Consumption was the deadliest, most common disease that mankind has faced up till now. Three billion people in Europe and North America died between the fourteenth and the end of the eighteenth century. It was a death sentence with no known cause which led to the development of unusual empirical therapies. Lucky Consumptive patients reached a Sanatorium. Sanatoria were developed to house sick patients in an environment where they stood the best chance of recovery from their illness. There was no organised healthcare system and funding for a Sanatorium depended upon provision provided by wealthy individuals, or societies. Charles Dunnell Rudd was a Cape Merchant who had made a fortune in South Africa successfully prospecting for Gold and Diamonds. His mother had died from Consumption and he wished to invest some of his money in building a Sanatorium. It had been shown that Consumptive patients survived longer if they took vigorous exercise, slept out of doors, and were nursed on higher land near to forests. Rudd anonymously purchased raised land at Northwood for this purpose. Helena (later Princess Christian) was Queen Victoria's third daughter, and had a marked social awareness, arranging charitable meals for the less fortunate. She was very hard working and became the Principal Patron for Mount Vernon Hospital, donating money and attending annual fundraising Festival Dinners. Contemporary photographs from this period show female patients walking around the grounds and occupying designated rest shelters. The male patients had a more vigorous lifestyle, working in the gardens and sleeping in their beds out of doors. Those surviving often acquired new skills which might enhance their future employment prospects. These measures greatly improved the prognosis for consumptive patients. After Koch discovered the Tubercle Bacillus effective curative anti-tuberculous therapy evolved.

Accelerating Strategic Changes for Digital Transformation in the Healthcare Industry discusses innovative conceptual frameworks, tools, and solutions to successfully tackle the challenges of mitigating the major disruption caused by COVID-19 in the healthcare sector and society. It emphasizes case studies and empirical studies from around the world, providing a comprehensive view of best lessons on digital tools to manage the health crisis. It focuses on the role of advances in digital and collaborative technologies to offer rapid and effective tools for better health solutions for new and emerging health problems. Specially it pays attention to how information technologies help us in the current global health emergency and the coronavirus epidemic response, gaining more understanding of the new coronavirus and helping to contain the outbreak. In addition, it explores how these new tools and digital health solutions can support the economic and social recovery in the post-pandemic world.It is a valuable resource for researchers, students, policy makers and members of the biomedical and medical fields who want to learn more about the transformative role of digital transformation to in the healthcare sector.

Neurostimulation for Epilepsy: Advances, Applications and Opportunities comprehensively reviews the diverse array of neurostimulation technologies currently in use and development for the treatment of epilepsy. The book covers basic research on mechanisms of neurostimulation, technical features of various FDA-approved and investigational devices for neurostimulation, clinical applications and programming considerations of these devices, and emerging insights and research based on data derived from these devices. It provides a contemporary assessment of neurostimulation in epilepsy, one that reveals recent progress in clinical applications and outcomes, fundamental questions that remain unanswered in the field, and future directions and considerations in developing next-generation devices.

Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) is a generic term for all methods that help people making decisions according to their preferences, in situations where there is more than one conflicting criterion. It is a branch of operational research dealing with finding optimal results in complex scenarios including various indicators, conflicting objectives and criteria. The approach of MCDM involves decision making concerning quantitative and qualitative factors. The importance and success of MCDM are due to the fact that they have successfully dealt with different types of problematics for supporting decision makers such as choice, ranking and sorting, description. Even though, each of the different problematics in MCDM is important, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Sorting Methods will focus on sorting approaches across a wide range of interesting techniques and research disciplines. The applications which have been and can be solved by these techniques are more and more important in current real-world decision-making problems. Therefore, the book provides a clear overview of MCDM sorting methods and the different tools which can be used to solve real-world problems by revising such tools and characterizing them according to their performance and suitability for different types of problems. The book is aimed at a broad audience including computer scientists, engineers, geography and GIS experts, business and financial management experts, environment experts, and all those professional people interested in MCDM and its applications. The book may also be useful for teaching MCDM courses in fields such as industrial management, computer science, and applied mathematics, as new developments in multi-criteria decision making.

Security and Privacy Issues in Internet of Medical Things addresses the security challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients. As IoMT devices are vulnerable to cyberattacks, and a security breach through IoMT devices may act as a pathway for hackers to enter hospital networks, the book covers a very timely topic. The incorporation of blockchain in the healthcare environment has given birth to the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), which consists of a collection of healthcare systems that espouse groundbreaking technologies. Systems consist of inter-linked sensors, wearable technology devices and clinical frameworks that perform explicit, secure machine-to-machine and cloud platform communications. The significance of IoMT in the field of healthcare is undoubtedly a win-win situation for patients through technology enhancements and a collection of analytics that helps in better diagnosis and treatment. Due to higher accuracy levels, IoMT devices are more reliable in reporting and data tracking and help avoid human errors and incorrect reporting.

Standardizing Pharmacology: Assays and Hormones, Volume Two in the Discoveries in Pharmacology series, presents selected articles from historic discoveries that are enhanced with commentary from contemporary scholars who present discussions on the importance of each chapter, along with an updated bibliography on the subject and contributions from a Nobel Prize winner and other pioneers in pharmacology. Academic and industry researchers in pharmacology and medicine, as well as advanced students will find this series a useful teaching tool and launch to new discoveries. Sections cover key discoveries in receptor theory, pharmacological methods and the development of hormone therapy, including J. Parascandola on the development of receptor theory, R.S. Yalow on radioimmunoassay, M. van Rossum and J.T L.A. Hurkmans on bioassays, M. Tausk on androgen therapy and C. Djerassi on oral contraceptives, with commentaries from experts such as T. Hoekfelt and V.C. Jordan.

Mathematical Modeling, Simulations, and Artificial Intelligence for Emergent Pandemic Diseases: Lessons Learned from COVID-19 includes new research, models and simulations developed during the COVID-19 pandemic into how mathematical methods and practice can impact future response. Chapters go beyond forecasting COVID-19, bringing different scale angles and mathematical techniques (e.g., ordinary differential and difference equations, agent-based models, artificial intelligence, and complex networks) which could have potential use in modeling other emergent pandemic diseases. A major part of the book focuses on preparing the scientific community for the next pandemic, particularly the application of mathematical modeling in ecology, economics and epidemiology. Readers will benefit from learning how to apply advanced mathematical modeling to a variety of topics of practical interest, including optimal allocations of masks and vaccines but also more theoretical problems such as the evolution of viral variants.

Emerging Practices in Telehealth: Best Practices in a Rapidly Changing Field is an introduction to telehealth basics, best practices and implementation methods. The book guides the reader from start to finish through the workflow implementation of telehealth technology, including EMRs, clinical workflows, RPM, billing systems, and patient experience. It also explores how telehealth can increase healthcare access and decrease disparities across the globe. Practicing clinicians, medical fellows, allied healthcare professionals, hospital administrators, and hospital IT professionals will all benefit from this practical guidebook.

Polymeric materials offer a high level of versatility due to the range of applications possible within the biomedical and clinical fields - including wound closure - particularly in comparison to metals or ceramics. These specialised materials also allow for a diverse array of therapeutic effects. Although there have been advances in improving polymeric materials for surgical sutures, there is little information available regarding improving the therapeutic value of sutures, and advanced technologies used to implement this improvement. Advanced Technologies and Polymer Materials for Surgical Sutures provides thorough coverage on suture materials with improved mechanical and therapeutic properties that can improve quality of life; chapter topics include drug-releasing kinetics of sutures, shape memory polymer sutures and future trends. This book is a useful resource for academics and researchers in the materials science and biomedical engineering fields, as well as professionals in biomaterials and biotextiles development and clinicians looking to learn more about suture material properties and suture/body interactions.

Industrial Tomography: Systems and Applications, Second Edition thoroughly explores the important techniques of industrial tomography, also discusses image reconstruction, systems, and applications. This book presents complex processes, including the way three-dimensional imaging is used to create multiple cross-sections, and how computer software helps monitor flows, filtering, mixing, drying processes, and chemical reactions inside vessels and pipelines. This book is suitable for materials scientists and engineers and applied physicists working in the photonics and optoelectronics industry or in the applications industries.

3D Bioprinting and Nanotechnology in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, Second Edition provides an in-depth introduction to bioprinting and nanotechnology and their industrial applications. Sections cover 4D Printing Smart Multi-responsive Structure, Cells for Bioprinting, 4D Printing Biomaterials, 3D/4D printing functional biomedical devices, 3D Printing for Cardiac and Heart Regeneration, Integrating 3D printing with Ultrasound for Musculoskeletal Regeneration, 3D Printing for Liver Regeneration, 3D Printing for Cancer Studies, 4D Printing Soft Bio-robots, Clinical Translation and Future Directions. The book's team of expert contributors have pooled their expertise in order to provide a summary of the suitability, sustainability and limitations of each technique for each specific application. The increasing availability and decreasing costs of nanotechnologies and 3D printing technologies are driving their use to meet medical needs. This book provides an overview of these technologies and their integration.

Anomaly Detection and Complex Event Processing over IoT Data Streams: With Application to eHealth and Patient Data Monitoring presents advanced processing techniques for IoT data streams and the anomaly detection algorithms over them. The book brings new advances and generalized techniques for processing IoT data streams, semantic data enrichment with contextual information at Edge, Fog and Cloud as well as complex event processing in IoT applications. The book comprises fundamental models, concepts and algorithms, architectures and technological solutions as well as their application to eHealth. Case studies, such as the bio-metric signals stream processing are presented -the massive amount of raw ECG signals from the sensors are processed dynamically across the data pipeline and classified with modern machine learning approaches including the Hierarchical Temporal Memory and Deep Learning algorithms. The book discusses adaptive solutions to IoT stream processing that can be extended to different use cases from different fields of eHealth, to enable a complex analysis of patient data in a historical, predictive and even prescriptive application scenarios. The book ends with a discussion on ethics, emerging research trends, issues and challenges of IoT data stream processing.

Implementation of Smart Healthcare Systems using AI, IoT, and Blockchain provides imperative research on the development of data fusion and analytics for healthcare and their implementation into current issues in a real-time environment. While highlighting IoT, bio-inspired computing, big data, and evolutionary programming, the book explores various concepts and theories of data fusion, IoT, and Big Data Analytics. It also investigates the challenges and methodologies required to integrate data from multiple heterogeneous sources, analytical platforms in healthcare sectors. This book is unique in the way that it provides useful insights into the implementation of a smart and intelligent healthcare system in a post-Covid-19 world using enabling technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, and blockchain in providing transparent, faster, secure and privacy preserved healthcare ecosystem for the masses.

Cognitive and Soft Computing Techniques for the Analysis of Healthcare Data discusses the insight of data processing applications in various domains through soft computing techniques and enormous advancements in the field. The book focuses on the cross-disciplinary mechanisms and ground-breaking research ideas on novel techniques and data processing approaches in handling structured and unstructured healthcare data. It also gives insight into various information-processing models and many memories associated with it while processing the information for forecasting future trends and decision making. This book is an excellent resource for researchers and professionals who work in the Healthcare Industry, Data Science, and Machine learning.

Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare Applications and Management introduces application domains of various AI algorithms across healthcare management. Instead of discussing AI first and then exploring its applications in healthcare afterward, the authors attack the problems in context directly, in order to accelerate the path of an interested reader toward building industrial-strength healthcare applications. Readers will be introduced to a wide spectrum of AI applications supporting all stages of patient flow in a healthcare facility. The authors explain how AI supports patients throughout a healthcare facility, including diagnosis and treatment recommendations needed to get patients from the point of admission to the point of discharge while maintaining quality, patient safety, and patient/provider satisfaction. AI methods are expected to decrease the burden on physicians, improve the quality of patient care, and decrease overall treatment costs. Current conditions affected by COVID-19 pose new challenges for healthcare management and learning how to apply AI will be important for a broad spectrum of students and mature professionals working in medical informatics. This book focuses on predictive analytics, health text processing, data aggregation, management of patients, and other fields which have all turned out to be bottlenecks for the efficient management of coronavirus patients.

Contemporary Management of Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: A Precision Medicine Approach summarizes current knowledge and provides evidenced-based practice recommendations on how to treat patients with metastatic colorectal cancer. The book presents topics such as pre-operating imaging, the use of molecular markers in treatment decisions, neoadjuvant therapy, synchronous colorectal liver metastasis, and minimally invasive approaches. In addition, it discusses immunotherapy, targeted therapies and survivorship. This is a valuable resource for practitioners, cancer researchers, oncologists, graduate students and members of biomedical research who need to understand more about novel treatments for colorectal cancer metastasis.

Computational Intelligence in Healthcare Applications discusses a variety of techniques designed to represent, enhance and empower inter-domain research based on computational intelligence in healthcare. The book serves as a reference for the pervasive healthcare domain which takes into consideration new convergent computing and other applications. The book discusses topics such as mathematical modeling in medical imaging, predictive modeling based on artificial intelligence and deep learning, smart healthcare and wearable devices, and evidence-based predictive modeling. In addition, it discusses computer-aided diagnostic for clinical inferences and pervasive and ubiquitous techniques in healthcare. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers in medical informatics, however, it is also ideal for members of the biomedical field and healthcare industry who are interested in learning more about novel technologies and their applications in the field.

The Practical Guide to Clinical Research and Publication provides a comprehensive overview of the key foundations of epidemiology, statistics and epidemiological studies. This book presents the most important terms and knowledge in the field from a medical point-of-view. Sections contain numerous, clinically-oriented examples and drawings to facilitate understanding and clarify the relation to clinic and practice. The book contains many graphics and key points for easier understanding and is written using bullet points for ease of use and comprehension. It is ideal for physicians and clinical researchers who want to use it as guidance for clinical research or teaching.