How should we proceed with advanced research of humanities and social sciences in collaboration? What are the pressing issues of this new trend in a cataclysmic time for civilization? This book, originated with a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Topic-Setting Program, addresses these challenging questions in four parts for innovating twenty-first-century humanities and social sciences. It broadens the horizon for reviewing multi-disciplinary landscapes of risks and regulation of new technologies by focusing on paradigmatic cases from the fields of life and environment. Here, genome editing for reproductive treatment and renewable energy under the constraint of climate change in Japanese and global contexts are involved. The volume comprises a combination of topics and aspects such as public policy and philosophy of science, medicine and law, climate ethics, and the economics of electricity. This edited collection will thus motivate forward-thinking readers across the diverse spectrum of social sciences and humanities to survey themes of their own interests in multi-disciplinary studies. In so doing, they can explore the evolving frontiers of those disciplines and the depths of individual contributions by experts in philosophy, ethics, law, economics, and science, technology, and society (STS), including bioscience.

Innovation in Clinical Trial Methodologies: Lessons Learned during the Corona Pandemic presents a selection of updated chapters from Re-Engineering Clinical Trials that feature innovative options and methods in clinical trials. The Coronavirus pandemic is an accelerator for digitalization in many industries, including clinical trials. This book considers best practices, alternative study concepts requiring fewer patients, studies with less patient interaction, the design of "virtualized" protocols, and moving from data to decisions. This book will be helpful to pharmacologists, physicians and clinical researchers involved in the process of clinical development and clinical trial design.

This book is the first overview on Deep Learning (DL) for biomedical data analysis. It surveys the most recent techniques and approaches in this field, with both a broad coverage and enough depth to be of practical use to working professionals. This book offers enough fundamental and technical information on these techniques, approaches and the related problems without overcrowding the reader's head. It presents the results of the latest investigations in the field of DL for biomedical data analysis. The techniques and approaches presented in this book deal with the most important and/or the newest topics encountered in this field. They combine fundamental theory of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and DL with practical applications in Biology and Medicine. Certainly, the list of topics covered in this book is not exhaustive but these topics will shed light on the implications of the presented techniques and approaches on other topics in biomedical data analysis. The book finds a balance between theoretical and practical coverage of a wide range of issues in the field of biomedical data analysis, thanks to DL. The few published books on DL for biomedical data analysis either focus on specific topics or lack technical depth. The chapters presented in this book were selected for quality and relevance. The book also presents experiments that provide qualitative and quantitative overviews in the field of biomedical data analysis. The reader will require some familiarity with AI, ML and DL and will learn about techniques and approaches that deal with the most important and/or the newest topics encountered in the field of DL for biomedical data analysis. He/she will discover both the fundamentals behind DL techniques and approaches, and their applications on biomedical data. This book can also serve as a reference book for graduate courses in Bioinformatics, AI, ML and DL. The book aims not only at professional researchers and practitioners but also graduate students, senior undergraduate students and young researchers. This book will certainly show the way to new techniques and approaches to make new discoveries.

The healthcare industry is starting to adopt digital twins to improve personalized medicine, healthcare organization performance, and new medicine and devices. These digital twins can create useful models based on information from wearable devices, omics, and patient records to connect the dots across processes that span patients, doctors, and healthcare organizations as well as drug and device manufacturers. Digital twins are digital representations of human physiology built on computer models. The use of digital twins in healthcare is revolutionizing clinical processes and hospital management by enhancing medical care with digital tracking and advancing modelling of the human body. These tools are of great help to researchers in studying diseases, new drugs, and medical devices. Digital Twins and Healthcare: Trends, Techniques, and Challenges facilitates the advancement and knowledge dissemination in methodologies and applications of digital twins in the healthcare and medicine fields. This book raises interest and awareness of the uses of digital twins in healthcare in the research community. Covering topics such as deep neural network, edge computing, and transfer learning method, this premier reference source is an essential resource for hospital administrators, pharmacists, medical professionals, IT consultants, students and educators of higher education, librarians, and researchers.

This book comprehensively summarizes the biology, etiology, and pathology of ovarian cancer and explores the role of deep molecular and cellular profiling in the advancement of precision medicine. The initial chapter discusses our current understanding of the origin, development, progression and tumorigenesis of ovarian cancer. In turn, the book highlights the development of resistance, disease occurrence, and poor prognosis that are the hallmarks of ovarian cancer. The book then reviews the role of deep molecular and cellular profiling to overcome challenges that are associated with the treatment of ovarian cancer. It explores the use of genome-wide association analysis to identify genetic variants for the evaluation of ovarian carcinoma risk and prognostic prediction. Lastly, it highlights various diagnostic and prognostic ovarian cancer biomarkers for the development of molecular-targeted therapy.

This open access book focuses on the discrepancies in biobank research regulations that are among the most significant hurdles to effective research collaboration. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has established stringent requirements for the processing of health and genetic data, while simultaneously allowing considerable multi-level exceptions for the purposes of scientific research. In addition to directly applicable exceptions, the GDPR places the regulatory responsibility for further defining how the Member States strike a balance between the individuals' rights and the public interest in research within their national legal orders. Since Member States' approaches to the trade-off between data subjects' rights on the one hand, and appropriate safeguards on the other, differ according to their ethical and legal traditions, their data protection requirements for research also differ considerably. This study takes a comprehensive approach to determine how the GDPR affects regulatory regimes on the use of personal data in biobanking research, with a particular focus on the balance between individuals' rights, public interest and scientific research. In this regard, it has two main goals: first, to scrutinize the GDPR research regime, its objective and constitutive elements, the impact it has on biobanking, and its role in a changing EU landscape post-Brexit; and second, to examine how various exceptions have been operationalized nationally, and what challenges and opportunities this diversification entails. The book not only captures the complexity GDPR creates for biobanking, but also sheds light on various approaches to tackling the corresponding challenges. It offers the first comprehensive analysis of GDPR for biobanking, and the most up-to-date overview of the national biobank regulatory frameworks in Europe.

Research on assistive technologies is undergoing many developments in its effectiveness in helping those with varying impairments. New technologies are constantly being created, researched, and implemented for those who need these technological aides in daily life. Assistive Technologies for Physical and Cognitive Disabilities combines worldwide cases on people with physical and cognitive disabilities with the latest applications in assistive technologies. This reference work brings different researchers together under one title to discuss current findings, developments, and ongoing research in the area of rehabilitative technology. This reference book is of critical use to professionals, researchers, healthcare practitioners, caretakers, academicians, and students.

Nanotechnology for Oral Drug Delivery: From Concept to Applications discusses the current challenges of oral drug delivery, broadly revising the different physicochemical barriers faced by nanotechnolgy-based oral drug delivery systems, and highlighting the challenges of improving intestinal permeability and drug absorption. Oral delivery is the most widely used form of drug administration due to ease of ingestion, cost effectiveness, and versatility, by allowing for the accommodation of different types of drugs, having the highest patient compliance. In this book, a comprehensive overview of the most promising and up-to-date engineered and surface functionalized drug carrier systems, as well as opportunities for the development of novel and robust delivery platforms for oral drug administration are discussed. The relevance of controlling the physicochemical properties of the developed particle formulations, from size and shape to drug release profile are broadly reviewed. Advances in both in vitro and in vivo scenarios are discussed, focusing on the possibilities to study the biological-material interface. The industrial perspective on the production of nanotechnology-based oral drug delivery systems is also covered. Nanotechnology for Oral Drug Delivery: From Concept to Applications is essential reading for researchers, professors, advanced students and industry professionals working in the development, manufacturing and/or commercialization of nanotechnology-based systems for oral drug delivery, targeted drug delivery, controlled drug release, materials science and biomaterials, in vitro and in vivo testing of potential oral drug delivery technologies.

The book Heat Shock Proteins in Inflammatory Diseases provides the most comprehensive highlight and insight of the expression, function and therapeutic activity of Heat Shock Proteins in inflammatory diseases including sepsis, psoriasis, neurodegenerative diseases, cancers, viral infection and autoimmune rheumatic diseases. Using an integrative approach, the contributors provide a synopsis of the most current updates on the state of HSP in inflammatory diseases. Key basic and clinical research laboratories from major universities, academic medical hospitals, biotechnology and pharmaceutical laboratories around the world have contributed chapters that review present research activity and importantly project the field into the future. The book is a must read for graduate students. medical students, basic science researchers and postdoctoral scholars in the fields of Cancer Biology, Oncology, Translational Medicine, Clinical Research, Biotechnology, Cell & Molecular Medicine, Pharmaceutical Scientists and Researchers involved in Drug Discovery.

This book introduces a variety of advanced machine learning approaches covering the areas of neural networks, fuzzy logic, and hybrid intelligent systems for the determination and diagnosis of cancer. Moreover, the tactical solutions of machine learning have proved its vast range of significance and, provided novel solutions in the medical field for the diagnosis of disease. This book also explores the distinct deep learning approaches that are capable of yielding more accurate outcomes for the diagnosis of cancer. In addition to providing an overview of the emerging machine and deep learning approaches, it also enlightens an insight on how to evaluate the efficiency and appropriateness of such techniques and analysis of cancer data used in the cancer diagnosis. Therefore, this book focuses on the recent advancements in the machine learning and deep learning approaches used in the diagnosis of different types of cancer along with their research challenges and future directions for the targeted audience including scientists, experts, Ph.D. students, postdocs, and anyone interested in the subjects discussed.

The papers in this proceeding discuss current and future trends in wearable communications and personal health management through the use of wireless body area networks (WBAN). The authors posit new technologies that can provide trustworthy communications mechanisms from the user to medical health databases. The authors discuss not only on-body devices, but also technologies providing information in-body. Also discussed are dependable communications combined with accurate localization and behavior analysis, which will benefit WBAN technology and make the healthcare processes more effective. The papers were presented at the 13th EAI International Conference on Body Area Networks (BODYNETS 2018), Oulu, Finland, 02-03 October 2018.

Integrated Science: Science without Borders" is the first volume of the INTEGRATED SCIENCE Book series, aiming to publish the results of the most updated ideas and reviews in transdisciplinary fields and to highlight the integration of discrete disciplines, including formal sciences, physical-chemical sciences and engineering, biological sciences, medical sciences, and social sciences. This volume primarily focuses on the research involving the integration of two or more academic fields offering an innovative, borderless view, which is one of the main focuses of the Universal Scientific Education and Research Network (USERN). The whole world is suffering from complex problems; these are borderless problems; thus, a borderless solution could merely solve such complex issues. Transdisciplinarity is a domain, that researchers work jointly, using a shared conceptual framework, drawing together disciplinary-specific theories, concepts, and approaches to address common problems. Lack of confidence, lack of expertise, complexities of healthcare, the confusing nature of healthcare environments, and lack of organization and standardization are the obstacles of successful scientific communication. Consequently, this book provides an overview of the essential elements of transdisciplinary studies and integrated science. The unique aspect of this book -privileging it from other books- is covering all aspects of science as harmonies of a single symphony.

Medicine has, until recently, been slow to adapt to information technologies and systems for many reasons, but the future lies therein. Innovations in Data Methodologies and Computational Algorithms for Medical Applications offers the most cutting-edge research in the field, offering insights into case studies and methodologies from around the world. The text details the latest developments and will serve as a vital resource to practitioners and academics alike in the burgeoning field of medical applications of technologies. As security and privacy improve, Electronic Health Records and informatics in the medical field are becoming ubiquitous, and staying abreast of the latest information can be difficult. This volume serves as a reference handbook and theoretical framework for the future of the field.

The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) 2015 is an international, multidisciplinary conference for the presentation and discussion of current research in the theory and application of computational methods in problems of biological significance. Presentations are rigorously peer reviewed and are published in an archival proceedings volume. PSB 2015 will be held from January 4 - 8, 2015 in Kohala Coast, Hawaii. Tutorials and workshops will be offered prior to the start of the conference.PSB 2015 will bring together top researchers from the US, the Asian Pacific nations, and around the world to exchange research results and address open issues in all aspects of computational biology. It is a forum for the presentation of work in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modeling, and other computational methods, as applied to biological problems, with emphasis on applications in data-rich areas of molecular biology.The PSB has been designed to be responsive to the need for critical mass in sub-disciplines within biocomputing. For that reason, it is the only meeting whose sessions are defined dynamically each year in response to specific proposals. PSB sessions are organized by leaders of research in biocomputing's "hot topics." In this way, the meeting provides an early forum for serious examination of emerging methods and approaches in this rapidly changing field.

Mycotoxins are the metabolites of fungus and are reported to contaminate nearly 25% of the food produced worldwide. The mycotoxins of most significance are the aflatoxins due to their severe health implications and their prevalence in food commodities on a larger scale. Aflatoxins are produced by certain species of fungi the most prominent among which are Aspergillus flavus, A. parasiticus and A. nominous. Food commodities of African and South Asian countries are especially reported to have aflatoxins well beyond the allowable limits but due to the global trade of food commodities developed countries are also prone towards the perils of aflatoxins. Moreover, climate changes may have a substantial impact on the distribution and global prevalence of aflatoxins in the near future. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has classified the aflatoxins as group 1 category carcinogen. Aflatoxins are also reported as teratogenic, mutagenic, growth retardant, immunosuppressant and may also cause nervous system and reproductive system disorders. Preventive approaches involving good manufacturing from "farm to fork" are the major focus of the current food industry. The aim of our book is to provide readers with the most recent data and up-to-date studies from aflatoxins research, with specific focuses on (i) the impact of aflatoxins on human health, (ii) new approaches by the researchers from different parts of the world to degrade aflatoxins and (iii) potential preventive approaches that can significantly lessen the burden of aflatoxins in food products

During the COVID-19 pandemic, computational intelligence and computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have supported the effective treatment of the virus. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been playing a significant role in the rapidly emerging healthcare sector in terms of CAD, software algorithms, hardware implementation, and applications in the medical field. Through this, the constraints of the traditional system must be addressed to innovate and shed light on emerging healthcare technologies. Computational Intelligence and Applications for Pandemics and Healthcare explores the state-of-the-art computational intelligence approaches in medical data and classifies existing computational techniques used in medical areas. It discusses the tactics and methods as well as the limitations and performances of computational intelligence applications for healthcare. The constraints of traditional healthcare systems are addressed by using CAD and computationally-intelligent medical data. Covering topics such as cloud-based monitoring systems, detection and diagnosis, and intelligent medical systems, this book is an excellent resource for computer scientists, government officials, medical students, medical professionals, hospitals, researchers, and academicians.

Behavioral medicine emerged in the 1970s as the interdisciplinary field concerned with the integration of behavioral, psychosocial, and biomedical science knowledge relevant to the understanding of health and illness, and the application of this knowledge to prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. Recent years have witnessed an enormous diversification of behavioral medicine, with new sciences (such as genetics, life course epidemiology) and new technologies (such as neuroimaging) coming into play. This book brings together such new developments by providing an up-to-date compendium of methods and applications drawn from the broad range of behavioral medicine research and practice. The book is divided into 10 sections that address key fields in behavioral medicine. Each section begins with one or two methodological or conceptual chapters, followed by contributions that address substantive topics within that field. Major health problems such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, HIV/AIDs, and obesity are explored from multiple perspectives. The aim is to present behavioral medicine as an integrative discipline, involving diverse methodologies and paradigms that converge on health and well being."

This edited book serves as a vital resource on the contributions of microorganisms to advances in nanotechnology, establishing their applications in diverse areas of biomedicine, environment, biocatalysis, food and nutrition, and renewable energy. It documents the impacts of microorganisms in nanotechnology leading to further developments in microbial nanobiotechnology. This book appeals to researchers and scholars of microbiology, biochemistry and nanotechnology.

This book summarizes the latest research findings in the neurocircuitry of innate behaviors, covering major topics such as innate fear, aggression, feeding, reward, social interaction, parental care, spatial navigation, and sleep-wake regulation. For decades, humans have been fascinated by wild animals' instincts, like the annual two-thousand-mile migration of the monarch butterfly in North American, and the "imprint" behavior of newborn birds. Since these instincts are always displayed in stereotypical patterns in most individuals of a given species, the neural circuits processing such behaviors must be genetically hard-wired in the brain. Recently, with the development of modern techniques, including optogenetics, retrograde and anterograde virus tracing, and in vivo calcium imaging, researchers have been able to determine and dissect the specific neural circuits for many innate behaviors by selectively manipulating well-defined cell types in the brain. This book discusses recent advances in the investigation of the neural-circuit mechanisms underlying innate behaviors.

In 1997, Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) therapy (Cyberonics, Houston, Texas) was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of epilepsy refractory to antiepileptic medications. In 2005, VNS received FDA approval for treatment-resistant depression refractory to antidepressants, and Cyberonics recently received FDA approval for the clinical study of VNS for rapid cycling bipolar depression. Many researchers continue to investigate the anxiolytic effects of VNS in human and non-human animal models. The author presents a study of VNS effects on anxiety and the capacity of atropine methyl nitrate to attenuate these effects. The results indicate that VNS decreases anxiety in the laboratory animals tested. These findings provide evidence to support the testing and subsequent use of VNS therapy for the treatment of clinical anxiety in humans. Because many therapies that are effective in the treatment of depression effectively treat anxiety, VNS therapy should be effective and approvable for clinical anxiety. This book can serve as a research tool, training mechanism, or surgical guide to the implantation of the vagus nerve stimulating electrode in the laboratory rat. Hopefully, this resource provides information that facilitates FDA approval of VNS for treatment-resistant anxiety, a chronic, devastating and often debilitating illness.