is a great reference tool for scientists who deal with problems of designing and implementing processing tools employed in systems that assist the radiologists and biologists in patient data analysis.

This book provides a broad overview of the topic Bioinformatics with focus on data, information and knowledge. From data acquisition and storage to visualization, ranging through privacy, regulatory and other practical and theoretical topics, the author touches several fundamental aspects of the innovative interface between Medical and Technology domains that is Biomedical Informatics. Each chapter starts by providing a useful inventory of definitions and commonly used acronyms for each topic and throughout the text, the reader finds several real-world examples, methodologies and ideas that complement the technical and theoretical background. This new edition includes new sections at the end of each chapter, called "future outlook and research avenues," providing pointers to future challenges. At the beginning of each chapter a new section called "key problems", has been added, where the author discusses possible traps and unsolvable or major problems.

Computer technology has developed remarkably in the field of neurosurgery during the past 10 to 20 years. Great achievements have been made recently in neuroimaging techniques and computer technology for neuronavigation, from frameless, armless systems to robotic microscopes. Contained in the present volume are all the papers presented at the International Symposium on Computer-Assisted Neurosurgery and selected papers presented at the 6th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Society of Computers in Neurosurgery, which were held in Kobe, Japan, on January 24-26, 1997. This volume is a comprehensive description and review of current technical ad vancements in computer-assisted neurosurgery, with a special focus on advanced intraoperative neuroimaging, various neuronavigation system, robotic microscopes, and strategies for preoperative and intraoperative surgical planning using high-power workstations with three-dimensional software. We express our thanks to the contributors for their participation and cooperation, and to Springer-Verlag for personal and technical assistance in publishing this work. We sincerely hope that this volume will contribute to improving neurosurgical technology and outcomes.

Biomarker discovery is an important area of biomedical research that may lead to significant breakthroughs in disease analysis and targeted therapy. Biomarkers are biological entities whose alterations are measurable and are characteristic of a particular biological condition. Discovering, managing, and interpreting knowledge of new biomarkers are challenging and attractive problems in the emerging field of biomedical informatics.

This volumeis a collection of state-of-the-artresearch into the application of data mining to the discovery and analysis of new biomarkers. Presenting new results, models and algorithms, the included contributions focus on biomarker data integration, information retrieval methods, and statistical machine learning techniques.

This volume is intended for students, and researchers in bioinformatics, proteomics, and genomics, as wellengineers and applied scientistsinterested in the interdisciplinary application of data mining techniques."

In nowadays aging society, many people require mobility assistance. Sometimes, assistive devices need a certain degree of autonomy when users' disabilities difficult manual control. However, clinicians report that excessive assistance may lead to loss of residual skills and frustration. Shared control focuses on deciding when users need help and providing it. Collaborative control aims at giving just the right amount of help in a transparent, seamless way. This book presents the collaborative control paradigm. User performance may be indicative of physical/cognitive condition, so it is used to decide how much help is needed. Besides, collaborative control integrates machine and user commands so that people contribute to self-motion at all times. Collaborative control was extensively tested for 3 years using a robotized wheelchair at a rehabilitation hospital in Rome with volunteer inpatients presenting different disabilities, ranging from mild to severe. We also present a taxonomy of common metrics for wheelchair navigation and tests are evaluated accordingly. Obtained results are coherent both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view.

Financial identity theft is well understood with clear underlying motives. Medical identity theft is new and presents a growing problem. The solutions to both problems however, are less clear.

The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft discusses how the digital networked environment is critically different from the world of paper, eyeballs and pens. Many of the effective identity protections are embedded behind the eyeballs, where the presumably passive observer is actually a fairly keen student of human behavior. The emergence of medical identity theft and the implications of medical data privacy are described in the second section of this book.

The Economics of Financial and Medical Identity Theft also presents an overview of the current technology for identity management. The book closes with a series of vignettes in the last chapter, looking at the risks we may see in the future and how these risks can be mitigated or avoided.

The Cell-Surface Interaction, by J. S. Hayes, E. M. Czekanska and R. G. Richards. Studying Cell-Surface Interactions In Vitro: A Survey of Experimental Approaches and Techniques, by Stefanie Michaelis, Rudolf Robelek and Joachim Wegener. Harnessing Cell-Biomaterial Interactions for Osteochondral Tissue Regeneration, by Kyobum Kim, Diana M. Yoon, Antonios G. Mikos and F. Kurtis Kasper. Interaction of Cells with Decellularized Biological Materials, by Mathias Wilhelmi, Bettina Giere and Michael Harder. Evaluation of Biocompatibility Using In Vitro Methods: Interpretation and Limitations, by Arie Bruinink and Reto Luginbuehl. Artificial Scaffolds and Mesenchymal Stem Cells for Hard Tissues, by Margit Schulze and Edda Tobiasch. Bioactive Glass-Based Scaffolds for Bone Tissue Engineering, by Julia Will, Lutz-Christian Gerhardt and Aldo R. Boccaccini. Microenvironment Design for Stem Cell Fate Determination, by Tali Re em and Smadar Cohen. Stem Cell Differentiation Depending on Different Surfaces, by Sonja Kress, Anne Neumann, Birgit Weyand and Cornelia Kasper. Designing the Biocompatibility of Biohybrids, by Frank Witte, Ivonne Bartsch and Elmar Willbold. Interaction of Cartilage and Ceramic Matrix, by K. Wiegandt, C. Goepfert, R. Portner and R. Janssen. Bioresorption and Degradation of Biomaterials, by Debarun Das, Ziyang Zhang, Thomas Winkler, Meenakshi Mour, Christina I. Gunter, Michael M. Morlock, Hans-Gunther Machens and Arndt F. Schilling."

How do firms jointly develop open information infrastructures? To answer this question, this book draws on the results of a longitudinal research project covering the development of the pharmaceutical distribution industry in China from 2004 to 2012, focusing on the emergence and subsequent evolution of industry-wide information infrastructures. How do firms delimit areas of proprietary innovation in open innovation projects? How do firms coordinate, initiate, negotiate and implement the development of innovative infrastructures? How do processes and practices within firms enable and constrain such collective efforts? - This book provides answers to these questions and draws conclusions regarding the challenges and new capabilities that firms will need in a world in which participation in the building of open information infrastructures becomes a necessary task for commercial organizations.

This book informs readers of the needs and rationale for the integration of medical and dental care and information with an international perspective as to how and where medical and dental care separated into specific domains. It provide high level guidance on issues involved with care and data integration and how to achieve an integrated model of health care supported by integrated HIT. A patient typically expects that a visit to a dentist can usually be resolved immediately. This expectation places a premium on instant, accurate, thorough, and current information. The state-of-the-art of fully integrated (dental-medical) electronic health record (EHR) is covered and this is contrasted with the current state of dental-medical software. While dentists in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA), the US Indian Health Service (IHS), or the US military, for example, have access to fully integrated health records, most US clinicians still gather information from separate sources via fax or phone calls. The authors provide an in-depth discussion of the role of informatics and information science in the articulation of medical and dental practices and clinical data with the focus on applied clinical informatics to improve quality of care, practice efficiency, coordination and continuity of care, communication between physicians and dentists and to provide a more comprehensive care for the patients. Lastly, the book examines advances in medical and dental research and how these may affect dentistry in the future. Most new advances in healthcare research are information-intensive.

This book examines the interaction between nano tools and nano materials. It explains the use of appropriate tools in surgery for a variety of applications and provides a complete description of clinical procedures accompanied by photographs. Coverage also presents the latest developments in surface coatings technology such as chemical vapor deposition for use on complex cutting tools for biomedical applications.

Antimicrobial Activity of Nanoparticles: Applications in Wound Healing and Infection Treatment presents the state of the art among nanotechnological approaches used in the treatment of infections. This field has gained a large amount of interest over the past few years, in response to the increasing resistance of pathogens to antibiotics. Leading researchers from around the world discuss the synthesis routes of nanobiomaterials, characterization, and their applications as antimicrobial agents. The book covers various aspects: from antiviral and antibacterial nanoparticles, to the functionalization of nanoparticles and their toxicity to human cells. This book offers an advanced reference text for biomedical engineers, materials scientists, clinicians, and biochemists, with an interest in nanomedicine and infection control.

In den letzten Jahren hat sich der Workshop "Bildverarbeitung fur die Medizin" durch erfolgreiche Veranstaltungen etabliert. Ziel ist auch 2014 wieder die Darstellung aktueller Forschungsergebnisse und die Vertiefung der Gesprache zwischen Wissenschaftlern, Industrie und Anwendern. Die Beitrage dieses Bandes - einige davon in englischer Sprache - umfassen alle Bereiche der medizinischen Bildverarbeitung, insbesondere Bildgebung und -akquisition, Molekulare Bildgebung, Visualisierung und Animation, Bildsegmentierung und -fusion, Anatomische Atlanten, Zeitreihenanalysen, Biomechanische Modellierung, Klinische Anwendung computerunterstutzter Systeme, Validierung und Qualitatssicherung u.v.m.

Various applications in the field of pulmonary image analysis require a registration of CT images of the lung. For example, a registration-based estimation of the breathing motion is employed to increase the accuracy of dose distribution in radiotherapy. Alexander Schmidt-Richberg develops methods to explicitly model morphological and physiological knowledge about respiration in algorithms for the registration of thoracic CT images. The author focusses on two lung-specific issues: on the one hand, the alignment of the interlobular fissures and on the other hand, the estimation of sliding motion at the lung boundaries. He shows that by explicitly considering these aspects based on a segmentation of the respective structure, registration accuracy can be significantly improved.

Revealing the many roles of RNA in regulating gene expression For decades after the discoveries of messenger RNA, transfer RNA, and ribosomal RNA, it was largely assumed that the role of RNA in the cell was limited to shuttling the genomic message, chaperoning amino acids, and toiling in the ribosomes. Eventually, hints that RNA molecules might have regulatory roles began to appear. With the advent of genomics and bioinformatics, it became evident that numerous other RNA forms exist and have specific functions, including small RNAs (sRNA), RNA thermometers, and riboswitches to regulate core metabolic pathways, bacterial pathogenesis, iron homeostasis, quorum sensing, and biofilm formation. All of these functions, and more, are presented in Regulating with RNA in Bacteria and Archaea, written by RNA biologists from around the globe. Divided into eight sections-RNases and Helicases, Cis-Acting RNAs, Cis Encoded Base Pairing RNAs, Trans-Encoded Base Pairing RNAs, Protein Titration and Scaffolding, General Considerations, Emerging Topics, and Resources-this book serves as an excellent resource for established RNA biologists and for the many scientists who are studying regulated cellular systems. It is no longer a fair assumption that gene expression regulation is the provenance of proteins only or that control is exerted primarily at the level of transcription. This book makes clear that regulatory RNAs are key partners along with proteins in controlling the complex interactions and pathways found within prokaryotes.

This volume presents the proceedings of the International Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI). The conference was a new special topic conference initiative by the International Federation of Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), held in Vilamoura, Portugal on 7-9 November, 2013. The main theme of the ICHI2013 was Integrating Information and Communication Technologies with Biomedicine for Global Health .

The proceedings offer a unique forum to examine enabling technologies of sensors, devices and systems that optimize the acquisition, transmission, processing, storage, retrieval 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."

The development of effective methods for the prediction of ontological annotations is an important goal in computational biology, yet evaluating their performance is difficult due to problems caused by the structure of biomedical ontologies and incomplete annotations of genes. This work proposes an information-theoretic framework to evaluate the performance of computational protein function prediction. A Bayesian network is used, structured according to the underlying ontology, to model the prior probability of a protein's function. The concepts of misinformation and remaining uncertainty are then defined, that can be seen as analogs of precision and recall. Finally, semantic distance is proposed as a single statistic for ranking classification models. The approach is evaluated by analyzing three protein function predictors of gene ontology terms. The work addresses several weaknesses of current metrics, and provides valuable insights into the performance of protein function prediction tools.

PDE Modeling of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine: Computer Analysis in R presents the formulation and computer implementation of mathematical models for the forefront research areas of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. The mathematical model discussed in this book consists of a system of eight partial differential equations (PDEs) with dependent variables. The computer-based example models are presented through routines coded in R-a quality, open-source scientific computing system that is readily available from the Internet. Formal mathematics is minimized, e.g., no theorems and proofs. Includes detailed examples that the reader can execute on modest computers.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the basic computer technology. Each succeeding chapter, describes the problems in medicine, followed by a review in chronological sequence of why and how computers were applied to try to meet these problems. Only the technical aspects of computer hardware, software, and communications are discussed as they are necessary to explain how the technology was applied. This approach generally led to defining the objectives for applications of medical informatics. At the end of each chapter, the author summarizes his personal views and interpretations of the chapter contents. Although the concurrent evolution of medical informatics in Canada, Europe, and Japan certainly influenced workers in the United States, the scope of this historical review is limited to the development of medical informatics within the United States. Furthermore, this review is limited to electronic digital computers; it excludes mechanical, analog, and hybrid computers.

Myocardial tissue engineering (MTE), a concept that intends to prolong patients life after cardiac damage by supporting or restoring heart function, is continuously improving. Common MTE strategies include an engineered vehicle, which may be a porous scaffold or a dense substrate or patch, made of either natural or synthetic polymeric materials. The function of the substrate is to aid transportation of cells into the diseased region of the heart and support their integration. This book, which contains chapters written by leading experts in MTE, gives a complete analysis of the area and presents the latest advances in the field. The chapters cover all relevant aspects of MTE strategies, including cell sources, specific TE techniques and biomaterials used. Many different cell types have been suggested for cell therapy in the framework of MTE, including autologous bone marrow-derived or cardiac progenitors, as well as embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells, each having their particular advantages and disadvantages. The book covers a complete range of biomaterials, examining different aspects of their application in MTE, such as biocompatibility with cardiac cells, mechanical capability and compatibility with the mechanical properties of the native myocardium as well as degradation behaviour in vivo and in vitro. Although a great deal of research is being carried out in the field, this book also addresses many questions that still remain unanswered and highlights those areas in which further research efforts are required. The book will also give an insight into clinical trials and possible novel cell sources for cell therapy in MTE."