New Jersey HIE to share patients’ imaging records

“AmeriHealth New Jersey has launched a statewide pilot program that will allow physicians in New Jersey to share patients’ imaging records.
The new initiative, “New Jersey Health Information Exchange (NJHIE),” gives radiologists and other physicians 24-hour electronic access to shared-patient medical imaging records through a secure Web portal.”
Article
Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 8 September 2008

Biomedical images online for exhibition purposes

“There are many ways of finding biomedical images on the web for exhibition use, and some are better the others.”
Article
Thomas, Biomedicine on Display, 7 September 2008

Enterprise Image Management

“To me, the basic components of a medical record are Problems, Medications, Allergies, Notes/Reports, Lab/Micro Results, and Radiology results including images. Of all of these, image exchange between different vendor systems and among organizations is the most problematic. Standards exist to transmit the outputs of CT, MRI, Ultrasound and digital xray machines to PACS systems, but most vendors customize or extend the standards to meet their own proprietary needs. Sharing images among providers is essential for coordination of care and efficiency. The path forward to enable image sharing across vendors, modalities, and imaging technologies is not entirely clear.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as Healthcare CIO, 4 June 2008

For-profit HIEs are the answer, entrepreneur says

“Multi-stakeholder collaboratives? No way.
Public-private partnerships to develop health information exchanges? Forget about it.
For-profit, businesslike HIEs are the way to go in the current environment, according to a company president who says the free enterprise model can deliver results better, faster and cheaper.”
Article
Nancy Ferris, Government Health IT, 8 May 2008

Balearic Islands connect to joint network

“All public hospitals and around 80 connected Primary Health Centers in the Balearic Islands are now connected to a joint network, where the use of a master patient index is enabling Balearic doctors to access patient data and medical findings anytime.”
Article
eHealth Europe, 5 May 2008

Medical Advances—Through Your iPhone?

“Bioengineering professor Boris Rubinsky has what he hopes is the perfect antidote to bulky, expensive, hard-to-use medical machines: the mobile phone.
The University of California professor says that by reducing a complex electromagnetic imaging machine to a portable electromagnetic scanner that can work in tandem with a regular cell phone and a computer, he has essentially replicated a $10,000 piece of equipment for just hundreds of dollars. The mobile scanner plugs into the phone, which beams the data to the computer, generating an image that can be transmitted to a doctor or hospital far away.”
Article
Olga Kharif, Business Week, 30 April 2008

Ethical Issues of Brain Functional Imaging: Reading your Mind

Abstract:
Neuroimaging practice and research are overviewed in this paper through an ethics lens. The main ethical implications in biomedical research concerning functional brain imaging are discussed with the focus on issues related to imaging of personal information and privacy. Specific norms and guidelines will be eventually formed in the future under the umbrella of the new discipline of Neuroethics.

Irene S. Karanasiou^a, Christos G. Biniaris^b and Andrew J. Marsh^c
a School of Electrical & Computer Eng., National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece
^b VMW Solutions Ltd., UK
^c University of Westminster, UK

To be published in “Medical and Care Compunetics 5″, IOSPress, 2008.

Web-based repositories pose threat of unprotected records

“The reluctance or inability of the healthcare industry or federal government to provide a universal online personal medical record repository mechanism has created a vacuum. This vacuum, in turn, has attracted deep-pocket giants like Google and Microsoft.
In February, Internet search titan Google stepped into the online repository arena, teaming with The Cleveland Clinic Foundation to store the personal health records of up to 10,000 enterprise patients who volunteered to have their records electronically transferred so they can be retrieved anywhere through Google Health’s new service. Google may eventually open the service to everyone, although the company declined to say when the system would be expanded to general availability.
The Google move follows by four months Microsoft’s appearance in the same space. Last October, the software leviathan launched HealthVault, a free online service aimed at helping people collect and manage their personal health information. Others have entered the repository race as well. AOL cofounder Steve Case established Revolution Health in 2005. WebMD, backed by Netscape cofounder Jim Clark, has been around even longer.”
Article
PACSWeb, 6 April 2008

Cancer Detected Earlier, Faster, with New Medical Imaging, Stanford Study Finds

“Doctors may one day be able to detect early stages of colon cancer without a biopsy, using a new technique developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
This imaging technology is one of many new ways of detecting cancers in the body in real time, said Christopher Contag, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and of microbiology and of immunology, who led the study. Contag said he hoped it might be one of the first to be used routinely for early detection of cancer.”
Article
Business Wire, 16 March 2008

Siemens Says Integrated Diagnostics Tools Will Change Healthcare

“Thomas Miller has a vision for a new health care frontier that combines molecular imaging, molecular diagnostics, and informatics. Miller, who is CEO of workflow and solutions for Siemens Healthcare, says recent advances in these fields have created precise diagnostic tools capable of assessing and treating a growing number of diseases. These new tools provide physicians with an understanding of diseases at the molecular or genetic level, enabling them to tailor effective treatment to the individual. Digital HealthCare & Productivity recently spoke with Miller about how the health care IT network can become more efficient by using these patient-centric medical tools that transform data into knowledge.”
Article
Cindy Atoji, Digital HealthCare & Productivity, 11 March 2008

Bridging Radiology and Public Health: The Emerging Field of Radiologic Public Health Informatics

“Radiology and public health have an emerging opportunity to collaborate, in which radiology’s vast supply of imaging data can be integrated into public health information systems for epidemiologic assessments and responses to population health problems. Fueling the linkage of radiology and public health include (i) the transition from analog film to digital formats, enabling flexible use of radiologic data; (ii) radiology’s role in imaging across nearly all medical and surgical subspecialties, which establishes a foundation for a consolidated and uniform database of images and reports for public health use; and (iii) the use of radiologic data to characterize disease patterns in a population occupying a geographic area at one time and to characterize disease progression over time via follow-up examinations. The backbone for this integration is through informatics projects such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and RadLex constructing terminology libraries and ontologies, as well as algorithms integrating data from the electronic health record and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine Structured Reporting. Radiology’s role in public health is being tested in disease surveillance systems for outbreak detection and bioterrorism, such as the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Challenges for radiologic public health informatics include refining the systems and user interfaces, adhering to privacy regulations, and strengthening collaborative relations among stakeholders, including radiologists and public health officials. Linking radiology with public health, radiologic public health informatics is a promising avenue through which radiology can contribute to public health decision making and health policy.”
Abstract
Daniel J. Mollura, John A. Carrino, Diane L. Matuszak, Zaruhi R. Mnatsakanyan, John Eng, Protagoras Cutchis, Steven M. Babin, Carol Sniegoski and Joseph S. Lombardo, Journal of the American College of Radiology, Volume 5, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 174-181, doi:10.1016/j.jacr.2007.08.020

Siemens and National Jewish medical and research center form strategic alliance to advance shared vision of personalized medicine

“With a shared vision of a more personalized medicine, Siemens Healthcare and National Jewish Medical and Research Center have formed a strategic alliance to improve and develop novel imaging and diagnostic technologies using genomics, proteomics, and integrated research and clinical care.
As part of the initiative, National Jewish will integrate Siemens technology throughout out the institution to help diagnose respiratory, cardiac and rheumatologic diseases. Especially important will be the Institute for Advanced Biomedical Imaging™, where much of the patient care and collaborative research planned for this alliance will be conducted.”
Article
HealthTech Wire, 18 February 2008

New partnership to develop technologies for personalized medicine

“Siemens Healthcare and the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver are teaming up to develop new imaging, diagnostic and information technologies using genomics, proteomics and integrated research and clinical care.”
Article
Bernie Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 13 February 2008

IBM uses 3D imaging to visualise patient records

“Researchers at IBM have developed new visualisation software that will allow doctors to view personal medical records on an animated human body.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 27 September 2007

Cost-effective handling of digital medical images in the telemedicine environment

“The results show that conventional digital camera images of X-ray images were diagnostically similar to the expensive digitizer. Lossy compression, when used moderately with the imaging noise to compression noise ratio (ICR) greater than four, can bring about image improvement with better diagnostic quality than the original image. Statistical analysis shows that there is no diagnostic difference between expensive high quality monitors and conventional computer monitors.”
Abstract
Miew Keen Choong, Rajasvaran Logeswaran and Michel Bister, Journal of Medical Informatics, Volume 76, Issue 9, September 2007, Pages 646-654

Finnish mammography clinics cut waits with imaging system

“Patient treatment times at Finland’s leading mammography screening provider have been cut in half due to the implementation of a digital imaging IT system.”
Article
Chip Means, Healthcare IT News EU, 24 August 2007

Web-based PACS a low-cost option

“Healthcare imaging facilities should ditch their costly film processing systems, according to the vendor of a new Web-based picture archiving and communication system. ”
Article
Chip Means, Healthcare IT News, 23 August 2007

A New Algorithm for Content-Based Region QueryY in Databases with Medical Images

Dumitru Dan Burdescu, Liana Stanescu
University of Craiova, Faculty of Automation, Computers and Electronics, Romania

Abstract:

In present there are a variety of activity fields from the military or civil domains in which massive databases with grey level or color images were created. One of these domains is the medical field. For querying these imagistic collections, the traditional simple methods based on text are not sufficient. As a result, new techniques known under the name of content-based visual information retrieval appeared. In the medical field, images, and especially digital images, are produced and used for diagnostics and therapy in large amounts. In some medical areas, hundreds or even thousands of images are daily produced. A big part of them are color images, like the images collected with the endoscope’s help, so to take into consideration the color characteristic in the content–based visual retrieval presents importance. There were proposed several methods based on the content, for accessing the medical images. However, there are still few systems that can be integrated in the diagnosis process. There are several important reasons that explain the need of supplementary methods for image retrieval. In the process of taking clinical decision, may be very important to specify an image like query and to retrieve those images from the database that are most similar to the specified image query, together with the afferent diagnosis. Except the diagnosis process, the education and research activity can be improved by using the access visual methods. The inclusion of the visual characteristics in the medical studies is another interesting point of view in a lot of medical domain. The visual characteristics not allow only the retrieving of the patients having the same disease, and also the cases where the visual similitude exists, but the diagnosis differs.

The content – based visual query may be realized either at the level of the entire image (content-based visual query), or based on the color regions existed in images (content-based region query). In a content-based region query, the images are compared on their regions. For realizing the content-based region query on a database with medical images, it is necessary an automated algorithm for detecting the color regions, significant for the diagnosis. It was chosen the color set back-projection algorithm, introduced initially by Swain and Ballard and then developed in the research projects at Columbia University, in the content-based visual retrieval domain. This technique provides the automated extraction of regions and the representation of their color content. The extraction system for color regions has four steps:

1. The image transformation, quantization and filtering (the transformation from RGB to HSV color space and the quantization at 166 colors)
2. Back-projection of binary color sets
3. The labeling of regions
4. The extraction of region features ( the binary color set, the area, the centroid coordinates and the minimum bounding rectangle coordinates)

Image Based CFD

Workhop Organizers:
Andreas Anayiotos, University of Alabama Birmingham, USA
X.Y. Xu, Imperial College, London, UK

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Diagnostics and Virtual Training in Vascular Diseases

Workhop Organizers:
J.H.C. Reiber, Ph.D., Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands
A.G. Hoekstra, Ph.D., Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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Tagged: diagnose, imaging and virtual ; posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2004 at 10:16 pm
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