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Sample records for biomedical events extraction

  1. A robust approach to extract biomedical events from literature.

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    Bui, Quoc-Chinh; Sloot, Peter M A

    2012-10-15

    The abundance of biomedical literature has attracted significant interest in novel methods to automatically extract biomedical relations from the literature. Until recently, most research was focused on extracting binary relations such as protein-protein interactions and drug-disease relations. However, these binary relations cannot fully represent the original biomedical data. Therefore, there is a need for methods that can extract fine-grained and complex relations known as biomedical events. In this article we propose a novel method to extract biomedical events from text. Our method consists of two phases. In the first phase, training data are mapped into structured representations. Based on that, templates are used to extract rules automatically. In the second phase, extraction methods are developed to process the obtained rules. When evaluated against the Genia event extraction abstract and full-text test datasets (Task 1), we obtain results with F-scores of 52.34 and 53.34, respectively, which are comparable to the state-of-the-art systems. Furthermore, our system achieves superior performance in terms of computational efficiency. Our source code is available for academic use at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10256952/BioEvent.zip.

  2. A semi-supervised learning framework for biomedical event extraction based on hidden topics.

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    Zhou, Deyu; Zhong, Dayou

    2015-05-01

    Scientists have devoted decades of efforts to understanding the interaction between proteins or RNA production. The information might empower the current knowledge on drug reactions or the development of certain diseases. Nevertheless, due to the lack of explicit structure, literature in life science, one of the most important sources of this information, prevents computer-based systems from accessing. Therefore, biomedical event extraction, automatically acquiring knowledge of molecular events in research articles, has attracted community-wide efforts recently. Most approaches are based on statistical models, requiring large-scale annotated corpora to precisely estimate models' parameters. However, it is usually difficult to obtain in practice. Therefore, employing un-annotated data based on semi-supervised learning for biomedical event extraction is a feasible solution and attracts more interests. In this paper, a semi-supervised learning framework based on hidden topics for biomedical event extraction is presented. In this framework, sentences in the un-annotated corpus are elaborately and automatically assigned with event annotations based on their distances to these sentences in the annotated corpus. More specifically, not only the structures of the sentences, but also the hidden topics embedded in the sentences are used for describing the distance. The sentences and newly assigned event annotations, together with the annotated corpus, are employed for training. Experiments were conducted on the multi-level event extraction corpus, a golden standard corpus. Experimental results show that more than 2.2% improvement on F-score on biomedical event extraction is achieved by the proposed framework when compared to the state-of-the-art approach. The results suggest that by incorporating un-annotated data, the proposed framework indeed improves the performance of the state-of-the-art event extraction system and the similarity between sentences might be precisely

  3. Figure text extraction in biomedical literature.

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    Daehyun Kim

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available Figures are ubiquitous in biomedical full-text articles, and they represent important biomedical knowledge. However, the sheer volume of biomedical publications has made it necessary to develop computational approaches for accessing figures. Therefore, we are developing the Biomedical Figure Search engine (http://figuresearch.askHERMES.org to allow bioscientists to access figures efficiently. Since text frequently appears in figures, automatically extracting such text may assist the task of mining information from figures. Little research, however, has been conducted exploring text extraction from biomedical figures.We first evaluated an off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR tool on its ability to extract text from figures appearing in biomedical full-text articles. We then developed a Figure Text Extraction Tool (FigTExT to improve the performance of the OCR tool for figure text extraction through the use of three innovative components: image preprocessing, character recognition, and text correction. We first developed image preprocessing to enhance image quality and to improve text localization. Then we adapted the off-the-shelf OCR tool on the improved text localization for character recognition. Finally, we developed and evaluated a novel text correction framework by taking advantage of figure-specific lexicons.The evaluation on 382 figures (9,643 figure texts in total randomly selected from PubMed Central full-text articles shows that FigTExT performed with 84% precision, 98% recall, and 90% F1-score for text localization and with 62.5% precision, 51.0% recall and 56.2% F1-score for figure text extraction. When limiting figure texts to those judged by domain experts to be important content, FigTExT performed with 87.3% precision, 68.8% recall, and 77% F1-score. FigTExT significantly improved the performance of the off-the-shelf OCR tool we used, which on its own performed with 36.6% precision, 19.3% recall, and 25.3% F1-score for

  4. A hybrid model based on neural networks for biomedical relation extraction.

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    Zhang, Yijia; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao; Wang, Jian; Zhang, Shaowu; Sun, Yuanyuan; Yang, Liang

    2018-05-01

    Biomedical relation extraction can automatically extract high-quality biomedical relations from biomedical texts, which is a vital step for the mining of biomedical knowledge hidden in the literature. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are two major neural network models for biomedical relation extraction. Neural network-based methods for biomedical relation extraction typically focus on the sentence sequence and employ RNNs or CNNs to learn the latent features from sentence sequences separately. However, RNNs and CNNs have their own advantages for biomedical relation extraction. Combining RNNs and CNNs may improve biomedical relation extraction. In this paper, we present a hybrid model for the extraction of biomedical relations that combines RNNs and CNNs. First, the shortest dependency path (SDP) is generated based on the dependency graph of the candidate sentence. To make full use of the SDP, we divide the SDP into a dependency word sequence and a relation sequence. Then, RNNs and CNNs are employed to automatically learn the features from the sentence sequence and the dependency sequences, respectively. Finally, the output features of the RNNs and CNNs are combined to detect and extract biomedical relations. We evaluate our hybrid model using five public (protein-protein interaction) PPI corpora and a (drug-drug interaction) DDI corpus. The experimental results suggest that the advantages of RNNs and CNNs in biomedical relation extraction are complementary. Combining RNNs and CNNs can effectively boost biomedical relation extraction performance. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  5. An Overview of Biomolecular Event Extraction from Scientific Documents.

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    Vanegas, Jorge A; Matos, Sérgio; González, Fabio; Oliveira, José L

    2015-01-01

    This paper presents a review of state-of-the-art approaches to automatic extraction of biomolecular events from scientific texts. Events involving biomolecules such as genes, transcription factors, or enzymes, for example, have a central role in biological processes and functions and provide valuable information for describing physiological and pathogenesis mechanisms. Event extraction from biomedical literature has a broad range of applications, including support for information retrieval, knowledge summarization, and information extraction and discovery. However, automatic event extraction is a challenging task due to the ambiguity and diversity of natural language and higher-level linguistic phenomena, such as speculations and negations, which occur in biological texts and can lead to misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation. Many strategies have been proposed in the last decade, originating from different research areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics. This review summarizes the most representative approaches in biomolecular event extraction and presents an analysis of the current state of the art and of commonly used methods, features, and tools. Finally, current research trends and future perspectives are also discussed.

  6. An Overview of Biomolecular Event Extraction from Scientific Documents

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    Jorge A. Vanegas

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available This paper presents a review of state-of-the-art approaches to automatic extraction of biomolecular events from scientific texts. Events involving biomolecules such as genes, transcription factors, or enzymes, for example, have a central role in biological processes and functions and provide valuable information for describing physiological and pathogenesis mechanisms. Event extraction from biomedical literature has a broad range of applications, including support for information retrieval, knowledge summarization, and information extraction and discovery. However, automatic event extraction is a challenging task due to the ambiguity and diversity of natural language and higher-level linguistic phenomena, such as speculations and negations, which occur in biological texts and can lead to misunderstanding or incorrect interpretation. Many strategies have been proposed in the last decade, originating from different research areas such as natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics. This review summarizes the most representative approaches in biomolecular event extraction and presents an analysis of the current state of the art and of commonly used methods, features, and tools. Finally, current research trends and future perspectives are also discussed.

  7. Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

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    Yue Shang

    Full Text Available Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1 We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2 We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3 For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

  8. Enhancing biomedical text summarization using semantic relation extraction.

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    Shang, Yue; Li, Yanpeng; Lin, Hongfei; Yang, Zhihao

    2011-01-01

    Automatic text summarization for a biomedical concept can help researchers to get the key points of a certain topic from large amount of biomedical literature efficiently. In this paper, we present a method for generating text summary for a given biomedical concept, e.g., H1N1 disease, from multiple documents based on semantic relation extraction. Our approach includes three stages: 1) We extract semantic relations in each sentence using the semantic knowledge representation tool SemRep. 2) We develop a relation-level retrieval method to select the relations most relevant to each query concept and visualize them in a graphic representation. 3) For relations in the relevant set, we extract informative sentences that can interpret them from the document collection to generate text summary using an information retrieval based method. Our major focus in this work is to investigate the contribution of semantic relation extraction to the task of biomedical text summarization. The experimental results on summarization for a set of diseases show that the introduction of semantic knowledge improves the performance and our results are better than the MEAD system, a well-known tool for text summarization.

  9. A Relation Extraction Framework for Biomedical Text Using Hybrid Feature Set

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    Abdul Wahab Muzaffar

    2015-01-01

    Full Text Available The information extraction from unstructured text segments is a complex task. Although manual information extraction often produces the best results, it is harder to manage biomedical data extraction manually because of the exponential increase in data size. Thus, there is a need for automatic tools and techniques for information extraction in biomedical text mining. Relation extraction is a significant area under biomedical information extraction that has gained much importance in the last two decades. A lot of work has been done on biomedical relation extraction focusing on rule-based and machine learning techniques. In the last decade, the focus has changed to hybrid approaches showing better results. This research presents a hybrid feature set for classification of relations between biomedical entities. The main contribution of this research is done in the semantic feature set where verb phrases are ranked using Unified Medical Language System (UMLS and a ranking algorithm. Support Vector Machine and Naïve Bayes, the two effective machine learning techniques, are used to classify these relations. Our approach has been validated on the standard biomedical text corpus obtained from MEDLINE 2001. Conclusively, it can be articulated that our framework outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches used for relation extraction on the same corpus.

  10. Improving the extraction of complex regulatory events from scientific text by using ontology-based inference.

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    Kim, Jung-Jae; Rebholz-Schuhmann, Dietrich

    2011-10-06

    The extraction of complex events from biomedical text is a challenging task and requires in-depth semantic analysis. Previous approaches associate lexical and syntactic resources with ontologies for the semantic analysis, but fall short in testing the benefits from the use of domain knowledge. We developed a system that deduces implicit events from explicitly expressed events by using inference rules that encode domain knowledge. We evaluated the system with the inference module on three tasks: First, when tested against a corpus with manually annotated events, the inference module of our system contributes 53.2% of correct extractions, but does not cause any incorrect results. Second, the system overall reproduces 33.1% of the transcription regulatory events contained in RegulonDB (up to 85.0% precision) and the inference module is required for 93.8% of the reproduced events. Third, we applied the system with minimum adaptations to the identification of cell activity regulation events, confirming that the inference improves the performance of the system also on this task. Our research shows that the inference based on domain knowledge plays a significant role in extracting complex events from text. This approach has great potential in recognizing the complex concepts of such biomedical ontologies as Gene Ontology in the literature.

  11. Improving the extraction of complex regulatory events from scientific text by using ontology-based inference

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    Kim Jung-jae

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The extraction of complex events from biomedical text is a challenging task and requires in-depth semantic analysis. Previous approaches associate lexical and syntactic resources with ontologies for the semantic analysis, but fall short in testing the benefits from the use of domain knowledge. Results We developed a system that deduces implicit events from explicitly expressed events by using inference rules that encode domain knowledge. We evaluated the system with the inference module on three tasks: First, when tested against a corpus with manually annotated events, the inference module of our system contributes 53.2% of correct extractions, but does not cause any incorrect results. Second, the system overall reproduces 33.1% of the transcription regulatory events contained in RegulonDB (up to 85.0% precision and the inference module is required for 93.8% of the reproduced events. Third, we applied the system with minimum adaptations to the identification of cell activity regulation events, confirming that the inference improves the performance of the system also on this task. Conclusions Our research shows that the inference based on domain knowledge plays a significant role in extracting complex events from text. This approach has great potential in recognizing the complex concepts of such biomedical ontologies as Gene Ontology in the literature.

  12. NAMED ENTITY RECOGNITION FROM BIOMEDICAL TEXT -AN INFORMATION EXTRACTION TASK

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    N. Kanya

    2016-07-01

    Full Text Available Biomedical Text Mining targets the Extraction of significant information from biomedical archives. Bio TM encompasses Information Retrieval (IR and Information Extraction (IE. The Information Retrieval will retrieve the relevant Biomedical Literature documents from the various Repositories like PubMed, MedLine etc., based on a search query. The IR Process ends up with the generation of corpus with the relevant document retrieved from the Publication databases based on the query. The IE task includes the process of Preprocessing of the document, Named Entity Recognition (NER from the documents and Relationship Extraction. This process includes Natural Language Processing, Data Mining techniques and machine Language algorithm. The preprocessing task includes tokenization, stop word Removal, shallow parsing, and Parts-Of-Speech tagging. NER phase involves recognition of well-defined objects such as genes, proteins or cell-lines etc. This process leads to the next phase that is extraction of relationships (IE. The work was based on machine learning algorithm Conditional Random Field (CRF.

  13. BioN∅T: A searchable database of biomedical negated sentences

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    Agarwal Shashank

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Negated biomedical events are often ignored by text-mining applications; however, such events carry scientific significance. We report on the development of BioN∅T, a database of negated sentences that can be used to extract such negated events. Description Currently BioN∅T incorporates ≈32 million negated sentences, extracted from over 336 million biomedical sentences from three resources: ≈2 million full-text biomedical articles in Elsevier and the PubMed Central, as well as ≈20 million abstracts in PubMed. We evaluated BioN∅T on three important genetic disorders: autism, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, and found that BioN∅T is able to capture negated events that may be ignored by experts. Conclusions The BioN∅T database can be a useful resource for biomedical researchers. BioN∅T is freely available at http://bionot.askhermes.org/. In future work, we will develop semantic web related technologies to enrich BioN∅T.

  14. An unsupervised text mining method for relation extraction from biomedical literature.

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    Changqin Quan

    Full Text Available The wealth of interaction information provided in biomedical articles motivated the implementation of text mining approaches to automatically extract biomedical relations. This paper presents an unsupervised method based on pattern clustering and sentence parsing to deal with biomedical relation extraction. Pattern clustering algorithm is based on Polynomial Kernel method, which identifies interaction words from unlabeled data; these interaction words are then used in relation extraction between entity pairs. Dependency parsing and phrase structure parsing are combined for relation extraction. Based on the semi-supervised KNN algorithm, we extend the proposed unsupervised approach to a semi-supervised approach by combining pattern clustering, dependency parsing and phrase structure parsing rules. We evaluated the approaches on two different tasks: (1 Protein-protein interactions extraction, and (2 Gene-suicide association extraction. The evaluation of task (1 on the benchmark dataset (AImed corpus showed that our proposed unsupervised approach outperformed three supervised methods. The three supervised methods are rule based, SVM based, and Kernel based separately. The proposed semi-supervised approach is superior to the existing semi-supervised methods. The evaluation on gene-suicide association extraction on a smaller dataset from Genetic Association Database and a larger dataset from publicly available PubMed showed that the proposed unsupervised and semi-supervised methods achieved much higher F-scores than co-occurrence based method.

  15. MBA: a literature mining system for extracting biomedical abbreviations.

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    Xu, Yun; Wang, ZhiHao; Lei, YiMing; Zhao, YuZhong; Xue, Yu

    2009-01-09

    The exploding growth of the biomedical literature presents many challenges for biological researchers. One such challenge is from the use of a great deal of abbreviations. Extracting abbreviations and their definitions accurately is very helpful to biologists and also facilitates biomedical text analysis. Existing approaches fall into four broad categories: rule based, machine learning based, text alignment based and statistically based. State of the art methods either focus exclusively on acronym-type abbreviations, or could not recognize rare abbreviations. We propose a systematic method to extract abbreviations effectively. At first a scoring method is used to classify the abbreviations into acronym-type and non-acronym-type abbreviations, and then their corresponding definitions are identified by two different methods: text alignment algorithm for the former, statistical method for the latter. A literature mining system MBA was constructed to extract both acronym-type and non-acronym-type abbreviations. An abbreviation-tagged literature corpus, called Medstract gold standard corpus, was used to evaluate the system. MBA achieved a recall of 88% at the precision of 91% on the Medstract gold-standard EVALUATION Corpus. We present a new literature mining system MBA for extracting biomedical abbreviations. Our evaluation demonstrates that the MBA system performs better than the others. It can identify the definition of not only acronym-type abbreviations including a little irregular acronym-type abbreviations (e.g., ), but also non-acronym-type abbreviations (e.g., ).

  16. Sortal anaphora resolution to enhance relation extraction from biomedical literature.

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    Kilicoglu, Halil; Rosemblat, Graciela; Fiszman, Marcelo; Rindflesch, Thomas C

    2016-04-14

    Entity coreference is common in biomedical literature and it can affect text understanding systems that rely on accurate identification of named entities, such as relation extraction and automatic summarization. Coreference resolution is a foundational yet challenging natural language processing task which, if performed successfully, is likely to enhance such systems significantly. In this paper, we propose a semantically oriented, rule-based method to resolve sortal anaphora, a specific type of coreference that forms the majority of coreference instances in biomedical literature. The method addresses all entity types and relies on linguistic components of SemRep, a broad-coverage biomedical relation extraction system. It has been incorporated into SemRep, extending its core semantic interpretation capability from sentence level to discourse level. We evaluated our sortal anaphora resolution method in several ways. The first evaluation specifically focused on sortal anaphora relations. Our methodology achieved a F1 score of 59.6 on the test portion of a manually annotated corpus of 320 Medline abstracts, a 4-fold improvement over the baseline method. Investigating the impact of sortal anaphora resolution on relation extraction, we found that the overall effect was positive, with 50 % of the changes involving uninformative relations being replaced by more specific and informative ones, while 35 % of the changes had no effect, and only 15 % were negative. We estimate that anaphora resolution results in changes in about 1.5 % of approximately 82 million semantic relations extracted from the entire PubMed. Our results demonstrate that a heavily semantic approach to sortal anaphora resolution is largely effective for biomedical literature. Our evaluation and error analysis highlight some areas for further improvements, such as coordination processing and intra-sentential antecedent selection.

  17. Negated bio-events: analysis and identification

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    2013-01-01

    Background Negation occurs frequently in scientific literature, especially in biomedical literature. It has previously been reported that around 13% of sentences found in biomedical research articles contain negation. Historically, the main motivation for identifying negated events has been to ensure their exclusion from lists of extracted interactions. However, recently, there has been a growing interest in negative results, which has resulted in negation detection being identified as a key challenge in biomedical relation extraction. In this article, we focus on the problem of identifying negated bio-events, given gold standard event annotations. Results We have conducted a detailed analysis of three open access bio-event corpora containing negation information (i.e., GENIA Event, BioInfer and BioNLP’09 ST), and have identified the main types of negated bio-events. We have analysed the key aspects of a machine learning solution to the problem of detecting negated events, including selection of negation cues, feature engineering and the choice of learning algorithm. Combining the best solutions for each aspect of the problem, we propose a novel framework for the identification of negated bio-events. We have evaluated our system on each of the three open access corpora mentioned above. The performance of the system significantly surpasses the best results previously reported on the BioNLP’09 ST corpus, and achieves even better results on the GENIA Event and BioInfer corpora, both of which contain more varied and complex events. Conclusions Recently, in the field of biomedical text mining, the development and enhancement of event-based systems has received significant interest. The ability to identify negated events is a key performance element for these systems. We have conducted the first detailed study on the analysis and identification of negated bio-events. Our proposed framework can be integrated with state-of-the-art event extraction systems. The

  18. Under-reporting of Adverse Events in the Biomedical Literature

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    Ronald N. Kostoff

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available Purpose: To address the under-reporting of research results, with emphasis on the underreporting/distorted reporting of adverse events in the biomedical research literature. Design/methodology/approach: A four-step approach is used:(1 To identify the characteristics of literature that make it adequate to support policy; (2 to show how each of these characteristics becomes degraded to make inadequate literature; (3 to identify incentives to prevent inadequate literature; and (4 to show policy implications of inadequate literature. Findings: This review has provided reasons for, and examples of, adverse health effects of myriad substances (1 being under-reported in the premiere biomedical literature, or (2 entering this literature in distorted form. Since there is no way to gauge the extent of this under/distorted-reporting, the quality and credibility of the ‘premiere’ biomedical literature is unknown. Therefore, any types of meta-analyses or scientometric analyses of this literature will have unknown quality and credibility. The most sophisticated scientometric analysis cannot compensate for a highly flawed database. Research limitations: The main limitation is in identifying examples of under-reporting. There are many incentives for under-reporting and few dis-incentives. Practical implications: Almost all research publications, addressing causes of disease, treatments for disease, diagnoses for disease, scientometrics of disease and health issues, and other aspects of healthcare, build upon previous healthcare-related research published. Many researchers will not have laboratories or other capabilities to replicate or validate the published research, and depend almost completely on the integrity of this literature. If the literature is distorted, then future research can be misguided, and health policy recommendations can be ineffective or worse. Originality/value: This review has examined a much wider range of technical and nontechnical

  19. BioCause: Annotating and analysing causality in the biomedical domain.

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    Mihăilă, Claudiu; Ohta, Tomoko; Pyysalo, Sampo; Ananiadou, Sophia

    2013-01-16

    Biomedical corpora annotated with event-level information represent an important resource for domain-specific information extraction (IE) systems. However, bio-event annotation alone cannot cater for all the needs of biologists. Unlike work on relation and event extraction, most of which focusses on specific events and named entities, we aim to build a comprehensive resource, covering all statements of causal association present in discourse. Causality lies at the heart of biomedical knowledge, such as diagnosis, pathology or systems biology, and, thus, automatic causality recognition can greatly reduce the human workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. A biomedical text corpus annotated with such relations is, hence, crucial for developing and evaluating biomedical text mining. We have defined an annotation scheme for enriching biomedical domain corpora with causality relations. This schema has subsequently been used to annotate 851 causal relations to form BioCause, a collection of 19 open-access full-text biomedical journal articles belonging to the subdomain of infectious diseases. These documents have been pre-annotated with named entity and event information in the context of previous shared tasks. We report an inter-annotator agreement rate of over 60% for triggers and of over 80% for arguments using an exact match constraint. These increase significantly using a relaxed match setting. Moreover, we analyse and describe the causality relations in BioCause from various points of view. This information can then be leveraged for the training of automatic causality detection systems. Augmenting named entity and event annotations with information about causal discourse relations could benefit the development of more sophisticated IE systems. These will further influence the development of multiple tasks, such as enabling textual inference to detect entailments, discovering new facts and providing new

  20. Exploiting graph kernels for high performance biomedical relation extraction.

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    Panyam, Nagesh C; Verspoor, Karin; Cohn, Trevor; Ramamohanarao, Kotagiri

    2018-01-30

    Relation extraction from biomedical publications is an important task in the area of semantic mining of text. Kernel methods for supervised relation extraction are often preferred over manual feature engineering methods, when classifying highly ordered structures such as trees and graphs obtained from syntactic parsing of a sentence. Tree kernels such as the Subset Tree Kernel and Partial Tree Kernel have been shown to be effective for classifying constituency parse trees and basic dependency parse graphs of a sentence. Graph kernels such as the All Path Graph kernel (APG) and Approximate Subgraph Matching (ASM) kernel have been shown to be suitable for classifying general graphs with cycles, such as the enhanced dependency parse graph of a sentence. In this work, we present a high performance Chemical-Induced Disease (CID) relation extraction system. We present a comparative study of kernel methods for the CID task and also extend our study to the Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) extraction task, an important biomedical relation extraction task. We discuss novel modifications to the ASM kernel to boost its performance and a method to apply graph kernels for extracting relations expressed in multiple sentences. Our system for CID relation extraction attains an F-score of 60%, without using external knowledge sources or task specific heuristic or rules. In comparison, the state of the art Chemical-Disease Relation Extraction system achieves an F-score of 56% using an ensemble of multiple machine learning methods, which is then boosted to 61% with a rule based system employing task specific post processing rules. For the CID task, graph kernels outperform tree kernels substantially, and the best performance is obtained with APG kernel that attains an F-score of 60%, followed by the ASM kernel at 57%. The performance difference between the ASM and APG kernels for CID sentence level relation extraction is not significant. In our evaluation of ASM for the PPI task, ASM

  1. Active learning for ontological event extraction incorporating named entity recognition and unknown word handling.

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    Han, Xu; Kim, Jung-jae; Kwoh, Chee Keong

    2016-01-01

    Biomedical text mining may target various kinds of valuable information embedded in the literature, but a critical obstacle to the extension of the mining targets is the cost of manual construction of labeled data, which are required for state-of-the-art supervised learning systems. Active learning is to choose the most informative documents for the supervised learning in order to reduce the amount of required manual annotations. Previous works of active learning, however, focused on the tasks of entity recognition and protein-protein interactions, but not on event extraction tasks for multiple event types. They also did not consider the evidence of event participants, which might be a clue for the presence of events in unlabeled documents. Moreover, the confidence scores of events produced by event extraction systems are not reliable for ranking documents in terms of informativity for supervised learning. We here propose a novel committee-based active learning method that supports multi-event extraction tasks and employs a new statistical method for informativity estimation instead of using the confidence scores from event extraction systems. Our method is based on a committee of two systems as follows: We first employ an event extraction system to filter potential false negatives among unlabeled documents, from which the system does not extract any event. We then develop a statistical method to rank the potential false negatives of unlabeled documents 1) by using a language model that measures the probabilities of the expression of multiple events in documents and 2) by using a named entity recognition system that locates the named entities that can be event arguments (e.g. proteins). The proposed method further deals with unknown words in test data by using word similarity measures. We also apply our active learning method for the task of named entity recognition. We evaluate the proposed method against the BioNLP Shared Tasks datasets, and show that our method

  2. PIMiner: A web tool for extraction of protein interactions from biomedical literature

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    Chowdhary, Rajesh

    2013-01-01

    Information on Protein Interactions (PIs) is valuable for biomedical research, but often lies buried in the scientific literature and cannot be readily retrieved. While much progress has been made over the years in extracting PIs from the literature using computational methods, there is a lack of free, public, user-friendly tools for the discovery of PIs. We developed an online tool for the extraction of PI relationships from PubMed-abstracts, which we name PIMiner. Protein pairs and the words that describe their interactions are reported by PIMiner so that new interactions can be easily detected within text. The interaction likelihood levels are reported too. The option to extract only specific types of interactions is also provided. The PIMiner server can be accessed through a web browser or remotely through a client\\'s command line. PIMiner can process 50,000 PubMed abstracts in approximately 7 min and thus appears suitable for large-scale processing of biological/biomedical literature. Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

  3. The BioLexicon: a large-scale terminological resource for biomedical text mining

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    Thompson Paul

    2011-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events. Results This article provides an overview of the design, construction and evaluation of a large-scale lexical and conceptual resource for the biomedical domain, the BioLexicon. The resource can be exploited by text mining tools at several levels, e.g., part-of-speech tagging, recognition of biomedical entities, and the extraction of events in which they are involved. As such, the BioLexicon must account for real usage of words in biomedical texts. In particular, the BioLexicon gathers together different types of terms from several existing data resources into a single, unified repository, and augments them with new term variants automatically extracted from biomedical literature. Extraction of events is facilitated through the inclusion of biologically pertinent verbs (around which events are typically organized together with information about typical patterns of grammatical and semantic behaviour, which are acquired from domain-specific texts. In order to foster interoperability, the BioLexicon is

  4. The BioLexicon: a large-scale terminological resource for biomedical text mining

    Science.gov (United States)

    2011-01-01

    Background Due to the rapidly expanding body of biomedical literature, biologists require increasingly sophisticated and efficient systems to help them to search for relevant information. Such systems should account for the multiple written variants used to represent biomedical concepts, and allow the user to search for specific pieces of knowledge (or events) involving these concepts, e.g., protein-protein interactions. Such functionality requires access to detailed information about words used in the biomedical literature. Existing databases and ontologies often have a specific focus and are oriented towards human use. Consequently, biological knowledge is dispersed amongst many resources, which often do not attempt to account for the large and frequently changing set of variants that appear in the literature. Additionally, such resources typically do not provide information about how terms relate to each other in texts to describe events. Results This article provides an overview of the design, construction and evaluation of a large-scale lexical and conceptual resource for the biomedical domain, the BioLexicon. The resource can be exploited by text mining tools at several levels, e.g., part-of-speech tagging, recognition of biomedical entities, and the extraction of events in which they are involved. As such, the BioLexicon must account for real usage of words in biomedical texts. In particular, the BioLexicon gathers together different types of terms from several existing data resources into a single, unified repository, and augments them with new term variants automatically extracted from biomedical literature. Extraction of events is facilitated through the inclusion of biologically pertinent verbs (around which events are typically organized) together with information about typical patterns of grammatical and semantic behaviour, which are acquired from domain-specific texts. In order to foster interoperability, the BioLexicon is modelled using the Lexical

  5. Proposal for a new LEIR Slow Extraction Scheme dedicated to Biomedical Research

    CERN Document Server

    Garonna, A; Carli, C

    2014-01-01

    This report presents a proposal for a new slow extraction scheme for the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) in the context of the feasibility study for a biomedical research facility at CERN. LEIR has to be maintained as a heavy ion accumulator ring for LHC and for fixed-target experiments with the SPS. In parallel to this on-going operation for physics experiments, an additional secondary use of LEIR for a biomedical research facility was proposed [Dosanjh2013, Holzscheiter2012, PHE2010]. This facility would complement the existing research beam-time available at other laboratories for studies related to ion beam therapy. The new slow extraction [Abler2013] is based on the third-integer resonance. The reference beam is composed of fully stripped carbon ions with extraction energies of 20-440 MeV/u, transverse physical emittances of 5-25 µm and momentum spreads of ±2-9•10-4. Two resonance driving mechanisms have been studied: the quadrupole-driven method and the RF-knockout technique. Both were made compatible...

  6. DESIGNING AN EVENT EXTRACTION SYSTEM

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Botond BENEDEK

    2017-06-01

    Full Text Available In the Internet world, the amount of information available reaches very high quotas. In order to find specific information, some tools were created that automatically scroll through the existing web pages and update their databases with the latest information on the Internet. In order to systematize the search and achieve a result in a concrete form, another step is needed for processing the information returned by the search engine and generating the response in a more organized form. Centralizing events of a certain type is useful first of all for creating a news service. Through this system we are pursuing a knowledge - events from the Internet documents - extraction system. The system will recognize events of a certain type (weather, sports, politics, text data mining, etc. depending on how it will be trained (the concept it has in the dictionary. These events can be provided to the user, or it can also extract the context in which the event occurred, to indicate the initial form in which the event was embedded.

  7. Proposal for a new LEIR slow extraction scheme dedicated to biomedical research

    CERN Document Server

    Garonna, A; Abler, D

    2014-01-01

    A proposal is here presented for a new slow extraction scheme for the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) in the context of the feasibility study for a future biomedical research facility at CERN. The new slow extraction system is based on the third-integer resonance. Two resonance driving mechanisms have been studied: the quadrupole-driven method and the RF-knockout technique. Both were made compatible with the tight constraints imposed by parallel operation of LEIR as heavy ion accumulator and care was taken to maximize the use of the available hardware.

  8. Text mining patents for biomedical knowledge.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rodriguez-Esteban, Raul; Bundschus, Markus

    2016-06-01

    Biomedical text mining of scientific knowledge bases, such as Medline, has received much attention in recent years. Given that text mining is able to automatically extract biomedical facts that revolve around entities such as genes, proteins, and drugs, from unstructured text sources, it is seen as a major enabler to foster biomedical research and drug discovery. In contrast to the biomedical literature, research into the mining of biomedical patents has not reached the same level of maturity. Here, we review existing work and highlight the associated technical challenges that emerge from automatically extracting facts from patents. We conclude by outlining potential future directions in this domain that could help drive biomedical research and drug discovery. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  9. On importance of impurities, potential leachables and extractables in algal nanocellulose for biomedical use.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Jun; Willför, Stefan; Mihranyan, Albert

    2017-09-15

    Nanocellulose-based biomaterials for biomedical and pharmaceutical applications have been extensively explored. However, studies on different levels of impurities in the nanocellulose and their potential risks are lacking. This article is the most comprehensive to date survey of the importance and characterization of possible leachables and extractables in nanocellulose for biomedical use. In particular, the (1,3)-β-d-glucan interference in endotoxin detection in algal nanocellulose was addressed. Potential lipophilic and hydrophilic leachables, toxic heavy metals, and microbial contaminants are also monitored. As a model system, nanocellulose from Cladophora sp. algae is investigated. The leachable (1,3)-β-d-glucan and endotoxin, which possess strong immunogenic potential, from the cellulose were minimized to clinically insignificant levels of 4.7μg/g and 2.5EU/g, respectively. The levels of various impurities in the Cladophora cellulose are acceptable for future biomedical applications. The presented approach could be considered as a guideline for other types of nanocellulose. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  10. Minimally-invasive, microneedle-array extraction of interstitial fluid for comprehensive biomedical applications: transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, exosome research, and biomarker identification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taylor, Robert M; Miller, Philip R; Ebrahimi, Parwana; Polsky, Ronen; Baca, Justin T

    2018-01-01

    Interstitial fluid (ISF) has recently garnered interest as a biological fluid that could be used as an alternate to blood for biomedical applications, diagnosis, and therapy. ISF extraction techniques are promising because they are less invasive and less painful than venipuncture. ISF is an alternative, incompletely characterized source of physiological data. Here, we describe a novel method of ISF extraction in rats, using microneedle arrays, which provides volumes of ISF that are sufficient for downstream analysis techniques such as proteomics, genomics, and extracellular vesicle purification and analysis. This method is potentially less invasive than previously reported techniques. The limited invasiveness and larger volumes of extracted ISF afforded by this microneedle-assisted ISF extraction method provide a technique that is less stressful and more humane to laboratory animals, while also allowing for a reduction in the numbers of animals needed to acquire sufficient volumes of ISF for biomedical analysis and application.

  11. Portable blood extraction device integrated with biomedical monitoring system

    Science.gov (United States)

    Khumpuang, S.; Horade, M.; Fujioka, K.; Sugiyama, S.

    2006-01-01

    Painless and portable blood extraction device has been immersed in the world of miniaturization on bio-medical research particularly in manufacturing point-of-care systems. The fabrication of a blood extraction device integrated with an electrolyte-monitoring system is reported in this paper. The device has advantages in precise controlled dosage of blood extracted including the slightly damaged blood vessels and nervous system. The in-house blood diagnostic will become simple for the patients. Main components of the portable system are; the blood extraction device and electrolyte-monitoring system. The monitoring system consists of ISFET (Ion Selective Field Effect Transistor) for measuring the concentration level of minerals in blood. In this work, we measured the level of 3 ions; Na+, K+ and Cl-. The mentioned ions are frequently required the measurement since their concentration levels in the blood can indicate whether the kidney, pancreas, liver or heart is being malfunction. The fabrication of the whole system and experimentation on each ISM (Ion Sensitive Membrane) will be provided. Taking the advantages of LIGA technology, the 100 hollow microneedles fabricated by Synchrotron Radiation deep X-ray lithography through PCT (Plane-pattern to Cross-section Transfer) technique have been consisted in 5x5 mm2 area. The microneedle is 300 μm in base-diameter, 500 μm-pitch, 800 μm-height and 50 μm hole-diameter. The total size of the blood extraction device is 2x2x2 cm 3. The package is made from a plastic socket including slots for inserting microneedle array and ISFET connecting to an electrical circuit for the monitoring. Through the dimensional design for simply handling and selection of disposable material, the patients can self-evaluate the critical level of the body minerals in anywhere and anytime.

  12. Extracting microRNA-gene relations from biomedical literature using distant supervision.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Andre Lamurias

    Full Text Available Many biomedical relation extraction approaches are based on supervised machine learning, requiring an annotated corpus. Distant supervision aims at training a classifier by combining a knowledge base with a corpus, reducing the amount of manual effort necessary. This is particularly useful for biomedicine because many databases and ontologies have been made available for many biological processes, while the availability of annotated corpora is still limited. We studied the extraction of microRNA-gene relations from text. MicroRNA regulation is an important biological process due to its close association with human diseases. The proposed method, IBRel, is based on distantly supervised multi-instance learning. We evaluated IBRel on three datasets, and the results were compared with a co-occurrence approach as well as a supervised machine learning algorithm. While supervised learning outperformed on two of those datasets, IBRel obtained an F-score 28.3 percentage points higher on the dataset for which there was no training set developed specifically. To demonstrate the applicability of IBRel, we used it to extract 27 miRNA-gene relations from recently published papers about cystic fibrosis. Our results demonstrate that our method can be successfully used to extract relations from literature about a biological process without an annotated corpus. The source code and data used in this study are available at https://github.com/AndreLamurias/IBRel.

  13. TERMA Framework for Biomedical Signal Analysis: An Economic-Inspired Approach

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mohamed Elgendi

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available Biomedical signals contain features that represent physiological events, and each of these events has peaks. The analysis of biomedical signals for monitoring or diagnosing diseases requires the detection of these peaks, making event detection a crucial step in biomedical signal processing. Many researchers have difficulty detecting these peaks to investigate, interpret and analyze their corresponding events. To date, there is no generic framework that captures these events in a robust, efficient and consistent manner. A new method referred to for the first time as two event-related moving averages (“TERMA” involves event-related moving averages and detects events in biomedical signals. The TERMA framework is flexible and universal and consists of six independent LEGO building bricks to achieve high accuracy detection of biomedical events. Results recommend that the window sizes for the two moving averages ( W 1 and W 2 have to follow the inequality ( 8 × W 1 ≥ W 2 ≥ ( 2 × W 1 . Moreover, TERMA is a simple yet efficient event detector that is suitable for wearable devices, point-of-care devices, fitness trackers and smart watches, compared to more complex machine learning solutions.

  14. Semantics-based information extraction for detecting economic events

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    A.C. Hogenboom (Alexander); F. Frasincar (Flavius); K. Schouten (Kim); O. van der Meer

    2013-01-01

    textabstractAs today's financial markets are sensitive to breaking news on economic events, accurate and timely automatic identification of events in news items is crucial. Unstructured news items originating from many heterogeneous sources have to be mined in order to extract knowledge useful for

  15. A Risk Assessment System with Automatic Extraction of Event Types

    Science.gov (United States)

    Capet, Philippe; Delavallade, Thomas; Nakamura, Takuya; Sandor, Agnes; Tarsitano, Cedric; Voyatzi, Stavroula

    In this article we describe the joint effort of experts in linguistics, information extraction and risk assessment to integrate EventSpotter, an automatic event extraction engine, into ADAC, an automated early warning system. By detecting as early as possible weak signals of emerging risks ADAC provides a dynamic synthetic picture of situations involving risk. The ADAC system calculates risk on the basis of fuzzy logic rules operated on a template graph whose leaves are event types. EventSpotter is based on a general purpose natural language dependency parser, XIP, enhanced with domain-specific lexical resources (Lexicon-Grammar). Its role is to automatically feed the leaves with input data.

  16. Feature extraction and sensor selection for NPP initiating event identification

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lin, Ting-Han; Wu, Shun-Chi; Chen, Kuang-You; Chou, Hwai-Pwu

    2017-01-01

    Highlights: • A two-stage feature extraction scheme for NPP initiating event identification. • With stBP, interrelations among the sensors can be retained for identification. • With dSFS, sensors that are crucial for identification can be efficiently selected. • Efficacy of the scheme is illustrated with data from the Maanshan NPP simulator. - Abstract: Initiating event identification is essential in managing nuclear power plant (NPP) severe accidents. In this paper, a novel two-stage feature extraction scheme that incorporates the proposed sensor type-wise block projection (stBP) and deflatable sequential forward selection (dSFS) is used to elicit the discriminant information in the data obtained from various NPP sensors to facilitate event identification. With the stBP, the primal features can be extracted without eliminating the interrelations among the sensors of the same type. The extracted features are then subjected to a further dimensionality reduction by selecting the sensors that are most relevant to the events under consideration. This selection is not easy, and a combinatorial optimization technique is normally required. With the dSFS, an optimal sensor set can be found with less computational load. Moreover, its sensor deflation stage allows sensors in the preselected set to be iteratively refined to avoid being trapped into a local optimum. Results from detailed experiments containing data of 12 event categories and a total of 112 events generated with a Taiwan’s Maanshan NPP simulator are presented to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.

  17. Event-by-event extraction of kinetic and chemical freeze-out properties in the CBM experiment

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Vovchenko, Volodymyr [Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); GSI Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt (Germany); Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv (Ukraine); Kisel, Ivan [Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); GSI Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung, Darmstadt (Germany); Anchishkin, Dmitry [Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv (Ukraine); Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyiv (Ukraine); Collaboration: CBM-Collaboration

    2015-07-01

    The future CBM experiment at FAIR is designed to study properties of strongly interacting matter produced in heavy-ion collisions at high baryon densities. It will employ high intensity beams and large acceptance detectors. One important task is to extract the thermal parameters of matter at stages of kinetic and chemical freeze-out from the observed data. The extraction of thermal parameters is implemented as a package within the CBMROOT framework. The kinetic freeze-out temperature and the inverse slope of charged pions are extracted from their measured momentum spectra with appropriate correction on acceptance and reconstruction efficiency. The parameters of the chemical freeze-out are extracted by fitting the measured particle ratios in the framework of Hadron Resonance Gas model. The procedures can be used to perform analysis on event-by-event as well as on the inclusive spectra level.

  18. Event-based text mining for biology and functional genomics

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thompson, Paul; Nawaz, Raheel; McNaught, John; Kell, Douglas B.

    2015-01-01

    The assessment of genome function requires a mapping between genome-derived entities and biochemical reactions, and the biomedical literature represents a rich source of information about reactions between biological components. However, the increasingly rapid growth in the volume of literature provides both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers to isolate information about reactions of interest in a timely and efficient manner. In response, recent text mining research in the biology domain has been largely focused on the identification and extraction of ‘events’, i.e. categorised, structured representations of relationships between biochemical entities, from the literature. Functional genomics analyses necessarily encompass events as so defined. Automatic event extraction systems facilitate the development of sophisticated semantic search applications, allowing researchers to formulate structured queries over extracted events, so as to specify the exact types of reactions to be retrieved. This article provides an overview of recent research into event extraction. We cover annotated corpora on which systems are trained, systems that achieve state-of-the-art performance and details of the community shared tasks that have been instrumental in increasing the quality, coverage and scalability of recent systems. Finally, several concrete applications of event extraction are covered, together with emerging directions of research. PMID:24907365

  19. BioSimplify: an open source sentence simplification engine to improve recall in automatic biomedical information extraction

    OpenAIRE

    Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha; Gonzalez, Graciela

    2011-01-01

    BioSimplify is an open source tool written in Java that introduces and facilitates the use of a novel model for sentence simplification tuned for automatic discourse analysis and information extraction (as opposed to sentence simplification for improving human readability). The model is based on a "shot-gun" approach that produces many different (simpler) versions of the original sentence by combining variants of its constituent elements. This tool is optimized for processing biomedical scien...

  20. Ontology-driven extraction of event logs from relational databases

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Calvanese, Diego; Montali, Marco; Syamsiyah, Alifah; van der Aalst, Wil M P; Reichert, M.; Reijers, H.A.

    2015-01-01

    Process mining is an emerging discipline whose aim is to discover, monitor and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from event logs representing actual process executions in a given organizational setting. In this light, it can be applied only if faithful event logs, adhering to accepted

  1. Multilingual event extraction for epidemic detection.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lejeune, Gaël; Brixtel, Romain; Doucet, Antoine; Lucas, Nadine

    2015-10-01

    This paper presents a multilingual news surveillance system applied to tele-epidemiology. It has been shown that multilingual approaches improve timeliness in detection of epidemic events across the globe, eliminating the wait for local news to be translated into major languages. We present here a system to extract epidemic events in potentially any language, provided a Wikipedia seed for common disease names exists. The Daniel system presented herein relies on properties that are common to news writing (the journalistic genre), the most useful being repetition and saliency. Wikipedia is used to screen common disease names to be matched with repeated characters strings. Language variations, such as declensions, are handled by processing text at the character-level, rather than at the word level. This additionally makes it possible to handle various writing systems in a similar fashion. As no multilingual ground truth existed to evaluate the Daniel system, we built a multilingual corpus from the Web, and collected annotations from native speakers of Chinese, English, Greek, Polish and Russian, with no connection or interest in the Daniel system. This data set is available online freely, and can be used for the evaluation of other event extraction systems. Experiments for 5 languages out of 17 tested are detailed in this paper: Chinese, English, Greek, Polish and Russian. The Daniel system achieves an average F-measure of 82% in these 5 languages. It reaches 87% on BEcorpus, the state-of-the-art corpus in English, slightly below top-performing systems, which are tailored with numerous language-specific resources. The consistent performance of Daniel on multiple languages is an important contribution to the reactivity and the coverage of epidemiological event detection systems. Most event extraction systems rely on extensive resources that are language-specific. While their sophistication induces excellent results (over 90% precision and recall), it restricts their

  2. Electromembrane extraction for pharmaceutical and biomedical analysis

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Huang, Chuixiu; Seip, Knut Fredrik; Gjelstad, Astrid

    2015-01-01

    . The present paper discusses recent development of EME. The paper focuses on the principles of EME, and discusses how to optimize operational parameters. In addition, pharmaceutical and biomedical applications of EME are reviewed, with emphasis on basic drugs, acidic drugs, amino acids, and peptides. Finally...

  3. Research on Crowdsourcing Emergency Information Extraction of Based on Events' Frame

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yang, Bo; Wang, Jizhou; Ma, Weijun; Mao, Xi

    2018-01-01

    At present, the common information extraction method cannot extract the structured emergency event information accurately; the general information retrieval tool cannot completely identify the emergency geographic information; these ways also do not have an accurate assessment of these results of distilling. So, this paper proposes an emergency information collection technology based on event framework. This technique is to solve the problem of emergency information picking. It mainly includes emergency information extraction model (EIEM), complete address recognition method (CARM) and the accuracy evaluation model of emergency information (AEMEI). EIEM can be structured to extract emergency information and complements the lack of network data acquisition in emergency mapping. CARM uses a hierarchical model and the shortest path algorithm and allows the toponomy pieces to be joined as a full address. AEMEI analyzes the results of the emergency event and summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of the event framework. Experiments show that event frame technology can solve the problem of emergency information drawing and provides reference cases for other applications. When the emergency disaster is about to occur, the relevant departments query emergency's data that has occurred in the past. They can make arrangements ahead of schedule which defense and reducing disaster. The technology decreases the number of casualties and property damage in the country and world. This is of great significance to the state and society.

  4. Large-scale event extraction from literature with multi-level gene normalization.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sofie Van Landeghem

    Full Text Available Text mining for the life sciences aims to aid database curation, knowledge summarization and information retrieval through the automated processing of biomedical texts. To provide comprehensive coverage and enable full integration with existing biomolecular database records, it is crucial that text mining tools scale up to millions of articles and that their analyses can be unambiguously linked to information recorded in resources such as UniProt, KEGG, BioGRID and NCBI databases. In this study, we investigate how fully automated text mining of complex biomolecular events can be augmented with a normalization strategy that identifies biological concepts in text, mapping them to identifiers at varying levels of granularity, ranging from canonicalized symbols to unique gene and proteins and broad gene families. To this end, we have combined two state-of-the-art text mining components, previously evaluated on two community-wide challenges, and have extended and improved upon these methods by exploiting their complementary nature. Using these systems, we perform normalization and event extraction to create a large-scale resource that is publicly available, unique in semantic scope, and covers all 21.9 million PubMed abstracts and 460 thousand PubMed Central open access full-text articles. This dataset contains 40 million biomolecular events involving 76 million gene/protein mentions, linked to 122 thousand distinct genes from 5032 species across the full taxonomic tree. Detailed evaluations and analyses reveal promising results for application of this data in database and pathway curation efforts. The main software components used in this study are released under an open-source license. Further, the resulting dataset is freely accessible through a novel API, providing programmatic and customized access (http://www.evexdb.org/api/v001/. Finally, to allow for large-scale bioinformatic analyses, the entire resource is available for bulk download from

  5. Therapeutic Significance of Loligo vulgaris (Lamarck, 1798) ink Extract: A Biomedical Approach

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nadarajah, Sri Kumaran; Vijayaraj, Radha; Mani, Jayaprakashvel

    2017-01-01

    Background: The squid ink extract is well known for its biomedical properties. Objective: In this study, squid Loligo vulgaris was collected from Tuticorin costal water, Bay of Bengal, India. Materials and Methods: Proximate composition of the crude squid ink was studied and found to have protein as the major component over lipid and carbohydrates. Further, bioactive fractions of squid ink were extracted with ethanol, and therapeutic applications such as hemolytic, antioxidant, antimicrobial, and in vitro anti-inflammatory properties were analyzed using standard methods. Results: In hemolytic assay, the squid ink extract exhibited a maximum hemolytic activity of 128 hemolytic unit against tested erythrocytes. In DPPH assay, the ethanolic extract of squid ink has exhibited an antioxidant activity of 83.5%. The squid ink was found to be potent antibacterial agent against the pathogens tested. 200 μL of L. vulgaris ink extract showed remarkable antibacterial activity as zone of inhibition against Escherichia coli (28 mm), Klebsiella pneumoniae (22 mm), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (21 mm), and Staphylococcus aureus (24 mm). The 68.9% inhibition of protein denaturation by the squid ink extract indicated that it has very good in vitro anti-inflammatory properties. The Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analysis of the ethanolic extracts of the squid ink indicated the presence of functional groups such as 1° and 2° amines, amides, alkynes (terminal), alkenes, aldehydes, nitriles, alkanes, aliphatic amines, carboxylic acids, and alkyl halides, which complements the biochemical background of therapeutic applications. Conclusion: Hence, results of this study concluded that the ethanolic extract of L. vulgaris has many therapeutic applications such as antimicrobial, antioxidant, and anti-inflammatory activities. SUMMARY Squid ink is very high in a number of important nutrients. It’s particularly high in antioxidants for instance, which as well all know help to protect

  6. BioSimplify: an open source sentence simplification engine to improve recall in automatic biomedical information extraction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha; Gonzalez, Graciela

    2010-11-13

    BioSimplify is an open source tool written in Java that introduces and facilitates the use of a novel model for sentence simplification tuned for automatic discourse analysis and information extraction (as opposed to sentence simplification for improving human readability). The model is based on a "shot-gun" approach that produces many different (simpler) versions of the original sentence by combining variants of its constituent elements. This tool is optimized for processing biomedical scientific literature such as the abstracts indexed in PubMed. We tested our tool on its impact to the task of PPI extraction and it improved the f-score of the PPI tool by around 7%, with an improvement in recall of around 20%. The BioSimplify tool and test corpus can be downloaded from https://biosimplify.sourceforge.net.

  7. FamPlex: a resource for entity recognition and relationship resolution of human protein families and complexes in biomedical text mining.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bachman, John A; Gyori, Benjamin M; Sorger, Peter K

    2018-06-28

    For automated reading of scientific publications to extract useful information about molecular mechanisms it is critical that genes, proteins and other entities be correctly associated with uniform identifiers, a process known as named entity linking or "grounding." Correct grounding is essential for resolving relationships among mined information, curated interaction databases, and biological datasets. The accuracy of this process is largely dependent on the availability of machine-readable resources associating synonyms and abbreviations commonly found in biomedical literature with uniform identifiers. In a task involving automated reading of ∼215,000 articles using the REACH event extraction software we found that grounding was disproportionately inaccurate for multi-protein families (e.g., "AKT") and complexes with multiple subunits (e.g."NF- κB"). To address this problem we constructed FamPlex, a manually curated resource defining protein families and complexes as they are commonly encountered in biomedical text. In FamPlex the gene-level constituents of families and complexes are defined in a flexible format allowing for multi-level, hierarchical membership. To create FamPlex, text strings corresponding to entities were identified empirically from literature and linked manually to uniform identifiers; these identifiers were also mapped to equivalent entries in multiple related databases. FamPlex also includes curated prefix and suffix patterns that improve named entity recognition and event extraction. Evaluation of REACH extractions on a test corpus of ∼54,000 articles showed that FamPlex significantly increased grounding accuracy for families and complexes (from 15 to 71%). The hierarchical organization of entities in FamPlex also made it possible to integrate otherwise unconnected mechanistic information across families, subfamilies, and individual proteins. Applications of FamPlex to the TRIPS/DRUM reading system and the Biocreative VI Bioentity

  8. Finding biomedical categories in Medline®

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yeganova Lana

    2012-10-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background There are several humanly defined ontologies relevant to Medline. However, Medline is a fast growing collection of biomedical documents which creates difficulties in updating and expanding these humanly defined ontologies. Automatically identifying meaningful categories of entities in a large text corpus is useful for information extraction, construction of machine learning features, and development of semantic representations. In this paper we describe and compare two methods for automatically learning meaningful biomedical categories in Medline. The first approach is a simple statistical method that uses part-of-speech and frequency information to extract a list of frequent nouns from Medline. The second method implements an alignment-based technique to learn frequent generic patterns that indicate a hyponymy/hypernymy relationship between a pair of noun phrases. We then apply these patterns to Medline to collect frequent hypernyms as potential biomedical categories. Results We study and compare these two alternative sets of terms to identify semantic categories in Medline. We find that both approaches produce reasonable terms as potential categories. We also find that there is a significant agreement between the two sets of terms. The overlap between the two methods improves our confidence regarding categories predicted by these independent methods. Conclusions This study is an initial attempt to extract categories that are discussed in Medline. Rather than imposing external ontologies on Medline, our methods allow categories to emerge from the text.

  9. Adverse Event extraction from Structured Product Labels using the Event-based Text-mining of Health Electronic Records (ETHER)system.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pandey, Abhishek; Kreimeyer, Kory; Foster, Matthew; Botsis, Taxiarchis; Dang, Oanh; Ly, Thomas; Wang, Wei; Forshee, Richard

    2018-01-01

    Structured Product Labels follow an XML-based document markup standard approved by the Health Level Seven organization and adopted by the US Food and Drug Administration as a mechanism for exchanging medical products information. Their current organization makes their secondary use rather challenging. We used the Side Effect Resource database and DailyMed to generate a comparison dataset of 1159 Structured Product Labels. We processed the Adverse Reaction section of these Structured Product Labels with the Event-based Text-mining of Health Electronic Records system and evaluated its ability to extract and encode Adverse Event terms to Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities Preferred Terms. A small sample of 100 labels was then selected for further analysis. Of the 100 labels, Event-based Text-mining of Health Electronic Records achieved a precision and recall of 81 percent and 92 percent, respectively. This study demonstrated Event-based Text-mining of Health Electronic Record's ability to extract and encode Adverse Event terms from Structured Product Labels which may potentially support multiple pharmacoepidemiological tasks.

  10. Text mining facilitates database curation - extraction of mutation-disease associations from Bio-medical literature.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ravikumar, Komandur Elayavilli; Wagholikar, Kavishwar B; Li, Dingcheng; Kocher, Jean-Pierre; Liu, Hongfang

    2015-06-06

    Advances in the next generation sequencing technology has accelerated the pace of individualized medicine (IM), which aims to incorporate genetic/genomic information into medicine. One immediate need in interpreting sequencing data is the assembly of information about genetic variants and their corresponding associations with other entities (e.g., diseases or medications). Even with dedicated effort to capture such information in biological databases, much of this information remains 'locked' in the unstructured text of biomedical publications. There is a substantial lag between the publication and the subsequent abstraction of such information into databases. Multiple text mining systems have been developed, but most of them focus on the sentence level association extraction with performance evaluation based on gold standard text annotations specifically prepared for text mining systems. We developed and evaluated a text mining system, MutD, which extracts protein mutation-disease associations from MEDLINE abstracts by incorporating discourse level analysis, using a benchmark data set extracted from curated database records. MutD achieves an F-measure of 64.3% for reconstructing protein mutation disease associations in curated database records. Discourse level analysis component of MutD contributed to a gain of more than 10% in F-measure when compared against the sentence level association extraction. Our error analysis indicates that 23 of the 64 precision errors are true associations that were not captured by database curators and 68 of the 113 recall errors are caused by the absence of associated disease entities in the abstract. After adjusting for the defects in the curated database, the revised F-measure of MutD in association detection reaches 81.5%. Our quantitative analysis reveals that MutD can effectively extract protein mutation disease associations when benchmarking based on curated database records. The analysis also demonstrates that incorporating

  11. Citizen Science for Mining the Biomedical Literature

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ginger Tsueng

    2016-12-01

    Full Text Available Biomedical literature represents one of the largest and fastest growing collections of unstructured biomedical knowledge. Finding critical information buried in the literature can be challenging. To extract information from free-flowing text, researchers need to: 1. identify the entities in the text (named entity recognition, 2. apply a standardized vocabulary to these entities (normalization, and 3. identify how entities in the text are related to one another (relationship extraction. Researchers have primarily approached these information extraction tasks through manual expert curation and computational methods. We have previously demonstrated that named entity recognition (NER tasks can be crowdsourced to a group of non-experts via the paid microtask platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT, and can dramatically reduce the cost and increase the throughput of biocuration efforts. However, given the size of the biomedical literature, even information extraction via paid microtask platforms is not scalable. With our web-based application Mark2Cure (http://mark2cure.org, we demonstrate that NER tasks also can be performed by volunteer citizen scientists with high accuracy. We apply metrics from the Zooniverse Matrices of Citizen Science Success and provide the results here to serve as a basis of comparison for other citizen science projects. Further, we discuss design considerations, issues, and the application of analytics for successfully moving a crowdsourcing workflow from a paid microtask platform to a citizen science platform. To our knowledge, this study is the first application of citizen science to a natural language processing task.

  12. Conference on medical physics and biomedical engineering

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    2013-01-01

    event for our Association’s 10th anniversary. We had the honor of hosting some of the most outstanding lecturers, experts in the field of medical physics and biomedical engineering. Lecturers, who consistently participate in high level organized symposia, conferences, and congresses, evaluated our conference as a highly successful event. The success of the previous conference encouraged us to continue the tradition of the three-year evaluation of our work and organize the Third Conference On Medical Physics And Biomedical Engineering in October 2013. This event is organized again thanks to the cooperation of the European Federation of Organizations for Medical Physics (EFOMP). Renowned experts took part as Conference’s plenary speakers. This proceeding contains works in different fields presented on the conference orally or as poster presentations. (Author)

  13. Extraction of moments of net-particle event-by-event fluctuations in the CBM experiment

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Vovchenko, Volodymyr [Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Taras Shevchenko University, Kyiv (Ukraine); Kisel, Ivan [Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (Germany); Collaboration: CBM-Collaboration

    2016-07-01

    The future CBM experiment at FAIR will employ high intensity beams and large acceptance detectors in order to study the properties of the strongly interacting matter produced in heavy-ion collisions at high baryon densities. The search for the conjectured critical point of QCD is one the important tasks. It is predicted from statistical physics that higher moments of event-by-event fluctuations are very sensitive to the proximity of the critical point. This argument is explicitly demonstrated with the van der Waals equation of state. Thus, it was suggested that higher moments of fluctuations of conserved charges can be used as probes for the critical behavior. The statistical convergence of cumulants of different order is explored. The extraction of scaled variance, skewness, and kurtosis of proton distribution from simulated UrQMD events is performed and the efficiency correction described by binomial distribution is accounted for. The validity of this correction is tested with different modelings of the CBM detector response: from binomial distribution with fluctuating event-by-event efficiency to a full-scale GEANT simulation. The obtained results indicate that a more elaborate efficiency correction is needed in order to accurately reconstruct moments of higher orders.

  14. Text Mining in Biomedical Domain with Emphasis on Document Clustering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Renganathan, Vinaitheerthan

    2017-07-01

    With the exponential increase in the number of articles published every year in the biomedical domain, there is a need to build automated systems to extract unknown information from the articles published. Text mining techniques enable the extraction of unknown knowledge from unstructured documents. This paper reviews text mining processes in detail and the software tools available to carry out text mining. It also reviews the roles and applications of text mining in the biomedical domain. Text mining processes, such as search and retrieval of documents, pre-processing of documents, natural language processing, methods for text clustering, and methods for text classification are described in detail. Text mining techniques can facilitate the mining of vast amounts of knowledge on a given topic from published biomedical research articles and draw meaningful conclusions that are not possible otherwise.

  15. Advances in biomedical signal and image processing – A systematic review

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    J. Rajeswari

    Full Text Available Biomedical signal and image processing establish a dynamic area of specialization in both academic as well as research aspects of biomedical engineering. The concepts of signal and image processing have been widely used for extracting the physiological information in implementing many clinical procedures for sophisticated medical practices and applications. In this paper, the relationship between electrophysiological signals, i.e., electrocardiogram (ECG, electromyogram (EMG, electroencephalogram (EEG and functional image processing and their derived interactions have been discussed. Examples have been investigated in various case studies such as neurosciences, functional imaging, and cardiovascular system, by using different algorithms and methods. The interaction between the extracted information obtained from multiple signals and modalities seems to be very promising. The advanced algorithms and methods in the area of information retrieval based on time-frequency representation have been investigated. Finally, some examples of algorithms have been discussed in which the electrophysiological signals and functional images have been properly extracted and have a significant impact on various biomedical applications. Keywords: Biomedical signals and images, Processing, Analysis

  16. An Ensemble Approach for Emotion Cause Detection with Event Extraction and Multi-Kernel SVMs

    Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

    Ruifeng Xu; Jiannan Hu; Qin Lu; Dongyin Wu; Lin Gui

    2017-01-01

    In this paper,we present a new challenging task for emotion analysis,namely emotion cause extraction.In this task,we focus on the detection of emotion cause a.k.a the reason or the stimulant of an emotion,rather than the regular emotion classification or emotion component extraction.Since there is no open dataset for this task available,we first designed and annotated an emotion cause dataset which follows the scheme of W3C Emotion Markup Language.We then present an emotion cause detection method by using event extraction framework,where a tree structure-based representation method is used to represent the events.Since the distribution of events is imbalanced in the training data,we propose an under-sampling-based bagging algorithm to solve this problem.Even with a limited training set,the proposed approach may still extract sufficient features for analysis by a bagging of multi-kernel based SVMs method.Evaluations show that our approach achieves an F-measure 7.04% higher than the state-of-the-art methods.

  17. In-line phase contrast micro-CT reconstruction for biomedical specimens.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Fu, Jian; Tan, Renbo

    2014-01-01

    X-ray phase contrast micro computed tomography (micro-CT) can non-destructively provide the internal structure information of soft tissues and low atomic number materials. It has become an invaluable analysis tool for biomedical specimens. Here an in-line phase contrast micro-CT reconstruction technique is reported, which consists of a projection extraction method and the conventional filter back-projection (FBP) reconstruction algorithm. The projection extraction is implemented by applying the Fourier transform to the forward projections of in-line phase contrast micro-CT. This work comprises a numerical study of the method and its experimental verification using a biomedical specimen dataset measured at an X-ray tube source micro-CT setup. The numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the presented technique can improve the imaging contrast of biomedical specimens. It will be of interest for a wide range of in-line phase contrast micro-CT applications in medicine and biology.

  18. CONAN : Text Mining in the Biomedical Domain

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Malik, R.

    2006-01-01

    This thesis is about Text Mining. Extracting important information from literature. In the last years, the number of biomedical articles and journals is growing exponentially. Scientists might not find the information they want because of the large number of publications. Therefore a system was

  19. Optimization and Data Analysis in Biomedical Informatics

    CERN Document Server

    Pardalos, Panos M; Xanthopoulos, Petros

    2012-01-01

    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

  20. A novel biomedical image indexing and retrieval system via deep preference learning.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pang, Shuchao; Orgun, Mehmet A; Yu, Zhezhou

    2018-05-01

    The traditional biomedical image retrieval methods as well as content-based image retrieval (CBIR) methods originally designed for non-biomedical images either only consider using pixel and low-level features to describe an image or use deep features to describe images but still leave a lot of room for improving both accuracy and efficiency. In this work, we propose a new approach, which exploits deep learning technology to extract the high-level and compact features from biomedical images. The deep feature extraction process leverages multiple hidden layers to capture substantial feature structures of high-resolution images and represent them at different levels of abstraction, leading to an improved performance for indexing and retrieval of biomedical images. We exploit the current popular and multi-layered deep neural networks, namely, stacked denoising autoencoders (SDAE) and convolutional neural networks (CNN) to represent the discriminative features of biomedical images by transferring the feature representations and parameters of pre-trained deep neural networks from another domain. Moreover, in order to index all the images for finding the similarly referenced images, we also introduce preference learning technology to train and learn a kind of a preference model for the query image, which can output the similarity ranking list of images from a biomedical image database. To the best of our knowledge, this paper introduces preference learning technology for the first time into biomedical image retrieval. We evaluate the performance of two powerful algorithms based on our proposed system and compare them with those of popular biomedical image indexing approaches and existing regular image retrieval methods with detailed experiments over several well-known public biomedical image databases. Based on different criteria for the evaluation of retrieval performance, experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms outperform the state

  1. Magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Krustev, P.; Ruskov, T.

    2007-01-01

    In this paper we describe different biomedical application using magnetic nanoparticles. Over the past decade, a number of biomedical applications have begun to emerge for magnetic nanoparticles of differing sizes, shapes, and compositions. Areas under investigation include targeted drug delivery, ultra-sensitive disease detection, gene therapy, high throughput genetic screening, biochemical sensing, and rapid toxicity cleansing. Magnetic nanoparticles exhibit ferromagnetic or superparamagnetic behavior, magnetizing strongly under an applied field. In the second case (superparamagnetic nanoparticles) there is no permanent magnetism once the field is removed. The superparamagnetic nanoparticles are highly attractive as in vivo probes or in vitro tools to extract information on biochemical systems. The optical properties of magnetic metal nanoparticles are spectacular and, therefore, have promoted a great deal of excitement during the last few decades. Many applications as MRI imaging and hyperthermia rely on the use of iron oxide particles. Moreover magnetic nanoparticles conjugated with antibodies are also applied to hyperthermia and have enabled tumor specific contrast enhancement in MRI. Other promising biomedical applications are connected with tumor cells treated with magnetic nanoparticles with X-ray ionizing radiation, which employs magnetic nanoparticles as a complementary radiate source inside the tumor. (authors)

  2. Investigating and Annotating the Role of Citation in Biomedical Full-Text Articles.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Hong; Agarwal, Shashank; Frid, Nadya

    2009-11-01

    Citations are ubiquitous in scientific articles and play important roles for representing the semantic content of a full-text biomedical article. In this work, we manually examined full-text biomedical articles to analyze the semantic content of citations in full-text biomedical articles. After developing a citation relation schema and annotation guideline, our pilot annotation results show an overall agreement of 0.71, and here we report on the research challenges and the lessons we've learned while trying to overcome them. Our work is a first step toward automatic citation classification in full-text biomedical articles, which may contribute to many text mining tasks, including information retrieval, extraction, summarization, and question answering.

  3. A novel technique to extract events from access control system and locate persons

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Vincent, M.; Vaidyanathan, Mythili; Patidar, Suresh Chandra; Prabhakara Rao, G.

    2011-01-01

    Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research houses many laboratories which handle radioactive materials and classified materials. Protection and accounting of men and material and critical facilities are important aspect of nuclear security. Access Control System (ACS) is used to enhance the protective measures against elevated threat environment. Access control system hardware consists of hand geometry readers, RFID readers, Controllers, Electromagnetic door locks, Turnstiles, fiber cable laying and termination etc. Access Control System controls and monitors the people accessing the secured facilities. Access Control System generates events on: 1. Showing of RFID card, 2. Rotation of turnstile, 3. Download of valid card numbers, 4. Generation of alarms etc. Access control system turnstiles are located in main entrance of a facility, entrance of inside laboratory and door locks are fixed on secured facilities. Events are stored in SQL server database. From the events stored in database a novel technique is developed to extract events and list the persons in a particular facility, list all entry/exit events on one day, list the first in and last out entries. This paper discusses the complex multi level group by queries and software developed to extract events from database, locate persons and generate reports. Software is developed as a web application in ASP.Net and query is written in SQL. User can select the doors, type of events and generate reports. Reports are generated using the master data stored about employees RFID cards and events data stored in tables. Four types of reports are generated 1. Plant Emergency Report, 2. Locate User Report, 3. Entry - Exit Report, 4. First in Last out Report. To generate plant emergency report for whole plant only events generated in outer gates have to be considered. To generate plant emergency report for inside laboratory, events generated in entrance gates have to be ignored. (author)

  4. BEST: Next-Generation Biomedical Entity Search Tool for Knowledge Discovery from Biomedical Literature.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sunwon Lee

    Full Text Available As the volume of publications rapidly increases, searching for relevant information from the literature becomes more challenging. To complement standard search engines such as PubMed, it is desirable to have an advanced search tool that directly returns relevant biomedical entities such as targets, drugs, and mutations rather than a long list of articles. Some existing tools submit a query to PubMed and process retrieved abstracts to extract information at query time, resulting in a slow response time and limited coverage of only a fraction of the PubMed corpus. Other tools preprocess the PubMed corpus to speed up the response time; however, they are not constantly updated, and thus produce outdated results. Further, most existing tools cannot process sophisticated queries such as searches for mutations that co-occur with query terms in the literature. To address these problems, we introduce BEST, a biomedical entity search tool. BEST returns, as a result, a list of 10 different types of biomedical entities including genes, diseases, drugs, targets, transcription factors, miRNAs, and mutations that are relevant to a user's query. To the best of our knowledge, BEST is the only system that processes free text queries and returns up-to-date results in real time including mutation information in the results. BEST is freely accessible at http://best.korea.ac.kr.

  5. Vaccine adverse event text mining system for extracting features from vaccine safety reports.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Botsis, Taxiarchis; Buttolph, Thomas; Nguyen, Michael D; Winiecki, Scott; Woo, Emily Jane; Ball, Robert

    2012-01-01

    To develop and evaluate a text mining system for extracting key clinical features from vaccine adverse event reporting system (VAERS) narratives to aid in the automated review of adverse event reports. Based upon clinical significance to VAERS reviewing physicians, we defined the primary (diagnosis and cause of death) and secondary features (eg, symptoms) for extraction. We built a novel vaccine adverse event text mining (VaeTM) system based on a semantic text mining strategy. The performance of VaeTM was evaluated using a total of 300 VAERS reports in three sequential evaluations of 100 reports each. Moreover, we evaluated the VaeTM contribution to case classification; an information retrieval-based approach was used for the identification of anaphylaxis cases in a set of reports and was compared with two other methods: a dedicated text classifier and an online tool. The performance metrics of VaeTM were text mining metrics: recall, precision and F-measure. We also conducted a qualitative difference analysis and calculated sensitivity and specificity for classification of anaphylaxis cases based on the above three approaches. VaeTM performed best in extracting diagnosis, second level diagnosis, drug, vaccine, and lot number features (lenient F-measure in the third evaluation: 0.897, 0.817, 0.858, 0.874, and 0.914, respectively). In terms of case classification, high sensitivity was achieved (83.1%); this was equal and better compared to the text classifier (83.1%) and the online tool (40.7%), respectively. Our VaeTM implementation of a semantic text mining strategy shows promise in providing accurate and efficient extraction of key features from VAERS narratives.

  6. Assessing the state of the art in biomedical relation extraction: overview of the BioCreative V chemical-disease relation (CDR) task.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wei, Chih-Hsuan; Peng, Yifan; Leaman, Robert; Davis, Allan Peter; Mattingly, Carolyn J; Li, Jiao; Wiegers, Thomas C; Lu, Zhiyong

    2016-01-01

    Manually curating chemicals, diseases and their relationships is significantly important to biomedical research, but it is plagued by its high cost and the rapid growth of the biomedical literature. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing computational approaches for automatic chemical-disease relation (CDR) extraction. Despite these attempts, the lack of a comprehensive benchmarking dataset has limited the comparison of different techniques in order to assess and advance the current state-of-the-art. To this end, we organized a challenge task through BioCreative V to automatically extract CDRs from the literature. We designed two challenge tasks: disease named entity recognition (DNER) and chemical-induced disease (CID) relation extraction. To assist system development and assessment, we created a large annotated text corpus that consisted of human annotations of chemicals, diseases and their interactions from 1500 PubMed articles. 34 teams worldwide participated in the CDR task: 16 (DNER) and 18 (CID). The best systems achieved an F-score of 86.46% for the DNER task--a result that approaches the human inter-annotator agreement (0.8875)--and an F-score of 57.03% for the CID task, the highest results ever reported for such tasks. When combining team results via machine learning, the ensemble system was able to further improve over the best team results by achieving 88.89% and 62.80% in F-score for the DNER and CID task, respectively. Additionally, another novel aspect of our evaluation is to test each participating system's ability to return real-time results: the average response time for each team's DNER and CID web service systems were 5.6 and 9.3 s, respectively. Most teams used hybrid systems for their submissions based on machining learning. Given the level of participation and results, we found our task to be successful in engaging the text-mining research community, producing a large annotated corpus and improving the results of

  7. Biomedical signal and image processing

    CERN Document Server

    Najarian, Kayvan

    2012-01-01

    INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL SIGNAL AND IMAGE PROCESSINGSignals and Biomedical Signal ProcessingIntroduction and OverviewWhat is a ""Signal""?Analog, Discrete, and Digital SignalsProcessing and Transformation of SignalsSignal Processing for Feature ExtractionSome Characteristics of Digital ImagesSummaryProblemsFourier TransformIntroduction and OverviewOne-Dimensional Continuous Fourier TransformSampling and NYQUIST RateOne-Dimensional Discrete Fourier TransformTwo-Dimensional Discrete Fourier TransformFilter DesignSummaryProblemsImage Filtering, Enhancement, and RestorationIntroduction and Overview

  8. Multichannel biomedical time series clustering via hierarchical probabilistic latent semantic analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wang, Jin; Sun, Xiangping; Nahavandi, Saeid; Kouzani, Abbas; Wu, Yuchuan; She, Mary

    2014-11-01

    Biomedical time series clustering that automatically groups a collection of time series according to their internal similarity is of importance for medical record management and inspection such as bio-signals archiving and retrieval. In this paper, a novel framework that automatically groups a set of unlabelled multichannel biomedical time series according to their internal structural similarity is proposed. Specifically, we treat a multichannel biomedical time series as a document and extract local segments from the time series as words. We extend a topic model, i.e., the Hierarchical probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (H-pLSA), which was originally developed for visual motion analysis to cluster a set of unlabelled multichannel time series. The H-pLSA models each channel of the multichannel time series using a local pLSA in the first layer. The topics learned in the local pLSA are then fed to a global pLSA in the second layer to discover the categories of multichannel time series. Experiments on a dataset extracted from multichannel Electrocardiography (ECG) signals demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than previous state-of-the-art approaches and is relatively robust to the variations of parameters including length of local segments and dictionary size. Although the experimental evaluation used the multichannel ECG signals in a biometric scenario, the proposed algorithm is a universal framework for multichannel biomedical time series clustering according to their structural similarity, which has many applications in biomedical time series management. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  9. Automatically Recognizing Medication and Adverse Event Information From Food and Drug Administration's Adverse Event Reporting System Narratives.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Polepalli Ramesh, Balaji; Belknap, Steven M; Li, Zuofeng; Frid, Nadya; West, Dennis P; Yu, Hong

    2014-06-27

    The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) is a repository of spontaneously-reported adverse drug events (ADEs) for FDA-approved prescription drugs. FAERS reports include both structured reports and unstructured narratives. The narratives often include essential information for evaluation of the severity, causality, and description of ADEs that are not present in the structured data. The timely identification of unknown toxicities of prescription drugs is an important, unsolved problem. The objective of this study was to develop an annotated corpus of FAERS narratives and biomedical named entity tagger to automatically identify ADE related information in the FAERS narratives. We developed an annotation guideline and annotate medication information and adverse event related entities on 122 FAERS narratives comprising approximately 23,000 word tokens. A named entity tagger using supervised machine learning approaches was built for detecting medication information and adverse event entities using various categories of features. The annotated corpus had an agreement of over .9 Cohen's kappa for medication and adverse event entities. The best performing tagger achieves an overall performance of 0.73 F1 score for detection of medication, adverse event and other named entities. In this study, we developed an annotated corpus of FAERS narratives and machine learning based models for automatically extracting medication and adverse event information from the FAERS narratives. Our study is an important step towards enriching the FAERS data for postmarketing pharmacovigilance.

  10. PIMiner: A web tool for extraction of protein interactions from biomedical literature

    KAUST Repository

    Chowdhary, Rajesh; Zhang, Jinfeng; Tan, Sinlam; Osborne, Daniel E.; Bajic, Vladimir B.; Liu, Jun

    2013-01-01

    server can be accessed through a web browser or remotely through a client's command line. PIMiner can process 50,000 PubMed abstracts in approximately 7 min and thus appears suitable for large-scale processing of biological/biomedical literature

  11. A Cross-Lingual Similarity Measure for Detecting Biomedical Term Translations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bollegala, Danushka; Kontonatsios, Georgios; Ananiadou, Sophia

    2015-01-01

    Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source) from another language (target). Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a) intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extracted from the term under consideration, and (b) extrinsic features that consist of unigrams and bigrams extracted from the contextual windows surrounding the term under consideration. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure using each of those feature types. First, to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space in each language, we propose prototype vector projection (PVP)—a non-negative lower-dimensional vector projection method. Second, we propose a method to learn a mapping between the feature spaces in the source and target language using partial least squares regression (PLSR). The proposed method requires only a small number of training instances to learn a cross-lingual similarity measure. The proposed PVP method outperforms popular dimensionality reduction methods such as the singular value decomposition (SVD) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) in a nearest neighbor prediction task. Moreover, our experimental results covering several language pairs such as

  12. A cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting biomedical term translations.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Danushka Bollegala

    Full Text Available Bilingual dictionaries for technical terms such as biomedical terms are an important resource for machine translation systems as well as for humans who would like to understand a concept described in a foreign language. Often a biomedical term is first proposed in English and later it is manually translated to other languages. Despite the fact that there are large monolingual lexicons of biomedical terms, only a fraction of those term lexicons are translated to other languages. Manually compiling large-scale bilingual dictionaries for technical domains is a challenging task because it is difficult to find a sufficiently large number of bilingual experts. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure for detecting most similar translation candidates for a biomedical term specified in one language (source from another language (target. Specifically, a biomedical term in a language is represented using two types of features: (a intrinsic features that consist of character n-grams extracted from the term under consideration, and (b extrinsic features that consist of unigrams and bigrams extracted from the contextual windows surrounding the term under consideration. We propose a cross-lingual similarity measure using each of those feature types. First, to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space in each language, we propose prototype vector projection (PVP--a non-negative lower-dimensional vector projection method. Second, we propose a method to learn a mapping between the feature spaces in the source and target language using partial least squares regression (PLSR. The proposed method requires only a small number of training instances to learn a cross-lingual similarity measure. The proposed PVP method outperforms popular dimensionality reduction methods such as the singular value decomposition (SVD and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF in a nearest neighbor prediction task. Moreover, our experimental results covering several language

  13. Biofabrication and characterization of silver nanoparticles using aqueous extract of seaweed Enteromorpha compressa and its biomedical properties

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vijayan Sri Ramkumar

    2017-03-01

    Full Text Available Green synthesis of nanoparticles using seaweeds are fascinating high research attention nowadays and also gaining center of attention in biomedical applications. In this work, we have synthesized biocompatible and functionalized silver nanoparticles using an aqueous extract of seaweed Enteromorpha compressa as a reducing as well as stabilizing agent and their efficient antimicrobial and anticancer activity are reported here. The UV–vis spectra of AgNPs showed the characteristics SPR absorption band at 421 nm. The chemical interaction and crystalline nature of the AgNPs were evaluated by FT-IR and XRD studies. The XRD result of AgNPs shows typical Ag reflection peaks at 38.1°, 44.2°, 64.4° and 77.1° corresponding to (111, (200, (220 and (311 Bragg’s planes. The surface morphology and composition of the samples were observed by HRTEM, EDS and SAED pattern analyses. Spherical shaped Ag nano structures were observed in the size ranges between 4 and 24 nm with clear lattice fringes in the HRTEM image. This report reveals that seaweed mediated synthesis of AgNPs and sustained delivery of Ag ions to the bacterial and fungal surface have been reducing their growth rate which was evaluated by well diffusion assay. The synthesized AgNPs showed favorable cytotoxicity against Ehlrich Ascites Carcinoma (EAC cells with IC50 value was recorded at 95.35 μg mL−1. This study showed cost effective silver nanoparticles synthesis with excellent biocompatibility and thus could potentially be utilized in biomedical and pharmaceutical applications.

  14. MOLIERE: Automatic Biomedical Hypothesis Generation System.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sybrandt, Justin; Shtutman, Michael; Safro, Ilya

    2017-08-01

    Hypothesis generation is becoming a crucial time-saving technique which allows biomedical researchers to quickly discover implicit connections between important concepts. Typically, these systems operate on domain-specific fractions of public medical data. MOLIERE, in contrast, utilizes information from over 24.5 million documents. At the heart of our approach lies a multi-modal and multi-relational network of biomedical objects extracted from several heterogeneous datasets from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). These objects include but are not limited to scientific papers, keywords, genes, proteins, diseases, and diagnoses. We model hypotheses using Latent Dirichlet Allocation applied on abstracts found near shortest paths discovered within this network, and demonstrate the effectiveness of MOLIERE by performing hypothesis generation on historical data. Our network, implementation, and resulting data are all publicly available for the broad scientific community.

  15. Challenges facing academic research in commercializing event-detector implantable devices for an in-vivo biomedical subcutaneous device for biomedical analysis

    Science.gov (United States)

    Juanola-Feliu, E.; Colomer-Farrarons, J.; Miribel-Català, P.; Samitier, J.; Valls-Pasola, J.

    2011-05-01

    It is widely recognized that the welfare of the most advanced economies is at risk, and that the only way to tackle this situation is by controlling the knowledge economies and dealing with. To achieve this ambitious goal, we need to improve the performance of each dimension in the "knowledge triangle": education, research and innovation. Indeed, recent findings point to the importance of strategies of adding-value and marketing during R+D processes so as to bridge the gap between the laboratory and the market and so ensure the successful commercialization of new technology-based products. Moreover, in a global economy in which conventional manufacturing is dominated by developing economies, the future of industry in the most advanced economies must rely on its ability to innovate in those high-tech activities that can offer a differential added-value, rather than on improving existing technologies and products. It seems quite clear, therefore, that the combination of health (medicine) and nanotechnology in a new biomedical device is very capable of meeting these requisites. This work propose a generic CMOS Front-End Self-Powered In-Vivo Implantable Biomedical Device, based on a threeelectrode amperometric biosensor approach, capable of detecting threshold values for targeted concentrations of pathogens, ions, oxygen concentration, etc. Given the speed with which diabetes can spread, as diabetes is the fastest growing disease in the world, the nano-enabled implantable device for in-vivo biomedical analysis needs to be introduced into the global diabetes care devices market. In the case of glucose monitoring, the detection of a threshold decrease in the glucose level it is mandatory to avoid critic situations like the hypoglycemia. Although the case study reported in this paper is complex because it involves multiple organizations and sources of data, it contributes to extend experience to the best practices and models on nanotechnology applications and

  16. An improved rank based disease prediction using web navigation patterns on bio-medical databases

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    P. Dhanalakshmi

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available Applying machine learning techniques to on-line biomedical databases is a challenging task, as this data is collected from large number of sources and it is multi-dimensional. Also retrieval of relevant document from large repository such as gene document takes more processing time and an increased false positive rate. Generally, the extraction of biomedical document is based on the stream of prior observations of gene parameters taken at different time periods. Traditional web usage models such as Markov, Bayesian and Clustering models are sensitive to analyze the user navigation patterns and session identification in online biomedical database. Moreover, most of the document ranking models on biomedical database are sensitive to sparsity and outliers. In this paper, a novel user recommendation system was implemented to predict the top ranked biomedical documents using the disease type, gene entities and user navigation patterns. In this recommendation system, dynamic session identification, dynamic user identification and document ranking techniques were used to extract the highly relevant disease documents on the online PubMed repository. To verify the performance of the proposed model, the true positive rate and runtime of the model was compared with that of traditional static models such as Bayesian and Fuzzy rank. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed ranking model is better than the traditional models.

  17. OAE: The Ontology of Adverse Events.

    Science.gov (United States)

    He, Yongqun; Sarntivijai, Sirarat; Lin, Yu; Xiang, Zuoshuang; Guo, Abra; Zhang, Shelley; Jagannathan, Desikan; Toldo, Luca; Tao, Cui; Smith, Barry

    2014-01-01

    A medical intervention is a medical procedure or application intended to relieve or prevent illness or injury. Examples of medical interventions include vaccination and drug administration. After a medical intervention, adverse events (AEs) may occur which lie outside the intended consequences of the intervention. The representation and analysis of AEs are critical to the improvement of public health. The Ontology of Adverse Events (OAE), previously named Adverse Event Ontology (AEO), is a community-driven ontology developed to standardize and integrate data relating to AEs arising subsequent to medical interventions, as well as to support computer-assisted reasoning. OAE has over 3,000 terms with unique identifiers, including terms imported from existing ontologies and more than 1,800 OAE-specific terms. In OAE, the term 'adverse event' denotes a pathological bodily process in a patient that occurs after a medical intervention. Causal adverse events are defined by OAE as those events that are causal consequences of a medical intervention. OAE represents various adverse events based on patient anatomic regions and clinical outcomes, including symptoms, signs, and abnormal processes. OAE has been used in the analysis of several different sorts of vaccine and drug adverse event data. For example, using the data extracted from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), OAE was used to analyse vaccine adverse events associated with the administrations of different types of influenza vaccines. OAE has also been used to represent and classify the vaccine adverse events cited in package inserts of FDA-licensed human vaccines in the USA. OAE is a biomedical ontology that logically defines and classifies various adverse events occurring after medical interventions. OAE has successfully been applied in several adverse event studies. The OAE ontological framework provides a platform for systematic representation and analysis of adverse events and of the factors (e

  18. A Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network for vesicle fusion event classification.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Haohan; Mao, Yunxiang; Yin, Zhaozheng; Xu, Yingke

    2017-09-01

    Quantitative analysis of vesicle exocytosis and classification of different modes of vesicle fusion from the fluorescence microscopy are of primary importance for biomedical researches. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network (HCNN) method to automatically identify vesicle fusion events in time-lapse Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence Microscopy (TIRFM) image sequences. Firstly, a detection and tracking method is developed to extract image patch sequences containing potential fusion events. Then, a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is applied on each image patch of the patch sequence with outliers rejected for robust Gaussian fitting. By utilizing the high-level time-series intensity change features introduced by GMM and the visual appearance features embedded in some key moments of the fusion process, the proposed HCNN architecture is able to classify each candidate patch sequence into three classes: full fusion event, partial fusion event and non-fusion event. Finally, we validate the performance of our method on 9 challenging datasets that have been annotated by cell biologists, and our method achieves better performances when comparing with three previous methods. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  19. [Biomedical informatics].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Capurro, Daniel; Soto, Mauricio; Vivent, Macarena; Lopetegui, Marcelo; Herskovic, Jorge R

    2011-12-01

    Biomedical Informatics is a new discipline that arose from the need to incorporate information technologies to the generation, storage, distribution and analysis of information in the domain of biomedical sciences. This discipline comprises basic biomedical informatics, and public health informatics. The development of the discipline in Chile has been modest and most projects have originated from the interest of individual people or institutions, without a systematic and coordinated national development. Considering the unique features of health care system of our country, research in the area of biomedical informatics is becoming an imperative.

  20. Characteristics desired in clinical data warehouse for biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shin, Soo-Yong; Kim, Woo Sung; Lee, Jae-Ho

    2014-04-01

    Due to the unique characteristics of clinical data, clinical data warehouses (CDWs) have not been successful so far. Specifically, the use of CDWs for biomedical research has been relatively unsuccessful thus far. The characteristics necessary for the successful implementation and operation of a CDW for biomedical research have not clearly defined yet. THREE EXAMPLES OF CDWS WERE REVIEWED: a multipurpose CDW in a hospital, a CDW for independent multi-institutional research, and a CDW for research use in an institution. After reviewing the three CDW examples, we propose some key characteristics needed in a CDW for biomedical research. A CDW for research should include an honest broker system and an Institutional Review Board approval interface to comply with governmental regulations. It should also include a simple query interface, an anonymized data review tool, and a data extraction tool. Also, it should be a biomedical research platform for data repository use as well as data analysis. The proposed characteristics desired in a CDW may have limited transfer value to organizations in other countries. However, these analysis results are still valid in Korea, and we have developed clinical research data warehouse based on these desiderata.

  1. A robust pointer segmentation in biomedical images toward building a visual ontology for biomedical article retrieval

    Science.gov (United States)

    You, Daekeun; Simpson, Matthew; Antani, Sameer; Demner-Fushman, Dina; Thoma, George R.

    2013-01-01

    Pointers (arrows and symbols) are frequently used in biomedical images to highlight specific image regions of interest (ROIs) that are mentioned in figure captions and/or text discussion. Detection of pointers is the first step toward extracting relevant visual features from ROIs and combining them with textual descriptions for a multimodal (text and image) biomedical article retrieval system. Recently we developed a pointer recognition algorithm based on an edge-based pointer segmentation method, and subsequently reported improvements made on our initial approach involving the use of Active Shape Models (ASM) for pointer recognition and region growing-based method for pointer segmentation. These methods contributed to improving the recall of pointer recognition but not much to the precision. The method discussed in this article is our recent effort to improve the precision rate. Evaluation performed on two datasets and compared with other pointer segmentation methods show significantly improved precision and the highest F1 score.

  2. Resource Disambiguator for the Web: Extracting Biomedical Resources and Their Citations from the Scientific Literature.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ibrahim Burak Ozyurt

    Full Text Available The NIF Registry developed and maintained by the Neuroscience Information Framework is a cooperative project aimed at cataloging research resources, e.g., software tools, databases and tissue banks, funded largely by governments and available as tools to research scientists. Although originally conceived for neuroscience, the NIF Registry has over the years broadened in the scope to include research resources of general relevance to biomedical research. The current number of research resources listed by the Registry numbers over 13K. The broadening in scope to biomedical science led us to re-christen the NIF Registry platform as SciCrunch. The NIF/SciCrunch Registry has been cataloging the resource landscape since 2006; as such, it serves as a valuable dataset for tracking the breadth, fate and utilization of these resources. Our experience shows research resources like databases are dynamic objects, that can change location and scope over time. Although each record is entered manually and human-curated, the current size of the registry requires tools that can aid in curation efforts to keep content up to date, including when and where such resources are used. To address this challenge, we have developed an open source tool suite, collectively termed RDW: Resource Disambiguator for the (Web. RDW is designed to help in the upkeep and curation of the registry as well as in enhancing the content of the registry by automated extraction of resource candidates from the literature. The RDW toolkit includes a URL extractor from papers, resource candidate screen, resource URL change tracker, resource content change tracker. Curators access these tools via a web based user interface. Several strategies are used to optimize these tools, including supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms as well as statistical text analysis. The complete tool suite is used to enhance and maintain the resource registry as well as track the usage of individual

  3. Mining of relations between proteins over biomedical scientific literature using a deep-linguistic approach.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rinaldi, Fabio; Schneider, Gerold; Kaljurand, Kaarel; Hess, Michael; Andronis, Christos; Konstandi, Ourania; Persidis, Andreas

    2007-02-01

    The amount of new discoveries (as published in the scientific literature) in the biomedical area is growing at an exponential rate. This growth makes it very difficult to filter the most relevant results, and thus the extraction of the core information becomes very expensive. Therefore, there is a growing interest in text processing approaches that can deliver selected information from scientific publications, which can limit the amount of human intervention normally needed to gather those results. This paper presents and evaluates an approach aimed at automating the process of extracting functional relations (e.g. interactions between genes and proteins) from scientific literature in the biomedical domain. The approach, using a novel dependency-based parser, is based on a complete syntactic analysis of the corpus. We have implemented a state-of-the-art text mining system for biomedical literature, based on a deep-linguistic, full-parsing approach. The results are validated on two different corpora: the manually annotated genomics information access (GENIA) corpus and the automatically annotated arabidopsis thaliana circadian rhythms (ATCR) corpus. We show how a deep-linguistic approach (contrary to common belief) can be used in a real world text mining application, offering high-precision relation extraction, while at the same time retaining a sufficient recall.

  4. Annotating image ROIs with text descriptions for multimodal biomedical document retrieval

    Science.gov (United States)

    You, Daekeun; Simpson, Matthew; Antani, Sameer; Demner-Fushman, Dina; Thoma, George R.

    2013-01-01

    Regions of interest (ROIs) that are pointed to by overlaid markers (arrows, asterisks, etc.) in biomedical images are expected to contain more important and relevant information than other regions for biomedical article indexing and retrieval. We have developed several algorithms that localize and extract the ROIs by recognizing markers on images. Cropped ROIs then need to be annotated with contents describing them best. In most cases accurate textual descriptions of the ROIs can be found from figure captions, and these need to be combined with image ROIs for annotation. The annotated ROIs can then be used to, for example, train classifiers that separate ROIs into known categories (medical concepts), or to build visual ontologies, for indexing and retrieval of biomedical articles. We propose an algorithm that pairs visual and textual ROIs that are extracted from images and figure captions, respectively. This algorithm based on dynamic time warping (DTW) clusters recognized pointers into groups, each of which contains pointers with identical visual properties (shape, size, color, etc.). Then a rule-based matching algorithm finds the best matching group for each textual ROI mention. Our method yields a precision and recall of 96% and 79%, respectively, when ground truth textual ROI data is used.

  5. Biomedical engineering and nanotechnology

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Pawar, S.H.; Khyalappa, R.J.; Yakhmi, J.V.

    2009-01-01

    This book is predominantly a compilation of papers presented in the conference which is focused on the development in biomedical materials, biomedical devises and instrumentation, biomedical effects of electromagnetic radiation, electrotherapy, radiotherapy, biosensors, biotechnology, bioengineering, tissue engineering, clinical engineering and surgical planning, medical imaging, hospital system management, biomedical education, biomedical industry and society, bioinformatics, structured nanomaterial for biomedical application, nano-composites, nano-medicine, synthesis of nanomaterial, nano science and technology development. The papers presented herein contain the scientific substance to suffice the academic directivity of the researchers from the field of biomedicine, biomedical engineering, material science and nanotechnology. Papers relevant to INIS are indexed separately

  6. Biomedical photonics handbook biomedical diagnostics

    CERN Document Server

    Vo-Dinh, Tuan

    2014-01-01

    Shaped by Quantum Theory, Technology, and the Genomics RevolutionThe integration of photonics, electronics, biomaterials, and nanotechnology holds great promise for the future of medicine. This topic has recently experienced an explosive growth due to the noninvasive or minimally invasive nature and the cost-effectiveness of photonic modalities in medical diagnostics and therapy. The second edition of the Biomedical Photonics Handbook presents fundamental developments as well as important applications of biomedical photonics of interest to scientists, engineers, manufacturers, teachers, studen

  7. Biomedical engineering principles

    CERN Document Server

    Ritter, Arthur B; Valdevit, Antonio; Ascione, Alfred N

    2011-01-01

    Introduction: Modeling of Physiological ProcessesCell Physiology and TransportPrinciples and Biomedical Applications of HemodynamicsA Systems Approach to PhysiologyThe Cardiovascular SystemBiomedical Signal ProcessingSignal Acquisition and ProcessingTechniques for Physiological Signal ProcessingExamples of Physiological Signal ProcessingPrinciples of BiomechanicsPractical Applications of BiomechanicsBiomaterialsPrinciples of Biomedical Capstone DesignUnmet Clinical NeedsEntrepreneurship: Reasons why Most Good Designs Never Get to MarketAn Engineering Solution in Search of a Biomedical Problem

  8. Are figure legends sufficient? Evaluating the contribution of associated text to biomedical figure comprehension.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Hong; Agarwal, Shashank; Johnston, Mark; Cohen, Aaron

    2009-01-06

    Biomedical scientists need to access figures to validate research facts and to formulate or to test novel research hypotheses. However, figures are difficult to comprehend without associated text (e.g., figure legend and other reference text). We are developing automated systems to extract the relevant explanatory information along with figures extracted from full text articles. Such systems could be very useful in improving figure retrieval and in reducing the workload of biomedical scientists, who otherwise have to retrieve and read the entire full-text journal article to determine which figures are relevant to their research. As a crucial step, we studied the importance of associated text in biomedical figure comprehension. Twenty subjects evaluated three figure-text combinations: figure+legend, figure+legend+title+abstract, and figure+full-text. Using a Likert scale, each subject scored each figure+text according to the extent to which the subject thought he/she understood the meaning of the figure and the confidence in providing the assigned score. Additionally, each subject entered a free text summary for each figure-text. We identified missing information using indicator words present within the text summaries. Both the Likert scores and the missing information were statistically analyzed for differences among the figure-text types. We also evaluated the quality of text summaries with the text-summarization evaluation method the ROUGE score. Our results showed statistically significant differences in figure comprehension when varying levels of text were provided. When the full-text article is not available, presenting just the figure+legend left biomedical researchers lacking 39-68% of the information about a figure as compared to having complete figure comprehension; adding the title and abstract improved the situation, but still left biomedical researchers missing 30% of the information. When the full-text article is available, figure comprehension

  9. Biomedical engineering fundamentals

    CERN Document Server

    Bronzino, Joseph D

    2014-01-01

    Known as the bible of biomedical engineering, The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, Fourth Edition, sets the standard against which all other references of this nature are measured. As such, it has served as a major resource for both skilled professionals and novices to biomedical engineering.Biomedical Engineering Fundamentals, the first volume of the handbook, presents material from respected scientists with diverse backgrounds in physiological systems, biomechanics, biomaterials, bioelectric phenomena, and neuroengineering. More than three dozen specific topics are examined, including cardia

  10. Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research - Vol 14, No 1 (2015)

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research - Vol 14, No 1 (2015) ... Histopathological effects of oral and subcutaneous administration of Roselle Calyx ... Ameliorative effect of Vitamin C on lead induced hepatotoxicty in rats · EMAIL ... Effect of Hibiscus sabdariffa calyx extract on stressed rabbit plasma cholesterol status ...

  11. Effects of the Multidisciplinary Risk Assessment and Management Program for Patients with Diabetes Mellitus (RAMP-DM) on biomedical outcomes, observed cardiovascular events and cardiovascular risks in primary care: a longitudinal comparative study.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jiao, Fang Fang; Fung, Colman Siu Cheung; Wong, Carlos King Ho; Wan, Yuk Fai; Dai, Daisy; Kwok, Ruby; Lam, Cindy Lo Kuen

    2014-08-21

    To assess whether the Multidisciplinary Risk Assessment and Management Program for Patients with Diabetes Mellitus (RAMP-DM) led to improvements in biomedical outcomes, observed cardiovascular events and predicted cardiovascular risks after 12-month intervention in the primary care setting. A random sample of 1,248 people with diabetes enrolled to RAMP-DM for at least 12 months was selected and 1,248 people with diabetes under the usual primary care were matched by age, sex, and HbA1c level at baseline as the usual care group. Biomedical and cardiovascular outcomes were measured at baseline and at 12-month after the enrollment. Difference-in-differences approach was employed to measure the effect of RAMP-DM on the changes in biomedical outcomes, proportion of subjects reaching treatment targets, observed and predicted cardiovascular risks. Compared to the usual care group, RAMP-DM group had lower cardiovascular events incidence (1.21% vs 2.89%, P = 0.003), and net decrease in HbA1c (-0.20%, P risks (total CVD risk, -2.06%, P risk, -1.43%, P risk, -0.71%, P risks. The RAMP-DM resulted in greater improvements in HbA1c and reduction in observed and predicted cardiovascular risks at 12 months follow-up, which indicated a risk-stratification multidisciplinary intervention was an effective strategy for managing Chinese people with diabetes in the primary care setting. ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02034695.

  12. DTMiner: identification of potential disease targets through biomedical literature mining.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Xu, Dong; Zhang, Meizhuo; Xie, Yanping; Wang, Fan; Chen, Ming; Zhu, Kenny Q; Wei, Jia

    2016-12-01

    Biomedical researchers often search through massive catalogues of literature to look for potential relationships between genes and diseases. Given the rapid growth of biomedical literature, automatic relation extraction, a crucial technology in biomedical literature mining, has shown great potential to support research of gene-related diseases. Existing work in this field has produced datasets that are limited both in scale and accuracy. In this study, we propose a reliable and efficient framework that takes large biomedical literature repositories as inputs, identifies credible relationships between diseases and genes, and presents possible genes related to a given disease and possible diseases related to a given gene. The framework incorporates name entity recognition (NER), which identifies occurrences of genes and diseases in texts, association detection whereby we extract and evaluate features from gene-disease pairs, and ranking algorithms that estimate how closely the pairs are related. The F1-score of the NER phase is 0.87, which is higher than existing studies. The association detection phase takes drastically less time than previous work while maintaining a comparable F1-score of 0.86. The end-to-end result achieves a 0.259 F1-score for the top 50 genes associated with a disease, which performs better than previous work. In addition, we released a web service for public use of the dataset. The implementation of the proposed algorithms is publicly available at http://gdr-web.rwebox.com/public_html/index.php?page=download.php The web service is available at http://gdr-web.rwebox.com/public_html/index.php CONTACT: jenny.wei@astrazeneca.com or kzhu@cs.sjtu.edu.cn Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

  13. Character-level neural network for biomedical named entity recognition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gridach, Mourad

    2017-06-01

    Biomedical named entity recognition (BNER), which extracts important named entities such as genes and proteins, is a challenging task in automated systems that mine knowledge in biomedical texts. The previous state-of-the-art systems required large amounts of task-specific knowledge in the form of feature engineering, lexicons and data pre-processing to achieve high performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural network architecture that benefits from both word- and character-level representations automatically, by using a combination of bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) and conditional random field (CRF) eliminating the need for most feature engineering tasks. We evaluate our system on two datasets: JNLPBA corpus and the BioCreAtIvE II Gene Mention (GM) corpus. We obtained state-of-the-art performance by outperforming the previous systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the combination of deep neural networks, CRF, word embeddings and character-level representation in recognizing biomedical named entities. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  14. Introduction to biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Enderle, John D; Blanchard, Susan M

    2005-01-01

    Under the direction of John Enderle, Susan Blanchard and Joe Bronzino, leaders in the field have contributed chapters on the most relevant subjects for biomedical engineering students. These chapters coincide with courses offered in all biomedical engineering programs so that it can be used at different levels for a variety of courses of this evolving field. Introduction to Biomedical Engineering, Second Edition provides a historical perspective of the major developments in the biomedical field. Also contained within are the fundamental principles underlying biomedical engineering design, analysis, and modeling procedures. The numerous examples, drill problems and exercises are used to reinforce concepts and develop problem-solving skills making this book an invaluable tool for all biomedical students and engineers. New to this edition: Computational Biology, Medical Imaging, Genomics and Bioinformatics. * 60% update from first edition to reflect the developing field of biomedical engineering * New chapters o...

  15. Text mining for adverse drug events: the promise, challenges, and state of the art.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Harpaz, Rave; Callahan, Alison; Tamang, Suzanne; Low, Yen; Odgers, David; Finlayson, Sam; Jung, Kenneth; LePendu, Paea; Shah, Nigam H

    2014-10-01

    Text mining is the computational process of extracting meaningful information from large amounts of unstructured text. It is emerging as a tool to leverage underutilized data sources that can improve pharmacovigilance, including the objective of adverse drug event (ADE) detection and assessment. This article provides an overview of recent advances in pharmacovigilance driven by the application of text mining, and discusses several data sources-such as biomedical literature, clinical narratives, product labeling, social media, and Web search logs-that are amenable to text mining for pharmacovigilance. Given the state of the art, it appears text mining can be applied to extract useful ADE-related information from multiple textual sources. Nonetheless, further research is required to address remaining technical challenges associated with the text mining methodologies, and to conclusively determine the relative contribution of each textual source to improving pharmacovigilance.

  16. SSEL-ADE: A semi-supervised ensemble learning framework for extracting adverse drug events from social media.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Jing; Zhao, Songzheng; Wang, Gang

    2018-01-01

    With the development of Web 2.0 technology, social media websites have become lucrative but under-explored data sources for extracting adverse drug events (ADEs), which is a serious health problem. Besides ADE, other semantic relation types (e.g., drug indication and beneficial effect) could hold between the drug and adverse event mentions, making ADE relation extraction - distinguishing ADE relationship from other relation types - necessary. However, conducting ADE relation extraction in social media environment is not a trivial task because of the expertise-dependent, time-consuming and costly annotation process, and the feature space's high-dimensionality attributed to intrinsic characteristics of social media data. This study aims to develop a framework for ADE relation extraction using patient-generated content in social media with better performance than that delivered by previous efforts. To achieve the objective, a general semi-supervised ensemble learning framework, SSEL-ADE, was developed. The framework exploited various lexical, semantic, and syntactic features, and integrated ensemble learning and semi-supervised learning. A series of experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of SSEL-ADE and reveal that our proposed framework outperforms most of existing ADE relation extraction methods The SSEL-ADE can facilitate enhanced ADE relation extraction performance, thereby providing more reliable support for pharmacovigilance. Moreover, the proposed semi-supervised ensemble methods have the potential of being applied to effectively deal with other social media-based problems. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. PASBio: predicate-argument structures for event extraction in molecular biology

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wattarujeekrit, Tuangthong; Shah, Parantu K; Collier, Nigel

    2004-01-01

    Background The exploitation of information extraction (IE), a technology aiming to provide instances of structured representations from free-form text, has been rapidly growing within the molecular biology (MB) research community to keep track of the latest results reported in literature. IE systems have traditionally used shallow syntactic patterns for matching facts in sentences but such approaches appear inadequate to achieve high accuracy in MB event extraction due to complex sentence structure. A consensus in the IE community is emerging on the necessity for exploiting deeper knowledge structures such as through the relations between a verb and its arguments shown by predicate-argument structure (PAS). PAS is of interest as structures typically correspond to events of interest and their participating entities. For this to be realized within IE a key knowledge component is the definition of PAS frames. PAS frames for non-technical domains such as newswire are already being constructed in several projects such as PropBank, VerbNet, and FrameNet. Knowledge from PAS should enable more accurate applications in several areas where sentence understanding is required like machine translation and text summarization. In this article, we explore the need to adapt PAS for the MB domain and specify PAS frames to support IE, as well as outlining the major issues that require consideration in their construction. Results We introduce PASBio by extending a model based on PropBank to the MB domain. The hypothesis we explore is that PAS holds the key for understanding relationships describing the roles of genes and gene products in mediating their biological functions. We chose predicates describing gene expression, molecular interactions and signal transduction events with the aim of covering a number of research areas in MB. Analysis was performed on sentences containing a set of verbal predicates from MEDLINE and full text journals. Results confirm the necessity to analyze

  18. Semantic relatedness and similarity of biomedical terms: examining the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publications on the performance of word2vec.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhu, Yongjun; Yan, Erjia; Wang, Fei

    2017-07-03

    Understanding semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms has a great impact on a variety of applications such as biomedical information retrieval, information extraction, and recommender systems. The objective of this study is to examine word2vec's ability in deriving semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms from large publication data. Specifically, we focus on the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publication data on the performance of word2vec. We download abstracts of 18,777,129 articles from PubMed and 766,326 full-text articles from PubMed Central (PMC). The datasets are preprocessed and grouped into subsets by recency, size, and section. Word2vec models are trained on these subtests. Cosine similarities between biomedical terms obtained from the word2vec models are compared against reference standards. Performance of models trained on different subsets are compared to examine recency, size, and section effects. Models trained on recent datasets did not boost the performance. Models trained on larger datasets identified more pairs of biomedical terms than models trained on smaller datasets in relatedness task (from 368 at the 10% level to 494 at the 100% level) and similarity task (from 374 at the 10% level to 491 at the 100% level). The model trained on abstracts produced results that have higher correlations with the reference standards than the one trained on article bodies (i.e., 0.65 vs. 0.62 in the similarity task and 0.66 vs. 0.59 in the relatedness task). However, the latter identified more pairs of biomedical terms than the former (i.e., 344 vs. 498 in the similarity task and 339 vs. 503 in the relatedness task). Increasing the size of dataset does not always enhance the performance. Increasing the size of datasets can result in the identification of more relations of biomedical terms even though it does not guarantee better precision. As summaries of research articles, compared with article

  19. Effective use of latent semantic indexing and computational linguistics in biological and biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Hongyu; Martin, Bronwen; Daimon, Caitlin M; Maudsley, Stuart

    2013-01-01

    Text mining is rapidly becoming an essential technique for the annotation and analysis of large biological data sets. Biomedical literature currently increases at a rate of several thousand papers per week, making automated information retrieval methods the only feasible method of managing this expanding corpus. With the increasing prevalence of open-access journals and constant growth of publicly-available repositories of biomedical literature, literature mining has become much more effective with respect to the extraction of biomedically-relevant data. In recent years, text mining of popular databases such as MEDLINE has evolved from basic term-searches to more sophisticated natural language processing techniques, indexing and retrieval methods, structural analysis and integration of literature with associated metadata. In this review, we will focus on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), a computational linguistics technique increasingly used for a variety of biological purposes. It is noted for its ability to consistently outperform benchmark Boolean text searches and co-occurrence models at information retrieval and its power to extract indirect relationships within a data set. LSI has been used successfully to formulate new hypotheses, generate novel connections from existing data, and validate empirical data.

  20. Three-dimensional biomedical imaging

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Robb, R.A.

    1985-01-01

    Scientists in biomedical imaging provide researchers, physicians, and academicians with an understanding of the fundamental theories and practical applications of three-dimensional biomedical imaging methodologies. Succinct descriptions of each imaging modality are supported by numerous diagrams and illustrations which clarify important concepts and demonstrate system performance in a variety of applications. Comparison of the different functional attributes, relative advantages and limitations, complementary capabilities, and future directions of three-dimensional biomedical imaging modalities are given. Volume 1: Introductions to Three-Dimensional Biomedical Imaging Photoelectronic-Digital Imaging for Diagnostic Radiology. X-Ray Computed Tomography - Basic Principles. X-Ray Computed Tomography - Implementation and Applications. X-Ray Computed Tomography: Advanced Systems and Applications in Biomedical Research and Diagnosis. Volume II: Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography. Position Emission Tomography (PET). Computerized Ultrasound Tomography. Fundamentals of NMR Imaging. Display of Multi-Dimensional Biomedical Image Information. Summary and Prognostications

  1. Biomedical informatics: we are what we publish.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Elkin, P L; Brown, S H; Wright, G

    2013-01-01

    This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine on "Biomedical Informatics: We are what we publish". It is introduced by an editorial and followed by a commentary paper with invited comments. In subsequent issues the discussion may continue through letters to the editor. Informatics experts have attempted to define the field via consensus projects which has led to consensus statements by both AMIA. and by IMIA. We add to the output of this process the results of a study of the Pubmed publications with abstracts from the field of Biomedical Informatics. We took the terms from the AMIA consensus document and the terms from the IMIA definitions of the field of Biomedical Informatics and combined them through human review to create the Health Informatics Ontology. We built a terminology server using the Intelligent Natural Language Processor (iNLP). Then we downloaded the entire set of articles in Medline identified by searching the literature by "Medical Informatics" OR "Bioinformatics". The articles were parsed by the joint AMIA / IMIA terminology and then again using SNOMED CT and for the Bioinformatics they were also parsed using HGNC Ontology. We identified 153,580 articles using "Medical Informatics" and 20,573 articles using "Bioinformatics". This resulted in 168,298 unique articles and an overlap of 5,855 articles. Of these 62,244 articles (37%) had titles and abstracts that contained at least one concept from the Health Informatics Ontology. SNOMED CT indexing showed that the field interacts with most all clinical fields of medicine. Further defining the field by what we publish can add value to the consensus driven processes that have been the mainstay of the efforts to date. Next steps should be to extract terms from the literature that are uncovered and create class hierarchies and relationships for this content. We should also examine the high occurring of MeSH terms as markers to define Biomedical Informatics

  2. BioSig: the free and open source software library for biomedical signal processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vidaurre, Carmen; Sander, Tilmann H; Schlögl, Alois

    2011-01-01

    BioSig is an open source software library for biomedical signal processing. The aim of the BioSig project is to foster research in biomedical signal processing by providing free and open source software tools for many different application areas. Some of the areas where BioSig can be employed are neuroinformatics, brain-computer interfaces, neurophysiology, psychology, cardiovascular systems, and sleep research. Moreover, the analysis of biosignals such as the electroencephalogram (EEG), electrocorticogram (ECoG), electrocardiogram (ECG), electrooculogram (EOG), electromyogram (EMG), or respiration signals is a very relevant element of the BioSig project. Specifically, BioSig provides solutions for data acquisition, artifact processing, quality control, feature extraction, classification, modeling, and data visualization, to name a few. In this paper, we highlight several methods to help students and researchers to work more efficiently with biomedical signals.

  3. Repeat: a framework to assess empirical reproducibility in biomedical research

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Leslie D. McIntosh

    2017-09-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The reproducibility of research is essential to rigorous science, yet significant concerns of the reliability and verifiability of biomedical research have been recently highlighted. Ongoing efforts across several domains of science and policy are working to clarify the fundamental characteristics of reproducibility and to enhance the transparency and accessibility of research. Methods The aim of the proceeding work is to develop an assessment tool operationalizing key concepts of research transparency in the biomedical domain, specifically for secondary biomedical data research using electronic health record data. The tool (RepeAT was developed through a multi-phase process that involved coding and extracting recommendations and practices for improving reproducibility from publications and reports across the biomedical and statistical sciences, field testing the instrument, and refining variables. Results RepeAT includes 119 unique variables grouped into five categories (research design and aim, database and data collection methods, data mining and data cleaning, data analysis, data sharing and documentation. Preliminary results in manually processing 40 scientific manuscripts indicate components of the proposed framework with strong inter-rater reliability, as well as directions for further research and refinement of RepeAT. Conclusions The use of RepeAT may allow the biomedical community to have a better understanding of the current practices of research transparency and accessibility among principal investigators. Common adoption of RepeAT may improve reporting of research practices and the availability of research outputs. Additionally, use of RepeAT will facilitate comparisons of research transparency and accessibility across domains and institutions.

  4. Fundamental of biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Sawhney, GS

    2007-01-01

    About the Book: A well set out textbook explains the fundamentals of biomedical engineering in the areas of biomechanics, biofluid flow, biomaterials, bioinstrumentation and use of computing in biomedical engineering. All these subjects form a basic part of an engineer''s education. The text is admirably suited to meet the needs of the students of mechanical engineering, opting for the elective of Biomedical Engineering. Coverage of bioinstrumentation, biomaterials and computing for biomedical engineers can meet the needs of the students of Electronic & Communication, Electronic & Instrumenta

  5. Facilities available for biomedical science research in the public universities in Lagos, Nigeria.

    Science.gov (United States)

    John, T A

    2010-03-01

    Across the world, basic medical scientists and physician scientists work on common platforms in state-of-the-arts laboratories doing translational research that occasionally results in bedside application. Biotechnology industries capitalise on useful findings for colossal profit.1 In Nigeria and the rest of Africa, biomedical science has not thrived and the contribution of publications to global high impact journals is low.2 This work investigated facilities available for modern biomedical research in Lagos public universities to extract culprit factors. The two public universities in Lagos, Nigeria were investigated by a cross sectional questionnaire survey of the technical staff manning biomedical science departments. They were asked about availability of 47 modern biomedical science research laboratory components such as cold room and microscopes and six research administration components such as director of research and grants administration. For convenient basic laboratory components such as autoclaves and balances, 50% responses indicated "well maintained and always functional" whereas for less convenient complex, high maintenance, state-of-the-arts equipment 19% responses indicated "well maintained and always functional." Respondents indicated that components of modern biomedical science research administration were 44% of expectation. The survey reveal a deficit in state-of the-arts research equipment and also a deficit in high maintenance, expensive equipment indicating that biomedical science in the investigated environment lacks the momentum of global trends and also lacks buoyant funding. In addition, administration supporting biomedical science is below expectation and may also account for the low contributions of research articles to global high impact journals.

  6. The biomedical disciplines and the structure of biomedical and clinical knowledge.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nederbragt, H

    2000-11-01

    The relation between biomedical knowledge and clinical knowledge is discussed by comparing their respective structures. The knowledge of a disease as a biological phenomenon is constructed by the interaction of facts and theories from the main biomedical disciplines: epidemiology, diagnostics, clinical trial, therapy development and pathogenesis. Although these facts and theories are based on probabilities and extrapolations, the interaction provides a reliable and coherent structure, comparable to a Kuhnian paradigma. In the structure of clinical knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the patient with the disease, not only biomedical knowledge contributes to the structure but also economic and social relations, ethics and personal experience. However, the interaction between each of the participating "knowledges" in clinical knowledge is not based on mutual dependency and accumulation of different arguments from each, as in biomedical knowledge, but on competition and partial exclusion. Therefore, the structure of biomedical knowledge is different from that of clinical knowledge. This difference is used as the basis for a discussion in which the place of technology, evidence-based medicine and the gap between scientific and clinical knowledge are evaluated.

  7. Scholarly Information Extraction Is Going to Make a Quantum Leap with PubMed Central (PMC).

    Science.gov (United States)

    Matthies, Franz; Hahn, Udo

    2017-01-01

    With the increasing availability of complete full texts (journal articles), rather than their surrogates (titles, abstracts), as resources for text analytics, entirely new opportunities arise for information extraction and text mining from scholarly publications. Yet, we gathered evidence that a range of problems are encountered for full-text processing when biomedical text analytics simply reuse existing NLP pipelines which were developed on the basis of abstracts (rather than full texts). We conducted experiments with four different relation extraction engines all of which were top performers in previous BioNLP Event Extraction Challenges. We found that abstract-trained engines loose up to 6.6% F-score points when run on full-text data. Hence, the reuse of existing abstract-based NLP software in a full-text scenario is considered harmful because of heavy performance losses. Given the current lack of annotated full-text resources to train on, our study quantifies the price paid for this short cut.

  8. Biomedical signals, imaging, and informatics

    CERN Document Server

    Bronzino, Joseph D

    2014-01-01

    Known as the bible of biomedical engineering, The Biomedical Engineering Handbook, Fourth Edition, sets the standard against which all other references of this nature are measured. As such, it has served as a major resource for both skilled professionals and novices to biomedical engineering.Biomedical Signals, Imaging, and Informatics, the third volume of the handbook, presents material from respected scientists with diverse backgrounds in biosignal processing, medical imaging, infrared imaging, and medical informatics.More than three dozen specific topics are examined, including biomedical s

  9. Powering biomedical devices

    CERN Document Server

    Romero, Edwar

    2013-01-01

    From exoskeletons to neural implants, biomedical devices are no less than life-changing. Compact and constant power sources are necessary to keep these devices running efficiently. Edwar Romero's Powering Biomedical Devices reviews the background, current technologies, and possible future developments of these power sources, examining not only the types of biomedical power sources available (macro, mini, MEMS, and nano), but also what they power (such as prostheses, insulin pumps, and muscular and neural stimulators), and how they work (covering batteries, biofluids, kinetic and ther

  10. Development of an information retrieval tool for biomedical patents.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alves, Tiago; Rodrigues, Rúben; Costa, Hugo; Rocha, Miguel

    2018-06-01

    The volume of biomedical literature has been increasing in the last years. Patent documents have also followed this trend, being important sources of biomedical knowledge, technical details and curated data, which are put together along the granting process. The field of Biomedical text mining (BioTM) has been creating solutions for the problems posed by the unstructured nature of natural language, which makes the search of information a challenging task. Several BioTM techniques can be applied to patents. From those, Information Retrieval (IR) includes processes where relevant data are obtained from collections of documents. In this work, the main goal was to build a patent pipeline addressing IR tasks over patent repositories to make these documents amenable to BioTM tasks. The pipeline was developed within @Note2, an open-source computational framework for BioTM, adding a number of modules to the core libraries, including patent metadata and full text retrieval, PDF to text conversion and optical character recognition. Also, user interfaces were developed for the main operations materialized in a new @Note2 plug-in. The integration of these tools in @Note2 opens opportunities to run BioTM tools over patent texts, including tasks from Information Extraction, such as Named Entity Recognition or Relation Extraction. We demonstrated the pipeline's main functions with a case study, using an available benchmark dataset from BioCreative challenges. Also, we show the use of the plug-in with a user query related to the production of vanillin. This work makes available all the relevant content from patents to the scientific community, decreasing drastically the time required for this task, and provides graphical interfaces to ease the use of these tools. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  11. Disease causality extraction based on lexical semantics and document-clause frequency from biomedical literature.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Dong-Gi; Shin, Hyunjung

    2017-05-18

    Recently, research on human disease network has succeeded and has become an aid in figuring out the relationship between various diseases. In most disease networks, however, the relationship between diseases has been simply represented as an association. This representation results in the difficulty of identifying prior diseases and their influence on posterior diseases. In this paper, we propose a causal disease network that implements disease causality through text mining on biomedical literature. To identify the causality between diseases, the proposed method includes two schemes: the first is the lexicon-based causality term strength, which provides the causal strength on a variety of causality terms based on lexicon analysis. The second is the frequency-based causality strength, which determines the direction and strength of causality based on document and clause frequencies in the literature. We applied the proposed method to 6,617,833 PubMed literature, and chose 195 diseases to construct a causal disease network. From all possible pairs of disease nodes in the network, 1011 causal pairs of 149 diseases were extracted. The resulting network was compared with that of a previous study. In terms of both coverage and quality, the proposed method showed outperforming results; it determined 2.7 times more causalities and showed higher correlation with associated diseases than the existing method. This research has novelty in which the proposed method circumvents the limitations of time and cost in applying all possible causalities in biological experiments and it is a more advanced text mining technique by defining the concepts of causality term strength.

  12. Extraction of events and rules of land use/cover change from the policy text

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Guangfa; Xia, Beicheng; Huang, Wangli; Jiang, Huixian; Chen, Youfei

    2007-06-01

    The database of recording the snapshots of land parcels history is the foundation for the most of the models on simulating land use/cover change (LUCC) process. But the sequences of temporal snapshots are not sufficient to deduce and describe the mechanism of LUCC process. The temporal relationship between scenarios of LUCC we recorded could not be transfer into causal relationship categorically, which was regarded as a key factor in spatial-temporal reasoning. The proprietor of land parcels adapted themselves to the policies from governments and the change of production market, and then made decisions in this or that way. The occurrence of each change of a land parcel in an urban area was often related with one or more decision texts when it was investigated on the local scale with high resolution of the background scene. These decision texts may come from different sections of a hierarchical government system on different levels, such as villages or communities, towns or counties, cities, provinces or even the paramount. All these texts were balance results between advantages and disadvantages of different interest groups. They are the essential forces of LUCC in human dimension. Up to now, a methodology is still wanted for on how to express these forces in a simulation system using GIS as a language. The presented paper was part of our initial research on this topic. The term "Event" is a very important concept in the frame of "Object-Oriented" theory in computer science. While in the domain of temporal GIS, the concept of event was developed in another category. The definitions of the event and their transformation relationship were discussed in this paper on three modeling levels as real world level, conceptual level and programming level. In this context, with a case study of LUCC in recent 30 years in Xiamen city of Fujian province, P. R. China, the paper focused on how to extract information of events and rules from the policy files collected and integrate

  13. Anethum Graveolens Linn (Umbelliferae) Extract Attenuates Stress ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Erah

    College of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Department of Biotechnology, Konkuk University, Chungju, Republic of ... anti-stress and cognition-improving effects of A. graveolens extract in a rat model. ..... This work was supported by Konkuk.

  14. A new visual navigation system for exploring biomedical Open Educational Resource (OER) videos.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhao, Baoquan; Xu, Songhua; Lin, Shujin; Luo, Xiaonan; Duan, Lian

    2016-04-01

    Biomedical videos as open educational resources (OERs) are increasingly proliferating on the Internet. Unfortunately, seeking personally valuable content from among the vast corpus of quality yet diverse OER videos is nontrivial due to limitations of today's keyword- and content-based video retrieval techniques. To address this need, this study introduces a novel visual navigation system that facilitates users' information seeking from biomedical OER videos in mass quantity by interactively offering visual and textual navigational clues that are both semantically revealing and user-friendly. The authors collected and processed around 25 000 YouTube videos, which collectively last for a total length of about 4000 h, in the broad field of biomedical sciences for our experiment. For each video, its semantic clues are first extracted automatically through computationally analyzing audio and visual signals, as well as text either accompanying or embedded in the video. These extracted clues are subsequently stored in a metadata database and indexed by a high-performance text search engine. During the online retrieval stage, the system renders video search results as dynamic web pages using a JavaScript library that allows users to interactively and intuitively explore video content both efficiently and effectively.ResultsThe authors produced a prototype implementation of the proposed system, which is publicly accessible athttps://patentq.njit.edu/oer To examine the overall advantage of the proposed system for exploring biomedical OER videos, the authors further conducted a user study of a modest scale. The study results encouragingly demonstrate the functional effectiveness and user-friendliness of the new system for facilitating information seeking from and content exploration among massive biomedical OER videos. Using the proposed tool, users can efficiently and effectively find videos of interest, precisely locate video segments delivering personally valuable

  15. Biomedical ontologies: toward scientific debate.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Maojo, V; Crespo, J; García-Remesal, M; de la Iglesia, D; Perez-Rey, D; Kulikowski, C

    2011-01-01

    Biomedical ontologies have been very successful in structuring knowledge for many different applications, receiving widespread praise for their utility and potential. Yet, the role of computational ontologies in scientific research, as opposed to knowledge management applications, has not been extensively discussed. We aim to stimulate further discussion on the advantages and challenges presented by biomedical ontologies from a scientific perspective. We review various aspects of biomedical ontologies going beyond their practical successes, and focus on some key scientific questions in two ways. First, we analyze and discuss current approaches to improve biomedical ontologies that are based largely on classical, Aristotelian ontological models of reality. Second, we raise various open questions about biomedical ontologies that require further research, analyzing in more detail those related to visual reasoning and spatial ontologies. We outline significant scientific issues that biomedical ontologies should consider, beyond current efforts of building practical consensus between them. For spatial ontologies, we suggest an approach for building "morphospatial" taxonomies, as an example that could stimulate research on fundamental open issues for biomedical ontologies. Analysis of a large number of problems with biomedical ontologies suggests that the field is very much open to alternative interpretations of current work, and in need of scientific debate and discussion that can lead to new ideas and research directions.

  16. An ensemble method for extracting adverse drug events from social media.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Jing; Zhao, Songzheng; Zhang, Xiaodi

    2016-06-01

    Because adverse drug events (ADEs) are a serious health problem and a leading cause of death, it is of vital importance to identify them correctly and in a timely manner. With the development of Web 2.0, social media has become a large data source for information on ADEs. The objective of this study is to develop a relation extraction system that uses natural language processing techniques to effectively distinguish between ADEs and non-ADEs in informal text on social media. We develop a feature-based approach that utilizes various lexical, syntactic, and semantic features. Information-gain-based feature selection is performed to address high-dimensional features. Then, we evaluate the effectiveness of four well-known kernel-based approaches (i.e., subset tree kernel, tree kernel, shortest dependency path kernel, and all-paths graph kernel) and several ensembles that are generated by adopting different combination methods (i.e., majority voting, weighted averaging, and stacked generalization). All of the approaches are tested using three data sets: two health-related discussion forums and one general social networking site (i.e., Twitter). When investigating the contribution of each feature subset, the feature-based approach attains the best area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) values, which are 78.6%, 72.2%, and 79.2% on the three data sets. When individual methods are used, we attain the best AUC values of 82.1%, 73.2%, and 77.0% using the subset tree kernel, shortest dependency path kernel, and feature-based approach on the three data sets, respectively. When using classifier ensembles, we achieve the best AUC values of 84.5%, 77.3%, and 84.5% on the three data sets, outperforming the baselines. Our experimental results indicate that ADE extraction from social media can benefit from feature selection. With respect to the effectiveness of different feature subsets, lexical features and semantic features can enhance the ADE extraction

  17. Biomedical text mining and its applications in cancer research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhu, Fei; Patumcharoenpol, Preecha; Zhang, Cheng; Yang, Yang; Chan, Jonathan; Meechai, Asawin; Vongsangnak, Wanwipa; Shen, Bairong

    2013-04-01

    Cancer is a malignant disease that has caused millions of human deaths. Its study has a long history of well over 100years. There have been an enormous number of publications on cancer research. This integrated but unstructured biomedical text is of great value for cancer diagnostics, treatment, and prevention. The immense body and rapid growth of biomedical text on cancer has led to the appearance of a large number of text mining techniques aimed at extracting novel knowledge from scientific text. Biomedical text mining on cancer research is computationally automatic and high-throughput in nature. However, it is error-prone due to the complexity of natural language processing. In this review, we introduce the basic concepts underlying text mining and examine some frequently used algorithms, tools, and data sets, as well as assessing how much these algorithms have been utilized. We then discuss the current state-of-the-art text mining applications in cancer research and we also provide some resources for cancer text mining. With the development of systems biology, researchers tend to understand complex biomedical systems from a systems biology viewpoint. Thus, the full utilization of text mining to facilitate cancer systems biology research is fast becoming a major concern. To address this issue, we describe the general workflow of text mining in cancer systems biology and each phase of the workflow. We hope that this review can (i) provide a useful overview of the current work of this field; (ii) help researchers to choose text mining tools and datasets; and (iii) highlight how to apply text mining to assist cancer systems biology research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  18. Advanced Methods of Biomedical Signal Processing

    CERN Document Server

    Cerutti, Sergio

    2011-01-01

    This book grew out of the IEEE-EMBS Summer Schools on Biomedical Signal Processing, which have been held annually since 2002 to provide the participants state-of-the-art knowledge on emerging areas in biomedical engineering. Prominent experts in the areas of biomedical signal processing, biomedical data treatment, medicine, signal processing, system biology, and applied physiology introduce novel techniques and algorithms as well as their clinical or physiological applications. The book provides an overview of a compelling group of advanced biomedical signal processing techniques, such as mult

  19. Issues of biomedically assisted fertilization before the European Court of Human Rights

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Bordaš Bernadet

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available The development of biomedicine has led to the birth of the first test-tube baby in 1978, and that event gave enormous impetus for further development of biomedically assisted fertilization, but also for the development of supporting legislation. Biomedically assisted fertilization and its application raises sensitive social and moral issues, so states retain their sovereign rights in this area and enact rules and regulations that reflect their national legislative policy. Comparative studies across Europe show that national legal acts are in force in many countries, but differences exist and states persist on them. Legal regulation of biomedically assisted fertilization provides legal security for individuals who are subjected to it, making easier the legal protection in cases where individual rights are violated. This paper presents two recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, the subject matter of which are issues of biomedically assisted fertilization, where legal remedy is sought under Article 8 of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Both judgments are in favor of the states against which complaints are filed by individuals: the Court ruled that national regulations have not violated the right to respect for the individual's private life.

  20. Handbook of biomedical optics

    CERN Document Server

    Boas, David A

    2011-01-01

    Biomedical optics holds tremendous promise to deliver effective, safe, non- or minimally invasive diagnostics and targeted, customizable therapeutics. Handbook of Biomedical Optics provides an in-depth treatment of the field, including coverage of applications for biomedical research, diagnosis, and therapy. It introduces the theory and fundamentals of each subject, ensuring accessibility to a wide multidisciplinary readership. It also offers a view of the state of the art and discusses advantages and disadvantages of various techniques.Organized into six sections, this handbook: Contains intr

  1. Journal of Biomedical Investigation: Editorial Policies

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Journal of Biomedical Investigation: Editorial Policies. Journal Home ... The focus of the Journal of Biomedical Research is to promote interdisciplinary research across all Biomedical Sciences. It publishes ... Business editor – Sam Meludu.

  2. Technical editing of research reports in biomedical journals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wager, Elizabeth; Middleton, Philippa

    2008-10-08

    Most journals try to improve their articles by technical editing processes such as proof-reading, editing to conform to 'house styles', grammatical conventions and checking accuracy of cited references. Despite the considerable resources devoted to technical editing, we do not know whether it improves the accessibility of biomedical research findings or the utility of articles. This is an update of a Cochrane methodology review first published in 2003. To assess the effects of technical editing on research reports in peer-reviewed biomedical journals, and to assess the level of accuracy of references to these reports. We searched The Cochrane Library Issue 2, 2007; MEDLINE (last searched July 2006); EMBASE (last searched June 2007) and checked relevant articles for further references. We also searched the Internet and contacted researchers and experts in the field. Prospective or retrospective comparative studies of technical editing processes applied to original research articles in biomedical journals, as well as studies of reference accuracy. Two review authors independently assessed each study against the selection criteria and assessed the methodological quality of each study. One review author extracted the data, and the second review author repeated this. We located 32 studies addressing technical editing and 66 surveys of reference accuracy. Only three of the studies were randomised controlled trials. A 'package' of largely unspecified editorial processes applied between acceptance and publication was associated with improved readability in two studies and improved reporting quality in another two studies, while another study showed mixed results after stricter editorial policies were introduced. More intensive editorial processes were associated with fewer errors in abstracts and references. Providing instructions to authors was associated with improved reporting of ethics requirements in one study and fewer errors in references in two studies, but no

  3. Computational intelligence in biomedical imaging

    CERN Document Server

    2014-01-01

    This book provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art computational intelligence research and technologies in biomedical images with emphasis on biomedical decision making. Biomedical imaging offers useful information on patients’ medical conditions and clues to causes of their symptoms and diseases. Biomedical images, however, provide a large number of images which physicians must interpret. Therefore, computer aids are demanded and become indispensable in physicians’ decision making. This book discusses major technical advancements and research findings in the field of computational intelligence in biomedical imaging, for example, computational intelligence in computer-aided diagnosis for breast cancer, prostate cancer, and brain disease, in lung function analysis, and in radiation therapy. The book examines technologies and studies that have reached the practical level, and those technologies that are becoming available in clinical practices in hospitals rapidly such as computational inte...

  4. Branding the bio/biomedical engineering degree.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Voigt, Herbert F

    2011-01-01

    The future challenges to medical and biological engineering, sometimes referred to as biomedical engineering or simply bioengineering, are many. Some of these are identifiable now and others will emerge from time to time as new technologies are introduced and harnessed. There is a fundamental issue regarding "Branding the bio/biomedical engineering degree" that requires a common understanding of what is meant by a B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering, Bioengineering, or Biological Engineering. In this paper we address some of the issues involved in branding the Bio/Biomedical Engineering degree, with the aim of clarifying the Bio/Biomedical Engineering brand.

  5. Biomedical nanotechnology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hurst, Sarah J

    2011-01-01

    This chapter summarizes the roles of nanomaterials in biomedical applications, focusing on those highlighted in this volume. A brief history of nanoscience and technology and a general introduction to the field are presented. Then, the chemical and physical properties of nanostructures that make them ideal for use in biomedical applications are highlighted. Examples of common applications, including sensing, imaging, and therapeutics, are given. Finally, the challenges associated with translating this field from the research laboratory to the clinic setting, in terms of the larger societal implications, are discussed.

  6. Biomedical applications of polymers

    CERN Document Server

    Gebelein, C G

    1991-01-01

    The biomedical applications of polymers span an extremely wide spectrum of uses, including artificial organs, skin and soft tissue replacements, orthopaedic applications, dental applications, and controlled release of medications. No single, short review can possibly cover all these items in detail, and dozens of books andhundreds of reviews exist on biomedical polymers. Only a few relatively recent examples will be cited here;additional reviews are listed under most of the major topics in this book. We will consider each of the majorclassifications of biomedical polymers to some extent, inclu

  7. Biomedical Engineering Desk Reference

    CERN Document Server

    Ratner, Buddy D; Schoen, Frederick J; Lemons, Jack E; Dyro, Joseph; Martinsen, Orjan G; Kyle, Richard; Preim, Bernhard; Bartz, Dirk; Grimnes, Sverre; Vallero, Daniel; Semmlow, John; Murray, W Bosseau; Perez, Reinaldo; Bankman, Isaac; Dunn, Stanley; Ikada, Yoshito; Moghe, Prabhas V; Constantinides, Alkis

    2009-01-01

    A one-stop Desk Reference, for Biomedical Engineers involved in the ever expanding and very fast moving area; this is a book that will not gather dust on the shelf. It brings together the essential professional reference content from leading international contributors in the biomedical engineering field. Material covers a broad range of topics including: Biomechanics and Biomaterials; Tissue Engineering; and Biosignal Processing* A hard-working desk reference providing all the essential material needed by biomedical and clinical engineers on a day-to-day basis * Fundamentals, key techniques,

  8. Visualization and classification in biomedical terahertz pulsed imaging

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Loeffler, Torsten; Siebert, Karsten; Czasch, Stephanie; Bauer, Tobias; Roskos, Hartmut G

    2002-01-01

    'Visualization' in imaging is the process of extracting useful information from raw data in such a way that meaningful physical contrasts are developed. 'Classification' is the subsequent process of defining parameter ranges which allow us to identify elements of images such as different tissues or different objects. In this paper, we explore techniques for visualization and classification in terahertz pulsed imaging (TPI) for biomedical applications. For archived (formalin-fixed, alcohol-dehydrated and paraffin-mounted) test samples, we investigate both time- and frequency-domain methods based on bright- and dark-field TPI. Successful tissue classification is demonstrated

  9. A scoping review of competencies for scientific editors of biomedical journals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Galipeau, James; Barbour, Virginia; Baskin, Patricia; Bell-Syer, Sally; Cobey, Kelly; Cumpston, Miranda; Deeks, Jon; Garner, Paul; MacLehose, Harriet; Shamseer, Larissa; Straus, Sharon; Tugwell, Peter; Wager, Elizabeth; Winker, Margaret; Moher, David

    2016-02-02

    Biomedical journals are the main route for disseminating the results of health-related research. Despite this, their editors operate largely without formal training or certification. To our knowledge, no body of literature systematically identifying core competencies for scientific editors of biomedical journals exists. Therefore, we aimed to conduct a scoping review to determine what is known on the competency requirements for scientific editors of biomedical journals. We searched the MEDLINE®, Cochrane Library, Embase®, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and ERIC databases (from inception to November 2014) and conducted a grey literature search for research and non-research articles with competency-related statements (i.e. competencies, knowledge, skills, behaviors, and tasks) pertaining to the role of scientific editors of peer-reviewed health-related journals. We also conducted an environmental scan, searched the results of a previous environmental scan, and searched the websites of existing networks, major biomedical journal publishers, and organizations that offer resources for editors. A total of 225 full-text publications were included, 25 of which were research articles. We extracted a total of 1,566 statements possibly related to core competencies for scientific editors of biomedical journals from these publications. We then collated overlapping or duplicate statements which produced a list of 203 unique statements. Finally, we grouped these statements into seven emergent themes: (1) dealing with authors, (2) dealing with peer reviewers, (3) journal publishing, (4) journal promotion, (5) editing, (6) ethics and integrity, and (7) qualities and characteristics of editors. To our knowledge, this scoping review is the first attempt to systematically identify possible competencies of editors. Limitations are that (1) we may not have captured all aspects of a biomedical editor's work in our searches, (2) removing redundant and overlapping items may have led to the

  10. Biomedical research applications

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Anon.

    1982-01-01

    The biomedical research Panel believes that the Calutron facility at Oak Ridge is a national and international resource of immense scientific value and of fundamental importance to continued biomedical research. This resource is essential to the development of new isotope uses in biology and medicine. It should therefore be nurtured by adequate support and operated in a way that optimizes its services to the scientific and technological community. The Panel sees a continuing need for a reliable supply of a wide variety of enriched stable isotopes. The past and present utilization of stable isotopes in biomedical research is documented in Appendix 7. Future requirements for stable isotopes are impossible to document, however, because of the unpredictability of research itself. Nonetheless we expect the demand for isotopes to increase in parallel with the continuing expansion of biomedical research as a whole. There are a number of promising research projects at the present time, and these are expected to lead to an increase in production requirements. The Panel also believes that a high degree of priority should be given to replacing the supplies of the 65 isotopes (out of the 224 previously available enriched isotopes) no longer available from ORNL

  11. Pathophysiologic mechanisms of biomedical nanomaterials

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Wang, Liming; Chen, Chunying

    2016-01-01

    Nanomaterials (NMs) have been widespread used in biomedical fields, daily consuming, and even food industry. It is crucial to understand the safety and biomedical efficacy of NMs. In this review, we summarized the recent progress about the physiological and pathological effects of NMs from several levels: protein-nano interface, NM-subcellular structures, and cell–cell interaction. We focused on the detailed information of nano-bio interaction, especially about protein adsorption, intracellular trafficking, biological barriers, and signaling pathways as well as the associated mechanism mediated by nanomaterials. We also introduced related analytical methods that are meaningful and helpful for biomedical effect studies in the future. We believe that knowledge about pathophysiologic effects of NMs is not only significant for rational design of medical NMs but also helps predict their safety and further improve their applications in the future. - Highlights: • Rapid protein adsorption onto nanomaterials that affects biomedical effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological membrane, intracellular trafficking and specific cellular effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological barriers • The signaling pathways mediated by nanomaterials and related biomedical effects • Novel techniques for studying translocation and biomedical effects of NMs

  12. Pathophysiologic mechanisms of biomedical nanomaterials

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Wang, Liming, E-mail: wangliming@ihep.ac.cn; Chen, Chunying, E-mail: chenchy@nanoctr.cn

    2016-05-15

    Nanomaterials (NMs) have been widespread used in biomedical fields, daily consuming, and even food industry. It is crucial to understand the safety and biomedical efficacy of NMs. In this review, we summarized the recent progress about the physiological and pathological effects of NMs from several levels: protein-nano interface, NM-subcellular structures, and cell–cell interaction. We focused on the detailed information of nano-bio interaction, especially about protein adsorption, intracellular trafficking, biological barriers, and signaling pathways as well as the associated mechanism mediated by nanomaterials. We also introduced related analytical methods that are meaningful and helpful for biomedical effect studies in the future. We believe that knowledge about pathophysiologic effects of NMs is not only significant for rational design of medical NMs but also helps predict their safety and further improve their applications in the future. - Highlights: • Rapid protein adsorption onto nanomaterials that affects biomedical effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological membrane, intracellular trafficking and specific cellular effects • Nanomaterials and their interaction with biological barriers • The signaling pathways mediated by nanomaterials and related biomedical effects • Novel techniques for studying translocation and biomedical effects of NMs.

  13. Biomedical signal analysis

    CERN Document Server

    Rangayyan, Rangaraj M

    2015-01-01

    The book will help assist a reader in the development of techniques for analysis of biomedical signals and computer aided diagnoses with a pedagogical examination of basic and advanced topics accompanied by over 350 figures and illustrations. Wide range of filtering techniques presented to address various applications. 800 mathematical expressions and equations. Practical questions, problems and laboratory exercises. Includes fractals and chaos theory with biomedical applications.

  14. Biomedical informatics and translational medicine

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Sarkar Indra

    2010-02-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Biomedical informatics involves a core set of methodologies that can provide a foundation for crossing the "translational barriers" associated with translational medicine. To this end, the fundamental aspects of biomedical informatics (e.g., bioinformatics, imaging informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics may be essential in helping improve the ability to bring basic research findings to the bedside, evaluate the efficacy of interventions across communities, and enable the assessment of the eventual impact of translational medicine innovations on health policies. Here, a brief description is provided for a selection of key biomedical informatics topics (Decision Support, Natural Language Processing, Standards, Information Retrieval, and Electronic Health Records and their relevance to translational medicine. Based on contributions and advancements in each of these topic areas, the article proposes that biomedical informatics practitioners ("biomedical informaticians" can be essential members of translational medicine teams.

  15. Use of systematic review to inform the infection risk for biomedical engineers and technicians servicing biomedical devices

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Smith, Anne-Louise

    2011-01-01

    Full text: Many microorganisms responsible for hospital acquired infections are able to stay viable on surfaces with no visible sign of contamination, in dry conditions and on non-porous surfaces. The infection risk to biomedical staff when servicing biomedical devices is not documented. An indirect approach has been used to examine the different aspects that will affect the risk of infection including a systematic review of microbial contamination and transmission relating to biomedical devices. A systematic review found 58% of biomedical devices have microbial contamination with 13% having at least one pathogenic organism. These microbes can persist for some months. Occupational-infections of biomedical service staff are low compared to other healthcare workers. A biomedical device with contaminated surface or dust was identified as the source of patient outbreaks in 13 papers. The cleaning agent most tested for removal of micro-organisms from devices was alcohol swabs, but sterile water swabs were also effective. However, manufacturers mainly recommend (74%) cleaning devices with water and detergent. Biomedical engineers and technicians have a small risk of being exposed to dangerous micro-organisms on most biomedical devices, but without skin breakage, this exposure is unlikely to cause ill-health. It is recommended that biomedical staff follow good infection control practices, wipe devices with detergent, sterile water or alcohol swabs as recommended by the manufacturer before working on them, and keep alcohol hand rubs accessible at all benches. (author)

  16. An Effective Approach to Biomedical Information Extraction with Limited Training Data

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha

    2011-01-01

    In the current millennium, extensive use of computers and the internet caused an exponential increase in information. Few research areas are as important as information extraction, which primarily involves extracting concepts and the relations between them from free text. Limitations in the size of training data, lack of lexicons and lack of…

  17. Customization of biomedical terminologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Homo, Julien; Dupuch, Laëtitia; Benbrahim, Allel; Grabar, Natalia; Dupuch, Marie

    2012-01-01

    Within the biomedical area over one hundred terminologies exist and are merged in the Unified Medical Language System Metathesaurus, which gives over 1 million concepts. When such huge terminological resources are available, the users must deal with them and specifically they must deal with irrelevant parts of these terminologies. We propose to exploit seed terms and semantic distance algorithms in order to customize the terminologies and to limit within them a semantically homogeneous space. An evaluation performed by a medical expert indicates that the proposed approach is relevant for the customization of terminologies and that the extracted terms are mostly relevant to the seeds. It also indicates that different algorithms provide with similar or identical results within a given terminology. The difference is due to the terminologies exploited. A special attention must be paid to the definition of optimal association between the semantic similarity algorithms and the thresholds specific to a given terminology.

  18. Rotation Covariant Image Processing for Biomedical Applications

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Henrik Skibbe

    2013-01-01

    Full Text Available With the advent of novel biomedical 3D image acquisition techniques, the efficient and reliable analysis of volumetric images has become more and more important. The amount of data is enormous and demands an automated processing. The applications are manifold, ranging from image enhancement, image reconstruction, and image description to object/feature detection and high-level contextual feature extraction. In most scenarios, it is expected that geometric transformations alter the output in a mathematically well-defined manner. In this paper we emphasis on 3D translations and rotations. Many algorithms rely on intensity or low-order tensorial-like descriptions to fulfill this demand. This paper proposes a general mathematical framework based on mathematical concepts and theories transferred from mathematical physics and harmonic analysis into the domain of image analysis and pattern recognition. Based on two basic operations, spherical tensor differentiation and spherical tensor multiplication, we show how to design a variety of 3D image processing methods in an efficient way. The framework has already been applied to several biomedical applications ranging from feature and object detection tasks to image enhancement and image restoration techniques. In this paper, the proposed methods are applied on a variety of different 3D data modalities stemming from medical and biological sciences.

  19. BIOMedical Search Engine Framework: Lightweight and customized implementation of domain-specific biomedical search engines.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jácome, Alberto G; Fdez-Riverola, Florentino; Lourenço, Anália

    2016-07-01

    Text mining and semantic analysis approaches can be applied to the construction of biomedical domain-specific search engines and provide an attractive alternative to create personalized and enhanced search experiences. Therefore, this work introduces the new open-source BIOMedical Search Engine Framework for the fast and lightweight development of domain-specific search engines. The rationale behind this framework is to incorporate core features typically available in search engine frameworks with flexible and extensible technologies to retrieve biomedical documents, annotate meaningful domain concepts, and develop highly customized Web search interfaces. The BIOMedical Search Engine Framework integrates taggers for major biomedical concepts, such as diseases, drugs, genes, proteins, compounds and organisms, and enables the use of domain-specific controlled vocabulary. Technologies from the Typesafe Reactive Platform, the AngularJS JavaScript framework and the Bootstrap HTML/CSS framework support the customization of the domain-oriented search application. Moreover, the RESTful API of the BIOMedical Search Engine Framework allows the integration of the search engine into existing systems or a complete web interface personalization. The construction of the Smart Drug Search is described as proof-of-concept of the BIOMedical Search Engine Framework. This public search engine catalogs scientific literature about antimicrobial resistance, microbial virulence and topics alike. The keyword-based queries of the users are transformed into concepts and search results are presented and ranked accordingly. The semantic graph view portraits all the concepts found in the results, and the researcher may look into the relevance of different concepts, the strength of direct relations, and non-trivial, indirect relations. The number of occurrences of the concept shows its importance to the query, and the frequency of concept co-occurrence is indicative of biological relations

  20. The ethics of biomedical big data

    CERN Document Server

    Mittelstadt, Brent Daniel

    2016-01-01

    This book presents cutting edge research on the new ethical challenges posed by biomedical Big Data technologies and practices. ‘Biomedical Big Data’ refers to the analysis of aggregated, very large datasets to improve medical knowledge and clinical care. The book describes the ethical problems posed by aggregation of biomedical datasets and re-use/re-purposing of data, in areas such as privacy, consent, professionalism, power relationships, and ethical governance of Big Data platforms. Approaches and methods are discussed that can be used to address these problems to achieve the appropriate balance between the social goods of biomedical Big Data research and the safety and privacy of individuals. Seventeen original contributions analyse the ethical, social and related policy implications of the analysis and curation of biomedical Big Data, written by leading experts in the areas of biomedical research, medical and technology ethics, privacy, governance and data protection. The book advances our understan...

  1. Biomedical applications engineering tasks

    Science.gov (United States)

    Laenger, C. J., Sr.

    1976-01-01

    The engineering tasks performed in response to needs articulated by clinicians are described. Initial contacts were made with these clinician-technology requestors by the Southwest Research Institute NASA Biomedical Applications Team. The basic purpose of the program was to effectively transfer aerospace technology into functional hardware to solve real biomedical problems.

  2. A novel end-to-end classifier using domain transferred deep convolutional neural networks for biomedical images.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pang, Shuchao; Yu, Zhezhou; Orgun, Mehmet A

    2017-03-01

    Highly accurate classification of biomedical images is an essential task in the clinical diagnosis of numerous medical diseases identified from those images. Traditional image classification methods combined with hand-crafted image feature descriptors and various classifiers are not able to effectively improve the accuracy rate and meet the high requirements of classification of biomedical images. The same also holds true for artificial neural network models directly trained with limited biomedical images used as training data or directly used as a black box to extract the deep features based on another distant dataset. In this study, we propose a highly reliable and accurate end-to-end classifier for all kinds of biomedical images via deep learning and transfer learning. We first apply domain transferred deep convolutional neural network for building a deep model; and then develop an overall deep learning architecture based on the raw pixels of original biomedical images using supervised training. In our model, we do not need the manual design of the feature space, seek an effective feature vector classifier or segment specific detection object and image patches, which are the main technological difficulties in the adoption of traditional image classification methods. Moreover, we do not need to be concerned with whether there are large training sets of annotated biomedical images, affordable parallel computing resources featuring GPUs or long times to wait for training a perfect deep model, which are the main problems to train deep neural networks for biomedical image classification as observed in recent works. With the utilization of a simple data augmentation method and fast convergence speed, our algorithm can achieve the best accuracy rate and outstanding classification ability for biomedical images. We have evaluated our classifier on several well-known public biomedical datasets and compared it with several state-of-the-art approaches. We propose a robust

  3. Position-aware deep multi-task learning for drug-drug interaction extraction.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhou, Deyu; Miao, Lei; He, Yulan

    2018-05-01

    A drug-drug interaction (DDI) is a situation in which a drug affects the activity of another drug synergistically or antagonistically when being administered together. The information of DDIs is crucial for healthcare professionals to prevent adverse drug events. Although some known DDIs can be found in purposely-built databases such as DrugBank, most information is still buried in scientific publications. Therefore, automatically extracting DDIs from biomedical texts is sorely needed. In this paper, we propose a novel position-aware deep multi-task learning approach for extracting DDIs from biomedical texts. In particular, sentences are represented as a sequence of word embeddings and position embeddings. An attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network is used to encode each sentence. The relative position information of words with the target drugs in text is combined with the hidden states of BiLSTM to generate the position-aware attention weights. Moreover, the tasks of predicting whether or not two drugs interact with each other and further distinguishing the types of interactions are learned jointly in multi-task learning framework. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the DDIExtraction challenge 2013 corpus and the results show that with the position-aware attention only, our proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 0.99% for binary DDI classification, and with both position-aware attention and multi-task learning, our approach achieves a micro F-score of 72.99% on interaction type identification, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach by 1.51%, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  4. Frontiers in biomedical engineering and biotechnology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Feng; Goodarzi, Ali; Wang, Haifeng; Stasiak, Joanna; Sun, Jianbo; Zhou, Yu

    2014-01-01

    The 2nd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (iCBEB 2013), held in Wuhan on 11–13 October 2013, is an annual conference that aims at providing an opportunity for international and national researchers and practitioners to present the most recent advances and future challenges in the fields of Biomedical Information, Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology. The papers published by this issue are selected from this conference, which witnesses the frontier in the field of Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology, which particularly has helped improving the level of clinical diagnosis in medical work.

  5. [Master course in biomedical engineering].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jobbágy, Akos; Benyó, Zoltán; Monos, Emil

    2009-11-22

    The Bologna Declaration aims at harmonizing the European higher education structure. In accordance with the Declaration, biomedical engineering will be offered as a master (MSc) course also in Hungary, from year 2009. Since 1995 biomedical engineering course has been held in cooperation of three universities: Semmelweis University, Budapest Veterinary University, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics. One of the latter's faculties, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, has been responsible for the course. Students could start their biomedical engineering studies - usually in parallel with their first degree course - after they collected at least 180 ECTS credits. Consequently, the biomedical engineering course could have been considered as a master course even before the Bologna Declaration. Students had to collect 130 ECTS credits during the six-semester course. This is equivalent to four-semester full-time studies, because during the first three semesters the curriculum required to gain only one third of the usual ECTS credits. The paper gives a survey on the new biomedical engineering master course, briefly summing up also the subjects in the curriculum.

  6. Education of biomedical engineering in Taiwan.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Kang-Ping; Kao, Tsair; Wang, Jia-Jung; Chen, Mei-Jung; Su, Fong-Chin

    2014-01-01

    Biomedical Engineers (BME) play an important role in medical and healthcare society. Well educational programs are important to support the healthcare systems including hospitals, long term care organizations, manufacture industries of medical devices/instrumentations/systems, and sales/services companies of medical devices/instrumentations/system. In past 30 more years, biomedical engineering society has accumulated thousands people hold a biomedical engineering degree, and work as a biomedical engineer in Taiwan. Most of BME students can be trained in biomedical engineering departments with at least one of specialties in bioelectronics, bio-information, biomaterials or biomechanics. Students are required to have internship trainings in related institutions out of campus for 320 hours before graduating. Almost all the biomedical engineering departments are certified by IEET (Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan), and met the IEET requirement in which required mathematics and fundamental engineering courses. For BMEs after graduation, Taiwanese Society of Biomedical Engineering (TSBME) provides many continue-learning programs and certificates for all members who expect to hold the certification as a professional credit in his working place. In current status, many engineering departments in university are continuously asked to provide joint programs with BME department to train much better quality students. BME is one of growing fields in Taiwan.

  7. PubMed-based quantitative analysis of biomedical publications in the SAARC countries: 1985-2009.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Azim Majumder, Md Anwarul; Shaban, Sami F; Rahman, Sayeeda; Rahman, Nuzhat; Ahmed, Moslehuddin; Bin Abdulrahman, Khalid A; Islam, Ziauddin

    2012-09-01

    To conduct a geographical analysis of biomedical publications from the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries over the past 25 years (1985-2009) using the PubMed database. A qualitative study. Web-based search during September 2010. A data extraction program, developed by one of the authors (SFS), was used to extract the raw publication counts from the downloaded PubMed data. A search of PubMed was performed for all journals indexed by selecting the advanced search option and entering the country name in the 'affiliation' field. The publications were normalized by total population, adult illiteracy rate, gross domestic product (GDP), secondary school enrollment ratio and Internet usage rate. The number of PubMed-listed papers published by the SAARC countries over the last 25 years totalled 141,783, which is 1.1% of the total papers indexed by PubMed in the same period. India alone produced 90.5% of total publications generated by SAARC countries. The average number of papers published per year from 1985 to 2009 was 5671 and number of publication increased approximately 242-fold. Normalizing by the population (per million) and GDP (per billion), India (133, 27.6%) and Nepal (323, 37.3%) had the highest publications respectively. There was a marked imbalance among the SAARC countries in terms of biomedical research and publication. Because of huge population and the high disease burden, biomedical research and publication output should receive special attention to formulate health policies, re-orient medical education curricula, and alleviate diseases and poverty.

  8. Environmental/Biomedical Terminology Index

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Huffstetler, J.K.; Dailey, N.S.; Rickert, L.W.; Chilton, B.D.

    1976-12-01

    The Information Center Complex (ICC), a centrally administered group of information centers, provides information support to environmental and biomedical research groups and others within and outside Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In-house data base building and development of specialized document collections are important elements of the ongoing activities of these centers. ICC groups must be concerned with language which will adequately classify and insure retrievability of document records. Language control problems are compounded when the complexity of modern scientific problem solving demands an interdisciplinary approach. Although there are several word lists, indexes, and thesauri specific to various scientific disciplines usually grouped as Environmental Sciences, no single generally recognized authority can be used as a guide to the terminology of all environmental science. If biomedical terminology for the description of research on environmental effects is also needed, the problem becomes even more complex. The building of a word list which can be used as a general guide to the environmental/biomedical sciences has been a continuing activity of the Information Center Complex. This activity resulted in the publication of the Environmental Biomedical Terminology Index

  9. Noise-assisted data processing with empirical mode decomposition in biomedical signals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Karagiannis, Alexandros; Constantinou, Philip

    2011-01-01

    In this paper, a methodology is described in order to investigate the performance of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) in biomedical signals, and especially in the case of electrocardiogram (ECG). Synthetic ECG signals corrupted with white Gaussian noise are employed and time series of various lengths are processed with EMD in order to extract the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). A statistical significance test is implemented for the identification of IMFs with high-level noise components and their exclusion from denoising procedures. Simulation campaign results reveal that a decrease of processing time is accomplished with the introduction of preprocessing stage, prior to the application of EMD in biomedical time series. Furthermore, the variation in the number of IMFs according to the type of the preprocessing stage is studied as a function of SNR and time-series length. The application of the methodology in MIT-BIH ECG records is also presented in order to verify the findings in real ECG signals.

  10. Biomedical Engineering in Modern Society

    Science.gov (United States)

    Attinger, E. O.

    1971-01-01

    Considers definition of biomedical engineering (BME) and how biomedical engineers should be trained. State of the art descriptions of BME and BME education are followed by a brief look at the future of BME. (TS)

  11. Active learning-based information structure analysis of full scientific articles and two applications for biomedical literature review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guo, Yufan; Silins, Ilona; Stenius, Ulla; Korhonen, Anna

    2013-06-01

    Techniques that are capable of automatically analyzing the information structure of scientific articles could be highly useful for improving information access to biomedical literature. However, most existing approaches rely on supervised machine learning (ML) and substantial labeled data that are expensive to develop and apply to different sub-fields of biomedicine. Recent research shows that minimal supervision is sufficient for fairly accurate information structure analysis of biomedical abstracts. However, is it realistic for full articles given their high linguistic and informational complexity? We introduce and release a novel corpus of 50 biomedical articles annotated according to the Argumentative Zoning (AZ) scheme, and investigate active learning with one of the most widely used ML models-Support Vector Machines (SVM)-on this corpus. Additionally, we introduce two novel applications that use AZ to support real-life literature review in biomedicine via question answering and summarization. We show that active learning with SVM trained on 500 labeled sentences (6% of the corpus) performs surprisingly well with the accuracy of 82%, just 2% lower than fully supervised learning. In our question answering task, biomedical researchers find relevant information significantly faster from AZ-annotated than unannotated articles. In the summarization task, sentences extracted from particular zones are significantly more similar to gold standard summaries than those extracted from particular sections of full articles. These results demonstrate that active learning of full articles' information structure is indeed realistic and the accuracy is high enough to support real-life literature review in biomedicine. The annotated corpus, our AZ classifier and the two novel applications are available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/yg244/12bioinfo.html

  12. Telemedicine optoelectronic biomedical data processing system

    Science.gov (United States)

    Prosolovska, Vita V.

    2010-08-01

    The telemedicine optoelectronic biomedical data processing system is created to share medical information for the control of health rights and timely and rapid response to crisis. The system includes the main blocks: bioprocessor, analog-digital converter biomedical images, optoelectronic module for image processing, optoelectronic module for parallel recording and storage of biomedical imaging and matrix screen display of biomedical images. Rated temporal characteristics of the blocks defined by a particular triggering optoelectronic couple in analog-digital converters and time imaging for matrix screen. The element base for hardware implementation of the developed matrix screen is integrated optoelectronic couples produced by selective epitaxy.

  13. Automated Extraction Of Associations Between Methylated Genes and Diseases From Biomedical Literature

    KAUST Repository

    Bin Res, Arwa A.

    2012-01-01

    . Based on this model, we developed a tool that automates extraction of associations between methylated genes and diseases from electronic text. Our study contributed an efficient method for extracting specific types of associations from free text

  14. The biomedical discourse relation bank

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Joshi Aravind

    2011-05-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Identification of discourse relations, such as causal and contrastive relations, between situations mentioned in text is an important task for biomedical text-mining. A biomedical text corpus annotated with discourse relations would be very useful for developing and evaluating methods for biomedical discourse processing. However, little effort has been made to develop such an annotated resource. Results We have developed the Biomedical Discourse Relation Bank (BioDRB, in which we have annotated explicit and implicit discourse relations in 24 open-access full-text biomedical articles from the GENIA corpus. Guidelines for the annotation were adapted from the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB, which has discourse relations annotated over open-domain news articles. We introduced new conventions and modifications to the sense classification. We report reliable inter-annotator agreement of over 80% for all sub-tasks. Experiments for identifying the sense of explicit discourse connectives show the connective itself as a highly reliable indicator for coarse sense classification (accuracy 90.9% and F1 score 0.89. These results are comparable to results obtained with the same classifier on the PDTB data. With more refined sense classification, there is degradation in performance (accuracy 69.2% and F1 score 0.28, mainly due to sparsity in the data. The size of the corpus was found to be sufficient for identifying the sense of explicit connectives, with classifier performance stabilizing at about 1900 training instances. Finally, the classifier performs poorly when trained on PDTB and tested on BioDRB (accuracy 54.5% and F1 score 0.57. Conclusion Our work shows that discourse relations can be reliably annotated in biomedical text. Coarse sense disambiguation of explicit connectives can be done with high reliability by using just the connective as a feature, but more refined sense classification requires either richer features or more

  15. Biomedical Science Technologists in Lagos Universities: Meeting ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Biomedical Science Technologists in Lagos Universities: Meeting Modern Standards ... like to see in biomedical science in Nigeria; 5) their knowledge of ten state-of-the-arts ... KEY WORDS: biomedical science, state-of-the-arts, technical staff ...

  16. Publishing priorities of biomedical research funders

    Science.gov (United States)

    Collins, Ellen

    2013-01-01

    Objectives To understand the publishing priorities, especially in relation to open access, of 10 UK biomedical research funders. Design Semistructured interviews. Setting 10 UK biomedical research funders. Participants 12 employees with responsibility for research management at 10 UK biomedical research funders; a purposive sample to represent a range of backgrounds and organisation types. Conclusions Publicly funded and large biomedical research funders are committed to open access publishing and are pleased with recent developments which have stimulated growth in this area. Smaller charitable funders are supportive of the aims of open access, but are concerned about the practical implications for their budgets and their funded researchers. Across the board, biomedical research funders are turning their attention to other priorities for sharing research outputs, including data, protocols and negative results. Further work is required to understand how smaller funders, including charitable funders, can support open access. PMID:24154520

  17. Basics of biomedical ultrasound for engineers

    CERN Document Server

    Azhari, Haim

    2010-01-01

    "Basics of Biomedical Ultrasound for Engineers is a structured textbook for university engineering courses in biomedical ultrasound and for researchers in the field. This book offers a tool for building a solid understanding of biomedical ultrasound, and leads the novice through the field in a step-by-step manner. The book begins with the most basic definitions of waves, proceeds to ultrasounds in fluids, and then delves into solid ultrasounds, the most complicated kind of ultrasound. It encompasses a wide range of topics within biomedical ultrasound, from conceptual definitions of waves to the intricacies of focusing devices, transducers, and acoustic fields"--Provided by publisher.

  18. Lignocellulosic Biomass Derived Functional Materials: Synthesis and Applications in Biomedical Engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Lei; Peng, Xinwen; Zhong, Linxin; Chua, Weitian; Xiang, Zhihua; Sun, Runcang

    2017-09-18

    The pertinent issue of resources shortage arising from global climate change in the recent years has accentuated the importance of materials that are environmental friendly. Despite the merits of current material like cellulose as the most abundant natural polysaccharide on earth, the incorporation of lignocellulosic biomass has the potential to value-add the recent development of cellulose-derivatives in drug delivery systems. Lignocellulosic biomass, with a hierarchical structure, comprised of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. As an excellent substrate that is renewable, biodegradable, biocompatible and chemically accessible for modified materials, lignocellulosic biomass sets forth a myriad of applications. To date, materials derived from lignocellulosic biomass have been extensively explored for new technological development and applications, such as biomedical, green electronics and energy products. In this review, chemical constituents of lignocellulosic biomass are first discussed before we critically examine the potential alternatives in the field of biomedical application. In addition, the pretreatment methods for extracting cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin from lignocellulosic biomass as well as their biological applications including drug delivery, biosensor, tissue engineering etc will be reviewed. It is anticipated there will be an increasing interest and research findings in cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin from natural resources, which help provide important directions for the development in biomedical applications. Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.

  19. Clustering cliques for graph-based summarization of the biomedical research literature

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Zhang, Han; Fiszman, Marcelo; Shin, Dongwook

    2013-01-01

    Background: Graph-based notions are increasingly used in biomedical data mining and knowledge discovery tasks. In this paper, we present a clique-clustering method to automatically summarize graphs of semantic predications produced from PubMed citations (titles and abstracts).Results: Sem......Rep is used to extract semantic predications from the citations returned by a PubMed search. Cliques were identified from frequently occurring predications with highly connected arguments filtered by degree centrality. Themes contained in the summary were identified with a hierarchical clustering algorithm...

  20. Analyzing rare diseases terms in biomedical terminologies

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Erika Pasceri

    2012-03-01

    Full Text Available Rare disease patients too often face common problems, including the lack of access to correct diagnosis, lack of quality information on the disease, lack of scientific knowledge of the disease, inequities and difficulties in access to treatment and care. These things could be changed by implementing a comprehensive approach to rare diseases, increasing international cooperation in scientific research, by gaining and sharing scientific knowledge about and by developing tools for extracting and sharing knowledge. A significant aspect to analyze is the organization of knowledge in the biomedical field for the proper management and recovery of health information. For these purposes, the sources needed have been acquired from the Office of Rare Diseases Research, the National Organization of Rare Disorders and Orphanet, organizations that provide information to patients and physicians and facilitate the exchange of information among different actors involved in this field. The present paper shows the representation of rare diseases terms in biomedical terminologies such as MeSH, ICD-10, SNOMED CT and OMIM, leveraging the fact that these terminologies are integrated in the UMLS. At the first level, it was analyzed the overlap among sources and at a second level, the presence of rare diseases terms in target sources included in UMLS, working at the term and concept level. We found that MeSH has the best representation of rare diseases terms.

  1. Environmental/Biomedical Terminology Index

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Huffstetler, J.K.; Dailey, N.S.; Rickert, L.W.; Chilton, B.D.

    1976-12-01

    The Information Center Complex (ICC), a centrally administered group of information centers, provides information support to environmental and biomedical research groups and others within and outside Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In-house data base building and development of specialized document collections are important elements of the ongoing activities of these centers. ICC groups must be concerned with language which will adequately classify and insure retrievability of document records. Language control problems are compounded when the complexity of modern scientific problem solving demands an interdisciplinary approach. Although there are several word lists, indexes, and thesauri specific to various scientific disciplines usually grouped as Environmental Sciences, no single generally recognized authority can be used as a guide to the terminology of all environmental science. If biomedical terminology for the description of research on environmental effects is also needed, the problem becomes even more complex. The building of a word list which can be used as a general guide to the environmental/biomedical sciences has been a continuing activity of the Information Center Complex. This activity resulted in the publication of the Environmental Biomedical Terminology Index (EBTI).

  2. Green Synthesis of Robust, Biocompatible Silver Nanoparticles Using Garlic Extract

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    White, G.V.; Kerscher, P.; Brown, R.M.; Morella, J.D.; Kitchens, C.L.; McAllister, W.; Dean, D.

    2012-01-01

    This paper details a facile approach for the synthesis of stable and monodisperse silver nanoparticles performed at ambient/low temperature, where Allium sativum (garlic) extract functions as the silver salt reducing agent during nanoparticle synthesis as well as the post synthesis stabilizing ligands. Varying the synthesis conditions provides control of particle size, size-distribution, and kinetics of particle formation. Infrared spectroscopy, energy dispersive X-ray chemical analysis, and high-performance liquid chromatography indicated that allicin and other carbohydrates in the garlic extract are the primary nanoparticle stabilizing moieties. The synthesized silver nanoparticles also demonstrate potential for biomedical applications, owing to (1) enhanced stability in biological media, (2) resistance to oxidation by the addition of H 2 O 2 , (3) ease and scalability of synthesis, and (4) lack of harsh chemicals required for synthesis. Cytotoxicity assays indicated no decrease in cellular proliferation for vascular smooth muscle cells and 3T3 fibroblasts at a concentration of 25 μg/mL, confirming that silver nanoparticles synthesized with garlic extract are potential candidates for future experimentation and implementation in the biomedical field.

  3. Detection of goal events in soccer videos

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kim, Hyoung-Gook; Roeber, Steffen; Samour, Amjad; Sikora, Thomas

    2005-01-01

    In this paper, we present an automatic extraction of goal events in soccer videos by using audio track features alone without relying on expensive-to-compute video track features. The extracted goal events can be used for high-level indexing and selective browsing of soccer videos. The detection of soccer video highlights using audio contents comprises three steps: 1) extraction of audio features from a video sequence, 2) event candidate detection of highlight events based on the information provided by the feature extraction Methods and the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), 3) goal event selection to finally determine the video intervals to be included in the summary. For this purpose we compared the performance of the well known Mel-scale Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) feature extraction method vs. MPEG-7 Audio Spectrum Projection feature (ASP) extraction method based on three different decomposition methods namely Principal Component Analysis( PCA), Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). To evaluate our system we collected five soccer game videos from various sources. In total we have seven hours of soccer games consisting of eight gigabytes of data. One of five soccer games is used as the training data (e.g., announcers' excited speech, audience ambient speech noise, audience clapping, environmental sounds). Our goal event detection results are encouraging.

  4. Functionalized carbon nanotubes: biomedical applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vardharajula, Sandhya; Ali, Sk Z; Tiwari, Pooja M; Eroğlu, Erdal; Vig, Komal; Dennis, Vida A; Singh, Shree R

    2012-01-01

    Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are emerging as novel nanomaterials for various biomedical applications. CNTs can be used to deliver a variety of therapeutic agents, including biomolecules, to the target disease sites. In addition, their unparalleled optical and electrical properties make them excellent candidates for bioimaging and other biomedical applications. However, the high cytotoxicity of CNTs limits their use in humans and many biological systems. The biocompatibility and low cytotoxicity of CNTs are attributed to size, dose, duration, testing systems, and surface functionalization. The functionalization of CNTs improves their solubility and biocompatibility and alters their cellular interaction pathways, resulting in much-reduced cytotoxic effects. Functionalized CNTs are promising novel materials for a variety of biomedical applications. These potential applications are particularly enhanced by their ability to penetrate biological membranes with relatively low cytotoxicity. This review is directed towards the overview of CNTs and their functionalization for biomedical applications with minimal cytotoxicity. PMID:23091380

  5. In silico assessment of biomedical products: The conundrum of rare but not so rare events in two case studies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Viceconti, Marco; Cobelli, Claudio; Haddad, Tarek; Himes, Adam; Kovatchev, Boris; Palmer, Mark

    2017-05-01

    In silico clinical trials, defined as "The use of individualized computer simulation in the development or regulatory evaluation of a medicinal product, medical device, or medical intervention," have been proposed as a possible strategy to reduce the regulatory costs of innovation and the time to market for biomedical products. We review some of the the literature on this topic, focusing in particular on those applications where the current practice is recognized as inadequate, as for example, the detection of unexpected severe adverse events too rare to be detected in a clinical trial, but still likely enough to be of concern. We then describe with more details two case studies, two successful applications of in silico clinical trial approaches, one relative to the University of Virginia/Padova simulator that the Food and Drug Administration has accepted as possible replacement for animal testing in the preclinical assessment of artificial pancreas technologies, and the second, an investigation of the probability of cardiac lead fracture, where a Bayesian network was used to combine in vivo and in silico observations, suggesting a whole new strategy of in silico-augmented clinical trials, to be used to increase the numerosity where recruitment is impossible, or to explore patients' phenotypes that are unlikely to appear in the trial cohort, but are still frequent enough to be of concern.

  6. Feasibility study for a biomedical experimental facility based on LEIR at CERN

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Abler, Daniel; Garonna, Adriano; Carli, Christian; Dosanjh, Manjit; Peach, Ken

    2013-01-01

    In light of the recent European developments in ion beam therapy, there is a strong interest from the biomedical research community to have more access to clinically relevant beams. Beamtime for pre-clinical studies is currently very limited and a new dedicated facility would allow extensive research into the radiobiological mechanisms of ion beam radiation and the development of more refined techniques of dosimetry and imaging. This basic research would support the current clinical efforts of the new treatment centres in Europe (for example HIT, CNAO and MedAustron). This paper presents first investigations on the feasibility of an experimental biomedical facility based on the CERN Low Energy Ion Ring LEIR accelerator. Such a new facility could provide beams of light ions (from protons to neon ions) in a collaborative and cost-effective way, since it would rely partly on CERN's competences and infrastructure. The main technical challenges linked to the implementation of a slow extraction scheme for LEIR and to the design of the experimental beamlines are described and first solutions presented. These include introducing new extraction septa into one of the straight sections of the synchrotron, changing the power supply configuration of the magnets, and designing a new horizontal beamline suitable for clinical beam energies, and a low-energy vertical beamline for particular radiobiological experiments. (author)

  7. Feasibility study for a biomedical experimental facility based on LEIR at CERN.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Abler, Daniel; Garonna, Adriano; Carli, Christian; Dosanjh, Manjit; Peach, Ken

    2013-07-01

    In light of the recent European developments in ion beam therapy, there is a strong interest from the biomedical research community to have more access to clinically relevant beams. Beamtime for pre-clinical studies is currently very limited and a new dedicated facility would allow extensive research into the radiobiological mechanisms of ion beam radiation and the development of more refined techniques of dosimetry and imaging. This basic research would support the current clinical efforts of the new treatment centres in Europe (for example HIT, CNAO and MedAustron). This paper presents first investigations on the feasibility of an experimental biomedical facility based on the CERN Low Energy Ion Ring LEIR accelerator. Such a new facility could provide beams of light ions (from protons to neon ions) in a collaborative and cost-effective way, since it would rely partly on CERN's competences and infrastructure. The main technical challenges linked to the implementation of a slow extraction scheme for LEIR and to the design of the experimental beamlines are described and first solutions presented. These include introducing new extraction septa into one of the straight sections of the synchrotron, changing the power supply configuration of the magnets, and designing a new horizontal beamline suitable for clinical beam energies, and a low-energy vertical beamline for particular radiobiological experiments.

  8. International symposium on Biomedical Data Infrastructure (BDI 2013)

    CERN Document Server

    Dhillon, Sarinder; Advances in biomedical infrastructure 2013

    2013-01-01

    Current Biomedical Databases are independently administered in geographically distinct locations, lending them almost ideally to adoption of intelligent data management approaches. This book focuses on research issues, problems and opportunities in Biomedical Data Infrastructure identifying new issues and directions for future research in Biomedical Data and Information Retrieval, Semantics in Biomedicine, and Biomedical Data Modeling and Analysis. The book will be a useful guide for researchers, practitioners, and graduate-level students interested in learning state-of-the-art development in biomedical data management.

  9. Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data Methods and Applications

    CERN Document Server

    Chen, Ding-Geng

    2012-01-01

    Interval-Censored Time-to-Event Data: Methods and Applications collects the most recent techniques, models, and computational tools for interval-censored time-to-event data. Top biostatisticians from academia, biopharmaceutical industries, and government agencies discuss how these advances are impacting clinical trials and biomedical research. Divided into three parts, the book begins with an overview of interval-censored data modeling, including nonparametric estimation, survival functions, regression analysis, multivariate data analysis, competing risks analysis, and other models for interva

  10. Professional Identification for Biomedical Engineers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Long, Francis M.

    1973-01-01

    Discusses four methods of professional identification in biomedical engineering including registration, certification, accreditation, and possible membership qualification of the societies. Indicates that the destiny of the biomedical engineer may be under the control of a new profession, neither the medical nor the engineering. (CC)

  11. Egyptian Journal of Biomedical Sciences

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The Egyptian Journal of Biomedical Sciences publishes in all aspects of biomedical research sciences. Both basic and clinical research papers are welcomed. Vol 23 (2007). DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT Open Access DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT Subscription or Fee Access. Table of Contents. Articles. Phytochemical And ...

  12. An exploration of the biomedical optics course construction of undergraduate biomedical engineering program in medical colleges

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guo, Shijun; Lyu, Jie; Zhang, Peiming

    2017-08-01

    In this paper, the teaching goals, teaching contents and teaching methods in biomedical optics course construction are discussed. From the dimension of teaching goals, students should master the principle of optical inspection on the human body, diagnosis and treatment of methodology and instruments, through the study of the theory and practice of this course, and can utilize biomedical optics methods to solve practical problems in the clinical medical engineering practice. From the dimension of teaching contents, based on the characteristics of biomedical engineering in medical colleges, the organic integration of engineering aspects, medical optical instruments, and biomedical aspects dispersed in human anatomy, human physiology, clinical medicine fundamental related to the biomedical optics is build. Noninvasive measurement of the human body composition and noninvasive optical imaging of the human body were taken as actual problems in biomedical optics fields. Typical medical applications such as eye optics and laser medicine were also integrated into the theory and practice teaching. From the dimension of teaching methods, referencing to organ-system based medical teaching mode, optical principle and instrument principle were taught by teachers from school of medical instruments, and the histological characteristics and clinical actual need in areas such as digestive diseases and urinary surgery were taught by teachers from school of basic medicine or clinical medicine of medical colleges. Furthermore, clinical application guidance would be provided by physician and surgeons in hospitals.

  13. CNN-based ranking for biomedical entity normalization.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Haodi; Chen, Qingcai; Tang, Buzhou; Wang, Xiaolong; Xu, Hua; Wang, Baohua; Huang, Dong

    2017-10-03

    Most state-of-the-art biomedical entity normalization systems, such as rule-based systems, merely rely on morphological information of entity mentions, but rarely consider their semantic information. In this paper, we introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that regards biomedical entity normalization as a ranking problem and benefits from semantic information of biomedical entities. The CNN-based ranking method first generates candidates using handcrafted rules, and then ranks the candidates according to their semantic information modeled by CNN as well as their morphological information. Experiments on two benchmark datasets for biomedical entity normalization show that our proposed CNN-based ranking method outperforms traditional rule-based method with state-of-the-art performance. We propose a CNN architecture that regards biomedical entity normalization as a ranking problem. Comparison results show that semantic information is beneficial to biomedical entity normalization and can be well combined with morphological information in our CNN architecture for further improvement.

  14. Event-by-event jet quenching

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Fries, R.J.; Rodriguez, R.; Ramirez, E.

    2010-08-14

    High momentum jets and hadrons can be used as probes for the quark gluon plasma (QGP) formed in nuclear collisions at high energies. We investigate the influence of fluctuations in the fireball on jet quenching observables by comparing propagation of light quarks and gluons through averaged, smooth QGP fireballs with event-by-event jet quenching using realistic inhomogeneous fireballs. We find that the transverse momentum and impact parameter dependence of the nuclear modification factor R{sub AA} can be fit well in an event-by-event quenching scenario within experimental errors. However the transport coefficient {cflx q} extracted from fits to the measured nuclear modification factor R{sub AA} in averaged fireballs underestimates the value from event-by-event calculations by up to 50%. On the other hand, after adjusting {cflx q} to fit R{sub AA} in the event-by-event analysis we find residual deviations in the azimuthal asymmetry v{sub 2} and in two-particle correlations, that provide a possible faint signature for a spatial tomography of the fireball. We discuss a correlation function that is a measure for spatial inhomogeneities in a collision and can be constrained from data.

  15. Event-by-event jet quenching

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Rodriguez, R. [Cyclotron Institute and Physics Department, Texas A and M University, College Station, TX 77843 (United States); Fries, R.J., E-mail: rjfries@comp.tamu.ed [Cyclotron Institute and Physics Department, Texas A and M University, College Station, TX 77843 (United States); RIKEN/BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY 11973 (United States); Ramirez, E. [Physics Department, University of Texas El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968 (United States)

    2010-09-27

    High momentum jets and hadrons can be used as probes for the quark gluon plasma (QGP) formed in nuclear collisions at high energies. We investigate the influence of fluctuations in the fireball on jet quenching observables by comparing propagation of light quarks and gluons through averaged, smooth QGP fireballs with event-by-event jet quenching using realistic inhomogeneous fireballs. We find that the transverse momentum and impact parameter dependence of the nuclear modification factor R{sub AA} can be fit well in an event-by-event quenching scenario within experimental errors. However the transport coefficient q extracted from fits to the measured nuclear modification factor R{sub AA} in averaged fireballs underestimates the value from event-by-event calculations by up to 50%. On the other hand, after adjusting q to fit R{sub AA} in the event-by-event analysis we find residual deviations in the azimuthal asymmetry v{sub 2} and in two-particle correlations, that provide a possible faint signature for a spatial tomography of the fireball. We discuss a correlation function that is a measure for spatial inhomogeneities in a collision and can be constrained from data.

  16. Information extraction system

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lemmond, Tracy D; Hanley, William G; Guensche, Joseph Wendell; Perry, Nathan C; Nitao, John J; Kidwell, Paul Brandon; Boakye, Kofi Agyeman; Glaser, Ron E; Prenger, Ryan James

    2014-05-13

    An information extraction system and methods of operating the system are provided. In particular, an information extraction system for performing meta-extraction of named entities of people, organizations, and locations as well as relationships and events from text documents are described herein.

  17. PageRank without hyperlinks: Reranking with PubMed related article networks for biomedical text retrieval

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Lin Jimmy

    2008-06-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Graph analysis algorithms such as PageRank and HITS have been successful in Web environments because they are able to extract important inter-document relationships from manually-created hyperlinks. We consider the application of these techniques to biomedical text retrieval. In the current PubMed® search interface, a MEDLINE® citation is connected to a number of related citations, which are in turn connected to other citations. Thus, a MEDLINE record represents a node in a vast content-similarity network. This article explores the hypothesis that these networks can be exploited for text retrieval, in the same manner as hyperlink graphs on the Web. Results We conducted a number of reranking experiments using the TREC 2005 genomics track test collection in which scores extracted from PageRank and HITS analysis were combined with scores returned by an off-the-shelf retrieval engine. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating PageRank scores yields significant improvements in terms of standard ranked-retrieval metrics. Conclusion The link structure of content-similarity networks can be exploited to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. These results generalize the applicability of graph analysis algorithms to text retrieval in the biomedical domain.

  18. PageRank without hyperlinks: reranking with PubMed related article networks for biomedical text retrieval.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lin, Jimmy

    2008-06-06

    Graph analysis algorithms such as PageRank and HITS have been successful in Web environments because they are able to extract important inter-document relationships from manually-created hyperlinks. We consider the application of these techniques to biomedical text retrieval. In the current PubMed(R) search interface, a MEDLINE(R) citation is connected to a number of related citations, which are in turn connected to other citations. Thus, a MEDLINE record represents a node in a vast content-similarity network. This article explores the hypothesis that these networks can be exploited for text retrieval, in the same manner as hyperlink graphs on the Web. We conducted a number of reranking experiments using the TREC 2005 genomics track test collection in which scores extracted from PageRank and HITS analysis were combined with scores returned by an off-the-shelf retrieval engine. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating PageRank scores yields significant improvements in terms of standard ranked-retrieval metrics. The link structure of content-similarity networks can be exploited to improve the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. These results generalize the applicability of graph analysis algorithms to text retrieval in the biomedical domain.

  19. Feasibility study for a biomedical experimental facility based on LEIR at CERN

    CERN Document Server

    Abler, Daniel; Carli, Christian; Dosanjh, Manjit; Peach, Ken; Orecchia, Roberto

    2013-01-01

    In light of the recent European developments in ion beam therapy, there is a strong interest from the biomedical research community to have more access to clinically relevant beams. Beamtime for pre-clinical studies is currently very limited and a new dedicated facility would allow extensive research into the radiobiological mechanisms of ion beam radiation and the development of more refined techniques of dosimetry and imaging. This basic research would support the current clinical efforts of the new treatment centres in Europe (for example HIT, CNAO and MedAustron). This paper presents first investigations on the feasibility of an experimental biomedical facility based on the CERN Low Energy Ion Ring LEIR accelerator. Such a new facility could provide beams of light ions (from protons to neon ions) in a collaborative and cost-effective way, since it would rely partly on CERN’s competences and infrastructure. The main technical challenges linked to the implementation of a slow extraction scheme for LEIR an...

  20. ParaBTM: A Parallel Processing Framework for Biomedical Text Mining on Supercomputers.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Xing, Yuting; Wu, Chengkun; Yang, Xi; Wang, Wei; Zhu, En; Yin, Jianping

    2018-04-27

    A prevailing way of extracting valuable information from biomedical literature is to apply text mining methods on unstructured texts. However, the massive amount of literature that needs to be analyzed poses a big data challenge to the processing efficiency of text mining. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing parallel processing on a supercomputer. We developed paraBTM, a runnable framework that enables parallel text mining on the Tianhe-2 supercomputer. It employs a low-cost yet effective load balancing strategy to maximize the efficiency of parallel processing. We evaluated the performance of paraBTM on several datasets, utilizing three types of named entity recognition tasks as demonstration. Results show that, in most cases, the processing efficiency can be greatly improved with parallel processing, and the proposed load balancing strategy is simple and effective. In addition, our framework can be readily applied to other tasks of biomedical text mining besides NER.

  1. [Biomedical engineering today : An overview from the viewpoint of the German Biomedical Engineering Society].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schlötelburg, C; Becks, T; Stieglitz, T

    2010-08-01

    Biomedical engineering is characterized by the interdisciplinary co-operation of technology, science, and ways of thinking, probably more than any other technological area. The close interaction of engineering and information sciences with medicine and biology results in innovative products and methods, but also requires high standards for the interdisciplinary transfer of ideas into products for patients' benefits. This article describes the situation of biomedical engineering in Germany. It displays characteristics of the medical device industry and ranks it with respect to the international market. The research landscape is described as well as up-to-date research topics and trends. The national funding situation of research in biomedical engineering is reviewed and existing innovation barriers are discussed.

  2. African Journal of Biomedical Research

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The African Journal of biomedical Research was founded in 1998 as a joint project ... of the journal led to the formation of a group (Biomedical Communications Group, ... analysis of multidrug resistant aerobic gram-negative clinical isolates from a ... Dental formula and dental abnormalities observed in the Eidolon helvum ...

  3. Special Issue: 3D Printing for Biomedical Engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chua, Chee Kai; Yeong, Wai Yee; An, Jia

    2017-02-28

    Three-dimensional (3D) printing has a long history of applications in biomedical engineering. The development and expansion of traditional biomedical applications are being advanced and enriched by new printing technologies. New biomedical applications such as bioprinting are highly attractive and trendy. This Special Issue aims to provide readers with a glimpse of the recent profile of 3D printing in biomedical research.

  4. Biomedical Use of Aerospace Personal Cooling Garments

    Science.gov (United States)

    Webbon, Bruce W.; Montgomery, Leslie D.; Callaway, Robert K.

    1994-01-01

    Personal thermoregulatory systems are required during extravehicular activity (EVA) to remove the metabolic heat generated by the suited astronaut. The Extravehicular and Protective Systems (STE) Branch of NASA Ames Research Center has developed advanced concepts or liquid cooling garments for both industrial and biomedical applications for the past 25 years. Examples of this work include: (1) liquid cooled helmets for helicopter pilots and race car drivers; (2) vests for fire and mine rescue personnel; (3) bras to increase the definition of tumors during thermography; (4) lower body garments for young women with erythomelaigia; and (5) whole body garments used by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). The benefits of the biomedical application of artificial thermoregulation received national attention through two recent events: (1) the liquid-cooled garment technology was inducted into the United States Space Foundation's Space Technology Hall of Fame (1993); and (2) NASA has signed a joint Memorandum of Understanding with the Multiple Sclerosis Association (1994) to share this technology for use with MS patient treatment. The STE Branch is currently pursuing a program to refine thermoregulatory design in light of recent technology developments that might be applicable for use by several medical patient populations. Projects have been initiated to apply thermoregulatory technology for the treatment and/or rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, migraine headaches, and to help prevent the loss of hair during chemotherapy.

  5. Applications of computational intelligence in biomedical technology

    CERN Document Server

    Majernik, Jaroslav; Pancerz, Krzysztof; Zaitseva, Elena

    2016-01-01

    This book presents latest results and selected applications of Computational Intelligence in Biomedical Technologies. Most of contributions deal with problems of Biomedical and Medical Informatics, ranging from theoretical considerations to practical applications. Various aspects of development methods and algorithms in Biomedical and Medical Informatics as well as Algorithms for medical image processing, modeling methods are discussed. Individual contributions also cover medical decision making support, estimation of risks of treatments, reliability of medical systems, problems of practical clinical applications and many other topics  This book is intended for scientists interested in problems of Biomedical Technologies, for researchers and academic staff, for all dealing with Biomedical and Medical Informatics, as well as PhD students. Useful information is offered also to IT companies, developers of equipment and/or software for medicine and medical professionals.  .

  6. Special Issue: 3D Printing for Biomedical Engineering

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Chee Kai Chua

    2017-02-01

    Full Text Available Three-dimensional (3D printing has a long history of applications in biomedical engineering. The development and expansion of traditional biomedical applications are being advanced and enriched by new printing technologies. New biomedical applications such as bioprinting are highly attractive and trendy. This Special Issue aims to provide readers with a glimpse of the recent profile of 3D printing in biomedical research.

  7. Research evaluation support services in biomedical libraries

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Karen Elizabeth Gutzman

    2018-01-01

    Conclusions: Libraries can leverage a variety of evaluation support services as an opportunity to successfully meet an array of challenges confronting the biomedical research community, including robust efforts to report and demonstrate tangible and meaningful outcomes of biomedical research and clinical care. These services represent a transformative direction that can be emulated by other biomedical and research libraries.

  8. Biomedical nanomaterials from design to implementation

    CERN Document Server

    Webster, Thomas

    2016-01-01

    Biomedical Nanomaterials brings together the engineering applications and challenges of using nanostructured surfaces and nanomaterials in healthcare in a single source. Each chapter covers important and new information in the biomedical applications of nanomaterials.

  9. For 481 biomedical open access journals, articles are not searchable in the Directory of Open Access Journals nor in conventional biomedical databases.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liljekvist, Mads Svane; Andresen, Kristoffer; Pommergaard, Hans-Christian; Rosenberg, Jacob

    2015-01-01

    Background. Open access (OA) journals allows access to research papers free of charge to the reader. Traditionally, biomedical researchers use databases like MEDLINE and EMBASE to discover new advances. However, biomedical OA journals might not fulfill such databases' criteria, hindering dissemination. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a database exclusively listing OA journals. The aim of this study was to investigate DOAJ's coverage of biomedical OA journals compared with the conventional biomedical databases. Methods. Information on all journals listed in four conventional biomedical databases (MEDLINE, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS) and DOAJ were gathered. Journals were included if they were (1) actively publishing, (2) full OA, (3) prospectively indexed in one or more database, and (4) of biomedical subject. Impact factor and journal language were also collected. DOAJ was compared with conventional databases regarding the proportion of journals covered, along with their impact factor and publishing language. The proportion of journals with articles indexed by DOAJ was determined. Results. In total, 3,236 biomedical OA journals were included in the study. Of the included journals, 86.7% were listed in DOAJ. Combined, the conventional biomedical databases listed 75.0% of the journals; 18.7% in MEDLINE; 36.5% in PubMed Central; 51.5% in SCOPUS and 50.6% in EMBASE. Of the journals in DOAJ, 88.7% published in English and 20.6% had received impact factor for 2012 compared with 93.5% and 26.0%, respectively, for journals in the conventional biomedical databases. A subset of 51.1% and 48.5% of the journals in DOAJ had articles indexed from 2012 and 2013, respectively. Of journals exclusively listed in DOAJ, one journal had received an impact factor for 2012, and 59.6% of the journals had no content from 2013 indexed in DOAJ. Conclusions. DOAJ is the most complete registry of biomedical OA journals compared with five conventional biomedical databases

  10. Extracting useful knowledge from event logs

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Djenouri, Youcef; Belhadi, Asma; Fournier-Viger, Philippe

    2018-01-01

    Business process analysis is a key activity that aims at increasing the efficiency of business operations. In recent years, several data mining based methods have been designed for discovering interesting patterns in event logs. A popular type of methods consists of applying frequent itemset mini...

  11. Initiating events study of the first extraction cycle process in a model reprocessing plant

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Wang, Renze; Zhang, Jian Gang; Zhuang, Dajie; Feng, Zong Yang [China Institute for Radiation Protection, Taiyuan (China)

    2016-06-15

    Definition and grouping of initiating events (IEs) are important basics for probabilistic safety assessment (PSA). An IE in a spent fuel reprocessing plant (SFRP) is an event that probably leads to the release of dangerous material to jeopardize workers, public and environment. The main difference between SFRPs and nuclear power plants (NPPs) is that hazard materials spread diffusely in a SFRP and radioactive material is just one kind of hazard material. Since the research on IEs for NPPs is in-depth around the world, there are several general methods to identify IEs: reference of lists in existence, review of experience feedback, qualitative analysis method, and deductive analysis method. While failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is an important qualitative analysis method, master logic diagram (MLD) method is the deductive analysis method. IE identification in SFRPs should be consulted with the experience of NPPs, however the differences between SFRPs and NPPs should be considered seriously. The plutonium uranium reduction extraction (Purex) process is adopted by the technics in a model reprocessing plant. The first extraction cycle (FEC) is the pivotal process in the Purex process. Whether the FEC can function safely and steadily would directly influence the production process of the whole plant-production quality. Important facilities of the FEC are installed in the equipment cells (ECs). In this work, IEs in the FEC process were identified and categorized by FMEA and MLD two methods, based on the fact that ECs are containments in the plant. The results show that only two ECs in the FEC do not need to be concerned particularly with safety problems, and criticality, fire and red oil explosion are IEs which should be emphatically analyzed. The results are accordant with the references.

  12. Proof of concept: concept-based biomedical information retrieval

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend

    2010-01-01

    In this thesis we investigate the possibility to integrate domain-specific knowledge into biomedical information retrieval (IR). Recent decades have shown a fast growing interest in biomedical research, reflected by an exponential growth in scientific literature. An important problem for biomedical

  13. Exploring subdomain variation in biomedical language

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Séaghdha Diarmuid Ó

    2011-05-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP technology to biomedical texts have generated significant interest in recent years. In this paper we identify and investigate the phenomenon of linguistic subdomain variation within the biomedical domain, i.e., the extent to which different subject areas of biomedicine are characterised by different linguistic behaviour. While variation at a coarser domain level such as between newswire and biomedical text is well-studied and known to affect the portability of NLP systems, we are the first to conduct an extensive investigation into more fine-grained levels of variation. Results Using the large OpenPMC text corpus, which spans the many subdomains of biomedicine, we investigate variation across a number of lexical, syntactic, semantic and discourse-related dimensions. These dimensions are chosen for their relevance to the performance of NLP systems. We use clustering techniques to analyse commonalities and distinctions among the subdomains. Conclusions We find that while patterns of inter-subdomain variation differ somewhat from one feature set to another, robust clusters can be identified that correspond to intuitive distinctions such as that between clinical and laboratory subjects. In particular, subdomains relating to genetics and molecular biology, which are the most common sources of material for training and evaluating biomedical NLP tools, are not representative of all biomedical subdomains. We conclude that an awareness of subdomain variation is important when considering the practical use of language processing applications by biomedical researchers.

  14. Handbook of photonics for biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Kim, Donghyun; Somekh, Michael

    2017-01-01

    Nanophotonics has emerged rapidly into technological mainstream with the advent and maturity of nanotechnology available in photonics and enabled many new exciting applications in the area of biomedical science and engineering that were unimagined even a few years ago with conventional photonic engineering techniques. Handbook of Nanophotonics in Biomedical Engineering is intended to be a reliable resource to a wealth of information on nanophotonics that can inspire readers by detailing emerging and established possibilities of nanophotonics in biomedical science and engineering applications. This comprehensive reference presents not only the basics of nanophotonics but also explores recent experimental and clinical methods used in biomedical and bioengineering research. Each peer-reviewed chapter of this book discusses fundamental aspects and materials/fabrication issues of nanophotonics, as well as applications in interfaces, cell, tissue, animal studies, and clinical engineering. The organization provides ...

  15. Automated Extraction Of Associations Between Methylated Genes and Diseases From Biomedical Literature

    KAUST Repository

    Bin Res, Arwa A.

    2012-12-01

    Associations between methylated genes and diseases have been investigated in several studies, and it is critical to have such information available for better understanding of diseases and clinical decisions. However, such information is scattered in a large number of electronic publications and it is difficult to manually search for it. Therefore, the goal of the project is to develop a machine learning model that can efficiently extract such information. Twelve machine learning algorithms were applied and compared in application to this problem based on three approaches that involve: document-term frequency matrices, position weight matrices, and a hybrid approach that uses the combination of the previous two. The best results we obtained by the hybrid approach with a random forest model that, in a 10-fold cross-validation, achieved F-score and accuracy of nearly 85% and 84%, respectively. On a completely separate testing set, F-score and accuracy of 89% and 88%, respectively, were obtained. Based on this model, we developed a tool that automates extraction of associations between methylated genes and diseases from electronic text. Our study contributed an efficient method for extracting specific types of associations from free text and the methodology developed here can be extended to other similar association extraction problems.

  16. BIG: a Grid Portal for Biomedical Data and Images

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Giovanni Aloisio

    2004-06-01

    Full Text Available Modern management of biomedical systems involves the use of many distributed resources, such as high performance computational resources to analyze biomedical data, mass storage systems to store them, medical instruments (microscopes, tomographs, etc., advanced visualization and rendering tools. Grids offer the computational power, security and availability needed by such novel applications. This paper presents BIG (Biomedical Imaging Grid, a Web-based Grid portal for management of biomedical information (data and images in a distributed environment. BIG is an interactive environment that deals with complex user's requests, regarding the acquisition of biomedical data, the "processing" and "delivering" of biomedical images, using the power and security of Computational Grids.

  17. SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ye, Zhan; Tafti, Ahmad P; He, Karen Y; Wang, Kai; He, Max M

    Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers) from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes. This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research.

  18. Enhancing biomedical design with design thinking.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kemnitzer, Ronald; Dorsa, Ed

    2009-01-01

    The development of biomedical equipment is justifiably focused on making products that "work." However, this approach leaves many of the people affected by these designs (operators, patients, etc.) with little or no representation when it comes to the design of these products. Industrial design is a "user focused" profession which takes into account the needs of diverse groups when making design decisions. The authors propose that biomedical equipment design can be enhanced, made more user and patient "friendly" by adopting the industrial design approach to researching, analyzing, and ultimately designing biomedical products.

  19. The development of biomedical engineering as experienced by one biomedical engineer.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Newell, Jonathan C

    2012-12-12

    This personal essay described the development of the field of Biomedical Engineering from its early days, from the perspective of one who lived through that development. It describes the making of a major invention using data that had been rejected by other scientists, the re-discovery of an obscure fact of physiology and its use in developing a major medical instrument, the development of a new medical imaging modality, and the near-death rescue of a research project. The essay concludes with comments about the development and present status of impedance imaging, and recent changes in the evolution of biomedical engineering as a field.

  20. Biomedical Research Institute, Biomedical Research Foundation of Northwest Louisiana, Shreveport, Louisiana

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1992-01-01

    Department of Energy (DOE) has prepared an Environmental Assessment (EA), DOE/EA-0789, evaluating the environmental impacts of construction and operation of a Biomedical Research Institute (BRI) at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Medical Center, Shreveport, Louisiana. The purpose of the BRI is to accelerate the development of biomedical research in cardiovascular disease, molecular biology, and neurobiology. Based on the analyses in the EA, DOE has determined that the proposed action does not constitute a major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment within the meaning of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). Therefore, the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement is not required

  1. Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    The Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research publishes papers in all fields of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences including Basic Medical Sciences, Clinical Sciences, Dental Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Biology, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Biotechnology in relation to Medicine, ...

  2. Chemical-induced disease relation extraction with various linguistic features.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gu, Jinghang; Qian, Longhua; Zhou, Guodong

    2016-01-01

    Understanding the relations between chemicals and diseases is crucial in various biomedical tasks such as new drug discoveries and new therapy developments. While manually mining these relations from the biomedical literature is costly and time-consuming, such a procedure is often difficult to keep up-to-date. To address these issues, the BioCreative-V community proposed a challenging task of automatic extraction of chemical-induced disease (CID) relations in order to benefit biocuration. This article describes our work on the CID relation extraction task on the BioCreative-V tasks. We built a machine learning based system that utilized simple yet effective linguistic features to extract relations with maximum entropy models. In addition to leveraging various features, the hypernym relations between entity concepts derived from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)-controlled vocabulary were also employed during both training and testing stages to obtain more accurate classification models and better extraction performance, respectively. We demoted relation extraction between entities in documents to relation extraction between entity mentions. In our system, pairs of chemical and disease mentions at both intra- and inter-sentence levels were first constructed as relation instances for training and testing, then two classification models at both levels were trained from the training examples and applied to the testing examples. Finally, we merged the classification results from mention level to document level to acquire final relations between chemicals and diseases. Our system achieved promisingF-scores of 60.4% on the development dataset and 58.3% on the test dataset using gold-standard entity annotations, respectively. Database URL:https://github.com/JHnlp/BC5CIDTask. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press.

  3. Advances in biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Brown, J H U

    1976-01-01

    Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Volume 5, is a collection of papers that deals with application of the principles and practices of engineering to basic and applied biomedical research, development, and the delivery of health care. The papers also describe breakthroughs in health improvements, as well as basic research that have been accomplished through clinical applications. One paper examines engineering principles and practices that can be applied in developing therapeutic systems by a controlled delivery system in drug dosage. Another paper examines the physiological and materials vari

  4. Relational Databases and Biomedical Big Data.

    Science.gov (United States)

    de Silva, N H Nisansa D

    2017-01-01

    In various biomedical applications that collect, handle, and manipulate data, the amounts of data tend to build up and venture into the range identified as bigdata. In such occurrences, a design decision has to be taken as to what type of database would be used to handle this data. More often than not, the default and classical solution to this in the biomedical domain according to past research is relational databases. While this used to be the norm for a long while, it is evident that there is a trend to move away from relational databases in favor of other types and paradigms of databases. However, it still has paramount importance to understand the interrelation that exists between biomedical big data and relational databases. This chapter will review the pros and cons of using relational databases to store biomedical big data that previous researches have discussed and used.

  5. Organizational Learning in Rare Events

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Andersen, Kristina Vaarst; Tyler, Beverly; Beukel, Karin

    When organizations encounter rare events they often find it challenging to extract learning from the experience. We analyze opportunities for organizational learning in one such rare event, namely Intellectual Property (IP) litigation, i.e., when organizations take disputes regarding their intell......When organizations encounter rare events they often find it challenging to extract learning from the experience. We analyze opportunities for organizational learning in one such rare event, namely Intellectual Property (IP) litigation, i.e., when organizations take disputes regarding...... the organization little discretion to utilize any learning from past litigation success. Thus, learning appears be to most beneficial in infringement cases. Based on statistical analysis of 10,211 litigation court cases in China, we find support for our hypotheses. Our findings suggest that organizations can learn...

  6. VII Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Bustamante, John; Sierra, Daniel

    2017-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the CLAIB 2016, held in Bucaramanga, Santander, Colombia, 26, 27 & 28 October 2016. The proceedings, presented by the Regional Council of Biomedical Engineering for Latin America (CORAL), offer research findings, experiences and activities between institutions and universities to develop Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering and related sciences. The conferences of the American Congress of Biomedical Engineering are sponsored by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), Society for Engineering in Biology and Medicine (EMBS) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among other organizations and international agencies to bring together scientists, academics and biomedical engineers in Latin America and other continents in an environment conducive to exchange and professional growth.

  7. Optimizing biomedical science learning in a veterinary curriculum: a review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Warren, Amy L; Donnon, Tyrone

    2013-01-01

    As veterinary medical curricula evolve, the time dedicated to biomedical science teaching, as well as the role of biomedical science knowledge in veterinary education, has been scrutinized. Aside from being mandated by accrediting bodies, biomedical science knowledge plays an important role in developing clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic reasoning skills in the application of clinical skills, in supporting evidence-based veterinary practice and life-long learning, and in advancing biomedical knowledge and comparative medicine. With an increasing volume and fast pace of change in biomedical knowledge, as well as increased demands on curricular time, there has been pressure to make biomedical science education efficient and relevant for veterinary medicine. This has lead to a shift in biomedical education from fact-based, teacher-centered and discipline-based teaching to applicable, student-centered, integrated teaching. This movement is supported by adult learning theories and is thought to enhance students' transference of biomedical science into their clinical practice. The importance of biomedical science in veterinary education and the theories of biomedical science learning will be discussed in this article. In addition, we will explore current advances in biomedical teaching methodologies that are aimed to maximize knowledge retention and application for clinical veterinary training and practice.

  8. Portulaca oleracea extracts protect human keratinocytes and fibroblasts from UV-induced apoptosis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Suyeon; Kim, Ki Ho; Park, Changhoon; Lee, Jong-Suk; Kim, Young Heui

    2014-10-01

    Portulaca oleracea extracts, known as Ma Chi Hyun in the traditional Korean medicine, show a variety of biomedical efficacies including those in anti-inflammation and anti-allergy. In this study, we investigate the protective activity of the P. oleracea extracts against UVB-induced damage in human epithelial keratinocytes and fibroblasts by several apoptosis-related tests. The results suggest that P. oleracea extracts have protective effects from UVB-induced apoptosis. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  9. From Biomedical to Psychosomatic Reasoning: A Theoretical Framework

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alireza Monajemi

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available Despite a general acceptance of the biopsychosocial model, medical education and patient care are still largely biomedical in focus, and physicians have many deficiencies in biopsychosocial formulations and care. Education in medical schools puts more emphasis on providing biomedical education (BM than biopsychosocial education (BPS; the initial knowledge formed in medical students is mainly with a biomedical approach. Therefore, it seems that psychosocial aspects play a minor role at this level and PSM knowledge will lag behind BM knowledge. However, it seems that the integration of biomedical and psychosocial-knowledge is crucial for a successful and efficient patient encounter. In this paper, based on the theory of medical expertise development, the steps through which biomedical reasoning transforms to psychosomatic reasoning will be discussed.

  10. Industry careers for the biomedical engineer.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Munzner, Robert F

    2004-01-01

    This year's conference theme is "linkages for innovation in biomedicine." Biomedical engineers, especially those transitioning their career from academic study into medical device industry, will play a critical role in converting the fruits of scientific research into the reality of modern medical devices. This special session is organized to help biomedical engineers to achieve their career goals more effectively. Participants will have opportunities to hear from and interact with leading industrial experts on many issues. These may include but not limited to 1) career paths for biomedical engineers (industrial, academic, or federal; technical vs. managerial track; small start-up or large established companies); 2) unique design challenges and regulatory requirements in medical device development; 3) aspects of a successful biomedical engineering job candidate (such as resume, interview, follow-up). Suggestions for other topics are welcome and should be directed to xkong@ieee.org The distinguished panelists include: Xuan Kong, Ph.D., VP of Research, NEUROMetrix Inc, Waltham, MA Robert F. Munzner, Ph.D., Medical Device Consultant, Doctor Device, Herndon, VA Glen McLaughlin, Ph.D., VP of Engineering and CTO, Zonare Medical System Inc., Mountain View, CA Grace Bartoo, Ph.D., RAC, General Manager, Decus Biomedical LLC San Carlos, CA.

  11. Simbody: multibody dynamics for biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sherman, Michael A; Seth, Ajay; Delp, Scott L

    Multibody software designed for mechanical engineering has been successfully employed in biomedical research for many years. For real time operation some biomedical researchers have also adapted game physics engines. However, these tools were built for other purposes and do not fully address the needs of biomedical researchers using them to analyze the dynamics of biological structures and make clinically meaningful recommendations. We are addressing this problem through the development of an open source, extensible, high performance toolkit including a multibody mechanics library aimed at the needs of biomedical researchers. The resulting code, Simbody, supports research in a variety of fields including neuromuscular, prosthetic, and biomolecular simulation, and related research such as biologically-inspired design and control of humanoid robots and avatars. Simbody is the dynamics engine behind OpenSim, a widely used biomechanics simulation application. This article reviews issues that arise uniquely in biomedical research, and reports on the architecture, theory, and computational methods Simbody uses to address them. By addressing these needs explicitly Simbody provides a better match to the needs of researchers than can be obtained by adaptation of mechanical engineering or gaming codes. Simbody is a community resource, free for any purpose. We encourage wide adoption and invite contributions to the code base at https://simtk.org/home/simbody.

  12. Advances in biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Brown, J H U

    1976-01-01

    Advances in Biomedical Engineering, Volume 6, is a collection of papers that discusses the role of integrated electronics in medical systems and the usage of biological mathematical models in biological systems. Other papers deal with the health care systems, the problems and methods of approach toward rehabilitation, as well as the future of biomedical engineering. One paper discusses the use of system identification as it applies to biological systems to estimate the values of a number of parameters (for example, resistance, diffusion coefficients) by indirect means. More particularly, the i

  13. Archives of Medical and Biomedical Research

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Archives of Medical and Biomedical Research is the official journal of the International Association of Medical and Biomedical Researchers (IAMBR) and the Society for Free Radical Research Africa (SFRR-Africa). It is an internationally peer reviewed, open access and multidisciplinary journal aimed at publishing original ...

  14. KaBOB: ontology-based semantic integration of biomedical databases.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Livingston, Kevin M; Bada, Michael; Baumgartner, William A; Hunter, Lawrence E

    2015-04-23

    The ability to query many independent biological databases using a common ontology-based semantic model would facilitate deeper integration and more effective utilization of these diverse and rapidly growing resources. Despite ongoing work moving toward shared data formats and linked identifiers, significant problems persist in semantic data integration in order to establish shared identity and shared meaning across heterogeneous biomedical data sources. We present five processes for semantic data integration that, when applied collectively, solve seven key problems. These processes include making explicit the differences between biomedical concepts and database records, aggregating sets of identifiers denoting the same biomedical concepts across data sources, and using declaratively represented forward-chaining rules to take information that is variably represented in source databases and integrating it into a consistent biomedical representation. We demonstrate these processes and solutions by presenting KaBOB (the Knowledge Base Of Biomedicine), a knowledge base of semantically integrated data from 18 prominent biomedical databases using common representations grounded in Open Biomedical Ontologies. An instance of KaBOB with data about humans and seven major model organisms can be built using on the order of 500 million RDF triples. All source code for building KaBOB is available under an open-source license. KaBOB is an integrated knowledge base of biomedical data representationally based in prominent, actively maintained Open Biomedical Ontologies, thus enabling queries of the underlying data in terms of biomedical concepts (e.g., genes and gene products, interactions and processes) rather than features of source-specific data schemas or file formats. KaBOB resolves many of the issues that routinely plague biomedical researchers intending to work with data from multiple data sources and provides a platform for ongoing data integration and development and for

  15. 3rd International Conference on Nanotechnologies and Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Tiginyanu, Ion

    2016-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Nanotechnologies and Biomedical Engineering which was held on September 23-26, 2015 in Chisinau, Republic of Moldova. ICNBME-2015 continues the series of International Conferences in the field of nanotechnologies and biomedical engineering. It aims at bringing together scientists and engineers dealing with fundamental and applied research for reporting on the latest theoretical developments and applications involved in the fields. Topics include Nanotechnologies and nanomaterials Plasmonics and metamaterials Bio-micro/nano technologies Biomaterials Biosensors and sensors systems Biomedical instrumentation Biomedical signal processing Biomedical imaging and image processing Molecular, cellular and tissue engineering Clinical engineering, health technology management and assessment; Health informatics, e-health and telemedicine Biomedical engineering education Nuclear and radiation safety and security Innovations and technology transfer...

  16. Event patterns extracted from anisotropic spectra of charged particles produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Chen, Ya-Hui; Liu, Fu-Hu [Shanxi University, Institute of Theoretical Physics and State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Taiyuan, Shanxi (China)

    2017-11-15

    Event patterns extracted from anisotropic spectra of charged particles produced in lead-lead collisions at 2.76 TeV are investigated. We use an inverse power-law resulted from the QCD calculus to describe the transverse momentum spectrum in the hard scattering process, and a revised Erlang distribution resulted from a multisource thermal model to describe the transverse momentum spectrum and anisotropic flow in the soft excitation process. The pseudorapidity distribution is described by a three-Gaussian function which is a revision of the Landau hydrodynamic model. Thus, the event patterns at the kinetic freeze-out are displayed by the scatter plots of the considered particles in the three-dimensional velocity, momentum, and rapidity spaces. (orig.)

  17. Event patterns extracted from anisotropic spectra of charged particles produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Ya-Hui; Liu, Fu-Hu

    2017-11-01

    Event patterns extracted from anisotropic spectra of charged particles produced in lead-lead collisions at 2.76 TeV are investigated. We use an inverse power-law resulted from the QCD calculus to describe the transverse momentum spectrum in the hard scattering process, and a revised Erlang distribution resulted from a multisource thermal model to describe the transverse momentum spectrum and anisotropic flow in the soft excitation process. The pseudorapidity distribution is described by a three-Gaussian function which is a revision of the Landau hydrodynamic model. Thus, the event patterns at the kinetic freeze-out are displayed by the scatter plots of the considered particles in the three-dimensional velocity, momentum, and rapidity spaces.

  18. Biomedical engineering for health research and development.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, X-Y

    2015-01-01

    Biomedical engineering is a new area of research in medicine and biology, providing new concepts and designs for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of various diseases. There are several types of biomedical engineering, such as tissue, genetic, neural and stem cells, as well as chemical and clinical engineering for health care. Many electronic and magnetic methods and equipments are used for the biomedical engineering such as Computed Tomography (CT) scans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans, Electroencephalography (EEG), Ultrasound and regenerative medicine and stem cell cultures, preparations of artificial cells and organs, such as pancreas, urinary bladders, liver cells, and fibroblasts cells of foreskin and others. The principle of tissue engineering is described with various types of cells used for tissue engineering purposes. The use of several medical devices and bionics are mentioned with scaffold, cells and tissue cultures and various materials are used for biomedical engineering. The use of biomedical engineering methods is very important for the human health, and research and development of diseases. The bioreactors and preparations of artificial cells or tissues and organs are described here.

  19. Digital fabrication of multi-material biomedical objects

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Cheung, H H; Choi, S H, E-mail: shchoi@hku.h [Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road (Hong Kong)

    2009-12-15

    This paper describes a multi-material virtual prototyping (MMVP) system for modelling and digital fabrication of discrete and functionally graded multi-material objects for biomedical applications. The MMVP system consists of a DMMVP module, an FGMVP module and a virtual reality (VR) simulation module. The DMMVP module is used to model discrete multi-material (DMM) objects, while the FGMVP module is for functionally graded multi-material (FGM) objects. The VR simulation module integrates these two modules to perform digital fabrication of multi-material objects, which can be subsequently visualized and analysed in a virtual environment to optimize MMLM processes for fabrication of product prototypes. Using the MMVP system, two biomedical objects, including a DMM human spine and an FGM intervertebral disc spacer are modelled and digitally fabricated for visualization and analysis in a VR environment. These studies show that the MMVP system is a practical tool for modelling, visualization, and subsequent fabrication of biomedical objects of discrete and functionally graded multi-materials for biomedical applications. The system may be adapted to control MMLM machines with appropriate hardware for physical fabrication of biomedical objects.

  20. Digital fabrication of multi-material biomedical objects

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Cheung, H H; Choi, S H

    2009-01-01

    This paper describes a multi-material virtual prototyping (MMVP) system for modelling and digital fabrication of discrete and functionally graded multi-material objects for biomedical applications. The MMVP system consists of a DMMVP module, an FGMVP module and a virtual reality (VR) simulation module. The DMMVP module is used to model discrete multi-material (DMM) objects, while the FGMVP module is for functionally graded multi-material (FGM) objects. The VR simulation module integrates these two modules to perform digital fabrication of multi-material objects, which can be subsequently visualized and analysed in a virtual environment to optimize MMLM processes for fabrication of product prototypes. Using the MMVP system, two biomedical objects, including a DMM human spine and an FGM intervertebral disc spacer are modelled and digitally fabricated for visualization and analysis in a VR environment. These studies show that the MMVP system is a practical tool for modelling, visualization, and subsequent fabrication of biomedical objects of discrete and functionally graded multi-materials for biomedical applications. The system may be adapted to control MMLM machines with appropriate hardware for physical fabrication of biomedical objects.

  1. Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Items 1 - 20 of 20 ... Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences. Journal Home > Archives: Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences. Log in or Register to get access to full text downloads.

  2. Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Items 1 - 19 of 19 ... Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research. Journal Home > Archives: Journal of Medicine and Biomedical Research. Log in or Register to get access to full text downloads.

  3. Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Suh, Sang C; Tanik, Murat M

    2011-01-01

    Biomedical Engineering: Health Care Systems, Technology and Techniques is an edited volume with contributions from world experts. It provides readers with unique contributions related to current research and future healthcare systems. Practitioners and researchers focused on computer science, bioinformatics, engineering and medicine will find this book a valuable reference.

  4. Biomedical technology prosperity game{trademark}

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Berman, M.; Boyack, K.W.; Wesenberg, D.L.

    1996-07-01

    Prosperity Games{trademark} are an outgrowth and adaptation of move/countermove and seminar War Games. Prosperity Games{trademark} are simulations that explore complex issues in a variety of areas including economics, politics, sociology, environment, education and research. These issues can be examined from a variety of perspectives ranging from a global, macroeconomic and geopolitical viewpoint down to the details of customer/supplier/market interactions in specific industries. All Prosperity Games{trademark} are unique in that both the game format and the player contributions vary from game to game. This report documents the Biomedical Technology Prosperity Game{trademark} conducted under the sponsorship of Sandia National Laboratories, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Koop Foundation, Inc. Players were drawn from all stakeholders involved in biomedical technologies including patients, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, legislators, suppliers/manufacturers, regulators, funding organizations, universities/laboratories, and the legal profession. The primary objectives of this game were to: (1) Identify advanced/critical technology issues that affect the cost and quality of health care. (2) Explore the development, patenting, manufacturing and licensing of needed technologies that would decrease costs while maintaining or improving quality. (3) Identify policy and regulatory changes that would reduce costs and improve quality and timeliness of health care delivery. (4) Identify and apply existing resources and facilities to develop and implement improved technologies and policies. (5) Begin to develop Biomedical Technology Roadmaps for industry and government cooperation. The deliberations and recommendations of these players provided valuable insights as to the views of this diverse group of decision makers concerning biomedical issues. Significant progress was made in the roadmapping of key areas in the biomedical technology field.

  5. A semantic-based method for extracting concept definitions from scientific publications: evaluation in the autism phenotype domain

    OpenAIRE

    Hassanpour, Saeed; O?Connor, Martin J; Das, Amar K

    2013-01-01

    Background A variety of informatics approaches have been developed that use information retrieval, NLP and text-mining techniques to identify biomedical concepts and relations within scientific publications or their sentences. These approaches have not typically addressed the challenge of extracting more complex knowledge such as biomedical definitions. In our efforts to facilitate knowledge acquisition of rule-based definitions of autism phenotypes, we have developed a novel semantic-based t...

  6. Engineering β-sheet peptide assemblies for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yu, Zhiqiang; Cai, Zheng; Chen, Qiling; Liu, Menghua; Ye, Ling; Ren, Jiaoyan; Liao, Wenzhen; Liu, Shuwen

    2016-03-01

    Hydrogels have been widely studied in various biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering, cell culture, immunotherapy and vaccines, and drug delivery. Peptide-based nanofibers represent a promising new strategy for current drug delivery approaches and cell carriers for tissue engineering. This review focuses on the recent advances in the use of self-assembling engineered β-sheet peptide assemblies for biomedical applications. The applications of peptide nanofibers in biomedical fields, such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, immunotherapy, and vaccines, are highlighted. The current challenges and future perspectives for self-assembling peptide nanofibers in biomedical applications are discussed.

  7. Biomedical engineering education--status and perspectives.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Magjarevic, Ratko; Zequera Diaz, Martha L

    2014-01-01

    Biomedical Engineering programs are present at a large number of universities all over the world with an increasing trend. New generations of biomedical engineers have to face the challenges of health care systems round the world which need a large number of professionals not only to support the present technology in the health care system but to develop new devices and services. Health care stakeholders would like to have innovative solutions directed towards solving problems of the world growing incidence of chronic disease and ageing population. These new solutions have to meet the requirements for continuous monitoring, support or care outside clinical settlements. Presence of these needs can be tracked through data from the Labor Organization in the U.S. showing that biomedical engineering jobs have the largest growth at the engineering labor market with expected 72% growth rate in the period from 2008-2018. In European Union the number of patents (i.e. innovation) is the highest in the category of biomedical technology. Biomedical engineering curricula have to adopt to the new needs and for expectations of the future. In this paper we want to give an overview of engineering professions in related to engineering in medicine and biology and the current status of BME education in some regions, as a base for further discussions.

  8. Innovations in Biomedical Engineering 2016

    CERN Document Server

    Tkacz, Ewaryst; Paszenda, Zbigniew; Piętka, Ewa

    2017-01-01

    This book presents the proceedings of the “Innovations in Biomedical Engineering IBE’2016” Conference held on October 16–18, 2016 in Poland, discussing recent research on innovations in biomedical engineering. The past decade has seen the dynamic development of more and more sophisticated technologies, including biotechnologies, and more general technologies applied in the area of life sciences. As such the book covers the broadest possible spectrum of subjects related to biomedical engineering innovations. Divided into four parts, it presents state-of-the-art achievements in: • engineering of biomaterials, • modelling and simulations in biomechanics, • informatics in medicine • signal analysis The book helps bridge the gap between technological and methodological engineering achievements on the one hand and clinical requirements in the three major areas diagnosis, therapy and rehabilitation on the other.

  9. Biomedical Engineering | Classification | College of Engineering & Applied

    Science.gov (United States)

    Engineering Concentration on Ergonomics M.S. Program in Computer Science Interdisciplinary Concentration on Energy Doctoral Programs in Engineering Non-Degree Candidate Departments Biomedical Engineering Biomedical Engineering Industry Advisory Council Civil & Environmental Engineering Civil &

  10. VI Latin American Congress on Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Hadad, Alejandro

    2015-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the CLAIB 2014, held in Paraná, Entre Ríos, Argentina 29, 30 & 31 October 2014. The proceedings, presented by the Regional Council of Biomedical Engineering for Latin America (CORAL) offer research findings, experiences and activities between institutions and universities to develop Bioengineering, Biomedical Engineering and related sciences. The conferences of the American Congress of Biomedical Engineering are sponsored by the International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering (IFMBE), Society for Engineering in Biology and Medicine (EMBS) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), among other organizations and international agencies and bringing together scientists, academics and biomedical engineers in Latin America and other continents in an environment conducive to exchange and professional growth. The Topics include: - Bioinformatics and Computational Biology - Bioinstrumentation; Sensors, Micro and Nano Technologies - Biomaterials, Tissu...

  11. John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nall, Marsha

    2004-01-01

    The John Glenn Biomedical Engineering Consortium is an inter-institutional research and technology development, beginning with ten projects in FY02 that are aimed at applying GRC expertise in fluid physics and sensor development with local biomedical expertise to mitigate the risks of space flight on the health, safety, and performance of astronauts. It is anticipated that several new technologies will be developed that are applicable to both medical needs in space and on earth.

  12. A corpus for plant-chemical relationships in the biomedical domain.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Choi, Wonjun; Kim, Baeksoo; Cho, Hyejin; Lee, Doheon; Lee, Hyunju

    2016-09-20

    Plants are natural products that humans consume in various ways including food and medicine. They have a long empirical history of treating diseases with relatively few side effects. Based on these strengths, many studies have been performed to verify the effectiveness of plants in treating diseases. It is crucial to understand the chemicals contained in plants because these chemicals can regulate activities of proteins that are key factors in causing diseases. With the accumulation of a large volume of biomedical literature in various databases such as PubMed, it is possible to automatically extract relationships between plants and chemicals in a large-scale way if we apply a text mining approach. A cornerstone of achieving this task is a corpus of relationships between plants and chemicals. In this study, we first constructed a corpus for plant and chemical entities and for the relationships between them. The corpus contains 267 plant entities, 475 chemical entities, and 1,007 plant-chemical relationships (550 and 457 positive and negative relationships, respectively), which are drawn from 377 sentences in 245 PubMed abstracts. Inter-annotator agreement scores for the corpus among three annotators were measured. The simple percent agreement scores for entities and trigger words for the relationships were 99.6 and 94.8 %, respectively, and the overall kappa score for the classification of positive and negative relationships was 79.8 %. We also developed a rule-based model to automatically extract such plant-chemical relationships. When we evaluated the rule-based model using the corpus and randomly selected biomedical articles, overall F-scores of 68.0 and 61.8 % were achieved, respectively. We expect that the corpus for plant-chemical relationships will be a useful resource for enhancing plant research. The corpus is available at http://combio.gist.ac.kr/plantchemicalcorpus .

  13. Biomedical enhancements as justice.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Nam, Jeesoo

    2015-02-01

    Biomedical enhancements, the applications of medical technology to make better those who are neither ill nor deficient, have made great strides in the past few decades. Using Amartya Sen's capability approach as my framework, I argue in this article that far from being simply permissible, we have a prima facie moral obligation to use these new developments for the end goal of promoting social justice. In terms of both range and magnitude, the use of biomedical enhancements will mark a radical advance in how we compensate the most disadvantaged members of society. © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  14. Event Displays for the Visualization of CMS Events

    CERN Document Server

    Jones, Christopher Duncan

    2010-01-01

    During the last year the CMS experiment engaged in consolidation of its existing event display programs. The core of the new system is based on the Fireworks event display program which was by-design directly integrated with the CMS Event Data Model (EDM) and the light version of the software framework (FWLite). The Event Visualization Environment (EVE) of the ROOT framework is used to manage a consistent set of 3D and 2D views, selection, user-feedback and user-interaction with the graphics windows; several EVE components were developed by CMS in collaboration with the ROOT project. In event display operation simple plugins are registered into the system to perform conversion from EDM collections into their visual representations which are then managed by the application. Full event navigation and filtering as well as collection-level filtering is supported. The same data-extraction principle can also be applied when Fireworks will eventually operate as a service within the full software framework.

  15. Event Display for the Visualization of CMS Events

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bauerdick, L. A. T.; Eulisse, G.; Jones, C. D.; Kovalskyi, D.; McCauley, T.; Mrak Tadel, A.; Muelmenstaedt, J.; Osborne, I.; Tadel, M.; Tu, Y.; Yagil, A.

    2011-12-01

    During the last year the CMS experiment engaged in consolidation of its existing event display programs. The core of the new system is based on the Fireworks event display program which was by-design directly integrated with the CMS Event Data Model (EDM) and the light version of the software framework (FWLite). The Event Visualization Environment (EVE) of the ROOT framework is used to manage a consistent set of 3D and 2D views, selection, user-feedback and user-interaction with the graphics windows; several EVE components were developed by CMS in collaboration with the ROOT project. In event display operation simple plugins are registered into the system to perform conversion from EDM collections into their visual representations which are then managed by the application. Full event navigation and filtering as well as collection-level filtering is supported. The same data-extraction principle can also be applied when Fireworks will eventually operate as a service within the full software framework.

  16. Event Display for the Visualization of CMS Events

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bauerdick, L A T; Eulisse, G; Jones, C D; McCauley, T; Osborne, I; Kovalskyi, D; Tadel, A Mrak; Muelmenstaedt, J; Tadel, M; Tu, Y; Yagil, A

    2011-01-01

    During the last year the CMS experiment engaged in consolidation of its existing event display programs. The core of the new system is based on the Fireworks event display program which was by-design directly integrated with the CMS Event Data Model (EDM) and the light version of the software framework (FWLite). The Event Visualization Environment (EVE) of the ROOT framework is used to manage a consistent set of 3D and 2D views, selection, user-feedback and user-interaction with the graphics windows; several EVE components were developed by CMS in collaboration with the ROOT project. In event display operation simple plugins are registered into the system to perform conversion from EDM collections into their visual representations which are then managed by the application. Full event navigation and filtering as well as collection-level filtering is supported. The same data-extraction principle can also be applied when Fireworks will eventually operate as a service within the full software framework.

  17. SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework

    Science.gov (United States)

    He, Karen Y.; Wang, Kai

    2016-01-01

    Background Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment. Results In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers) from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes. Conclusions This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research. PMID:27685652

  18. SparkText: Biomedical Text Mining on Big Data Framework.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Zhan Ye

    Full Text Available Many new biomedical research articles are published every day, accumulating rich information, such as genetic variants, genes, diseases, and treatments. Rapid yet accurate text mining on large-scale scientific literature can discover novel knowledge to better understand human diseases and to improve the quality of disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment.In this study, we designed and developed an efficient text mining framework called SparkText on a Big Data infrastructure, which is composed of Apache Spark data streaming and machine learning methods, combined with a Cassandra NoSQL database. To demonstrate its performance for classifying cancer types, we extracted information (e.g., breast, prostate, and lung cancers from tens of thousands of articles downloaded from PubMed, and then employed Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM, and Logistic Regression to build prediction models to mine the articles. The accuracy of predicting a cancer type by SVM using the 29,437 full-text articles was 93.81%. While competing text-mining tools took more than 11 hours, SparkText mined the dataset in approximately 6 minutes.This study demonstrates the potential for mining large-scale scientific articles on a Big Data infrastructure, with real-time update from new articles published daily. SparkText can be extended to other areas of biomedical research.

  19. An information technology emphasis in biomedical informatics education.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kane, Michael D; Brewer, Jeffrey L

    2007-02-01

    Unprecedented growth in the interdisciplinary domain of biomedical informatics reflects the recent advancements in genomic sequence availability, high-content biotechnology screening systems, as well as the expectations of computational biology to command a leading role in drug discovery and disease characterization. These forces have moved much of life sciences research almost completely into the computational domain. Importantly, educational training in biomedical informatics has been limited to students enrolled in the life sciences curricula, yet much of the skills needed to succeed in biomedical informatics involve or augment training in information technology curricula. This manuscript describes the methods and rationale for training students enrolled in information technology curricula in the field of biomedical informatics, which augments the existing information technology curriculum and provides training on specific subjects in Biomedical Informatics not emphasized in bioinformatics courses offered in life science programs, and does not require prerequisite courses in the life sciences.

  20. World Congress on Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    2015-01-01

    This book presents the proceedings of the IUPESM World Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics, a tri-annual high-level policy meeting dedicated exclusively to furthering the role of biomedical engineering and medical physics in medicine. The book offers papers about emerging issues related to the development and sustainability of the role and impact of medical physicists and biomedical engineers in medicine and healthcare. It provides a unique and important forum to secure a coordinated, multileveled global response to the need, demand, and importance of creating and supporting strong academic and clinical teams of biomedical engineers and medical physicists for the benefit of human health.

  1. Writing intelligible English prose for biomedical journals.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ludbrook, John

    2007-01-01

    1. I present a combination of semi-objective and subjective evidence that the quality of English prose in biomedical scientific writing is deteriorating. 2. I consider seven possible strategies for reversing this apparent trend. These refer to a greater emphasis on good writing by students in schools and by university students, consulting books on science writing, one-on-one mentoring, using 'scientific' measures to reveal lexical poverty, making use of freelance science editors and encouraging the editors of biomedical journals to pay more attention to the problem. 3. I conclude that a fruitful, long-term, strategy would be to encourage more biomedical scientists to embark on a career in science editing. This strategy requires a complementary initiative on the part of biomedical research institutions and universities to employ qualified science editors. 4. An immediately realisable strategy is to encourage postgraduate students in the biomedical sciences to undertake the service courses provided by many universities on writing English prose in general and scientific prose in particular. This strategy would require that heads of departments and supervisors urge their postgraduate students to attend such courses. 5. Two major publishers of biomedical journals, Blackwell Publications and Elsevier Science, now provide lists of commercial editing services on their web sites. I strongly recommend that authors intending to submit manuscripts to their journals (including Blackwell's Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology) make use of these services. This recommendation applies especially to those for whom English is a second language.

  2. Science gateways for biomedical big data analysis

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Shahand, S.

    2015-01-01

    Biomedical researchers are facing data deluge challenges such as dealing with large volume of complex heterogeneous data and complex and computationally demanding data processing methods. Such scale and complexity of biomedical research requires multi-disciplinary collaboration between scientists

  3. New frontiers in biomedical science and engineering during 2014-2015.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Feng; Lee, Dong-Hoon; Lagoa, Ricardo; Kumar, Sandeep

    2015-01-01

    The International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (ICBEB) is an international meeting held once a year. This, the fourth International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (ICBEB2015), will be held in Shanghai, China, during August 18th-21st, 2015. This annual conference intends to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners at home and abroad to present the most recent frontiers and future challenges in the fields of biomedical science, biomedical engineering, biomaterials, bioinformatics and computational biology, biomedical imaging and signal processing, biomechanical engineering and biotechnology, etc. The papers published in this issue are selected from this Conference, which witness the advances in biomedical engineering and biotechnology during 2014-2015.

  4. KNODWAT: a scientific framework application for testing knowledge discovery methods for the biomedical domain.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Holzinger, Andreas; Zupan, Mario

    2013-06-13

    Professionals in the biomedical domain are confronted with an increasing mass of data. Developing methods to assist professional end users in the field of Knowledge Discovery to identify, extract, visualize and understand useful information from these huge amounts of data is a huge challenge. However, there are so many diverse methods and methodologies available, that for biomedical researchers who are inexperienced in the use of even relatively popular knowledge discovery methods, it can be very difficult to select the most appropriate method for their particular research problem. A web application, called KNODWAT (KNOwledge Discovery With Advanced Techniques) has been developed, using Java on Spring framework 3.1. and following a user-centered approach. The software runs on Java 1.6 and above and requires a web server such as Apache Tomcat and a database server such as the MySQL Server. For frontend functionality and styling, Twitter Bootstrap was used as well as jQuery for interactive user interface operations. The framework presented is user-centric, highly extensible and flexible. Since it enables methods for testing using existing data to assess suitability and performance, it is especially suitable for inexperienced biomedical researchers, new to the field of knowledge discovery and data mining. For testing purposes two algorithms, CART and C4.5 were implemented using the WEKA data mining framework.

  5. Challenges for automatically extracting molecular interactions from full-text articles.

    Science.gov (United States)

    McIntosh, Tara; Curran, James R

    2009-09-24

    The increasing availability of full-text biomedical articles will allow more biomedical knowledge to be extracted automatically with greater reliability. However, most Information Retrieval (IR) and Extraction (IE) tools currently process only abstracts. The lack of corpora has limited the development of tools that are capable of exploiting the knowledge in full-text articles. As a result, there has been little investigation into the advantages of full-text document structure, and the challenges developers will face in processing full-text articles. We manually annotated passages from full-text articles that describe interactions summarised in a Molecular Interaction Map (MIM). Our corpus tracks the process of identifying facts to form the MIM summaries and captures any factual dependencies that must be resolved to extract the fact completely. For example, a fact in the results section may require a synonym defined in the introduction. The passages are also annotated with negated and coreference expressions that must be resolved.We describe the guidelines for identifying relevant passages and possible dependencies. The corpus includes 2162 sentences from 78 full-text articles. Our corpus analysis demonstrates the necessity of full-text processing; identifies the article sections where interactions are most commonly stated; and quantifies the proportion of interaction statements requiring coherent dependencies. Further, it allows us to report on the relative importance of identifying synonyms and resolving negated expressions. We also experiment with an oracle sentence retrieval system using the corpus as a gold-standard evaluation set. We introduce the MIM corpus, a unique resource that maps interaction facts in a MIM to annotated passages within full-text articles. It is an invaluable case study providing guidance to developers of biomedical IR and IE systems, and can be used as a gold-standard evaluation set for full-text IR tasks.

  6. The use of AMS to the biomedical sciences

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Vogel, J.S.

    1991-04-01

    The Center for Accelerator Mass Spectroscopy (AMS) began making AMS measurements in 1989. Biomedical experiments were originally limited by sample preparation techniques, but we expect the number of biomedical samples to increase five-fold. While many of the detailed techniques for making biomedical measurements resemble those used in other fields, biological tracer experiments differ substantially from the observational approaches of earth science investigators. The role of xenobiotius in initiating mutations in cells is of particular interest. One measure of the damage caused to the genetic material is obtained by counting the number of adducts formed by a chemical agent at a given dose. AMS allows direct measurement of the number of adducts through stoichiometric quantification of the 14 C label attached to the DNA after exposure to a labelled carcinogen. Other isotopes of interest include tritium, 36 Cl, 79 SE, 41 Ca, 26 Al and 129 I. Our experiments with low dose environmental carcinogens reflect the protocols which will become a common part of biomedical AMS. In biomedical experiments, the researcher defines the carbon to be analyzed through dissection and/or chemical purification; thus the sample is ''merely'' combusted and graphitized at the AMS facility. However, since biomedical samples can have a 14 C range of five orders of magnitude, preparation of graphite required construction of a special manifold to prevent cross-contamination. Additionally, a strain of 14 C-depleted C57BL/6 mice is being developed to further reduce background in biomedical experiments. AMS has a bright and diverse future in radioisotope tracing. Such work requires a dedicated amalgamation of AMS scientists and biomedical researchers who will redesign experimental protocols to maximize the AMS technique and minimize the danger of catastrophic contamination. 18 refs., 4 figs., 1 tab

  7. Hydroxyapatite coatings for biomedical applications

    CERN Document Server

    Zhang, Sam

    2013-01-01

    Hydroxyapatite coatings are of great importance in the biological and biomedical coatings fields, especially in the current era of nanotechnology and bioapplications. With a bonelike structure that promotes osseointegration, hydroxyapatite coating can be applied to otherwise bioinactive implants to make their surface bioactive, thus achieving faster healing and recovery. In addition to applications in orthopedic and dental implants, this coating can also be used in drug delivery. Hydroxyapatite Coatings for Biomedical Applications explores developments in the processing and property characteri

  8. Using Local Grammar for Entity Extraction from Clinical Reports

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Aicha Ghoulam

    2015-06-01

    Full Text Available Information Extraction (IE is a natural language processing (NLP task whose aim is to analyze texts written in natural language to extract structured and useful information such as named entities and semantic relations linking these entities. Information extraction is an important task for many applications such as bio-medical literature mining, customer care, community websites, and personal information management. The increasing information available in patient clinical reports is difficult to access. As it is often in an unstructured text form, doctors need tools to enable them access to this information and the ability to search it. Hence, a system for extracting this information in a structured form can benefits healthcare professionals. The work presented in this paper uses a local grammar approach to extract medical named entities from French patient clinical reports. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieved an F-Measure of 90. 06%.

  9. Signal and image analysis for biomedical and life sciences

    CERN Document Server

    Sun, Changming; Pham, Tuan D; Vallotton, Pascal; Wang, Dadong

    2014-01-01

    With an emphasis on applications of computational models for solving modern challenging problems in biomedical and life sciences, this book aims to bring collections of articles from biologists, medical/biomedical and health science researchers together with computational scientists to focus on problems at the frontier of biomedical and life sciences. The goals of this book are to build interactions of scientists across several disciplines and to help industrial users apply advanced computational techniques for solving practical biomedical and life science problems. This book is for users in t

  10. Review of spectral imaging technology in biomedical engineering: achievements and challenges.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Qingli; He, Xiaofu; Wang, Yiting; Liu, Hongying; Xu, Dongrong; Guo, Fangmin

    2013-10-01

    Spectral imaging is a technology that integrates conventional imaging and spectroscopy to get both spatial and spectral information from an object. Although this technology was originally developed for remote sensing, it has been extended to the biomedical engineering field as a powerful analytical tool for biological and biomedical research. This review introduces the basics of spectral imaging, imaging methods, current equipment, and recent advances in biomedical applications. The performance and analytical capabilities of spectral imaging systems for biological and biomedical imaging are discussed. In particular, the current achievements and limitations of this technology in biomedical engineering are presented. The benefits and development trends of biomedical spectral imaging are highlighted to provide the reader with an insight into the current technological advances and its potential for biomedical research.

  11. The importance of Zebrafish in biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Tavares, Bárbara; Santos Lopes, Susana

    2013-01-01

    Zebrafish (Danio rerio) is an ideal model organism for the study of vertebrate development. This is due to the large clutches that each couple produces, with up to 200 embryos every 7 days, and to the fact that the embryos and larvae are small, transparent and undergo rapid external development. Using scientific literature research tools available online and the keywords Zebrafish, biomedical research, human disease, and drug screening, we reviewed original studies and reviews indexed in PubMed. In this review we summarized work conducted with this model for the advancement of our knowledge related to several human diseases. We also focused on the biomedical research being performed in Portugal with the zebrafish model. Powerful live imaging and genetic tools are currently available for zebrafish making it a valuable model in biomedical research. The combination of these properties with the optimization of automated systems for drug screening has transformed the zebrafish into "a top model" in biomedical research, drug discovery and toxicity testing. Furthermore, with the optimization of xenografts technology it will be possible to use zebrafish to aide in the choice of the best therapy for each patient. Zebrafish is an excellent model organism in biomedical research, drug development and in clinical therapy.

  12. [Biomedical research in Revista de Biologia Tropical].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gutiérrez, José María

    2002-01-01

    The contributions published in Revista de Biología Tropical in the area of Biomedical Sciences are reviewed in terms of number of contributions and scope of research subjects. Biomedical Sciences, particularly Parasitology and Microbiology, constituted the predominant subject in the Revista during the first decade, reflecting the intense research environment at the School of Microbiology of the University of Costa Rica and at Hospital San Juan de Dios. The relative weight of Biomedicine in the following decades diminished, due to the outstanding increment in publications in Biological Sciences; however, the absolute number of contributions in Biomedical Sciences remained constant throughout the last decades, with around 80 contributions per decade. In spite of the predominance of Parasitology as the main biomedical subject, the last decades have witnessed the emergence of new areas of interest in the Revista, such as Pharmacology of natural products, Toxinology, especially related to snake venoms, and Human Genetics. This retrospective analysis evidences that Biomedical Sciences, particularly those related to Tropical Medicine, were a fundamental component during the first years of Revista de Biología Tropical, and have maintained a significant presence in the scientific output of this journal, the most relevant scientific publication in biological sciences in Central America.

  13. Biomedical Imaging Principles and Applications

    CERN Document Server

    Salzer, Reiner

    2012-01-01

    This book presents and describes imaging technologies that can be used to study chemical processes and structural interactions in dynamic systems, principally in biomedical systems. The imaging technologies, largely biomedical imaging technologies such as MRT, Fluorescence mapping, raman mapping, nanoESCA, and CARS microscopy, have been selected according to their application range and to the chemical information content of their data. These technologies allow for the analysis and evaluation of delicate biological samples, which must not be disturbed during the profess. Ultimately, this may me

  14. Camera systems in human motion analysis for biomedical applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chin, Lim Chee; Basah, Shafriza Nisha; Yaacob, Sazali; Juan, Yeap Ewe; Kadir, Aida Khairunnisaa Ab.

    2015-05-01

    Human Motion Analysis (HMA) system has been one of the major interests among researchers in the field of computer vision, artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering and sciences. This is due to its wide and promising biomedical applications, namely, bio-instrumentation for human computer interfacing and surveillance system for monitoring human behaviour as well as analysis of biomedical signal and image processing for diagnosis and rehabilitation applications. This paper provides an extensive review of the camera system of HMA, its taxonomy, including camera types, camera calibration and camera configuration. The review focused on evaluating the camera system consideration of the HMA system specifically for biomedical applications. This review is important as it provides guidelines and recommendation for researchers and practitioners in selecting a camera system of the HMA system for biomedical applications.

  15. A new educational program on biomedical engineering

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    van Alste, Jan A.

    2000-01-01

    At the University of Twente together with the Free University of Amsterdam a new educational program on Biomedical Engineering will be developed. The academic program with a five-year duration will start in September 2001. After a general, broad education in Biomedical Engineering in the first three

  16. Effect of an Aqueous Extract of Allium Sativum Linn on the Intestinal ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    This decrease was therefore dose-dependent and when expressed as percentage range from 20.16% to 62.61%. The above results suggest that an aqueous extract of Allium sativum decreases intestinal motility in rabbits. KEY WORDS: Allium sativum, garlic, intestinal motility. Nigerian Journal of Health and Biomedical ...

  17. Ion Channel ElectroPhysiology Ontology (ICEPO) - a case study of text mining assisted ontology development.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Elayavilli, Ravikumar Komandur; Liu, Hongfang

    2016-01-01

    Computational modeling of biological cascades is of great interest to quantitative biologists. Biomedical text has been a rich source for quantitative information. Gathering quantitative parameters and values from biomedical text is one significant challenge in the early steps of computational modeling as it involves huge manual effort. While automatically extracting such quantitative information from bio-medical text may offer some relief, lack of ontological representation for a subdomain serves as impedance in normalizing textual extractions to a standard representation. This may render textual extractions less meaningful to the domain experts. In this work, we propose a rule-based approach to automatically extract relations involving quantitative data from biomedical text describing ion channel electrophysiology. We further translated the quantitative assertions extracted through text mining to a formal representation that may help in constructing ontology for ion channel events using a rule based approach. We have developed Ion Channel ElectroPhysiology Ontology (ICEPO) by integrating the information represented in closely related ontologies such as, Cell Physiology Ontology (CPO), and Cardiac Electro Physiology Ontology (CPEO) and the knowledge provided by domain experts. The rule-based system achieved an overall F-measure of 68.93% in extracting the quantitative data assertions system on an independently annotated blind data set. We further made an initial attempt in formalizing the quantitative data assertions extracted from the biomedical text into a formal representation that offers potential to facilitate the integration of text mining into ontological workflow, a novel aspect of this study. This work is a case study where we created a platform that provides formal interaction between ontology development and text mining. We have achieved partial success in extracting quantitative assertions from the biomedical text and formalizing them in ontological

  18. Practical radiation shielding for biomedical research

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Klein, R.C.; Reginatto, M.; Party, E.; Gershey, E.L.

    1990-01-01

    This paper reports on calculations which exist for estimating shielding required for radioactivity; however, they are often not applicable for the radionuclides and activities common in biomedical research. A variety of commercially available Lucite shields are being marketed to the biomedical community. Their advertisements may lead laboratory workers to expect better radiation protection than these shields can provide or to assume erroneously that very weak beta emitters require extensive shielding. The authors have conducted a series of shielding experiments designed to simulate exposures from the amounts of 32 P, 51 Cr and 125 I typically used in biomedical laboratories. For most routine work, ≥0.64 cm of Lucite covered with various thicknesses of lead will reduce whole-body occupational exposure rates of < 1mR/hr at the point of contact

  19. Biomedical Big Data Training Collaborative (BBDTC): An effort to bridge the talent gap in biomedical science and research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Purawat, Shweta; Cowart, Charles; Amaro, Rommie E; Altintas, Ilkay

    2016-06-01

    The BBDTC (https://biobigdata.ucsd.edu) is a community-oriented platform to encourage high-quality knowledge dissemination with the aim of growing a well-informed biomedical big data community through collaborative efforts on training and education. The BBDTC collaborative is an e-learning platform that supports the biomedical community to access, develop and deploy open training materials. The BBDTC supports Big Data skill training for biomedical scientists at all levels, and from varied backgrounds. The natural hierarchy of courses allows them to be broken into and handled as modules . Modules can be reused in the context of multiple courses and reshuffled, producing a new and different, dynamic course called a playlist . Users may create playlists to suit their learning requirements and share it with individual users or the wider public. BBDTC leverages the maturity and design of the HUBzero content-management platform for delivering educational content. To facilitate the migration of existing content, the BBDTC supports importing and exporting course material from the edX platform. Migration tools will be extended in the future to support other platforms. Hands-on training software packages, i.e., toolboxes , are supported through Amazon EC2 and Virtualbox virtualization technologies, and they are available as: ( i ) downloadable lightweight Virtualbox Images providing a standardized software tool environment with software packages and test data on their personal machines, and ( ii ) remotely accessible Amazon EC2 Virtual Machines for accessing biomedical big data tools and scalable big data experiments. At the moment, the BBDTC site contains three open Biomedical big data training courses with lecture contents, videos and hands-on training utilizing VM toolboxes, covering diverse topics. The courses have enhanced the hands-on learning environment by providing structured content that users can use at their own pace. A four course biomedical big data series is

  20. Assessing the practice of biomedical ontology evaluation: Gaps and opportunities.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Amith, Muhammad; He, Zhe; Bian, Jiang; Lossio-Ventura, Juan Antonio; Tao, Cui

    2018-04-01

    With the proliferation of heterogeneous health care data in the last three decades, biomedical ontologies and controlled biomedical terminologies play a more and more important role in knowledge representation and management, data integration, natural language processing, as well as decision support for health information systems and biomedical research. Biomedical ontologies and controlled terminologies are intended to assure interoperability. Nevertheless, the quality of biomedical ontologies has hindered their applicability and subsequent adoption in real-world applications. Ontology evaluation is an integral part of ontology development and maintenance. In the biomedicine domain, ontology evaluation is often conducted by third parties as a quality assurance (or auditing) effort that focuses on identifying modeling errors and inconsistencies. In this work, we first organized four categorical schemes of ontology evaluation methods in the existing literature to create an integrated taxonomy. Further, to understand the ontology evaluation practice in the biomedicine domain, we reviewed a sample of 200 ontologies from the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal-the largest repository for biomedical ontologies-and observed that only 15 of these ontologies have documented evaluation in their corresponding inception papers. We then surveyed the recent quality assurance approaches for biomedical ontologies and their use. We also mapped these quality assurance approaches to the ontology evaluation criteria. It is our anticipation that ontology evaluation and quality assurance approaches will be more widely adopted in the development life cycle of biomedical ontologies. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  1. Biomedical engineering: A platform for research and innovation in ultrasound

    Science.gov (United States)

    Holland, Christy K.

    2004-05-01

    An undergraduate or graduate degree in biomedical engineering prepares students to solve problems at the interface between engineering and medicine. Biomedical engineering encompasses evolving areas such as advanced medical imaging for diagnosis and treatment of disease, tissue engineering for designing and manufacturing biological implants for damaged or diseased tissues and organs, and bioinformatics for determining which genes play a major role in health and disease. Biomedical engineering academic programs produce graduates with the ability to pursue successful careers in the biomedical device industry or to obtain advanced degrees leading to careers in biomedical engineering research, medicine, law or business. Biomedical engineering majors take courses in biology, anatomy, physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and medical product design and value life-long learning. Students learn to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams comprised of individuals with diverse social, cultural and technical backgrounds. Biomedical engineering is becoming increasingly important in imaging and image-guided research. Some examples of innovative ultrasound technology under development are ultrasound devices to accelerate the dissolution of blood clots, advanced surgical instruments with ultrasound guidance and ultrasound contrast agents for targeted drug delivery. Biomedical engineering is a great career choice for technically minded individuals who endeavor to work on applied problems that are medically relevant.

  2. Blockchain distributed ledger technologies for biomedical and health care applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuo, Tsung-Ting; Kim, Hyeon-Eui; Ohno-Machado, Lucila

    2017-11-01

    To introduce blockchain technologies, including their benefits, pitfalls, and the latest applications, to the biomedical and health care domains. Biomedical and health care informatics researchers who would like to learn about blockchain technologies and their applications in the biomedical/health care domains. The covered topics include: (1) introduction to the famous Bitcoin crypto-currency and the underlying blockchain technology; (2) features of blockchain; (3) review of alternative blockchain technologies; (4) emerging nonfinancial distributed ledger technologies and applications; (5) benefits of blockchain for biomedical/health care applications when compared to traditional distributed databases; (6) overview of the latest biomedical/health care applications of blockchain technologies; and (7) discussion of the potential challenges and proposed solutions of adopting blockchain technologies in biomedical/health care domains. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.

  3. Advances in biomedical engineering and biotechnology during 2013-2014.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Feng; Wang, Ying; Burkhart, Timothy A; González Penedo, Manuel Francisco; Ma, Shaodong

    2014-01-01

    The 3rd International Conference on Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (iCBEB 2014), held in Beijing from the 25th to the 28th of September 2014, is an annual conference that intends to provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners around the world to present the most recent advances and future challenges in the fields of biomedical engineering, biomaterials, bioinformatics and computational biology, biomedical imaging and signal processing, biomechanical engineering and biotechnology, amongst others. The papers published in this issue are selected from this conference, which witnesses the advances in biomedical engineering and biotechnology during 2013-2014.

  4. Biomedical applications of magnetic particles

    CERN Document Server

    Mefford, Thompson

    2018-01-01

    Magnetic particles are increasingly being used in a wide variety of biomedical applications. Written by a team of internationally respected experts, this book provides an up-to-date authoritative reference for scientists and engineers. The first section presents the fundamentals of the field by explaining the theory of magnetism, describing techniques to synthesize magnetic particles, and detailing methods to characterize magnetic particles. The second section describes biomedical applications, including chemical sensors and cellular actuators, and diagnostic applications such as drug delivery, hyperthermia cancer treatment, and magnetic resonance imaging contrast.

  5. Normalizing biomedical terms by minimizing ambiguity and variability

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    McNaught John

    2008-04-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background One of the difficulties in mapping biomedical named entities, e.g. genes, proteins, chemicals and diseases, to their concept identifiers stems from the potential variability of the terms. Soft string matching is a possible solution to the problem, but its inherent heavy computational cost discourages its use when the dictionaries are large or when real time processing is required. A less computationally demanding approach is to normalize the terms by using heuristic rules, which enables us to look up a dictionary in a constant time regardless of its size. The development of good heuristic rules, however, requires extensive knowledge of the terminology in question and thus is the bottleneck of the normalization approach. Results We present a novel framework for discovering a list of normalization rules from a dictionary in a fully automated manner. The rules are discovered in such a way that they minimize the ambiguity and variability of the terms in the dictionary. We evaluated our algorithm using two large dictionaries: a human gene/protein name dictionary built from BioThesaurus and a disease name dictionary built from UMLS. Conclusions The experimental results showed that automatically discovered rules can perform comparably to carefully crafted heuristic rules in term mapping tasks, and the computational overhead of rule application is small enough that a very fast implementation is possible. This work will help improve the performance of term-concept mapping tasks in biomedical information extraction especially when good normalization heuristics for the target terminology are not fully known.

  6. Cryogenics free production of hyperpolarized 129Xe and 83Kr for biomedical MRI applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hughes-Riley, Theodore; Six, Joseph S.; Lilburn, David M. L.; Stupic, Karl F.; Dorkes, Alan C.; Shaw, Dominick E.; Pavlovskaya, Galina E.; Meersmann, Thomas

    2013-12-01

    As an alternative to cryogenic gas handling, hyperpolarized (hp) gas mixtures were extracted directly from the spin exchange optical pumping (SEOP) process through expansion followed by compression to ambient pressure for biomedical MRI applications. The omission of cryogenic gas separation generally requires the usage of high xenon or krypton concentrations at low SEOP gas pressures to generate hp 129Xe or hp 83Kr with sufficient MR signal intensity for imaging applications. Two different extraction schemes for the hp gasses were explored with focus on the preservation of the nuclear spin polarization. It was found that an extraction scheme based on an inflatable, pressure controlled balloon is sufficient for hp 129Xe handling, while 83Kr can efficiently be extracted through a single cycle piston pump. The extraction methods were tested for ex vivo MRI applications with excised rat lungs. Precise mixing of the hp gases with oxygen, which may be of interest for potential in vivo applications, was accomplished during the extraction process using a piston pump. The 83Kr bulk gas phase T1 relaxation in the mixtures containing more than approximately 1% O2 was found to be slower than that of 129Xe in corresponding mixtures. The experimental setup also facilitated 129Xe T1 relaxation measurements as a function of O2 concentration within excised lungs.

  7. Cryogenics free production of hyperpolarized 129Xe and 83Kr for biomedical MRI applications☆

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hughes-Riley, Theodore; Six, Joseph S.; Lilburn, David M.L.; Stupic, Karl F.; Dorkes, Alan C.; Shaw, Dominick E.; Pavlovskaya, Galina E.; Meersmann, Thomas

    2013-01-01

    As an alternative to cryogenic gas handling, hyperpolarized (hp) gas mixtures were extracted directly from the spin exchange optical pumping (SEOP) process through expansion followed by compression to ambient pressure for biomedical MRI applications. The omission of cryogenic gas separation generally requires the usage of high xenon or krypton concentrations at low SEOP gas pressures to generate hp 129Xe or hp 83Kr with sufficient MR signal intensity for imaging applications. Two different extraction schemes for the hp gasses were explored with focus on the preservation of the nuclear spin polarization. It was found that an extraction scheme based on an inflatable, pressure controlled balloon is sufficient for hp 129Xe handling, while 83Kr can efficiently be extracted through a single cycle piston pump. The extraction methods were tested for ex vivo MRI applications with excised rat lungs. Precise mixing of the hp gases with oxygen, which may be of interest for potential in vivo applications, was accomplished during the extraction process using a piston pump. The 83Kr bulk gas phase T1 relaxation in the mixtures containing more than approximately 1% O2 was found to be slower than that of 129Xe in corresponding mixtures. The experimental setup also facilitated 129Xe T1 relaxation measurements as a function of O2 concentration within excised lungs. PMID:24135800

  8. Biomedical Optical Imaging Technologies Design and Applications

    CERN Document Server

    2013-01-01

    This book provides an introduction to design of biomedical optical imaging technologies and their applications. The main topics include: fluorescence imaging, confocal imaging, micro-endoscope, polarization imaging, hyperspectral imaging, OCT imaging, multimodal imaging and spectroscopic systems. Each chapter is written by the world leaders of the respective fields, and will cover: principles and limitations of optical imaging technology, system design and practical implementation for one or two specific applications, including design guidelines, system configuration, optical design, component requirements and selection, system optimization and design examples, recent advances and applications in biomedical researches and clinical imaging. This book serves as a reference for students and researchers in optics and biomedical engineering.

  9. NEMO: Extraction and normalization of organization names from PubMed affiliations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha Reddy; Topham, Philip

    2010-10-04

    Today, there are more than 18 million articles related to biomedical research indexed in MEDLINE, and information derived from them could be used effectively to save the great amount of time and resources spent by government agencies in understanding the scientific landscape, including key opinion leaders and centers of excellence. Associating biomedical articles with organization names could significantly benefit the pharmaceutical marketing industry, health care funding agencies and public health officials and be useful for other scientists in normalizing author names, automatically creating citations, indexing articles and identifying potential resources or collaborators. Large amount of extracted information helps in disambiguating organization names using machine-learning algorithms. We propose NEMO, a system for extracting organization names in the affiliation and normalizing them to a canonical organization name. Our parsing process involves multi-layered rule matching with multiple dictionaries. The system achieves more than 98% f-score in extracting organization names. Our process of normalization that involves clustering based on local sequence alignment metrics and local learning based on finding connected components. A high precision was also observed in normalization. NEMO is the missing link in associating each biomedical paper and its authors to an organization name in its canonical form and the Geopolitical location of the organization. This research could potentially help in analyzing large social networks of organizations for landscaping a particular topic, improving performance of author disambiguation, adding weak links in the co-author network of authors, augmenting NLM's MARS system for correcting errors in OCR output of affiliation field, and automatically indexing the PubMed citations with the normalized organization name and country. Our system is available as a graphical user interface available for download along with this paper.

  10. Astonishing advances in mouse genetic tools for biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kaczmarczyk, Lech; Jackson, Walker S

    2015-01-01

    The humble house mouse has long been a workhorse model system in biomedical research. The technology for introducing site-specific genome modifications led to Nobel Prizes for its pioneers and opened a new era of mouse genetics. However, this technology was very time-consuming and technically demanding. As a result, many investigators continued to employ easier genome manipulation methods, though resulting models can suffer from overlooked or underestimated consequences. Another breakthrough, invaluable for the molecular dissection of disease mechanisms, was the invention of high-throughput methods to measure the expression of a plethora of genes in parallel. However, the use of samples containing material from multiple cell types could obfuscate data, and thus interpretations. In this review we highlight some important issues in experimental approaches using mouse models for biomedical research. We then discuss recent technological advances in mouse genetics that are revolutionising human disease research. Mouse genomes are now easily manipulated at precise locations thanks to guided endonucleases, such as transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) or the CRISPR/Cas9 system, both also having the potential to turn the dream of human gene therapy into reality. Newly developed methods of cell type-specific isolation of transcriptomes from crude tissue homogenates, followed by detection with next generation sequencing (NGS), are vastly improving gene regulation studies. Taken together, these amazing tools simplify the creation of much more accurate mouse models of human disease, and enable the extraction of hitherto unobtainable data.

  11. Bio-Inspired Extreme Wetting Surfaces for Biomedical Applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shin, Sera; Seo, Jungmok; Han, Heetak; Kang, Subin; Kim, Hyunchul; Lee, Taeyoon

    2016-01-01

    Biological creatures with unique surface wettability have long served as a source of inspiration for scientists and engineers. More specifically, materials exhibiting extreme wetting properties, such as superhydrophilic and superhydrophobic surfaces, have attracted considerable attention because of their potential use in various applications, such as self-cleaning fabrics, anti-fog windows, anti-corrosive coatings, drag-reduction systems, and efficient water transportation. In particular, the engineering of surface wettability by manipulating chemical properties and structure opens emerging biomedical applications ranging from high-throughput cell culture platforms to biomedical devices. This review describes design and fabrication methods for artificial extreme wetting surfaces. Next, we introduce some of the newer and emerging biomedical applications using extreme wetting surfaces. Current challenges and future prospects of the surfaces for potential biomedical applications are also addressed. PMID:28787916

  12. Biomedical Data Mining

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    Peek, N.; Combi, C.; Tucker, A.

    2009-01-01

    Objective: To introduce the special topic of Methods of Information in Medicine on data mining in biomedicine, with selected papers from two workshops on Intelligent Data Analysis in bioMedicine (IDAMAP) held in Verona (2006) and Amsterdam (2007). Methods: Defining the field of biomedical data

  13. Superhydrophobic Materials for Biomedical Applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Colson, Yolonda L.; Grinstaff, Mark W.

    2016-01-01

    Superhydrophobic surfaces are actively studied across a wide range of applications and industries, and are now finding increased use in the biomedical arena as substrates to control protein adsorption, cellular interaction, and bacterial growth, as well as platforms for drug delivery devices and for diagnostic tools. The commonality in the design of these materials is to create a stable or metastable air state at the material surface, which lends itself to a number of unique properties. These activities are catalyzing the development of new materials, applications, and fabrication techniques, as well as collaborations across material science, chemistry, engineering, and medicine given the interdisciplinary nature of this work. The review begins with a discussion of superhydrophobicity, and then explores biomedical applications that are utilizing superhydrophobicity in depth including material selection characteristics, in vitro performance, and in vivo performance. General trends are offered for each application in addition to discussion of conflicting data in the literature, and the review concludes with the authors’ future perspectives on the utility of superhydrophobic surfaces for biomedical applications. PMID:27449946

  14. Biomedical learning experiences for middle school girls sponsored by the Kansas State University Student Chapter of the IEEE EMBS.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gruber, Lucinda; Griffith, Connor; Young, Ethan; Sullivan, Adriann; Schuler, Jeff; Arnold-Christian, Susan; Warren, Steve

    2009-01-01

    Learning experiences for middle school girls are an effective means to steer young women toward secondary engineering curricula that they might not have otherwise considered. Sponsorship of such experiences by a collegiate student group is worthwhile, as it gives the group common purpose and places college students in a position to mentor these young women. This paper addresses learning experiences in different areas of bio-medical engineering offered to middle school girls in November 2008 via a day-long workshop entitled "Engineering The Body." The Kansas State University (KSU) Student Chapter of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) worked with the KSU Women in Engineering and Science Program (WESP) to design and sponsor these experiences, which addressed the areas of joint mechanics, electrocardiograms, membrane transport, computer mouse design, and audio filters for cochlear implants. Fifty five middle-school girls participated in this event, affirming the notion that biomedical engineering appeals to young women and that early education and recruitment efforts have the potential to expand the biomedical engineering talent pool.

  15. Electrochemical extraction of gold from wastes as nanoparticles stabilized by phospholipids.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Moriwaki, Hiroshi; Yamada, Kotaro; Usami, Hisanao

    2017-02-01

    A simple one-step method for the extraction of gold from wastes as nanoparticles stabilized by phospholipids is demonstrated. This is achieved by applying an AC voltage for 5s to the gold-containing wastes, which act as the electrodes in a buffer solution containing a dispersed phospholipid (1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine, DOPC). This is an environmentally friendly and rapid method for recovering gold from wastes. The extracted gold nanoparticles have significant potential as a catalyst or biomedical material. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

  16. Biomedical waste management in Ayurveda hospitals - current practices & future prospectives.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rajan, Renju; Robin, Delvin T; M, Vandanarani

    2018-03-16

    Biomedical waste management is an integral part of traditional and contemporary system of health care. The paper focuses on the identification and classification of biomedical wastes in Ayurvedic hospitals, current practices of its management in Ayurveda hospitals and its future prospective. Databases like PubMed (1975-2017 Feb), Scopus (1960-2017), AYUSH Portal, DOAJ, DHARA and Google scholar were searched. We used the medical subject headings 'biomedical waste' and 'health care waste' for identification and classification. The terms 'biomedical waste management', 'health care waste management' alone and combined with 'Ayurveda' or 'Ayurvedic' for current practices and recent advances in the treatment of these wastes were used. We made a humble attempt to categorize the biomedical wastes from Ayurvedic hospitals as the available data about its grouping is very scarce. Proper biomedical waste management is the mainstay of hospital cleanliness, hospital hygiene and maintenance activities. Current disposal techniques adopted for Ayurveda biomedical wastes are - sewage/drains, incineration and land fill. But these methods are having some merits as well as demerits. Our review has identified a number of interesting areas for future research such as the logical application of bioremediation techniques in biomedical waste management and the usage of effective micro-organisms and solar energy in waste disposal. Copyright © 2017 Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore and World Ayurveda Foundation. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  17. Semiconducting silicon nanowires for biomedical applications

    CERN Document Server

    Coffer, JL

    2014-01-01

    Biomedical applications have benefited greatly from the increasing interest and research into semiconducting silicon nanowires. Semiconducting Silicon Nanowires for Biomedical Applications reviews the fabrication, properties, and applications of this emerging material. The book begins by reviewing the basics, as well as the growth, characterization, biocompatibility, and surface modification, of semiconducting silicon nanowires. It goes on to focus on silicon nanowires for tissue engineering and delivery applications, including cellular binding and internalization, orthopedic tissue scaffol

  18. Advanced computational approaches to biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Saha, Punam K; Basu, Subhadip

    2014-01-01

    There has been rapid growth in biomedical engineering in recent decades, given advancements in medical imaging and physiological modelling and sensing systems, coupled with immense growth in computational and network technology, analytic approaches, visualization and virtual-reality, man-machine interaction and automation. Biomedical engineering involves applying engineering principles to the medical and biological sciences and it comprises several topics including biomedicine, medical imaging, physiological modelling and sensing, instrumentation, real-time systems, automation and control, sig

  19. Biomedical sensor design using analog compressed sensing

    Science.gov (United States)

    Balouchestani, Mohammadreza; Krishnan, Sridhar

    2015-05-01

    The main drawback of current healthcare systems is the location-specific nature of the system due to the use of fixed/wired biomedical sensors. Since biomedical sensors are usually driven by a battery, power consumption is the most important factor determining the life of a biomedical sensor. They are also restricted by size, cost, and transmission capacity. Therefore, it is important to reduce the load of sampling by merging the sampling and compression steps to reduce the storage usage, transmission times, and power consumption in order to expand the current healthcare systems to Wireless Healthcare Systems (WHSs). In this work, we present an implementation of a low-power biomedical sensor using analog Compressed Sensing (CS) framework for sparse biomedical signals that addresses both the energy and telemetry bandwidth constraints of wearable and wireless Body-Area Networks (BANs). This architecture enables continuous data acquisition and compression of biomedical signals that are suitable for a variety of diagnostic and treatment purposes. At the transmitter side, an analog-CS framework is applied at the sensing step before Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) in order to generate the compressed version of the input analog bio-signal. At the receiver side, a reconstruction algorithm based on Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) condition is applied in order to reconstruct the original bio-signals form the compressed bio-signals with high probability and enough accuracy. We examine the proposed algorithm with healthy and neuropathy surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals. The proposed algorithm achieves a good level for Average Recognition Rate (ARR) at 93% and reconstruction accuracy at 98.9%. In addition, The proposed architecture reduces total computation time from 32 to 11.5 seconds at sampling-rate=29 % of Nyquist rate, Percentage Residual Difference (PRD)=26 %, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE)=3 %.

  20. Biomedical Image Registration

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Biomedical Image Registration, WBIR 2018, held in Leiden, The Netherlands, in June 2018. The 11 full and poster papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 17 submitted papers. The pap...

  1. Pacific Northwest Laboratory annual report for 1994 to the DOE Office of Energy Research Part 1: Biomedical sciences

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Park, J.F.

    1995-04-01

    Research in the biomedical sciences at PNL is described. Activities reported include: inhaled plutonium in dogs; national radiobiology archives; statistical analysis of data from animal studies; genotoxicity of inhaled energy effluents; molecular events during tumor initiation; biochemistry of free radical induced DNA damage; radon hazards in homes; mechanisms of radon injury; genetics of radon induced lung cancer; and in vivo/in vitro radon induced cellular damage.

  2. Optimization on Extraction Engineering of the Anti - inflammatory Bioactive Materials from Ainsliaea Fragrans Champ

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yang Jie

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available Ainsliaea fragrans Champ.(A.fragrans is a traditional Chinese herbal, phenolic compounds was the major anti - inflammatory bioactive constituents. To improve the bioavailability and enhanced the curative effect of A.fragrans, the anti - inflammatory effect of phenolic acids and the “non-active” group of control vectors constitute a new biomedical material, which is of great significance to the treatment of diseases inflammation. Hence, in this thesis, regarding the total phenolic acid transfer rate as the indicator, L9(34 orthogonal design was used to optimize the extraction process of total Phenolic acid from A.fragrans by reflux extraction method on solvent dosage, extraction times and extraction time.The optimal extraction technology was as follows: 15 times of water volume, reflux extraction 3 times, extraction time 60 min. The result of pharmacological activity indicated anti-inflammatory effect: 95% ethanol extraction > water extraction > 30% ethanol extraction > 60% ethanol extraction.

  3. Stimuli-responsive magnetic particles for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Medeiros, S F; Santos, A M; Fessi, H; Elaissari, A

    2011-01-17

    In recent years, magnetic nanoparticles have been studied due to their potential applications as magnetic carriers in biomedical area. These materials have been increasingly exploited as efficient delivery vectors, leading to opportunities of use as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agents, mediators of hyperthermia cancer treatment and in targeted therapies. Much attention has been also focused on "smart" polymers, which are able to respond to environmental changes, such as changes in the temperature and pH. In this context, this article reviews the state-of-the art in stimuli-responsive magnetic systems for biomedical applications. The paper describes different types of stimuli-sensitive systems, mainly temperature- and pH sensitive polymers, the combination of this characteristic with magnetic properties and, finally, it gives an account of their preparation methods. The article also discusses the main in vivo biomedical applications of such materials. A survey of the recent literature on various stimuli-responsive magnetic gels in biomedical applications is also included. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  4. Event-by-event jet quenching and higher Fourier moments of hard probes

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Fries, Rainer J. [Cyclotron Institute and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Texas A and M University, College Station TX 77845 (United States); RIKEN/BNL Research Center, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton NY 11973 (United States); Rodriguez, Ricardo [Department of Mathematics and Physics, Ave Maria University, Ave Maria FL 34142 (United States); Cyclotron Institute, Texas A and M University, College Station TX 77845 (United States)

    2011-04-01

    We investigate the effect of event-by-event fluctuations of the fireball created in high energy nuclear collisions on hard probe observables. We show that spatial inhomogeneities lead to changes in the nuclear suppression factor of high momentum hadrons which can be absorbed in the quenching strength q-hat. This can increase the theoretical uncertainty on extracted values of q-hat by up to 50%. We also investigate effects on azimuthal asymmetries v{sub 2} and dihadron correlation functions. The latter show a promising residual signal of event-by-event quenching that might allow us to estimate the size of spatial inhomogeneities in the fireball from experimental data.

  5. Facile synthesis of silver nanoparticles using Euphorbia antiquorum L. latex extract and evaluation of their biomedical perspectives as anticancer agents

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Chandrasekaran Rajkuberan

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available This study reveals the rapid biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles (EAAgNPs using aqueous latex extract of Euphorbia antiquorum L as a potential bioreductant. Synthesized EAAgNPs generate the surface plasmonic resonance peak at 438 nm in UV–Vis spectrophotometer. Size and shape of EAAgNPs were further characterized through transmission electron microscope (TEM which shows well-dispersed spherical nanoparticles with size ranging from 10 to 50 nm. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopic analysis (EDAX confirms the presence of silver (Ag as the major constituent element. X-ray diffraction (XRD pattern of EAAgNPs corresponding to (111, (200, (220 and (311 planes, reveals that the generated nanoparticles were face centered cubic crystalline in nature. Interestingly, fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR analysis shows the major role of active phenolic constituents in reduction and stabilization of EAAgNPs. Phyto-fabricated EAAgNPs exhibits significant antimicrobial and larvicidal activity against bacterial human pathogens as well as disease transmitting blood sucking parasites such as Culex quinquefasciatus and Aedes aegypti (IIIrd instar larvae. On the other hand, in vitro cytotoxicity assessment of bioformulated EAAgNPs has shown potential anticancer activity against human cervical carcinoma cells (HeLa. The preliminary biochemical (MTT assay and microscopic studies depict that the synthesized EAAgNPs at minimal dosage (IC50 = 28 μg triggers cellular toxicity response. Hence, the EAAgNPs can be considered as an environmentally benign and non-toxic nanobiomaterial for biomedical applications. Keywords: Crystal structure, Euphorbia antiquorum L., Silver nanoparticles, Anticancer, Human pathogens

  6. [Biomedical waste management in five hospitals in Dakar, Senegal].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ndiaye, M; El Metghari, L; Soumah, M M; Sow, M L

    2012-10-01

    Biomedical waste is currently a real health and environmental concern. In this regard, a study was conducted in 5 hospitals in Dakar to review their management of biomedical waste and to formulate recommendations. This is a descriptive cross-sectional study conducted from 1 April to 31 July 2010 in five major hospitals of Dakar. A questionnaire administered to hospital managers, heads of departments, residents and heads of hospital hygiene departments as well as interviews conducted with healthcare personnel and operators of waste incinerators made it possible to assess mechanisms and knowledge on biomedical waste management. Content analysis of interviews, observations and a data sheet allowed processing the data thus gathered. Of the 150 questionnaires distributed, 98 responses were obtained representing a response rate of 65.3%. An interview was conducted with 75 employees directly involved in the management of biomedical waste and observations were made on biomedical waste management in 86 hospital services. Sharps as well as blood and liquid waste were found in all services except in pharmacies, pharmaceutical waste in 66 services, infectious waste in 49 services and anatomical waste in 11 services. Sorting of biomedical waste was ill-adapted in 53.5% (N = 46) of services and the use of the colour-coding system effective in 31.4% (N = 27) of services. Containers for the safe disposal of sharps were available in 82.5% (N = 71) of services and were effectively utilized in 51.1% (N = 44) of these services. In most services, an illadapted packaging was observed with the use of plastic bottles and bins for waste collection and overfilled containers. With the exception of Hôpital Principal, the main storage area was in open air, unsecured, with biomedical waste littered on the floor and often mixed with waste similar to household refuse. The transfer of biomedical waste to the main storage area was done using trolleys or carts in 67.4% (N = 58) of services and

  7. Translational Bioinformatics and Clinical Research (Biomedical) Informatics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sirintrapun, S Joseph; Zehir, Ahmet; Syed, Aijazuddin; Gao, JianJiong; Schultz, Nikolaus; Cheng, Donavan T

    2015-06-01

    Translational bioinformatics and clinical research (biomedical) informatics are the primary domains related to informatics activities that support translational research. Translational bioinformatics focuses on computational techniques in genetics, molecular biology, and systems biology. Clinical research (biomedical) informatics involves the use of informatics in discovery and management of new knowledge relating to health and disease. This article details 3 projects that are hybrid applications of translational bioinformatics and clinical research (biomedical) informatics: The Cancer Genome Atlas, the cBioPortal for Cancer Genomics, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center clinical variants and results database, all designed to facilitate insights into cancer biology and clinical/therapeutic correlations. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  8. Discrete-Time Biomedical Signal Encryption

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Victor Grigoraş

    2017-12-01

    Full Text Available Chaotic modulation is a strong method of improving communication security. Analog and discrete chaotic systems are presented in actual literature. Due to the expansion of digital communication, discrete-time systems become more efficient and closer to actual technology. The present contribution offers an in-depth analysis of the effects chaos encryption produce on 1D and 2D biomedical signals. The performed simulations show that modulating signals are precisely recovered by the synchronizing receiver if discrete systems are digitally implemented and the coefficients precisely correspond. Channel noise is also applied and its effects on biomedical signal demodulation are highlighted.

  9. Development of Biomedical Polymer-Silicate Nanocomposites: A Materials Science Perspective

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Chia-Jung Wu

    2010-04-01

    Full Text Available Biomedical polymer-silicate nanocomposites have potential to become critically important to the development of biomedical applications, ranging from diagnostic and therapeutic devices, tissue regeneration and drug delivery matrixes to various bio-technologies that are inspired by biology but have only indirect biomedical relation. The fundamental understanding of polymer-nanoparticle interactions is absolutely necessary to control structure-property relationships of materials that need to work within the chemical, physical and biological constraints required by an application. This review summarizes the most recent published strategies to design and develop polymer-silicate nanocomposites (including clay based silicate nanoparticles and bioactive glass nanoparticles for a variety of biomedical applications. Emerging trends in bio-technological and biomedical nanocomposites are highlighted and potential new fields of applications are examined.

  10. Statistics and Biomedical Informatics in Forensic Sciences

    Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

    Zvárová, Jana

    2009-01-01

    Roč. 20, č. 6 (2009), s. 743-750 ISSN 1180-4009. [TIES 2007. Annual Meeting of the International Environmental Society /18./. Mikulov, 16.08.2007-20.08.2007] Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z10300504 Keywords : biomedical informatics * biomedical statistics * genetic information * forensic dentistry Subject RIV: BB - Applied Statistics, Operational Research Impact factor: 1.000, year: 2009

  11. Integration of relational and textual biomedical sources. A pilot experiment using a semi-automated method for logical schema acquisition.

    Science.gov (United States)

    García-Remesal, M; Maojo, V; Billhardt, H; Crespo, J

    2010-01-01

    Bringing together structured and text-based sources is an exciting challenge for biomedical informaticians, since most relevant biomedical sources belong to one of these categories. In this paper we evaluate the feasibility of integrating relational and text-based biomedical sources using: i) an original logical schema acquisition method for textual databases developed by the authors, and ii) OntoFusion, a system originally designed by the authors for the integration of relational sources. We conducted an integration experiment involving a test set of seven differently structured sources covering the domain of genetic diseases. We used our logical schema acquisition method to generate schemas for all textual sources. The sources were integrated using the methods and tools provided by OntoFusion. The integration was validated using a test set of 500 queries. A panel of experts answered a questionnaire to evaluate i) the quality of the extracted schemas, ii) the query processing performance of the integrated set of sources, and iii) the relevance of the retrieved results. The results of the survey show that our method extracts coherent and representative logical schemas. Experts' feedback on the performance of the integrated system and the relevance of the retrieved results was also positive. Regarding the validation of the integration, the system successfully provided correct results for all queries in the test set. The results of the experiment suggest that text-based sources including a logical schema can be regarded as equivalent to structured databases. Using our method, previous research and existing tools designed for the integration of structured databases can be reused - possibly subject to minor modifications - to integrate differently structured sources.

  12. An optimal big data workflow for biomedical image analysis

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Aurelle Tchagna Kouanou

    Full Text Available Background and objective: In the medical field, data volume is increasingly growing, and traditional methods cannot manage it efficiently. In biomedical computation, the continuous challenges are: management, analysis, and storage of the biomedical data. Nowadays, big data technology plays a significant role in the management, organization, and analysis of data, using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques. It also allows a quick access to data using the NoSQL database. Thus, big data technologies include new frameworks to process medical data in a manner similar to biomedical images. It becomes very important to develop methods and/or architectures based on big data technologies, for a complete processing of biomedical image data. Method: This paper describes big data analytics for biomedical images, shows examples reported in the literature, briefly discusses new methods used in processing, and offers conclusions. We argue for adapting and extending related work methods in the field of big data software, using Hadoop and Spark frameworks. These provide an optimal and efficient architecture for biomedical image analysis. This paper thus gives a broad overview of big data analytics to automate biomedical image diagnosis. A workflow with optimal methods and algorithm for each step is proposed. Results: Two architectures for image classification are suggested. We use the Hadoop framework to design the first, and the Spark framework for the second. The proposed Spark architecture allows us to develop appropriate and efficient methods to leverage a large number of images for classification, which can be customized with respect to each other. Conclusions: The proposed architectures are more complete, easier, and are adaptable in all of the steps from conception. The obtained Spark architecture is the most complete, because it facilitates the implementation of algorithms with its embedded libraries. Keywords: Biomedical images, Big

  13. International Symposium on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics

    CERN Document Server

    Katashev, Alexei; Lancere, Linda

    2013-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the International Symposium on Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics and is dedicated to the 150 anniversary of the Riga Technical University, Latvia. The content includes various hot topics in biomedical engineering and medical physics.

  14. Facilitating biomedical researchers' interrogation of electronic health record data: Ideas from outside of biomedical informatics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hruby, Gregory W; Matsoukas, Konstantina; Cimino, James J; Weng, Chunhua

    2016-04-01

    Electronic health records (EHR) are a vital data resource for research uses, including cohort identification, phenotyping, pharmacovigilance, and public health surveillance. To realize the promise of EHR data for accelerating clinical research, it is imperative to enable efficient and autonomous EHR data interrogation by end users such as biomedical researchers. This paper surveys state-of-art approaches and key methodological considerations to this purpose. We adapted a previously published conceptual framework for interactive information retrieval, which defines three entities: user, channel, and source, by elaborating on channels for query formulation in the context of facilitating end users to interrogate EHR data. We show the current progress in biomedical informatics mainly lies in support for query execution and information modeling, primarily due to emphases on infrastructure development for data integration and data access via self-service query tools, but has neglected user support needed during iteratively query formulation processes, which can be costly and error-prone. In contrast, the information science literature has offered elaborate theories and methods for user modeling and query formulation support. The two bodies of literature are complementary, implying opportunities for cross-disciplinary idea exchange. On this basis, we outline the directions for future informatics research to improve our understanding of user needs and requirements for facilitating autonomous interrogation of EHR data by biomedical researchers. We suggest that cross-disciplinary translational research between biomedical informatics and information science can benefit our research in facilitating efficient data access in life sciences. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  15. Integrating systems biology models and biomedical ontologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hoehndorf, Robert; Dumontier, Michel; Gennari, John H; Wimalaratne, Sarala; de Bono, Bernard; Cook, Daniel L; Gkoutos, Georgios V

    2011-08-11

    Systems biology is an approach to biology that emphasizes the structure and dynamic behavior of biological systems and the interactions that occur within them. To succeed, systems biology crucially depends on the accessibility and integration of data across domains and levels of granularity. Biomedical ontologies were developed to facilitate such an integration of data and are often used to annotate biosimulation models in systems biology. We provide a framework to integrate representations of in silico systems biology with those of in vivo biology as described by biomedical ontologies and demonstrate this framework using the Systems Biology Markup Language. We developed the SBML Harvester software that automatically converts annotated SBML models into OWL and we apply our software to those biosimulation models that are contained in the BioModels Database. We utilize the resulting knowledge base for complex biological queries that can bridge levels of granularity, verify models based on the biological phenomenon they represent and provide a means to establish a basic qualitative layer on which to express the semantics of biosimulation models. We establish an information flow between biomedical ontologies and biosimulation models and we demonstrate that the integration of annotated biosimulation models and biomedical ontologies enables the verification of models as well as expressive queries. Establishing a bi-directional information flow between systems biology and biomedical ontologies has the potential to enable large-scale analyses of biological systems that span levels of granularity from molecules to organisms.

  16. A Review of Cell Adhesion Studies for Biomedical and Biological Applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ahmad Khalili, Amelia; Ahmad, Mohd Ridzuan

    2015-01-01

    Cell adhesion is essential in cell communication and regulation, and is of fundamental importance in the development and maintenance of tissues. The mechanical interactions between a cell and its extracellular matrix (ECM) can influence and control cell behavior and function. The essential function of cell adhesion has created tremendous interests in developing methods for measuring and studying cell adhesion properties. The study of cell adhesion could be categorized into cell adhesion attachment and detachment events. The study of cell adhesion has been widely explored via both events for many important purposes in cellular biology, biomedical, and engineering fields. Cell adhesion attachment and detachment events could be further grouped into the cell population and single cell approach. Various techniques to measure cell adhesion have been applied to many fields of study in order to gain understanding of cell signaling pathways, biomaterial studies for implantable sensors, artificial bone and tooth replacement, the development of tissue-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip in tissue engineering, the effects of biochemical treatments and environmental stimuli to the cell adhesion, the potential of drug treatments, cancer metastasis study, and the determination of the adhesion properties of normal and cancerous cells. This review discussed the overview of the available methods to study cell adhesion through attachment and detachment events. PMID:26251901

  17. A Review of Cell Adhesion Studies for Biomedical and Biological Applications

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Amelia Ahmad Khalili

    2015-08-01

    Full Text Available Cell adhesion is essential in cell communication and regulation, and is of fundamental importance in the development and maintenance of tissues. The mechanical interactions between a cell and its extracellular matrix (ECM can influence and control cell behavior and function. The essential function of cell adhesion has created tremendous interests in developing methods for measuring and studying cell adhesion properties. The study of cell adhesion could be categorized into cell adhesion attachment and detachment events. The study of cell adhesion has been widely explored via both events for many important purposes in cellular biology, biomedical, and engineering fields. Cell adhesion attachment and detachment events could be further grouped into the cell population and single cell approach. Various techniques to measure cell adhesion have been applied to many fields of study in order to gain understanding of cell signaling pathways, biomaterial studies for implantable sensors, artificial bone and tooth replacement, the development of tissue-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip in tissue engineering, the effects of biochemical treatments and environmental stimuli to the cell adhesion, the potential of drug treatments, cancer metastasis study, and the determination of the adhesion properties of normal and cancerous cells. This review discussed the overview of the available methods to study cell adhesion through attachment and detachment events.

  18. Advances in electronic-nose technologies developed for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wilson, Alphus D; Baietto, Manuela

    2011-01-01

    The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and recent biomedical research findings and developments of electronic-nose sensor technologies, and to identify current and future potential e-nose applications that will continue to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of biomedical treatments and healthcare services for many years. An abundance of electronic-nose applications has been developed for a variety of healthcare sectors including diagnostics, immunology, pathology, patient recovery, pharmacology, physical therapy, physiology, preventative medicine, remote healthcare, and wound and graft healing. Specific biomedical e-nose applications range from uses in biochemical testing, blood-compatibility evaluations, disease diagnoses, and drug delivery to monitoring of metabolic levels, organ dysfunctions, and patient conditions through telemedicine. This paper summarizes the major electronic-nose technologies developed for healthcare and biomedical applications since the late 1980s when electronic aroma detection technologies were first recognized to be potentially useful in providing effective solutions to problems in the healthcare industry.

  19. Advances in Electronic-Nose Technologies Developed for Biomedical Applications

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Alphus D. Wilson

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and recent biomedical research findings and developments of electronic-nose sensor technologies, and to identify current and future potential e-nose applications that will continue to advance the effectiveness and efficiency of biomedical treatments and healthcare services for many years. An abundance of electronic-nose applications has been developed for a variety of healthcare sectors including diagnostics, immunology, pathology, patient recovery, pharmacology, physical therapy, physiology, preventative medicine, remote healthcare, and wound and graft healing. Specific biomedical e-nose applications range from uses in biochemical testing, blood-compatibility evaluations, disease diagnoses, and drug delivery to monitoring of metabolic levels, organ dysfunctions, and patient conditions through telemedicine. This paper summarizes the major electronic-nose technologies developed for healthcare and biomedical applications since the late 1980s when electronic aroma detection technologies were first recognized to be potentially useful in providing effective solutions to problems in the healthcare industry.

  20. Biomedical sensor technologies on the platform of mobile phones

    Science.gov (United States)

    Liu, Lin; Liu, Jing

    2011-06-01

    Biomedical sensors have been widely used in various areas of biomedical practices, which play an important role in disease detection, diagnosis, monitoring, treatment, health management, and so on. However, most of them and their related platforms are generally not easily accessible or just too expensive or complicated to be kept at home. As an alternative, new technologies enabled from the mobile phones are gradually changing such situations. As can be freely available to almost everyone, mobile phone offers a unique way to improve the conventional medical care through combining with various biomedical sensors. Moreover, the established systems will be both convenient and low cost. In this paper, we present an overview on the state-of-art biomedical sensors, giving a brief introduction of the fundamental principles and showing several new examples or concepts in the area. The focus was particularly put on interpreting the technical strategies to innovate the biomedical sensor technologies based on the platform of mobile phones. Some challenging issues, including feasibility, usability, security, and effectiveness, were discussed. With the help of electrical and mechanical technologies, it is expected that a full combination between the biomedical sensors and mobile phones will bring a bright future for the coming pervasive medical care.

  1. Development of a Pediatric Adverse Events Terminology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gipson, Debbie S; Kirkendall, Eric S; Gumbs-Petty, Brenda; Quinn, Theresa; Steen, A; Hicks, Amanda; McMahon, Ann; Nicholas, Savian; Zhao-Wong, Anna; Taylor-Zapata, Perdita; Turner, Mark; Herreshoff, Emily; Jones, Charlotte; Davis, Jonathan M; Haber, Margaret; Hirschfeld, Steven

    2017-01-01

    In 2009, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) established the Pediatric Terminology Harmonization Initiative to establish a core library of terms to facilitate the acquisition and sharing of knowledge between pediatric clinical research, practice, and safety reporting. A coalition of partners established a Pediatric Terminology Adverse Event Working Group in 2013 to develop a specific terminology relevant to international pediatric adverse event (AE) reporting. Pediatric specialists with backgrounds in clinical care, research, safety reporting, or informatics, supported by biomedical terminology experts from the National Cancer Institute's Enterprise Vocabulary Services participated. The multinational group developed a working definition of AEs and reviewed concepts (terms, synonyms, and definitions) from 16 pediatric clinical domains. The resulting AE terminology contains >1000 pediatric diseases, disorders, or clinical findings. The terms were tested for proof of concept use in 2 different settings: hospital readmissions and the NICU. The advantages of the AE terminology include ease of adoption due to integration with well-established and internationally accepted biomedical terminologies, a uniquely temporal focus on pediatric health and disease from conception through adolescence, and terms that could be used in both well- and underresourced environments. The AE terminology is available for use without restriction through the National Cancer Institute's Enterprise Vocabulary Services and is fully compatible with, and represented in, the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities. The terminology is intended to mature with use, user feedback, and optimization. Copyright © 2017 by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

  2. Design of Biomedical Robots for Phenotype Prediction Problems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    deAndrés-Galiana, Enrique J; Fernández-Martínez, Juan Luis; Sonis, Stephen T

    2016-08-01

    Genomics has been used with varying degrees of success in the context of drug discovery and in defining mechanisms of action for diseases like cancer and neurodegenerative and rare diseases in the quest for orphan drugs. To improve its utility, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness optimization of analytical methods, especially those that translate to clinically relevant outcomes, is critical. Here we define a novel tool for genomic analysis termed a biomedical robot in order to improve phenotype prediction, identifying disease pathogenesis and significantly defining therapeutic targets. Biomedical robot analytics differ from historical methods in that they are based on melding feature selection methods and ensemble learning techniques. The biomedical robot mathematically exploits the structure of the uncertainty space of any classification problem conceived as an ill-posed optimization problem. Given a classifier, there exist different equivalent small-scale genetic signatures that provide similar predictive accuracies. We perform the sensitivity analysis to noise of the biomedical robot concept using synthetic microarrays perturbed by different kinds of noises in expression and class assignment. Finally, we show the application of this concept to the analysis of different diseases, inferring the pathways and the correlation networks. The final aim of a biomedical robot is to improve knowledge discovery and provide decision systems to optimize diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. This analysis shows that the biomedical robots are robust against different kinds of noises and particularly to a wrong class assignment of the samples. Assessing the uncertainty that is inherent to any phenotype prediction problem is the right way to address this kind of problem.

  3. Optical Polarizationin Biomedical Applications

    CERN Document Server

    Tuchin, Valery V; Zimnyakov, Dmitry A

    2006-01-01

    Optical Polarization in Biomedical Applications introduces key developments in optical polarization methods for quantitative studies of tissues, while presenting the theory of polarization transfer in a random medium as a basis for the quantitative description of polarized light interaction with tissues. This theory uses the modified transfer equation for Stokes parameters and predicts the polarization structure of multiple scattered optical fields. The backscattering polarization matrices (Jones matrix and Mueller matrix) important for noninvasive medical diagnostic are introduced. The text also describes a number of diagnostic techniques such as CW polarization imaging and spectroscopy, polarization microscopy and cytometry. As a new tool for medical diagnosis, optical coherent polarization tomography is analyzed. The monograph also covers a range of biomedical applications, among them cataract and glaucoma diagnostics, glucose sensing, and the detection of bacteria.

  4. Radiation protection in medical and biomedical research

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Fuente Puch, A.E. de la

    2013-01-01

    The human exposure to ionizing radiation in the context of medical and biomedical research raises specific ethical challenges whose resolution approaches should be based on scientific, legal and procedural matters. Joint Resolution MINSAP CITMA-Regulation 'Basic Standards of Radiation Safety' of 30 November 2001 (hereafter NBS) provides for the first time in Cuba legislation specifically designed to protect patients and healthy people who participate in research programs medical and biomedical and exposed to radiation. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the need to develop specific requirements for radiation protection in medical and biomedical research, as well as to identify all the institutions involved in this in order to establish the necessary cooperation to ensure the protection of persons participating in the investigation

  5. Biomedical applications of nanodiamond (Review)

    Science.gov (United States)

    Turcheniuk, K.; Mochalin, Vadym N.

    2017-06-01

    The interest in nanodiamond applications in biology and medicine is on the rise over recent years. This is due to the unique combination of properties that nanodiamond provides. Small size (∼5 nm), low cost, scalable production, negligible toxicity, chemical inertness of diamond core and rich chemistry of nanodiamond surface, as well as bright and robust fluorescence resistant to photobleaching are the distinct parameters that render nanodiamond superior to any other nanomaterial when it comes to biomedical applications. The most exciting recent results have been related to the use of nanodiamonds for drug delivery and diagnostics—two components of a quickly growing area of biomedical research dubbed theranostics. However, nanodiamond offers much more in addition: it can be used to produce biodegradable bone surgery devices, tissue engineering scaffolds, kill drug resistant microbes, help us to fight viruses, and deliver genetic material into cell nucleus. All these exciting opportunities require an in-depth understanding of nanodiamond. This review covers the recent progress as well as general trends in biomedical applications of nanodiamond, and underlines the importance of purification, characterization, and rational modification of this nanomaterial when designing nanodiamond based theranostic platforms.

  6. BiOSS: A system for biomedical ontology selection.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martínez-Romero, Marcos; Vázquez-Naya, José M; Pereira, Javier; Pazos, Alejandro

    2014-04-01

    In biomedical informatics, ontologies are considered a key technology for annotating, retrieving and sharing the huge volume of publicly available data. Due to the increasing amount, complexity and variety of existing biomedical ontologies, choosing the ones to be used in a semantic annotation problem or to design a specific application is a difficult task. As a consequence, the design of approaches and tools addressed to facilitate the selection of biomedical ontologies is becoming a priority. In this paper we present BiOSS, a novel system for the selection of biomedical ontologies. BiOSS evaluates the adequacy of an ontology to a given domain according to three different criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the domain; (2) the semantic richness of the ontology in the domain; (3) the popularity of the ontology in the biomedical community. BiOSS has been applied to 5 representative problems of ontology selection. It also has been compared to existing methods and tools. Results are promising and show the usefulness of BiOSS to solve real-world ontology selection problems. BiOSS is openly available both as a web tool and a web service. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  7. Biomedical data integration in computational drug design and bioinformatics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Seoane, Jose A; Aguiar-Pulido, Vanessa; Munteanu, Cristian R; Rivero, Daniel; Rabunal, Juan R; Dorado, Julian; Pazos, Alejandro

    2013-03-01

    In recent years, in the post genomic era, more and more data is being generated by biological high throughput technologies, such as proteomics and transcriptomics. This omics data can be very useful, but the real challenge is to analyze all this data, as a whole, after integrating it. Biomedical data integration enables making queries to different, heterogeneous and distributed biomedical data sources. Data integration solutions can be very useful not only in the context of drug design, but also in biomedical information retrieval, clinical diagnosis, system biology, etc. In this review, we analyze the most common approaches to biomedical data integration, such as federated databases, data warehousing, multi-agent systems and semantic technology, as well as the solutions developed using these approaches in the past few years.

  8. Building the biomedical data science workforce.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dunn, Michelle C; Bourne, Philip E

    2017-07-01

    This article describes efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 2013 to 2016 to train a national workforce in biomedical data science. We provide an analysis of the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) training program strengths and weaknesses with an eye toward future directions aimed at any funder and potential funding recipient worldwide. The focus is on extramurally funded programs that have a national or international impact rather than the training of NIH staff, which was addressed by the NIH's internal Data Science Workforce Development Center. From its inception, the major goal of BD2K was to narrow the gap between needed and existing biomedical data science skills. As biomedical research increasingly relies on computational, mathematical, and statistical thinking, supporting the training and education of the workforce of tomorrow requires new emphases on analytical skills. From 2013 to 2016, BD2K jump-started training in this area for all levels, from graduate students to senior researchers.

  9. Building the biomedical data science workforce.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Michelle C Dunn

    2017-07-01

    Full Text Available This article describes efforts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH from 2013 to 2016 to train a national workforce in biomedical data science. We provide an analysis of the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K training program strengths and weaknesses with an eye toward future directions aimed at any funder and potential funding recipient worldwide. The focus is on extramurally funded programs that have a national or international impact rather than the training of NIH staff, which was addressed by the NIH's internal Data Science Workforce Development Center. From its inception, the major goal of BD2K was to narrow the gap between needed and existing biomedical data science skills. As biomedical research increasingly relies on computational, mathematical, and statistical thinking, supporting the training and education of the workforce of tomorrow requires new emphases on analytical skills. From 2013 to 2016, BD2K jump-started training in this area for all levels, from graduate students to senior researchers.

  10. Recent Advances and Emerging Applications in Text and Data Mining for Biomedical Discovery.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gonzalez, Graciela H; Tahsin, Tasnia; Goodale, Britton C; Greene, Anna C; Greene, Casey S

    2016-01-01

    Precision medicine will revolutionize the way we treat and prevent disease. A major barrier to the implementation of precision medicine that clinicians and translational scientists face is understanding the underlying mechanisms of disease. We are starting to address this challenge through automatic approaches for information extraction, representation and analysis. Recent advances in text and data mining have been applied to a broad spectrum of key biomedical questions in genomics, pharmacogenomics and other fields. We present an overview of the fundamental methods for text and data mining, as well as recent advances and emerging applications toward precision medicine. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press.

  11. 5th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering in Vietnam

    CERN Document Server

    Phuong, Tran

    2015-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Development of Biomedical Engineering in Vietnam which was held from June 16-18, 2014 in Ho Chi Minh City. The volume reflects the progress of Biomedical Engineering and discusses problems and solutions. I aims identifying new challenges, and shaping future directions for research in biomedical engineering fields including medical instrumentation, bioinformatics, biomechanics, medical imaging, drug delivery therapy, regenerative medicine and entrepreneurship in medical devices.

  12. Simulation and study of small numbers of random events

    Science.gov (United States)

    Shelton, R. D.

    1986-01-01

    Random events were simulated by computer and subjected to various statistical methods to extract important parameters. Various forms of curve fitting were explored, such as least squares, least distance from a line, maximum likelihood. Problems considered were dead time, exponential decay, and spectrum extraction from cosmic ray data using binned data and data from individual events. Computer programs, mostly of an iterative nature, were developed to do these simulations and extractions and are partially listed as appendices. The mathematical basis for the compuer programs is given.

  13. Patient stratification and identification of adverse event correlations in the space of 1190 drug related adverse events

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Roitmann, Eva; Eriksson, Robert; Brunak, Søren

    2014-01-01

    New pharmacovigilance methods are needed as a consequence of the morbidity caused by drugs. We exploit fine-grained drug related adverse event information extracted by text mining from electronic medical records (EMRs) to stratify patients based on their adverse events and to determine adverse...

  14. ZK DrugResist 2.0: A TextMiner to extract semantic relations of drug resistance from PubMed.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Khalid, Zoya; Sezerman, Osman Ugur

    2017-05-01

    Extracting useful knowledge from an unstructured textual data is a challenging task for biologists, since biomedical literature is growing exponentially on a daily basis. Building an automated method for such tasks is gaining much attention of researchers. ZK DrugResist is an online tool that automatically extracts mutations and expression changes associated with drug resistance from PubMed. In this study we have extended our tool to include semantic relations extracted from biomedical text covering drug resistance and established a server including both of these features. Our system was tested for three relations, Resistance (R), Intermediate (I) and Susceptible (S) by applying hybrid feature set. From the last few decades the focus has changed to hybrid approaches as it provides better results. In our case this approach combines rule-based methods with machine learning techniques. The results showed 97.67% accuracy with 96% precision, recall and F-measure. The results have outperformed the previously existing relation extraction systems thus can facilitate computational analysis of drug resistance against complex diseases and further can be implemented on other areas of biomedicine. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  15. Identifying Prominent Life Events on Twitter

    OpenAIRE

    Dickinson, Thomas; Fernández, Miriam; Thomas, Lisa A.; Mulholland, Paul; Briggs, Pam; Alani, Harith

    2015-01-01

    Social media is a common place for people to post and share digital reflections of their life events, including major events such as getting married, having children, graduating, etc. Although the creation of such posts is straightforward, the identification of events on online media remains a challenge. Much research in recent years focused on extracting major events from Twitter, such as earthquakes, storms, and floods. This paper however, targets the automatic detection of personal life ev...

  16. MeInfoText 2.0: gene methylation and cancer relation extraction from biomedical literature

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Fang Yu-Ching

    2011-12-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background DNA methylation is regarded as a potential biomarker in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer. The relations between aberrant gene methylation and cancer development have been identified by a number of recent scientific studies. In a previous work, we used co-occurrences to mine those associations and compiled the MeInfoText 1.0 database. To reduce the amount of manual curation and improve the accuracy of relation extraction, we have now developed MeInfoText 2.0, which uses a machine learning-based approach to extract gene methylation-cancer relations. Description Two maximum entropy models are trained to predict if aberrant gene methylation is related to any type of cancer mentioned in the literature. After evaluation based on 10-fold cross-validation, the average precision/recall rates of the two models are 94.7/90.1 and 91.8/90% respectively. MeInfoText 2.0 provides the gene methylation profiles of different types of human cancer. The extracted relations with maximum probability, evidence sentences, and specific gene information are also retrievable. The database is available at http://bws.iis.sinica.edu.tw:8081/MeInfoText2/. Conclusion The previous version, MeInfoText, was developed by using association rules, whereas MeInfoText 2.0 is based on a new framework that combines machine learning, dictionary lookup and pattern matching for epigenetics information extraction. The results of experiments show that MeInfoText 2.0 outperforms existing tools in many respects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that uses a hybrid approach to extract gene methylation-cancer relations. It is also the first attempt to develop a gene methylation and cancer relation corpus.

  17. KnowLife: a versatile approach for constructing a large knowledge graph for biomedical sciences.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ernst, Patrick; Siu, Amy; Weikum, Gerhard

    2015-05-14

    Biomedical knowledge bases (KB's) have become important assets in life sciences. Prior work on KB construction has three major limitations. First, most biomedical KBs are manually built and curated, and cannot keep up with the rate at which new findings are published. Second, for automatic information extraction (IE), the text genre of choice has been scientific publications, neglecting sources like health portals and online communities. Third, most prior work on IE has focused on the molecular level or chemogenomics only, like protein-protein interactions or gene-drug relationships, or solely address highly specific topics such as drug effects. We address these three limitations by a versatile and scalable approach to automatic KB construction. Using a small number of seed facts for distant supervision of pattern-based extraction, we harvest a huge number of facts in an automated manner without requiring any explicit training. We extend previous techniques for pattern-based IE with confidence statistics, and we combine this recall-oriented stage with logical reasoning for consistency constraint checking to achieve high precision. To our knowledge, this is the first method that uses consistency checking for biomedical relations. Our approach can be easily extended to incorporate additional relations and constraints. We ran extensive experiments not only for scientific publications, but also for encyclopedic health portals and online communities, creating different KB's based on different configurations. We assess the size and quality of each KB, in terms of number of facts and precision. The best configured KB, KnowLife, contains more than 500,000 facts at a precision of 93% for 13 relations covering genes, organs, diseases, symptoms, treatments, as well as environmental and lifestyle risk factors. KnowLife is a large knowledge base for health and life sciences, automatically constructed from different Web sources. As a unique feature, KnowLife is harvested from

  18. The AIBS In Yugoslavia: Programs in Biomedical Engineering

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thompson, Mary-Frances

    1978-01-01

    Programs in biomedical engineering have been developing worldwide since World War II. This article describes a multidisciplinary program which operates in Yugoslavia through a cooperative effort between that county and the AIBS. A major problem has been the slowness with which hospitals accept the concept of biomedical engineering. (MA)

  19. Europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles for biomedical applications

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Syamchand, S.S., E-mail: syamchand.ss@gmail.com; Sony, G., E-mail: emailtosony@gmail.com

    2015-09-15

    Lanthanide based nanoparticles are receiving great attention ought to their excellent luminescent and magnetic properties and find challenging biomedical applications. Among the luminescent lanthanide NPs, europium based NPs (Eu-NPs) are better candidates for immunoassay and imaging applications. The Eu-NPs have an edge over quantum dots (QDs) by means of their stable luminescence, long fluorescence lifetime, sharp emission peaks with narrow band width, lack of blinking and biocompatibility. This review surveys the synthesis and properties of a variety of Eu-NPs consolidated from different research articles, for their applications in medicine and biology. The exquisite luminescent properties of Eu-NPs are explored for developing biomedical applications such as immunoassay and bioimaging including multimodal imaging. The biomedical applications of Eu-NPs are mostly diagnostic in nature and mainly focus on various key analytes present in biological systems. The luminescent properties of europium enabled NPs are influenced by a number of factors such as the site symmetry, the metal nanoparticles, metal ions, quantum dots, surfactants, morphology of Eu-NPs, crystal defect, phenomena like antenna effect and physical parameters like temperature. Through this review we explore and assimilate all the factors which affect the luminescence in Eu-NPs and coil a new thread of parameters that control the luminescence in Eu-NPs, which would provide further insight in developing Eu-based nanoprobes for future biomedical prospects. - Highlights: • The review describes 14 major factors that influence the luminescence properties of europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles (Eu-NPs). • Surveys different types of europium containing nanoparticles that have been reported for their biomedical applications. • Eu-NPs are conveniently divided into four different categories, based on the type of the substrates involved. The four categories are (1) virgin Eu-substrate based NPs; (2

  20. Europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles for biomedical applications

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Syamchand, S.S.; Sony, G.

    2015-01-01

    Lanthanide based nanoparticles are receiving great attention ought to their excellent luminescent and magnetic properties and find challenging biomedical applications. Among the luminescent lanthanide NPs, europium based NPs (Eu-NPs) are better candidates for immunoassay and imaging applications. The Eu-NPs have an edge over quantum dots (QDs) by means of their stable luminescence, long fluorescence lifetime, sharp emission peaks with narrow band width, lack of blinking and biocompatibility. This review surveys the synthesis and properties of a variety of Eu-NPs consolidated from different research articles, for their applications in medicine and biology. The exquisite luminescent properties of Eu-NPs are explored for developing biomedical applications such as immunoassay and bioimaging including multimodal imaging. The biomedical applications of Eu-NPs are mostly diagnostic in nature and mainly focus on various key analytes present in biological systems. The luminescent properties of europium enabled NPs are influenced by a number of factors such as the site symmetry, the metal nanoparticles, metal ions, quantum dots, surfactants, morphology of Eu-NPs, crystal defect, phenomena like antenna effect and physical parameters like temperature. Through this review we explore and assimilate all the factors which affect the luminescence in Eu-NPs and coil a new thread of parameters that control the luminescence in Eu-NPs, which would provide further insight in developing Eu-based nanoprobes for future biomedical prospects. - Highlights: • The review describes 14 major factors that influence the luminescence properties of europium enabled luminescent nanoparticles (Eu-NPs). • Surveys different types of europium containing nanoparticles that have been reported for their biomedical applications. • Eu-NPs are conveniently divided into four different categories, based on the type of the substrates involved. The four categories are (1) virgin Eu-substrate based NPs; (2

  1. Important skills for biomedical services: The perspectives of Malaysian employers and employees.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Buntat, Yahya; Saud, Muhammad Sukri; Mokhtar, Mahani; Kamin, Yusri; Feh, Lim Set

    2016-10-17

    Increase in the occurrence of existing diseases, continual emergence of new or exotic diseases and re-emergence of old diseases have placed increasing demands on biomedical services in Malaysia. Biomedical technicians play an important role in operating biomedical instruments. However, there are no clear specifications about characteristics and traits for these semi-professional employees. Employers in a few studies claimed that biomedical graduates are not ready to enter and face challenges in the job market. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify technical and generic skills for a biomedical technician from the perspectives of the biomedical technicians and their employers. A quantitative survey design was employed whereby data were obtained through the administration of an instrument developed by the researchers. The sample consisted of 20 hospital managers and 186 biomedical technicians who are currently working in Malaysian government hospitals. The findings show that there are no difference in the perceptions of hospital managers and biomedical technicians regarding technical and non-technical skills. These findings resulted in a checklist which can be used for institutions to produce future biomedical technician graduates in order to meet job demands. However, future research is needed to validate the findings and explore the variables in depth.

  2. EVENT GENERATOR FOR RHIC SPIN PHYSICS

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    SAITO, N.; SCHAEFER, A.

    1999-01-01

    This volume archives the reports from the RIKEN BNL Research Center workshop on ''Event Generator for RHIC Spin Physics II'' held during the week March 15, 1999 at Brookhaven National Laboratory. It was the second meeting on the subject following a first one in last September. This workshop has been initiated to establish a firm collaboration between theorists and experimentalists involved in RHIC spin physics with the aim of developing a reliable, high-precision event generator for RHIC spin physics. Needless to say, adequate event generators are indispensable tools for high energy physics programs in general, especially in the process of: planning the experimental programs; developing algorithms to extract the physics signals of interest; estimating the background in the extracted results, and connecting the final particle kinematics to the fundamental i.e. partonic level processes. Since RHIC is the first polarized collider, dedicated efforts are required to obtain a full-fledged event generator which describes spin dependent reactions in great detail

  3. Micro/Nanostructured Films and Adhesives for Biomedical Applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lee, Jungkyu K; Kang, Sung Min; Yang, Sung Ho; Cho, Woo Kyung

    2015-12-01

    The advanced technologies available for micro/nanofabrication have opened new avenues for interdisciplinary approaches to solve the unmet medical needs of regenerative medicine and biomedical devices. This review highlights the recent developments in micro/nanostructured adhesives and films for biomedical applications, including waterproof seals for wounds or surgery sites, drug delivery, sensing human body signals, and optical imaging of human tissues. We describe in detail the fabrication processes required to prepare the adhesives and films, such as tape-based adhesives, nanofilms, and flexible and stretchable film-based electronic devices. We also discuss their biomedical functions, performance in vitro and in vivo, and the future research needed to improve the current systems.

  4. Proceedings of the international society for optical engineering biomedical image processing 2

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bovik, A.G.; Howard, V.

    1991-01-01

    This book contains the proceedings of biomedical image processing. Topics covered include: Filtering and reconstruction of biomedical images; analysis, classification and recognition of biomedical images; and 3-D microscopy

  5. An event database for rotational seismology

    Science.gov (United States)

    Salvermoser, Johannes; Hadziioannou, Celine; Hable, Sarah; Chow, Bryant; Krischer, Lion; Wassermann, Joachim; Igel, Heiner

    2016-04-01

    The ring laser sensor (G-ring) located at Wettzell, Germany, routinely observes earthquake-induced rotational ground motions around a vertical axis since its installation in 2003. Here we present results from a recently installed event database which is the first that will provide ring laser event data in an open access format. Based on the GCMT event catalogue and some search criteria, seismograms from the ring laser and the collocated broadband seismometer are extracted and processed. The ObsPy-based processing scheme generates plots showing waveform fits between rotation rate and transverse acceleration and extracts characteristic wavefield parameters such as peak ground motions, noise levels, Love wave phase velocities and waveform coherence. For each event, these parameters are stored in a text file (json dictionary) which is easily readable and accessible on the website. The database contains >10000 events starting in 2007 (Mw>4.5). It is updated daily and therefore provides recent events at a time lag of max. 24 hours. The user interface allows to filter events for epoch, magnitude, and source area, whereupon the events are displayed on a zoomable world map. We investigate how well the rotational motions are compatible with the expectations from the surface wave magnitude scale. In addition, the website offers some python source code examples for downloading and processing the openly accessible waveforms.

  6. [Computers in biomedical research: I. Analysis of bioelectrical signals].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vivaldi, E A; Maldonado, P

    2001-08-01

    A personal computer equipped with an analog-to-digital conversion card is able to input, store and display signals of biomedical interest. These signals can additionally be submitted to ad-hoc software for analysis and diagnosis. Data acquisition is based on the sampling of a signal at a given rate and amplitude resolution. The automation of signal processing conveys syntactic aspects (data transduction, conditioning and reduction); and semantic aspects (feature extraction to describe and characterize the signal and diagnostic classification). The analytical approach that is at the basis of computer programming allows for the successful resolution of apparently complex tasks. Two basic principles involved are the definition of simple fundamental functions that are then iterated and the modular subdivision of tasks. These two principles are illustrated, respectively, by presenting the algorithm that detects relevant elements for the analysis of a polysomnogram, and the task flow in systems that automate electrocardiographic reports.

  7. Extracting HEPs from Event Reports of Domestic Nuclear Power Plants-Case Study

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Park, Jinkyun; Kim, Yochan; Jung, Wondea [Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, Daejeon (Korea, Republic of)

    2016-10-15

    it is very important to soundly estimate the human error probability (HEP) of required tasks that could degrade the operational safety of systems. To this end, it is necessary to provide the HRA practitioners with the reliable catalog of HEPs. Unfortunately, one of the common issues raised by HRA practitioners is a lack of HRA data including HEPs. Therefore, many researchers are trying to provide reliable HRA data from diverse sources, such as (1) event reports reflecting the operational experience of domestic nuclear power plants (NPPs), and (2) human performance data observed from full- and/or partial-scope simulator exercises. It is evident that the contribution of human errors to the safety of socio-technical systems is very critical. For this reason, it is important for HRA practitioners to provide reliable HRA data including HEPs. Although a full-scope simulator can be used to collect valuable HRA data, it is still necessary to extract HRA data from the review of operational experience data. If so, it is possible to expect several benefits, such as the use of HRA data gathered from the operational experience of domestic NPPs as reference information to clarify the appropriateness of those collected from full-scope simulators.

  8. European virtual campus for biomedical engineering EVICAB.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Malmivuo, Jaakko A; Nousiainen, Juha O; Lindroos, Kari V

    2007-01-01

    European Commission has funded building a curriculum on Biomedical Engineering to the Internet for European universities under the project EVICAB. EVICAB forms a curriculum which will be free access and available free of charge. Therefore, in addition to the European universities, it will be available worldwide. EVICAB will make high quality education available for everyone, not only for the university students, and facilitate the development of the discipline of Biomedical Engineering.

  9. Laser surface texturing of polymers for biomedical applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Riveiro, Antonio; Maçon, Anthony L. B.; del Val, Jesus; Comesaña, Rafael; Pou, Juan

    2018-02-01

    Polymers are materials widely used in biomedical science because of their biocompatibility, and good mechanical properties (which, in some cases, are similar to those of human tissues); however, these materials are, in general, chemically and biologically inert. Surface characteristics, such as topography (at the macro-, micro, and nanoscale), surface chemistry, surface energy, charge or wettability are interrelated properties, and they cooperatively influence the biological performance of materials when used for biomedical applications. They regulate the biological response at the implant/tissue interface (e.g., influencing the cell adhesion, cell orientation, cell motility, etc.). Several surface processing techniques have been explored to modulate these properties for biomedical applications. Despite their potentials, these methods have limitations that prevent their applicability. In this regard, laser-based methods, in particular laser surface texturing (LST), can be an interesting alternative. Different works have showed the potentiality of this technique to control the surface properties of biomedical polymers and enhance their biological performance; however, more research is needed to obtain the desired biological response. This work provides a general overview of the basics and applications of LST for the surface modification of polymers currently used in the clinical practice (e.g. PEEK, UHMWPE, PP, etc.). The modification of roughness, wettability, and their impact on the biological response is addressed to offer new insights on the surface modification of biomedical polymers.

  10. Bio-medical CMOS ICs

    CERN Document Server

    Yoo, Hoi-Jun

    2011-01-01

    This book is based on a graduate course entitled, Ubiquitous Healthcare Circuits and Systems, that was given by one of the editors. It includes an introduction and overview to biomedical ICs and provides information on the current trends in research.

  11. NDE in biomedical engineering

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Bhagwat, Aditya; Kumar, Pradeep

    2015-01-01

    Biomedical Engineering (BME) is an interdisciplinary field, marking the conjunction of Medical and Engineering disciplines. It combines the design and problem solving skills of engineering with medical and biological sciences to advance health care treatment, including diagnosis, monitoring, and therapy

  12. Low-level radioactive biomedical wastes

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Casarett, G.W.

    A summary of the management and hazards of low-level radioactive biomedical wastes is presented. The volume, disposal methods, current problems, regulatory agencies, and possible solutions to disposal problems are discussed. The benefits derived from using radioactivity in medicine are briefly described. Potential health risks are discussed. The radioactivity in most of the radioactive biomedical waste is a small fraction of that contained naturally in the human body or in the natural environment. Benefit-risk-cost considerations are presented. The cost of managing these wastes is getting so high that a new perspective for comparison of radioactivity (facts, risks, costs, benefits and trade-offs) and alternate approaches to minimize the risk and cost and maximize the benefits is suggested

  13. Prediction markets and their potential role in biomedical research--a review.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Pfeiffer, Thomas; Almenberg, Johan

    2010-01-01

    Predictions markets are marketplaces for trading contracts with payoffs that depend on the outcome of future events. Popular examples are markets on the outcome of presidential elections, where contracts pay $1 if a specific candidate wins the election and $0 if someone else wins. Contract prices on prediction markets can be interpreted as forecasts regarding the outcome of future events. Further attractive properties include the potential to aggregate private information, to generate and disseminate a consensus among the market participants, and to offer incentives for the acquisition of information. It has been argued that these properties might be valuable in the context of scientific research. In this review, we give an overview of key properties of prediction markets and discuss potential benefits for science. To illustrate these benefits for biomedical research, we discuss an example application in the context of decision making in research on the genetics of diseases. Moreover, some potential practical problems of prediction market application in science are discussed, and solutions are outlined. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

  14. Building a biomedical ontology recommender web service

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Jonquet Clement

    2010-06-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Researchers in biomedical informatics use ontologies and terminologies to annotate their data in order to facilitate data integration and translational discoveries. As the use of ontologies for annotation of biomedical datasets has risen, a common challenge is to identify ontologies that are best suited to annotating specific datasets. The number and variety of biomedical ontologies is large, and it is cumbersome for a researcher to figure out which ontology to use. Methods We present the Biomedical Ontology Recommender web service. The system uses textual metadata or a set of keywords describing a domain of interest and suggests appropriate ontologies for annotating or representing the data. The service makes a decision based on three criteria. The first one is coverage, or the ontologies that provide most terms covering the input text. The second is connectivity, or the ontologies that are most often mapped to by other ontologies. The final criterion is size, or the number of concepts in the ontologies. The service scores the ontologies as a function of scores of the annotations created using the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO Annotator web service. We used all the ontologies from the UMLS Metathesaurus and the NCBO BioPortal. Results We compare and contrast our Recommender by an exhaustive functional comparison to previously published efforts. We evaluate and discuss the results of several recommendation heuristics in the context of three real world use cases. The best recommendations heuristics, rated ‘very relevant’ by expert evaluators, are the ones based on coverage and connectivity criteria. The Recommender service (alpha version is available to the community and is embedded into BioPortal.

  15. Finding and accessing diagrams in biomedical publications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kuhn, Tobias; Luong, ThaiBinh; Krauthammer, Michael

    2012-01-01

    Complex relationships in biomedical publications are often communicated by diagrams such as bar and line charts, which are a very effective way of summarizing and communicating multi-faceted data sets. Given the ever-increasing amount of published data, we argue that the precise retrieval of such diagrams is of great value for answering specific and otherwise hard-to-meet information needs. To this end, we demonstrate the use of advanced image processing and classification for identifying bar and line charts by the shape and relative location of the different image elements that make up the charts. With recall and precisions of close to 90% for the detection of relevant figures, we discuss the use of this technology in an existing biomedical image search engine, and outline how it enables new forms of literature queries over biomedical relationships that are represented in these charts.

  16. Networked Biomedical System for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Arjan Durresi

    2008-01-01

    Full Text Available We propose a distributed system that enables global and ubiquitous health monitoring of patients. The biomedical data will be collected by wearable health diagnostic devices, which will include various types of sensors and will be transmitted towards the corresponding Health Monitoring Centers. The permanent medical data of patients will be kept in the corresponding Home Data Bases, while the measured biomedical data will be sent to the Visitor Health Monitor Center and Visitor Data Base that serves the area of present location of the patient. By combining the measured biomedical data and the permanent medical data, Health Medical Centers will be able to coordinate the needed actions and help the local medical teams to make quickly the best decisions that could be crucial for the patient health, and that can reduce the cost of health service.

  17. Selected Topics in MicroNano-robotics for Biomedical Applications

    CERN Document Server

    2013-01-01

    Selected Topics in Micro/Nano-robotics for Biomedical Applications features a system approach and incorporates modern methodologies in autonomous mobile robots for programmable and controllable micro/nano-robots aiming at biomedical applications. The book provides chapters of instructional materials and cutting-edge research results in micro/nanorobotics for biomedical applications. The book presents new sensing technology on nanofibers, new power supply techniques including miniature fuel cells and energy harvesting devices, and manipulation techniques including AFM-based nano-robotic manipulation, robot-aided optical tweezers, and robot-assisted catheter surgery systems. It also contains case studies on using micro/nano-robots in biomedical environments and in biomedicine, as well as a design example to conceptually develop a Vitamin-pill sized robot to enter human’s gastrointestinal tract. Each chapter covers a different topic of the highly interdisciplinary area. Bring together the selected topics into ...

  18. Statistics in biomedical research

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    González-Manteiga, Wenceslao

    2007-06-01

    Full Text Available The discipline of biostatistics is nowadays a fundamental scientific component of biomedical, public health and health services research. Traditional and emerging areas of application include clinical trials research, observational studies, physiology, imaging, and genomics. The present article reviews the current situation of biostatistics, considering the statistical methods traditionally used in biomedical research, as well as the ongoing development of new methods in response to the new problems arising in medicine. Clearly, the successful application of statistics in biomedical research requires appropriate training of biostatisticians. This training should aim to give due consideration to emerging new areas of statistics, while at the same time retaining full coverage of the fundamentals of statistical theory and methodology. In addition, it is important that students of biostatistics receive formal training in relevant biomedical disciplines, such as epidemiology, clinical trials, molecular biology, genetics, and neuroscience.La Bioestadística es hoy en día una componente científica fundamental de la investigación en Biomedicina, salud pública y servicios de salud. Las áreas tradicionales y emergentes de aplicación incluyen ensayos clínicos, estudios observacionales, fisología, imágenes, y genómica. Este artículo repasa la situación actual de la Bioestadística, considerando los métodos estadísticos usados tradicionalmente en investigación biomédica, así como los recientes desarrollos de nuevos métodos, para dar respuesta a los nuevos problemas que surgen en Medicina. Obviamente, la aplicación fructífera de la estadística en investigación biomédica exige una formación adecuada de los bioestadísticos, formación que debería tener en cuenta las áreas emergentes en estadística, cubriendo al mismo tiempo los fundamentos de la teoría estadística y su metodología. Es importante, además, que los estudiantes de

  19. Molecular Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (MBIL)

    Data.gov (United States)

    Federal Laboratory Consortium — The Molecular Biomedical Imaging Laboratory (MBIL) is adjacent-a nd has access-to the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences clinical imaging facilities. MBIL...

  20. Biomedical semantics in the Semantic Web.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Splendiani, Andrea; Burger, Albert; Paschke, Adrian; Romano, Paolo; Marshall, M Scott

    2011-03-07

    The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences?We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th.

  1. Electrospun Nanofibres Containing Antimicrobial Plant Extracts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Wanwei Zhang

    2017-02-01

    Full Text Available Over the last 10 years great research interest has been directed toward nanofibrous architectures produced by electrospinning bioactive plant extracts. The resulting structures possess antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and anti-oxidant activity, which are attractive for biomedical applications and food industry. This review describes the diverse approaches that have been developed to produce electrospun nanofibres that are able to deliver naturally-derived chemical compounds in a controlled way and to prevent their degradation. The efficacy of those composite nanofibres as wound dressings, scaffolds for tissue engineering, and active food packaging systems will be discussed.

  2. Estimation of the isothermal compressibility from event-by-event multiplicity fluctuation studies

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Mukherjee Maitreyee

    2018-01-01

    Full Text Available The first estimation of the isothermal compressibility (kT of matter is presented for a wide range of collision energies from √sNN = 7.7 GeV to 2.76 TeV. kT is estimated with the help of event-byevent charged particle multiplicity fluctuations from experiment. Dynamical fluctuations are extracted by removing the statistical fluctuations obtained from the participant model. kT is also estimated from event generators AMPT, UrQMD, EPOS and a hadron resonance gas model. The values of isothermal compressibility are estimated for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC energies with the help of the event generators.

  3. New Directions for Biomedical Engineering

    Science.gov (United States)

    Plonsey, Robert

    1973-01-01

    Discusses the definition of "biomedical engineering" and the development of educational programs in the field. Includes detailed descriptions of the roles of bioengineers, medical engineers, and chemical engineers. (CC)

  4. Biofunctionalization of surfaces by energetic ion implantation: Review of progress on applications in implantable biomedical devices and antibody microarrays

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bilek, Marcela M. M.

    2014-08-01

    Despite major research efforts in the field of biomaterials, rejection, severe immune responses, scar tissue and poor integration continue to seriously limit the performance of today's implantable biomedical devices. Implantable biomaterials that interact with their host via an interfacial layer of active biomolecules to direct a desired cellular response to the implant would represent a major and much sought after improvement. Another, perhaps equally revolutionary, development that is on the biomedical horizon is the introduction of cost-effective microarrays for fast, highly multiplexed screening for biomarkers on cell membranes and in a variety of analyte solutions. Both of these advances will rely on effective methods of functionalizing surfaces with bioactive molecules. After a brief introduction to other methods currently available, this review will describe recently developed approaches that use energetic ions extracted from plasma to facilitate simple, one-step covalent surface immobilization of bioactive molecules. A kinetic theory model of the immobilization process by reactions with long-lived, mobile, surface-embedded radicals will be presented. The roles of surface chemistry and microstructure of the ion treated layer will be discussed. Early progress on applications of this technology to create diagnostic microarrays and to engineer bioactive surfaces for implantable biomedical devices will be reviewed.

  5. Careers in biomedical engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Madrid, R E; Rotger, V I; Herrera, M C

    2010-01-01

    Although biomedical engineering was started in Argentina about 35 years ago, it has had a sustained growth for the last 25 years in human resources, with the emergence of new undergraduate and postgraduate careers, as well as in research, knowledge, technological development, and health care.

  6. Reconstructing particle masses in events with displaced vertices

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cottin, Giovanna

    2018-03-01

    We propose a simple way to extract particle masses given a displaced vertex signature in event topologies where two long-lived mother particles decay to visible particles and an invisible daughter. The mother could be either charged or neutral and the neutral daughter could correspond to a dark matter particle in different models. The method allows to extract the parent and daughter masses by using on-shell conditions and energy-momentum conservation, in addition to the displaced decay positions of the parents, which allows to solve the kinematic equations fully on an event-by-event basis. We show the validity of the method by means of simulations including detector effects. If displaced events are seen in discovery searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), this technique can be applied.

  7. Artificial Sight Basic Research, Biomedical Engineering, and Clinical Advances

    CERN Document Server

    Humayun, Mark S; Chader, Gerald; Greenbaum, Elias

    2008-01-01

    Artificial sight is a frontier area of modern ophthalmology combining the multidisciplinary skills of surgical ophthalmology, biomedical engineering, biological physics, and psychophysical testing. Many scientific, engineering, and surgical challenges must be surmounted before widespread practical applications can be realized. The goal of Artificial Sight is to summarize the state-of-the-art research in this exciting area, and to describe some of the current approaches and initiatives that may help patients in a clinical setting. The Editors are active researchers in the fields of artificial sight, biomedical engineering and biological physics. They have received numerous professional awards and recognition for their work. The artificial sight team at the Doheny Eye Institute, led by Dr. Mark Humayun, is a world leader in this area of biomedical engineering and clinical research. Key Features Introduces and assesses the state of the art for a broad audience of biomedical engineers, biophysicists, and clinical...

  8. Polymer/metal nanocomposites for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zare, Yasser; Shabani, Iman

    2016-03-01

    Polymer/metal nanocomposites consisting of polymer as matrix and metal nanoparticles as nanofiller commonly show several attractive advantages such as electrical, mechanical and optical characteristics. Accordingly, many scientific and industrial communities have focused on polymer/metal nanocomposites in order to develop some new products or substitute the available materials. In the current paper, characteristics and applications of polymer/metal nanocomposites for biomedical applications are extensively explained in several categories including strong and stable materials, conductive devices, sensors and biomedical products. Moreover, some perspective utilizations are suggested for future studies. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  9. Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bonazzi, Vivien R; Bourne, Philip E

    2017-04-01

    The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated. While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative. We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research.

  10. Biomedical Applications of Enzymes From Marine Actinobacteria.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Kamala, K; Sivaperumal, P

    Marine microbial enzyme technologies have progressed significantly in the last few decades for different applications. Among the various microorganisms, marine actinobacterial enzymes have significant active properties, which could allow them to be biocatalysts with tremendous bioactive metabolites. Moreover, marine actinobacteria have been considered as biofactories, since their enzymes fulfill biomedical and industrial needs. In this chapter, the marine actinobacteria and their enzymes' uses in biological activities and biomedical applications are described. © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  11. Biomedical engineering and society: policy and ethics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Flexman, J A; Lazareck, L

    2007-01-01

    Biomedical engineering impacts health care and contributes to fundamental knowledge in medicine and biology. Policy, such as through regulation and research funding, has the potential to dramatically affect biomedical engineering research and commercialization. New developments, in turn, may affect society in new ways. The intersection of biomedical engineering and society and related policy issues must be discussed between scientists and engineers, policy-makers and the public. As a student, there are many ways to become engaged in the issues surrounding science and technology policy. At the University of Washington in Seattle, the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy (FOSEP, www.fosep.org) was started by graduate students and post-doctoral fellows interested in improving the dialogue between scientists, policymakers and the public and has received support from upper-level administration. This is just one example of how students can start thinking about science policy and ethics early in their careers.

  12. 15th International Conference on Biomedical Engineering

    CERN Document Server

    2014-01-01

    This volume presents the proceedings of the 15th ICMBE held from 4th to 7th December 2013, Singapore. Biomedical engineering is applied in most aspects of our healthcare ecosystem. From electronic health records to diagnostic tools to therapeutic, rehabilitative and regenerative treatments, the work of biomedical engineers is evident. Biomedical engineers work at the intersection of engineering, life sciences and healthcare. The engineers would use principles from applied science including mechanical, electrical, chemical and computer engineering together with physical sciences including physics, chemistry and mathematics to apply them to biology and medicine. Applying such concepts to the human body is very much the same concepts that go into building and programming a machine. The goal is to better understand, replace or fix a target system to ultimately improve the quality of healthcare. With this understanding, the conference proceedings offer a single platform for individuals and organisations working i...

  13. Biomedical applications using low temperature plasma technology

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Dai Xiujuan; Jiang Nan

    2006-01-01

    Low temperature plasma technology and biomedicine are two different subjects, but the combination of the two may play a critical role in modern science and technology. The 21 st century is believed to be a biotechnology century. Plasma technology is becoming a widely used platform for the fabrication of biomaterials and biomedical devices. In this paper some of the technologies used for material surface modification are briefly introduced. Some biomedical applications using plasma technology are described, followed by suggestions as to how a bridge between plasma technology and biomedicine can be built. A pulsed plasma technique that is used for surface functionalization is discussed in detail as an example of this kind of bridge or combination. Finally, it is pointed out that the combination of biomedical and plasma technology will be an important development for revolutionary 21st century technologies that requires different experts from different fields to work together. (authors)

  14. Biomedical Engineering and its Relevance to Total Health Care ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Aim: To highlight the importance of biomedical engineering, with respect to the many basic amenities including adequate water supply, electricity, drugs and medical equipment necessary for the proper functioning of medical doctors which are totally lacking in most developing countries. Method: Review of biomedical ...

  15. For 481 biomedical open access journals, articles are not searchable in the Directory of Open Access Journals nor in conventional biomedical databases

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Liljekvist, Mads Svane; Andresen, Kristoffer; Pommergaard, Hans-Christian

    2015-01-01

    biomedical databases (MEDLINE, PubMed Central, EMBASE and SCOPUS) and DOAJ were gathered. Journals were included if they were (1) actively publishing, (2) full OA, (3) prospectively indexed in one or more database, and (4) of biomedical subject. Impact factor and journal language were also collected. DOAJ...... journals, 86.7% were listed in DOAJ. Combined, the conventional biomedical databases listed 75.0% of the journals; 18.7% in MEDLINE; 36.5% in PubMed Central; 51.5% in SCOPUS and 50.6% in EMBASE. Of the journals in DOAJ, 88.7% published in English and 20.6% had received impact factor for 2012 compared...

  16. Repeated Time-to-event Analysis of Consecutive Analgesic Events in Postoperative Pain

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Juul, Rasmus Vestergaard; Rasmussen, Sten; Kreilgaard, Mads

    2015-01-01

    BACKGROUND: Reduction in consumption of opioid rescue medication is often used as an endpoint when investigating analgesic efficacy of drugs by adjunct treatment, but appropriate methods are needed to analyze analgesic consumption in time. Repeated time-to-event (RTTE) modeling is proposed as a way...... to describe analgesic consumption by analyzing the timing of consecutive analgesic events. METHODS: Retrospective data were obtained from 63 patients receiving standard analgesic treatment including morphine on request after surgery following hip fracture. Times of analgesic events up to 96 h after surgery...... were extracted from hospital medical records. Parametric RTTE analysis was performed with exponential, Weibull, or Gompertz distribution of analgesic events using NONMEM®, version 7.2 (ICON Development Solutions, USA). The potential influences of night versus day, sex, and age were investigated...

  17. PKDE4J: Entity and relation extraction for public knowledge discovery.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Song, Min; Kim, Won Chul; Lee, Dahee; Heo, Go Eun; Kang, Keun Young

    2015-10-01

    Due to an enormous number of scientific publications that cannot be handled manually, there is a rising interest in text-mining techniques for automated information extraction, especially in the biomedical field. Such techniques provide effective means of information search, knowledge discovery, and hypothesis generation. Most previous studies have primarily focused on the design and performance improvement of either named entity recognition or relation extraction. In this paper, we present PKDE4J, a comprehensive text-mining system that integrates dictionary-based entity extraction and rule-based relation extraction in a highly flexible and extensible framework. Starting with the Stanford CoreNLP, we developed the system to cope with multiple types of entities and relations. The system also has fairly good performance in terms of accuracy as well as the ability to configure text-processing components. We demonstrate its competitive performance by evaluating it on many corpora and found that it surpasses existing systems with average F-measures of 85% for entity extraction and 81% for relation extraction. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

  18. Rules and management of biomedical waste at Vivekananda Polyclinic: A case study

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Gupta, Saurabh; Boojh, Ram; Mishra, Ajai; Chandra, Hem

    2009-01-01

    Hospitals and other healthcare establishments have a 'duty of care' for the environment and for public health, and have particular responsibilities in relation to the waste they produce (i.e., biomedical waste). Negligence, in terms of biomedical waste management, significantly contributes to polluting the environment, affects the health of human beings, and depletes natural and financial resources. In India, in view of the serious situation of biomedical waste management, the Ministry of Environment and Forests, within the Government of India, ratified the Biomedical Waste (Management and Handling) Rules, in July 1998. The present paper provides a brief description of the biomedical waste (Management and Handling) Rules 1998, and the current biomedical waste management practices in one of the premier healthcare establishments of Lucknow, the Vivekananda Polyclinic. The objective in undertaking this study was to analyse the biomedical waste management system, including policy, practice (i.e., storage, collection, transportation and disposal), and compliance with the standards prescribed under the regulatory framework. The analysis consisted of interviews with medical authorities, doctors, and paramedical staff involved in the management of the biomedical wastes in the Polyclinic. Other important stakeholders that were consulted and interviewed included environmental engineers (looking after the Biomedical Waste Cell) of the State Pollution Control Board, and randomly selected patients and visitors to the Polyclinic. A general survey of the facilities of the Polyclinic was undertaken to ascertain the efficacy of the implemented measures. The waste was quantified based on random samples collected from each ward. It was found that, although the Polyclinic in general abides by the prescribed regulations for the treatment and disposal of biomedical waste, there is a need to further build the capacity of the Polyclinic and its staff in terms of providing state

  19. An integrated biomedical knowledge extraction and analysis platform: using federated search and document clustering technology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taylor, Donald P

    2007-01-01

    High content screening (HCS) requires time-consuming and often complex iterative information retrieval and assessment approaches to optimally conduct drug discovery programs and biomedical research. Pre- and post-HCS experimentation both require the retrieval of information from public as well as proprietary literature in addition to structured information assets such as compound libraries and projects databases. Unfortunately, this information is typically scattered across a plethora of proprietary bioinformatics tools and databases and public domain sources. Consequently, single search requests must be presented to each information repository, forcing the results to be manually integrated for a meaningful result set. Furthermore, these bioinformatics tools and data repositories are becoming increasingly complex to use; typically they fail to allow for more natural query interfaces. Vivisimo has developed an enterprise software platform to bridge disparate silos of information. The platform automatically categorizes search results into descriptive folders without the use of taxonomies to drive the categorization. A new approach to information retrieval for HCS experimentation is proposed.

  20. Biomedical engineering and the whitaker foundation: a thirty-year partnership.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Katona, Peter G

    2006-06-01

    The Whitaker Foundation, established in 1976, will close in 2006. It will have made awards totaling 805 million US dollars, with over 710 million US dollars in biomedical engineering. Close to 1,500 faculty members received research grants to help them establish academic careers in biomedical engineering, and over 400 graduate students received fellowship support. The Foundation also supported the enhancement or establishment of educational programs in biomedical engineering, especially encouraging the formation of departments. The number of biomedical engineering departments almost tripled during the past 10 years, now numbering close to 75. Leveraging of grants enabled the construction of 13 new buildings. With the field firmly established, the grant program supporting new faculty members will be the one missed the most. New opportunities, however, are emerging as interdisciplinary research is being embraced by both public and private funding sources. The life sciences will be increasingly incorporated into all areas of engineering, and it is expected that such "biofication" will pose both opportunities and challenges to biomedical engineering.

  1. How much longer will Africa have to depend on western nations for support of its capacity-building efforts for biomedical research?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Laabes, Emmanuel Philip; Desai, Rizwana; Zawedde, Stella Muyanja; Glew, Robert Hayes

    2011-03-01

    Advances in biomedical research techniques have resulted in the conquest of many diseases and the improvement in the health and well-being of populations, yet sub-Saharan Africa continues to lag behind western nations in terms of research infrastructure and capacity. The increasing numbers of links and collaborations between western institutions of higher learning and teaching hospitals and universities in sub-Saharan Africa have undoubtedly promoted scholarly research activity on the continent. However, most of the research agenda is, understandably, dominated by western collaborators who provide the much needed funding. Given the recent exposure by events on Wall Street of the frailties of western economies, Africa urgently needs to look inwards in its quest to train biomedical researchers of repute and to secure funding for its capacity-building needs. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

  2. Biomedical photonics handbook therapeutics and advanced biophotonics

    CERN Document Server

    Vo-Dinh, Tuan

    2014-01-01

    Shaped by Quantum Theory, Technology, and the Genomics RevolutionThe integration of photonics, electronics, biomaterials, and nanotechnology holds great promise for the future of medicine. This topic has recently experienced an explosive growth due to the noninvasive or minimally invasive nature and the cost-effectiveness of photonic modalities in medical diagnostics and therapy. The second edition of the Biomedical Photonics Handbook presents recent fundamental developments as well as important applications of biomedical photonics of interest to scientists, engineers, manufacturers, teachers,

  3. Biomedical research applications of electromagnetically separated enriched stable isotopes

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Lambrecht, R.M.

    1982-01-01

    The current and projected annual requirements through 1985 for stable isotopes enriched by electromagnetic separation methods were reviewed for applications in various types of biomedical research: (1) medical radiosotope production, labeled compounds, and potential radiopharmaceuticals; (2) nutrition, food science, and pharmacology; (3) metallobiochemistry and environmental toxicology; (4) nuclear magnetic resonance, electron paramagnetic resonance, and Moessbauer spectroscopy in biochemical, biophysical, and biomedical research; and (5) miscellaneous advances in radioactive and non-radioactive tracer technology. Radioisotopes available from commercial sources or routinely used in clinical nuclear medicine were excluded. Priorities and summaries are based on statements in the references and from answers to a survey conducted in the fall of 1981. Current requirements for enriched stable isotopes in biomedical research are not being satisfied. Severe shortages exist for 26 Mg, 43 Ca, 70 Zn, 76 Se, 78 Se, 102 Pd, 111 Cd, 113 Cd, and 190 Os. Many interesting and potentially important investigations in biomedical research require small quantities of specific elements at high isotopic enrichments

  4. From biomedical-engineering research to clinical application and industrialization

    Science.gov (United States)

    Taguchi, Tetsushi; Aoyagi, Takao

    2012-12-01

    The rising costs and aging of the population due to a low birth rate negatively affect the healthcare system in Japan. In 2011, the Council for Science and Technology Policy released the 4th Japan's Science and Technology Basic Policy Report from 2011 to 2015. This report includes two major innovations, 'Life Innovation' and 'Green Innovation', to promote economic growth. Biomedical engineering research is part of 'Life Innovation' and its outcomes are required to maintain people's mental and physical health. It has already resulted in numerous biomedical products, and new ones should be developed using nanotechnology-based concepts. The combination of accumulated knowledge and experience, and 'nanoarchitechtonics' will result in novel, well-designed functional biomaterials. This focus issue contains three reviews and 19 original papers on various biomedical topics, including biomaterials, drug-delivery systems, tissue engineering and diagnostics. We hope that it demonstrates the importance of collaboration among scientists, engineers and clinicians, and will contribute to the further development of biomedical engineering.

  5. Will Biomedical Enhancements Undermine Solidarity, Responsibility, Equality and Autonomy?

    Science.gov (United States)

    Lev, Ori

    2009-01-01

    Prominent thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas and Michael Sandel are warning that biomedical enhancements will undermine fundamental political values. Yet, whether biomedical enhancements will undermine such values depends on how biomedical enhancements will function, how they will be administered and to whom. Since only few enhancements are obtainable, it is difficult to tell whether their predictions are sound. Nevertheless, such warnings are extremely valuable. As a society we must, at the very least, be aware of developments that could have harmful consequences. Indeed, if important values would be jeopardized, we should take appropriate measures to protect them. This paper focuses on four central values: solidarity, personal responsibility, equality and autonomy. It delineates the conditions under which biomedical enhancements would undermine these values. It also details the circumstances under which these values would be unaffected by enhancements as well as those under which they would be promoted. Specifying these conditions is valuable; it would enable society to prepare appropriate ethical guidelines and policy responses in advance. PMID:20002073

  6. Exploring and linking biomedical resources through multidimensional semantic spaces.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Berlanga, Rafael; Jiménez-Ruiz, Ernesto; Nebot, Victoria

    2012-01-25

    The semantic integration of biomedical resources is still a challenging issue which is required for effective information processing and data analysis. The availability of comprehensive knowledge resources such as biomedical ontologies and integrated thesauri greatly facilitates this integration effort by means of semantic annotation, which allows disparate data formats and contents to be expressed under a common semantic space. In this paper, we propose a multidimensional representation for such a semantic space, where dimensions regard the different perspectives in biomedical research (e.g., population, disease, anatomy and protein/genes). This paper presents a novel method for building multidimensional semantic spaces from semantically annotated biomedical data collections. This method consists of two main processes: knowledge and data normalization. The former one arranges the concepts provided by a reference knowledge resource (e.g., biomedical ontologies and thesauri) into a set of hierarchical dimensions for analysis purposes. The latter one reduces the annotation set associated to each collection item into a set of points of the multidimensional space. Additionally, we have developed a visual tool, called 3D-Browser, which implements OLAP-like operators over the generated multidimensional space. The method and the tool have been tested and evaluated in the context of the Health-e-Child (HeC) project. Automatic semantic annotation was applied to tag three collections of abstracts taken from PubMed, one for each target disease of the project, the Uniprot database, and the HeC patient record database. We adopted the UMLS Meta-thesaurus 2010AA as the reference knowledge resource. Current knowledge resources and semantic-aware technology make possible the integration of biomedical resources. Such an integration is performed through semantic annotation of the intended biomedical data resources. This paper shows how these annotations can be exploited for

  7. The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bandrowski, Anita; Brinkman, Ryan; Brochhausen, Mathias; Brush, Matthew H; Bug, Bill; Chibucos, Marcus C; Clancy, Kevin; Courtot, Mélanie; Derom, Dirk; Dumontier, Michel; Fan, Liju; Fostel, Jennifer; Fragoso, Gilberto; Gibson, Frank; Gonzalez-Beltran, Alejandra; Haendel, Melissa A; He, Yongqun; Heiskanen, Mervi; Hernandez-Boussard, Tina; Jensen, Mark; Lin, Yu; Lister, Allyson L; Lord, Phillip; Malone, James; Manduchi, Elisabetta; McGee, Monnie; Morrison, Norman; Overton, James A; Parkinson, Helen; Peters, Bjoern; Rocca-Serra, Philippe; Ruttenberg, Alan; Sansone, Susanna-Assunta; Scheuermann, Richard H; Schober, Daniel; Smith, Barry; Soldatova, Larisa N; Stoeckert, Christian J; Taylor, Chris F; Torniai, Carlo; Turner, Jessica A; Vita, Randi; Whetzel, Patricia L; Zheng, Jie

    2016-01-01

    The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource (http://obi-ontology.org) providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed

  8. Personalized biomedical devices & systems for healthcare applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, I.-Ming; Phee, Soo Jay; Luo, Zhiqiang; Lim, Chee Kian

    2011-03-01

    With the advancement in micro- and nanotechnology, electromechanical components and systems are getting smaller and smaller and gradually can be applied to the human as portable, mobile and even wearable devices. Healthcare industry have started to benefit from this technology trend by providing more and more miniature biomedical devices for personalized medical treatments in order to obtain better and more accurate outcome. This article introduces some recent development in non-intrusive and intrusive biomedical devices resulted from the advancement of niche miniature sensors and actuators, namely, wearable biomedical sensors, wearable haptic devices, and ingestible medical capsules. The development of these devices requires carful integration of knowledge and people from many different disciplines like medicine, electronics, mechanics, and design. Furthermore, designing affordable devices and systems to benefit all mankind is a great challenge ahead. The multi-disciplinary nature of the R&D effort in this area provides a new perspective for the future mechanical engineers.

  9. Visualization and simulation of complex flows in biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    Imai, Yohsuke; Ishikawa, Takuji; Oliveira, Mónica

    2014-01-01

    This book focuses on the most recent advances in the application of visualization and simulation methods to understand the flow behavior of complex fluids used in biomedical engineering and other related fields. It shows the physiological flow behavior in large arteries, microcirculation, respiratory systems and in biomedical microdevices.

  10. IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.

    Science.gov (United States)

    2017-01-01

    The IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) is a scientific conference dedicated to mathematical, algorithmic, and computational aspects of biological and biomedical imaging, across all scales of observation. It fosters knowledge transfer among different imaging communities and contributes to an integrative approach to biomedical imaging. ISBI is a joint initiative from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). The 2018 meeting will include tutorials, and a scientific program composed of plenary talks, invited special sessions, challenges, as well as oral and poster presentations of peer-reviewed papers. High-quality papers are requested containing original contributions to the topics of interest including image formation and reconstruction, computational and statistical image processing and analysis, dynamic imaging, visualization, image quality assessment, and physical, biological, and statistical modeling. Accepted 4-page regular papers will be published in the symposium proceedings published by IEEE and included in IEEE Xplore. To encourage attendance by a broader audience of imaging scientists and offer additional presentation opportunities, ISBI 2018 will continue to have a second track featuring posters selected from 1-page abstract submissions without subsequent archival publication.

  11. Biomedical Applications of Zinc Oxide Nanomaterials

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhang, Yin; Nayak, Tapas R.; Hong, Hao; Cai, Weibo

    2013-01-01

    Nanotechnology has witnessed tremendous advancement over the last several decades. Zinc oxide (ZnO), which can exhibit a wide variety of nanostructures, possesses unique semiconducting, optical, and piezoelectric properties hence has been investigated for a wide variety of applications. One of the most important features of ZnO nanomaterials is low toxicity and biodegradability. Zn2+ is an indispensable trace element for adults (~10 mg of Zn2+ per day is recommended) and it is involved in various aspects of metabolism. Chemically, the surface of ZnO is rich in -OH groups, which can be readily functionalized by various surface decorating molecules. In this review article, we summarized the current status of the use of ZnO nanomaterials for biomedical applications, such as biomedical imaging (which includes fluorescence, magnetic resonance, positron emission tomography, as well as dual-modality imaging), drug delivery, gene delivery, and biosensing of a wide array of molecules of interest. Research in biomedical applications of ZnO nanomaterials will continue to flourish over the next decade, and much research effort will be needed to develop biocompatible/biodegradable ZnO nanoplatforms for potential clinical translation. PMID:24206130

  12. Professional ethics in biomedical engineering practice and research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Monzon, Jorge E; Monzon-Wyngaard, Alvaro

    2008-01-01

    This paper discusses some guidelines for use with the accepted fundamental canons of ethics for engineers. We present some rules of practice and professional obligations emerging from these canons. Basic recommendations for engineers dissenting on ethical grounds are also presented. Ethical issues relating to Biomedical Engineering research are illustrated. We mention some cases that could be used to further understanding the ethical implications of biomedical engineering practice.

  13. Adolf Friedrich Fercher: a pioneer of biomedical optics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hitzenberger, Christoph K

    2017-11-01

    Adolf Friedrich Fercher, an outstanding pioneer of biomedical optics, passed away earlier this year. He was a brilliant and visionary researcher who pioneered various fields of biomedical optics, such as laser speckle flowgraphy, tissue interferometry, and optical coherence tomography (OCT). On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of OCT, this paper reviews and commemorates Fercher's pioneering work. (2017) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

  14. Diode laser based light sources for biomedical applications

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Müller, André; Marschall, Sebastian; Jensen, Ole Bjarlin

    2013-01-01

    Diode lasers are by far the most efficient lasers currently available. With the ever-continuing improvement in diode laser technology, this type of laser has become increasingly attractive for a wide range of biomedical applications. Compared to the characteristics of competing laser systems, diode...... imaging. This review provides an overview of the latest development of diode laser technology and systems and their use within selected biomedical applications....

  15. A study to assess the knowledge and practice on bio-medical waste ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Background: The proper handling and disposal of bio-medical waste is very imperative. Unfortunately, laxity and lack of adequate knowledge and practice on bio-medical waste disposal leads to staid health and environment apprehension. Aim: To assess the knowledge and practice on bio-medical waste management ...

  16. Wearable and Implantable Mechanical Energy Harvesters for Self-Powered Biomedical Systems.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hinchet, Ronan; Kim, Sang-Woo

    2015-08-25

    In this issue of ACS Nano, Tang et al. investigate the ability of a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) to self-power a low-level laser cure system for osteogenesis by studying the efficiency of a bone remodeling laser treatment that is powered by a skin-patch-like TENG instead of a battery. We outline this field by highlighting the motivations for self-powered biomedical systems and by discussing recent progress in nanogenerators. We note the overlap between biomedical devices and TENGs and their dawning synergy, and we highlight key prospects for future developments. Biomedical systems should be more autonomous. This advance could improve their body integration and fields of action, leading to new medical diagnostics and treatments. However, future self-powered biomedical systems will need to be more flexible, biocompatible, and biodegradable. These advances hold the promise of enabling new smart autonomous biomedical systems and contributing significantly to the Internet of Things.

  17. Should biomedical research be like Airbnb?

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Vivien R Bonazzi

    2017-04-01

    Full Text Available The thesis presented here is that biomedical research is based on the trusted exchange of services. That exchange would be conducted more efficiently if the trusted software platforms to exchange those services, if they exist, were more integrated. While simpler and narrower in scope than the services governing biomedical research, comparison to existing internet-based platforms, like Airbnb, can be informative. We illustrate how the analogy to internet-based platforms works and does not work and introduce The Commons, under active development at the National Institutes of Health (NIH and elsewhere, as an example of the move towards platforms for research.

  18. Human factors design for the BMIT biomedical beamlines

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Miller, C Denise; Wysokinski, Tomasz W; Belev, George; Chapman, L Dean

    2013-01-01

    Operation of a biomedical beamline poses a unique set of operational and instrumentation challenges for a synchrotron facility. From proper handling and care of live animals and animal tissues, to a user community drawn primarily from the medical and veterinary realms, the work of a biomedical beamline is unique when compared to other beamlines. At the Biomedical Imaging and Therapy (BMIT) beamlines at Canadian Light Source (CLS), operation of the beamlines is geared towards our user community of medical personnel, in addition to basic science researchers. Human factors considerations have been incorporated wherever possible on BMIT, including in the design of software and hardware, as well as ease-of-use features of beamline control stations and experiment hutches. Feedback from users continues to drive usability improvements to beamline operations.

  19. Biomedical engineering education through global engineering teams.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Scheffer, C; Blanckenberg, M; Garth-Davis, B; Eisenberg, M

    2012-01-01

    Most industrial projects require a team of engineers from a variety of disciplines. The team members are often culturally diverse and geographically dispersed. Many students do not acquire sufficient skills from typical university courses to function efficiently in such an environment. The Global Engineering Teams (GET) programme was designed to prepare students such a scenario in industry. This paper discusses five biomedical engineering themed projects completed by GET students. The benefits and success of the programme in educating students in the field of biomedical engineering are discussed.

  20. Information Retrieval in Biomedical Research: From Articles to Datasets

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wei, Wei

    2017-01-01

    Information retrieval techniques have been applied to biomedical research for a variety of purposes, such as textual document retrieval and molecular data retrieval. As biomedical research evolves over time, information retrieval is also constantly facing new challenges, including the growing number of available data, the emerging new data types,…

  1. Evolving technologies drive the new roles of Biomedical Engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Frisch, P H; St Germain, J; Lui, W

    2008-01-01

    Rapidly changing technology coupled with the financial impact of organized health care, has required hospital Biomedical Engineering organizations to augment their traditional operational and business models to increase their role in developing enhanced clinical applications utilizing new and evolving technologies. The deployment of these technology based applications has required Biomedical Engineering organizations to re-organize to optimize the manner in which they provide and manage services. Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center has implemented a strategy to explore evolving technologies integrating them into enhanced clinical applications while optimally utilizing the expertise of the traditional Biomedical Engineering component (Clinical Engineering) to provide expanded support in technology / equipment management, device repair, preventive maintenance and integration with legacy clinical systems. Specifically, Biomedical Engineering is an integral component of the Medical Physics Department which provides comprehensive and integrated support to the Center in advanced physical, technical and engineering technology. This organizational structure emphasizes the integration and collaboration between a spectrum of technical expertise for clinical support and equipment management roles. The high cost of clinical equipment purchases coupled with the increasing cost of service has driven equipment management responsibilities to include significant business and financial aspects to provide a cost effective service model. This case study details the dynamics of these expanded roles, future initiatives and benefits for Biomedical Engineering and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

  2. Automated Detection of Financial Events in News Text

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    F.P. Hogenboom (Frederik)

    2014-01-01

    markdownabstractToday’s financial markets are inextricably linked with financial events like acquisitions, profit announcements, or product launches. Information extracted from news messages that report on such events could hence be beneficial for financial decision making. The ubiquity of news,

  3. Using text mining techniques to extract phenotypic information from the PhenoCHF corpus.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alnazzawi, Noha; Thompson, Paul; Batista-Navarro, Riza; Ananiadou, Sophia

    2015-01-01

    Phenotypic information locked away in unstructured narrative text presents significant barriers to information accessibility, both for clinical practitioners and for computerised applications used for clinical research purposes. Text mining (TM) techniques have previously been applied successfully to extract different types of information from text in the biomedical domain. They have the potential to be extended to allow the extraction of information relating to phenotypes from free text. To stimulate the development of TM systems that are able to extract phenotypic information from text, we have created a new corpus (PhenoCHF) that is annotated by domain experts with several types of phenotypic information relating to congestive heart failure. To ensure that systems developed using the corpus are robust to multiple text types, it integrates text from heterogeneous sources, i.e., electronic health records (EHRs) and scientific articles from the literature. We have developed several different phenotype extraction methods to demonstrate the utility of the corpus, and tested these methods on a further corpus, i.e., ShARe/CLEF 2013. Evaluation of our automated methods showed that PhenoCHF can facilitate the training of reliable phenotype extraction systems, which are robust to variations in text type. These results have been reinforced by evaluating our trained systems on the ShARe/CLEF corpus, which contains clinical records of various types. Like other studies within the biomedical domain, we found that solutions based on conditional random fields produced the best results, when coupled with a rich feature set. PhenoCHF is the first annotated corpus aimed at encoding detailed phenotypic information. The unique heterogeneous composition of the corpus has been shown to be advantageous in the training of systems that can accurately extract phenotypic information from a range of different text types. Although the scope of our annotation is currently limited to a single

  4. [Feature extraction for breast cancer data based on geometric algebra theory and feature selection using differential evolution].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Jing; Hong, Wenxue

    2014-12-01

    The feature extraction and feature selection are the important issues in pattern recognition. Based on the geometric algebra representation of vector, a new feature extraction method using blade coefficient of geometric algebra was proposed in this study. At the same time, an improved differential evolution (DE) feature selection method was proposed to solve the elevated high dimension issue. The simple linear discriminant analysis was used as the classifier. The result of the 10-fold cross-validation (10 CV) classification of public breast cancer biomedical dataset was more than 96% and proved superior to that of the original features and traditional feature extraction method.

  5. Education and research in biomedical engineering of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Benyó, Z

    2006-03-01

    Biomedical Engineering is a relatively new interdisciplinary science. This review paper presents the biomedical engineering activity, which is carried out at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE) and its partner institutions. In the first parts the main goals and the curriculum of the Biomedical Engineering Education Program is presented. The second part of the paper summarizes the most important biomedical engineering researches most of them carried out in the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory of BUTE.

  6. An enhanced approach for biomedical image restoration using image fusion techniques

    Science.gov (United States)

    Karam, Ghada Sabah; Abbas, Fatma Ismail; Abood, Ziad M.; Kadhim, Kadhim K.; Karam, Nada S.

    2018-05-01

    Biomedical image is generally noisy and little blur due to the physical mechanisms of the acquisition process, so one of the common degradations in biomedical image is their noise and poor contrast. The idea of biomedical image enhancement is to improve the quality of the image for early diagnosis. In this paper we are using Wavelet Transformation to remove the Gaussian noise from biomedical images: Positron Emission Tomography (PET) image and Radiography (Radio) image, in different color spaces (RGB, HSV, YCbCr), and we perform the fusion of the denoised images resulting from the above denoising techniques using add image method. Then some quantive performance metrics such as signal -to -noise ratio (SNR), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and Mean Square Error (MSE), etc. are computed. Since this statistical measurement helps in the assessment of fidelity and image quality. The results showed that our approach can be applied of Image types of color spaces for biomedical images.

  7. DNA nanotechnology and its applications in biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Sun, Lifan; Yu, Lu; Shen, Wanqiu

    2014-09-01

    DNA nanotechnology, which uses DNA as a material to self-assemble designed nanostructures, including DNA 2D arrays, 3D nanostructures, DNA nanotubes and DNA nanomechanical devices, has showed great promise in biomedical applications. Various DNA nanostructures have been used for protein characterization, enzyme assembly, biosensing, drug delivery and biomimetic assemblies. In this review, we will present recent advances of DNA nanotechnology and its applications in biomedical research field.

  8. Multiscale computer modeling in biomechanics and biomedical engineering

    CERN Document Server

    2013-01-01

    This book reviews the state-of-the-art in multiscale computer modeling, in terms of both accomplishments and challenges. The information in the book is particularly useful for biomedical engineers, medical physicists and researchers in systems biology, mathematical biology, micro-biomechanics and biomaterials who are interested in how to bridge between traditional biomedical engineering work at the organ and tissue scales, and the newer arenas of cellular and molecular bioengineering.

  9. Towards precision medicine; a new biomedical cosmology.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Vegter, M W

    2018-02-10

    Precision Medicine has become a common label for data-intensive and patient-driven biomedical research. Its intended future is reflected in endeavours such as the Precision Medicine Initiative in the USA. This article addresses the question whether it is possible to discern a new 'medical cosmology' in Precision Medicine, a concept that was developed by Nicholas Jewson to describe comprehensive transformations involving various dimensions of biomedical knowledge and practice, such as vocabularies, the roles of patients and physicians and the conceptualisation of disease. Subsequently, I will elaborate my assessment of the features of Precision Medicine with the help of Michel Foucault, by exploring how precision medicine involves a transformation along three axes: the axis of biomedical knowledge, of biomedical power and of the patient as a self. Patients are encouraged to become the managers of their own health status, while the medical domain is reframed as a data-sharing community, characterised by changing power relationships between providers and patients, producers and consumers. While the emerging Precision Medicine cosmology may surpass existing knowledge frameworks; it obscures previous traditions and reduces research-subjects to mere data. This in turn, means that the individual is both subjected to the neoliberal demand to share personal information, and at the same time has acquired the positive 'right' to become a member of the data-sharing community. The subject has to constantly negotiate the meaning of his or her data, which can either enable self-expression, or function as a commanding Superego.

  10. How to Learn Multidisciplinary Design: Biomedical Engineering in Cross Cultural Seminar

    OpenAIRE

    Shigehiro Hashimoto

    2016-01-01

    The way to learn multidisciplinary design has been discussed. "Biomedical engineering" is exemplified for multidisciplinary field. "Biomedical Engineering" makes the multidisciplinary research area, which includes biology, medicine, engineering, and others. The cross-cultural student seminars on biomedical engineering have been exemplified as the case studies. In the group work, students are divided into the small cross cultural groups. Each group finds a problem, methods to solve the problem...

  11. Summer Biomedical Engineering Institute 1972

    Science.gov (United States)

    Deloatch, E. M.

    1973-01-01

    The five problems studied for biomedical applications of NASA technology are reported. The studies reported are: design modification of electrophoretic equipment, operating room environment control, hematological viscometry, handling system for iridium, and indirect blood pressure measuring device.

  12. Handbook on advanced design and manufacturing technologies for biomedical devices

    CERN Document Server

    2013-01-01

    The last decades have seen remarkable advances in computer-aided design, engineering and manufacturing technologies, multi-variable simulation tools, medical imaging, biomimetic design, rapid prototyping, micro and nanomanufacturing methods and information management resources, all of which provide new horizons for the Biomedical Engineering fields and the Medical Device Industry. Handbook on Advanced Design and Manufacturing Technologies for Biomedical Devices covers such topics in depth, with an applied perspective and providing several case studies that help to analyze and understand the key factors of the different stages linked to the development of a novel biomedical device, from the conceptual and design steps, to the prototyping and industrialization phases. Main research challenges and future potentials are also discussed, taking into account relevant social demands and a growing market already exceeding billions of dollars. In time, advanced biomedical devices will decisively change methods and resu...

  13. Anatomy for Biomedical Engineers

    Science.gov (United States)

    Carmichael, Stephen W.; Robb, Richard A.

    2008-01-01

    There is a perceived need for anatomy instruction for graduate students enrolled in a biomedical engineering program. This appeared especially important for students interested in and using medical images. These students typically did not have a strong background in biology. The authors arranged for students to dissect regions of the body that…

  14. People with low back pain perceive needs for non-biomedical services in workplace, financial, social and household domains: a systematic review

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Louisa Chou

    2018-04-01

    Full Text Available Question: What needs of non-biomedical services are perceived by people with low back pain? Design: Systematic review of qualitative and quantitative studies examining perceived needs of non-biomedical services for low back pain, identified through searching of MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL and PsycINFO (1990 to 2016. Participants: Adults with low back pain of any duration. Data extraction and analysis: Descriptive data regarding study design and methodology were extracted. The preferences, expectations and satisfaction with non-biomedical services reported by people with low back pain were identified and categorised within areas of perceived need. Results: Twenty studies (19 qualitative and one quantitative involving 522 unique participants (total pool of 590 were included in this systematic review. Four areas emerged. Workplace: people with low back pain experience pressure to return to work despite difficulties with the demands of their occupation. They want their employers to be informed about low back pain and they desire workplace accommodations. Financial: people with low back pain want financial support, but have concerns about the inefficiencies of compensation systems and the stigma associated with financial remuneration. Social: people with low back pain report feeling disconnected from social networks and want back-specific social support. Household: people with low back pain report difficulties with household duties; however, there are few data regarding their need for auxiliary devices and domestic help. Conclusion: People with low back pain identified work place, financial and social pressures, and difficulties with household duties as areas of need beyond their healthcare requirements that affect their ability to comply with management of their condition. Consideration of such needs may inform physiotherapists, the wider health system, social networks and the workplace to provide more relevant and effective services. [Chou L, Cicuttini

  15. Biomedical Impact in Implantable Devices-The Transcatheter Aortic Valve as an example

    Science.gov (United States)

    Anastasiou, Alexandros; Saatsakis, George

    2015-09-01

    Objective: To update of the scientific community about the biomedical engineering involvement in the implantable devices chain. Moreover the transcatheter Aortic Valve (TAV) replacement, in the field of cardiac surgery, will be analyzed as an example of contemporary implantable technology. Methods: A detailed literature review regarding biomedical engineers participating in the implantable medical product chain, starting from the design of the product till the final implantation technique. Results: The scientific role of biomedical engineers has clearly been established. Certain parts of the product chain are implemented almost exclusively by experienced biomedical engineers such as the transcatheter aortic valve device. The successful professional should have a multidisciplinary knowledge, including medicine, in order to pursue the challenges for such intuitive technology. This clearly indicates that biomedical engineers are among the most appropriate scientists to accomplish such tasks. Conclusions: The biomedical engineering involvement in medical implantable devices has been widely accepted by the scientific community, worldwide. Its important contribution, starting from the design and extended to the development, clinical trials, scientific support, education of other scientists (surgeons, cardiologists, technicians etc.), and even to sales, makes biomedical engineers a valuable player in the scientific arena. Notably, the sector of implantable devices is constantly raising, as emerging technologies continuously set up new targets.

  16. Developing biomedical devices design, innovation and protection

    CERN Document Server

    Andreoni, Giuseppe; Colombo, Barbara

    2013-01-01

    During the past two decades incredible progress has been achieved in the instruments and devices used in the biomedical field. This progress stems from continuous scientific research that has taken advantage of many findings and advances in technology made available by universities and industry. Innovation is the key word, and in this context legal protection and intellectual property rights (IPR) are of crucial importance. This book provides students and practitioners with the fundamentals for designing biomedical devices and explains basic design principles. Furthermore, as an aid to the dev

  17. Graphene Field Effect Transistors for Biomedical Applications: Current Status and Future Prospects.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Forsyth, Rhiannan; Devadoss, Anitha; Guy, Owen J

    2017-07-26

    Since the discovery of the two-dimensional (2D) carbon material, graphene, just over a decade ago, the development of graphene-based field effect transistors (G-FETs) has become a widely researched area, particularly for use in point-of-care biomedical applications. G-FETs are particularly attractive as next generation bioelectronics due to their mass-scalability and low cost of the technology's manufacture. Furthermore, G-FETs offer the potential to complete label-free, rapid, and highly sensitive analysis coupled with a high sample throughput. These properties, coupled with the potential for integration into portable instrumentation, contribute to G-FETs' suitability for point-of-care diagnostics. This review focuses on elucidating the recent developments in the field of G-FET sensors that act on a bioaffinity basis, whereby a binding event between a bioreceptor and the target analyte is transduced into an electrical signal at the G-FET surface. Recognizing and quantifying these target analytes accurately and reliably is essential in diagnosing many diseases, therefore it is vital to design the G-FET with care. Taking into account some limitations of the sensor platform, such as Debye-Hükel screening and device surface area, is fundamental in developing improved bioelectronics for applications in the clinical setting. This review highlights some efforts undertaken in facing these limitations in order to bring G-FET development for biomedical applications forward.

  18. Graphene Field Effect Transistors for Biomedical Applications: Current Status and Future Prospects

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Rhiannan Forsyth

    2017-07-01

    Full Text Available Since the discovery of the two-dimensional (2D carbon material, graphene, just over a decade ago, the development of graphene-based field effect transistors (G-FETs has become a widely researched area, particularly for use in point-of-care biomedical applications. G-FETs are particularly attractive as next generation bioelectronics due to their mass-scalability and low cost of the technology’s manufacture. Furthermore, G-FETs offer the potential to complete label-free, rapid, and highly sensitive analysis coupled with a high sample throughput. These properties, coupled with the potential for integration into portable instrumentation, contribute to G-FETs’ suitability for point-of-care diagnostics. This review focuses on elucidating the recent developments in the field of G-FET sensors that act on a bioaffinity basis, whereby a binding event between a bioreceptor and the target analyte is transduced into an electrical signal at the G-FET surface. Recognizing and quantifying these target analytes accurately and reliably is essential in diagnosing many diseases, therefore it is vital to design the G-FET with care. Taking into account some limitations of the sensor platform, such as Debye–Hükel screening and device surface area, is fundamental in developing improved bioelectronics for applications in the clinical setting. This review highlights some efforts undertaken in facing these limitations in order to bring G-FET development for biomedical applications forward.

  19. Biomedical signal and image processing.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cerutti, Sergio; Baselli, Giuseppe; Bianchi, Anna; Caiani, Enrico; Contini, Davide; Cubeddu, Rinaldo; Dercole, Fabio; Rienzo, Luca; Liberati, Diego; Mainardi, Luca; Ravazzani, Paolo; Rinaldi, Sergio; Signorini, Maria; Torricelli, Alessandro

    2011-01-01

    Generally, physiological modeling and biomedical signal processing constitute two important paradigms of biomedical engineering (BME): their fundamental concepts are taught starting from undergraduate studies and are more completely dealt with in the last years of graduate curricula, as well as in Ph.D. courses. Traditionally, these two cultural aspects were separated, with the first one more oriented to physiological issues and how to model them and the second one more dedicated to the development of processing tools or algorithms to enhance useful information from clinical data. A practical consequence was that those who did models did not do signal processing and vice versa. However, in recent years,the need for closer integration between signal processing and modeling of the relevant biological systems emerged very clearly [1], [2]. This is not only true for training purposes(i.e., to properly prepare the new professional members of BME) but also for the development of newly conceived research projects in which the integration between biomedical signal and image processing (BSIP) and modeling plays a crucial role. Just to give simple examples, topics such as brain–computer machine or interfaces,neuroengineering, nonlinear dynamical analysis of the cardiovascular (CV) system,integration of sensory-motor characteristics aimed at the building of advanced prostheses and rehabilitation tools, and wearable devices for vital sign monitoring and others do require an intelligent fusion of modeling and signal processing competences that are certainly peculiar of our discipline of BME.

  20. Extraction and Characterization of Nano cellulose from Coconut Fiber

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Nor Liyana Ahmad; Ishak Ahmad

    2013-01-01

    Coconut husk fibers has been modified by some chemical treatments to extract cellulose nano crystals (CNC), which are alkali treatment, bleaching and acid hydrolysis using concentrated sulphuric acid. The effect of the treatments on the coconut husk fibers has been analysed using Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and X-Ray diffraction (XRD). Meanwhile, the morphology observation and thermal stability of the fiber have been analysed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) respectively. The analyses show that the chemical modification could eliminate some of the lignin and hemicelluloses of the fiber. Nano cellulose extracted from acid hydrolysis has been analysed using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) to define the size of extracted nano cellulose. The cellulose nano crystals from coconut fibre has the average diameter and length in the range 13.7±6.2 nm and 172.3±8.4 nm, respectively. The obtained nano cellulose may have the potential applications in the fields of biomedical, oil adsorption, membrane, pharmaceutical and bio composites. (author)

  1. Opal web services for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ren, Jingyuan; Williams, Nadya; Clementi, Luca; Krishnan, Sriram; Li, Wilfred W

    2010-07-01

    Biomedical applications have become increasingly complex, and they often require large-scale high-performance computing resources with a large number of processors and memory. The complexity of application deployment and the advances in cluster, grid and cloud computing require new modes of support for biomedical research. Scientific Software as a Service (sSaaS) enables scalable and transparent access to biomedical applications through simple standards-based Web interfaces. Towards this end, we built a production web server (http://ws.nbcr.net) in August 2007 to support the bioinformatics application called MEME. The server has grown since to include docking analysis with AutoDock and AutoDock Vina, electrostatic calculations using PDB2PQR and APBS, and off-target analysis using SMAP. All the applications on the servers are powered by Opal, a toolkit that allows users to wrap scientific applications easily as web services without any modification to the scientific codes, by writing simple XML configuration files. Opal allows both web forms-based access and programmatic access of all our applications. The Opal toolkit currently supports SOAP-based Web service access to a number of popular applications from the National Biomedical Computation Resource (NBCR) and affiliated collaborative and service projects. In addition, Opal's programmatic access capability allows our applications to be accessed through many workflow tools, including Vision, Kepler, Nimrod/K and VisTrails. From mid-August 2007 to the end of 2009, we have successfully executed 239,814 jobs. The number of successfully executed jobs more than doubled from 205 to 411 per day between 2008 and 2009. The Opal-enabled service model is useful for a wide range of applications. It provides for interoperation with other applications with Web Service interfaces, and allows application developers to focus on the scientific tool and workflow development. Web server availability: http://ws.nbcr.net.

  2. [Big data, medical language and biomedical terminology systems].

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schulz, Stefan; López-García, Pablo

    2015-08-01

    A variety of rich terminology systems, such as thesauri, classifications, nomenclatures and ontologies support information and knowledge processing in health care and biomedical research. Nevertheless, human language, manifested as individually written texts, persists as the primary carrier of information, in the description of disease courses or treatment episodes in electronic medical records, and in the description of biomedical research in scientific publications. In the context of the discussion about big data in biomedicine, we hypothesize that the abstraction of the individuality of natural language utterances into structured and semantically normalized information facilitates the use of statistical data analytics to distil new knowledge out of textual data from biomedical research and clinical routine. Computerized human language technologies are constantly evolving and are increasingly ready to annotate narratives with codes from biomedical terminology. However, this depends heavily on linguistic and terminological resources. The creation and maintenance of such resources is labor-intensive. Nevertheless, it is sensible to assume that big data methods can be used to support this process. Examples include the learning of hierarchical relationships, the grouping of synonymous terms into concepts and the disambiguation of homonyms. Although clear evidence is still lacking, the combination of natural language technologies, semantic resources, and big data analytics is promising.

  3. PhysiomeSpace: digital library service for biomedical data.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Testi, Debora; Quadrani, Paolo; Viceconti, Marco

    2010-06-28

    Every research laboratory has a wealth of biomedical data locked up, which, if shared with other experts, could dramatically improve biomedical and healthcare research. With the PhysiomeSpace service, it is now possible with a few clicks to share with selected users biomedical data in an easy, controlled and safe way. The digital library service is managed using a client-server approach. The client application is used to import, fuse and enrich the data information according to the PhysiomeSpace resource ontology and upload/download the data to the library. The server services are hosted on the Biomed Town community portal, where through a web interface, the user can complete the metadata curation and share and/or publish the data resources. A search service capitalizes on the domain ontology and on the enrichment of metadata for each resource, providing a powerful discovery environment. Once the users have found the data resources they are interested in, they can add them to their basket, following a metaphor popular in e-commerce web sites. When all the necessary resources have been selected, the user can download the basket contents into the client application. The digital library service is now in beta and open to the biomedical research community.

  4. Session Introduction: Challenges of Pattern Recognition in Biomedical Data.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Verma, Shefali Setia; Verma, Anurag; Basile, Anna Okula; Bishop, Marta-Byrska; Darabos, Christian

    2018-01-01

    The analysis of large biomedical data often presents with various challenges related to not just the size of the data, but also to data quality issues such as heterogeneity, multidimensionality, noisiness, and incompleteness of the data. The data-intensive nature of computational genomics problems in biomedical informatics warrants the development and use of massive computer infrastructure and advanced software tools and platforms, including but not limited to the use of cloud computing. Our session aims to address these challenges in handling big data for designing a study, performing analysis, and interpreting outcomes of these analyses. These challenges have been prevalent in many studies including those which focus on the identification of novel genetic variant-phenotype associations using data from sources like Electronic Health Records (EHRs) or multi-omic data. One of the biggest challenges to focus on is the imperfect nature of the biomedical data where a lot of noise and sparseness is observed. In our session, we will present research articles that can help in identifying innovative ways to recognize and overcome newly arising challenges associated with pattern recognition in biomedical data.

  5. Proceedings of the fifth PTCOG meeting and international workshop on biomedical accelerators

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    1987-04-01

    This volume contains the proceeding and individual papers presented at the Fifth PTCOG meeting and International Workshop on Biomedical Accelerators. The meeting was divided into sessions on the biomedical aspects of therapy delivery, new biomedical accelerators, facilities, and beam localization and status report. Individual papers have been abstracted and indexed for the Energy Data Base.

  6. Proceedings of the fifth PTCOG meeting and international workshop on biomedical accelerators

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    1987-04-01

    This volume contains the proceeding and individual papers presented at the Fifth PTCOG meeting and International Workshop on Biomedical Accelerators. The meeting was divided into sessions on the biomedical aspects of therapy delivery, new biomedical accelerators, facilities, and beam localization and status report. Individual papers have been abstracted and indexed for the Energy Data Base

  7. Globalization and changing trends of biomedical research output.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conte, Marisa L; Liu, Jing; Schnell, Santiago; Omary, M Bishr

    2017-06-15

    The US continues to lead the world in research and development (R&D) expenditures, but there is concern that stagnation in federal support for biomedical research in the US could undermine the leading role the US has played in biomedical and clinical research discoveries. As a readout of research output in the US compared with other countries, assessment of original research articles published by US-based authors in ten clinical and basic science journals during 2000 to 2015 showed a steady decline of articles in high-ranking journals or no significant change in mid-ranking journals. In contrast, publication output originating from China-based investigators, in both high- and mid-ranking journals, has steadily increased commensurate with significant growth in R&D expenditures. These observations support the current concerns of stagnant and year-to-year uncertainty in US federal funding of biomedical research.

  8. Cloud computing applications for biomedical science: A perspective.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Navale, Vivek; Bourne, Philip E

    2018-06-01

    Biomedical research has become a digital data-intensive endeavor, relying on secure and scalable computing, storage, and network infrastructure, which has traditionally been purchased, supported, and maintained locally. For certain types of biomedical applications, cloud computing has emerged as an alternative to locally maintained traditional computing approaches. Cloud computing offers users pay-as-you-go access to services such as hardware infrastructure, platforms, and software for solving common biomedical computational problems. Cloud computing services offer secure on-demand storage and analysis and are differentiated from traditional high-performance computing by their rapid availability and scalability of services. As such, cloud services are engineered to address big data problems and enhance the likelihood of data and analytics sharing, reproducibility, and reuse. Here, we provide an introductory perspective on cloud computing to help the reader determine its value to their own research.

  9. [The relevance of qualitative techniques in biomedical research].

    Science.gov (United States)

    de Camargo, Kenneth Rochel

    2008-01-01

    On observing how qualitative and quantitative studies are reported in the biomedical literature it becomes evident that, besides the virtual absence of the former, they are presented in different ways. Authors of qualitative studies seem to need almost invariably to explain why they choose a qualitative approach whereas that does not occur in quantitative studies. This paper takes Ludwik Fleck's comparative epistemology as a means of exploring those differences empirically, illustrating on the basis of two studies dealing with different aspects of biomedical practices how qualitative methods can elucidate a variety of questions pertaining to this field. The paper concludes presenting some structural characteristics of the biomedical field which on one hand, would not be explored properly without employing qualitative methods and, on the other hand, can help understanding the little value given to qualitative techniques in this area.

  10. Calculation of Fission Observables Through Event-by-Event Simulation

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Randrup, J; Vogt, R

    2009-06-04

    The increased interest in more exclusive fission observables has demanded more detailed models. We present here a new computational model, FREYA, that aims to met this need by producing large samples of complete fission events from which any observable of interest can then be extracted consistently, including arbitrary correlations. The various model assumptions are described and the potential utility of the model is illustrated by means of several novel correlation observables.

  11. Biomedical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Jensen, Jørgen Arendt; Andersen, Ole Trier; Wilhjelm, Jens Erik

    1998-01-01

    The paper gives a brief overview of the biomedical engineering research and education at the Technical University of Denmark. An account of the research activities since the 1950?s is given, and examples of major efforts within ultrasound, biomagnetism, and neuroimaging are described. The evolution...... of the teaching activities since the late 1960?s along with an account of the recent initiatives to make a biomedical engineering profile at the university is described....

  12. A System for Extracting Study Design Parameters from Nutritional Genomics Abstracts

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Kelly Cassidy

    2013-06-01

    Full Text Available The extraction of study design parameters from biomedical journal articles is an important problem in natural language processing (NLP. Such parameters define the characteristics of a study, such as the duration, the number of subjects, and their profile. Here we present a system for extracting study design parameters from sentences in article abstracts. This system will be used as a component of a larger system for creating nutrigenomics networks from articles in the nutritional genomics domain. The algorithms presented consist of manually designed rules expressed either as regular expressions or in terms of sentence parse structure. A number of filters and NLP tools are also utilized within a pipelined algorithmic framework. Using this novel approach, our system performs extraction at a finer level of granularity than comparable systems, while generating results that surpass the current state of the art.

  13. Text Mining Genotype-Phenotype Relationships from Biomedical Literature for Database Curation and Precision Medicine.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Singhal, Ayush; Simmons, Michael; Lu, Zhiyong

    2016-11-01

    The practice of precision medicine will ultimately require databases of genes and mutations for healthcare providers to reference in order to understand the clinical implications of each patient's genetic makeup. Although the highest quality databases require manual curation, text mining tools can facilitate the curation process, increasing accuracy, coverage, and productivity. However, to date there are no available text mining tools that offer high-accuracy performance for extracting such triplets from biomedical literature. In this paper we propose a high-performance machine learning approach to automate the extraction of disease-gene-variant triplets from biomedical literature. Our approach is unique because we identify the genes and protein products associated with each mutation from not just the local text content, but from a global context as well (from the Internet and from all literature in PubMed). Our approach also incorporates protein sequence validation and disease association using a novel text-mining-based machine learning approach. We extract disease-gene-variant triplets from all abstracts in PubMed related to a set of ten important diseases (breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, Alzheimer's disease, hemochromatosis, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), diabetes mellitus, and cystic fibrosis). We then evaluate our approach in two ways: (1) a direct comparison with the state of the art using benchmark datasets; (2) a validation study comparing the results of our approach with entries in a popular human-curated database (UniProt) for each of the previously mentioned diseases. In the benchmark comparison, our full approach achieves a 28% improvement in F1-measure (from 0.62 to 0.79) over the state-of-the-art results. For the validation study with UniProt Knowledgebase (KB), we present a thorough analysis of the results and errors. Across all diseases, our approach returned 272 triplets (disease

  14. Advances in electronic-nose technologies developed for biomedical applications

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dan Wilson; Manuela. Baietto

    2011-01-01

    The research and development of new electronic-nose applications in the biomedical field has accelerated at a phenomenal rate over the past 25 years. Many innovative e-nose technologies have provided solutions and applications to a wide variety of complex biomedical and healthcare problems. The purposes of this review are to present a comprehensive analysis of past and...

  15. Study on pivot-point vibration of molecular bond-rupture events by quartz crystal microbalance for biomedical diagnostics.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Yuan, Yong J; Jia, Renjie

    2012-01-01

    Bond-rupture scanning for biomedical diagnostics is examined using quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) experiments and microparticle mechanics modeling calculations. Specific and nonspecific interactions between a microparticle and its binding QCM surface can be distinguished by gradually increasing the amplitude of driving voltage applied to QCM and monitoring its frequency changes. This research proposes a mechanical model of interactions between biological molecules and a QCM substrate surface. The mechanical force required to break a biotin-streptavidin bond was calculated through a one-pivot-point bottom-up vibration model. The bond-rupture force increases with an increase of the microparticle radius, the QCM resonant frequency, and the amplitude of driving voltage applied to the QCM. The significance of the research on biological molecular bond rupture is extremely important in characterizing microbial (such as cells and virus) specificity, due to the force magnitude needed to break bonds using a transducer.

  16. Rewriting and suppressing UMLS terms for improved biomedical term identification

    NARCIS (Netherlands)

    K.M. Hettne (Kristina); E.M. van Mulligen (Erik); M.J. Schuemie (Martijn); R.J.A. Schijvenaars (Bob); J.A. Kors (Jan)

    2010-01-01

    textabstractBackground: Identification of terms is essential for biomedical text mining. We concentrate here on the use of vocabularies for term identification, specifically the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). To make the UMLS more suitable for biomedical text mining we implemented and

  17. Functional supramolecular polymers for biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Dong, Ruijiao; Zhou, Yongfeng; Huang, Xiaohua; Zhu, Xinyuan; Lu, Yunfeng; Shen, Jian

    2015-01-21

    As a novel class of dynamic and non-covalent polymers, supramolecular polymers not only display specific structural and physicochemical properties, but also have the ability to undergo reversible changes of structure, shape, and function in response to diverse external stimuli, making them promising candidates for widespread applications ranging from academic research to industrial fields. By an elegant combination of dynamic/reversible structures with exceptional functions, functional supramolecular polymers are attracting increasing attention in various fields. In particular, functional supramolecular polymers offer several unique advantages, including inherent degradable polymer backbones, smart responsiveness to various biological stimuli, and the ease for the incorporation of multiple biofunctionalities (e.g., targeting and bioactivity), thereby showing great potential for a wide range of applications in the biomedical field. In this Review, the trends and representative achievements in the design and synthesis of supramolecular polymers with specific functions are summarized, as well as their wide-ranging biomedical applications such as drug delivery, gene transfection, protein delivery, bio-imaging and diagnosis, tissue engineering, and biomimetic chemistry. These achievements further inspire persistent efforts in an emerging interdisciplin-ary research area of supramolecular chemistry, polymer science, material science, biomedical engineering, and nanotechnology. © 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

  18. Successful aging: considering non-biomedical constructs

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Carver LF

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available Lisa F Carver,1 Diane Buchanan2 1Department of Sociology, Queen’s University Kingston, ON, Canada; 2School of Nursing, Queen’s University Kingston, ON, Canada Objectives: Successful aging continues to be applied in a variety of contexts and is defined using a number of different constructs. Although previous reviews highlight the multidimensionality of successful aging, a few have focused exclusively on non-biomedical factors, as was done here. Methods: This scoping review searched Ovid Medline database for peer-reviewed English-language articles published between 2006 and 2015, offering a model of successful aging and involving research with older adults. Results: Seventy-two articles were reviewed. Thirty-five articles met the inclusion criteria. Common non-biomedical constructs associated with successful aging included engagement, optimism and/or positive attitude, resilience, spirituality and/or religiosity, self-efficacy and/or self-esteem, and gerotranscendence. Discussion: Successful aging is a complex process best described using a multidimensional model. Given that the majority of elders will experience illness and/or disease during the life course, public health initiatives that promote successful aging need to employ non-biomedical constructs, facilitating the inclusion of elders living with disease and/or disability. Keywords: successful aging, resilience, gerotranscendence, engagement, optimism

  19. Terahertz Imaging for Biomedical Applications Pattern Recognition and Tomographic Reconstruction

    CERN Document Server

    Yin, Xiaoxia; Abbott, Derek

    2012-01-01

    Terahertz Imaging for Biomedical Applications: Pattern Recognition and Tomographic Reconstruction presents the necessary algorithms needed to assist screening, diagnosis, and treatment, and these algorithms will play a critical role in the accurate detection of abnormalities present in biomedical imaging. Terahertz biomedical imaging has become an area of interest due to its ability to simultaneously acquire both image and spectral information. Terahertz imaging systems are being commercialized with an increasing number of trials performed in a biomedical setting. Terahertz tomographic imaging and detection technology contributes to the ability to identify opaque objects with clear boundaries,and would be useful to both in vivo and ex vivo environments. This book also: Introduces terahertz radiation techniques and provides a number of topical examples of signal and image processing, as well as machine learning Presents the most recent developments in an emerging field, terahertz radiation Utilizes new methods...

  20. Recombinant production of plant lectins in microbial systems for biomedical application – the frutalin case study

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Carla eOliveira

    2014-08-01

    Full Text Available Frutalin is a homotetrameric partly-glycosylated alpha-D-galactose-binding lectin of biomedical interest from Artocarpus incisa (breadfruit seeds, belonging to the jacalin-related lectins family. As other plant lectins, frutalin is a heterogeneous mixture of several isoforms possibly with distinct biological activities. The main problem of using such lectins as biomedical tools is that batch-to-batch variation in isoforms content may lead to inconstant results. The production of lectins by recombinant means has the advantage of obtaining high amounts of proteins with defined amino-acid sequences and more precise properties. In this mini review, we provide the strategies followed to produce two different forms of frutalin in two different microbial systems: Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris. The processing and functional properties of the recombinant frutalin obtained from these hosts are compared to those of frutalin extracted from breadfruit. Emphasis is given particularly to recombinant frutalin produced in P. pastoris, which showed a remarkable capacity as biomarker of human prostate cancer and as apoptosis-inducer of cancer cells. Recombinant frutalin production opens perspectives for its development as a new tool in human medicine.

  1. Recombinant production of plant lectins in microbial systems for biomedical application – the frutalin case study

    Science.gov (United States)

    Oliveira, Carla; Teixeira, José A.; Domingues, Lucília

    2014-01-01

    Frutalin is a homotetrameric partly glycosylated α-D-galactose-binding lectin of biomedical interest from Artocarpus incisa (breadfruit) seeds, belonging to the jacalin-related lectins family. As other plant lectins, frutalin is a heterogeneous mixture of several isoforms possibly with distinct biological activities. The main problem of using such lectins as biomedical tools is that “batch-to-batch” variation in isoforms content may lead to inconstant results. The production of lectins by recombinant means has the advantage of obtaining high amounts of proteins with defined amino-acid sequences and more precise properties. In this mini review, we provide the strategies followed to produce two different forms of frutalin in two different microbial systems: Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris. The processing and functional properties of the recombinant frutalin obtained from these hosts are compared to those of frutalin extracted from breadfruit. Emphasis is given particularly to recombinant frutalin produced in P. pastoris, which showed a remarkable capacity as biomarker of human prostate cancer and as apoptosis-inducer of cancer cells. Recombinant frutalin production opens perspectives for its development as a new tool in human medicine. PMID:25152749

  2. Potential Medicinal Application and Toxicity Evaluation of Extracts from Bamboo Plants.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Panee, Jun

    2015-06-01

    Bamboo plants play a significant role in traditional Asian medicine, especially in China and Japan. Biomedical investigations on the health-benefiting effects as well as toxicity of different parts and species of bamboo have been carried out worldwide since the 1960s, and documented a wide range of protective effects of bamboo-derived products, such as protection against oxidative stress, inflammation, lipotoxicity, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Some of these products may interfere with male and female reproductive function, thyroid hormone metabolism, and hepatic xenobiotransformation enzymes. The diversity of bamboo species, parts of the plants available for medicinal use, and different extraction methods suggest that bamboo has great potential for producing a range of extracts with functional utility in medicine.

  3. Compound image segmentation of published biomedical figures.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Pengyuan; Jiang, Xiangying; Kambhamettu, Chandra; Shatkay, Hagit

    2018-04-01

    Images convey essential information in biomedical publications. As such, there is a growing interest within the bio-curation and the bio-databases communities, to store images within publications as evidence for biomedical processes and for experimental results. However, many of the images in biomedical publications are compound images consisting of multiple panels, where each individual panel potentially conveys a different type of information. Segmenting such images into constituent panels is an essential first step toward utilizing images. In this article, we develop a new compound image segmentation system, FigSplit, which is based on Connected Component Analysis. To overcome shortcomings typically manifested by existing methods, we develop a quality assessment step for evaluating and modifying segmentations. Two methods are proposed to re-segment the images if the initial segmentation is inaccurate. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method compared with other methods. The system is publicly available for use at: https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~compbio/FigSplit. The code is available upon request. shatkay@udel.edu. Supplementary data are available online at Bioinformatics.

  4. Livestock in biomedical research: history, current status and future prospective.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Polejaeva, Irina A; Rutigliano, Heloisa M; Wells, Kevin D

    2016-01-01

    Livestock models have contributed significantly to biomedical and surgical advances. Their contribution is particularly prominent in the areas of physiology and assisted reproductive technologies, including understanding developmental processes and disorders, from ancient to modern times. Over the past 25 years, biomedical research that traditionally embraced a diverse species approach shifted to a small number of model species (e.g. mice and rats). The initial reasons for focusing the main efforts on the mouse were the availability of murine embryonic stem cells (ESCs) and genome sequence data. This powerful combination allowed for precise manipulation of the mouse genome (knockouts, knockins, transcriptional switches etc.) leading to ground-breaking discoveries on gene functions and regulation, and their role in health and disease. Despite the enormous contribution to biomedical research, mouse models have some major limitations. Their substantial differences compared with humans in body and organ size, lifespan and inbreeding result in pronounced metabolic, physiological and behavioural differences. Comparative studies of strategically chosen domestic species can complement mouse research and yield more rigorous findings. Because genome sequence and gene manipulation tools are now available for farm animals (cattle, pigs, sheep and goats), a larger number of livestock genetically engineered (GE) models will be accessible for biomedical research. This paper discusses the use of cattle, goats, sheep and pigs in biomedical research, provides an overview of transgenic technology in farm animals and highlights some of the beneficial characteristics of large animal models of human disease compared with the mouse. In addition, status and origin of current regulation of GE biomedical models is also reviewed.

  5. Inhibition of HIV-1 infection by aqueous extracts of Prunella vulgaris L.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    McCoy Joe-Ann

    2011-04-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background The mint family (Lamiaceae produces a wide variety of constituents with medicinal properties. Several family members have been reported to have antiviral activity, including lemon balm (Melissa officinalis L., sage (Salvia spp., peppermint (Mentha × piperita L., hyssop (Hyssopus officinalis L., basil (Ocimum spp. and self-heal (Prunella vulgaris L.. To further characterize the anti-lentiviral activities of Prunella vulgaris, water and ethanol extracts were tested for their ability to inhibit HIV-1 infection. Results Aqueous extracts contained more anti-viral activity than did ethanol extracts, displaying potent antiviral activity against HIV-1 at sub μg/mL concentrations with little to no cellular cytotoxicity at concentrations more than 100-fold higher. Time-of-addition studies demonstrated that aqueous extracts were effective when added during the first five hours following initiation of infection, suggesting that the botanical constituents were targeting entry events. Further analysis revealed that extracts inhibited both virus/cell interactions and post-binding events. While only 40% inhibition was maximally achieved in our virus/cell interaction studies, extract effectively blocked post-binding events at concentrations similar to those that blocked infection, suggesting that it was targeting of these latter steps that was most important for mediating inhibition of virus infectivity. Conclusions We demonstrate that aqueous P. vulgaris extracts inhibited HIV-1 infectivity. Our studies suggest that inhibition occurs primarily by interference of early, post-virion binding events. The ability of aqueous extracts to inhibit early events within the HIV life cycle suggests that these extracts, or purified constituents responsible for the antiviral activity, are promising microbicides and/or antivirals against HIV-1.

  6. Research evaluation support services in biomedical libraries.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gutzman, Karen Elizabeth; Bales, Michael E; Belter, Christopher W; Chambers, Thane; Chan, Liza; Holmes, Kristi L; Lu, Ya-Ling; Palmer, Lisa A; Reznik-Zellen, Rebecca C; Sarli, Cathy C; Suiter, Amy M; Wheeler, Terrie R

    2018-01-01

    The paper provides a review of current practices related to evaluation support services reported by seven biomedical and research libraries. A group of seven libraries from the United States and Canada described their experiences with establishing evaluation support services at their libraries. A questionnaire was distributed among the libraries to elicit information as to program development, service and staffing models, campus partnerships, training, products such as tools and reports, and resources used for evaluation support services. The libraries also reported interesting projects, lessons learned, and future plans. The seven libraries profiled in this paper report a variety of service models in providing evaluation support services to meet the needs of campus stakeholders. The service models range from research center cores, partnerships with research groups, and library programs with staff dedicated to evaluation support services. A variety of products and services were described such as an automated tool to develop rank-based metrics, consultation on appropriate metrics to use for evaluation, customized publication and citation reports, resource guides, classes and training, and others. Implementing these services has allowed the libraries to expand their roles on campus and to contribute more directly to the research missions of their institutions. Libraries can leverage a variety of evaluation support services as an opportunity to successfully meet an array of challenges confronting the biomedical research community, including robust efforts to report and demonstrate tangible and meaningful outcomes of biomedical research and clinical care. These services represent a transformative direction that can be emulated by other biomedical and research libraries.

  7. NICHD Biomedical Mass Spectrometry Core Facility

    Data.gov (United States)

    Federal Laboratory Consortium — The NICHD Biomedical Mass Spectrometry Core Facility was created under the auspices of the Office of the Scientific Director to provide high-end mass-spectrometric...

  8. Globalization and changing trends of biomedical research output

    Science.gov (United States)

    Conte, Marisa L.; Liu, Jing; Omary, M. Bishr

    2017-01-01

    The US continues to lead the world in research and development (R&D) expenditures, but there is concern that stagnation in federal support for biomedical research in the US could undermine the leading role the US has played in biomedical and clinical research discoveries. As a readout of research output in the US compared with other countries, assessment of original research articles published by US-based authors in ten clinical and basic science journals during 2000 to 2015 showed a steady decline of articles in high-ranking journals or no significant change in mid-ranking journals. In contrast, publication output originating from China-based investigators, in both high- and mid-ranking journals, has steadily increased commensurate with significant growth in R&D expenditures. These observations support the current concerns of stagnant and year-to-year uncertainty in US federal funding of biomedical research. PMID:28614799

  9. Structural DNA Nanotechnology: Artificial Nanostructures for Biomedical Research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ke, Yonggang; Castro, Carlos; Choi, Jong Hyun

    2018-04-04

    Structural DNA nanotechnology utilizes synthetic or biologic DNA as designer molecules for the self-assembly of artificial nanostructures. The field is founded upon the specific interactions between DNA molecules, known as Watson-Crick base pairing. After decades of active pursuit, DNA has demonstrated unprecedented versatility in constructing artificial nanostructures with significant complexity and programmability. The nanostructures could be either static, with well-controlled physicochemical properties, or dynamic, with the ability to reconfigure upon external stimuli. Researchers have devoted considerable effort to exploring the usability of DNA nanostructures in biomedical research. We review the basic design methods for fabricating both static and dynamic DNA nanostructures, along with their biomedical applications in fields such as biosensing, bioimaging, and drug delivery. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering Volume 20 is June 4, 2018. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

  10. Development of silver nanoparticles loaded chitosan-alginate constructs with biomedical potentialities.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bilal, Muhammad; Rasheed, Tahir; Iqbal, Hafiz M N; Li, Chuanlong; Hu, Hongbo; Zhang, Xuehong

    2017-12-01

    Herein, a facile biosynthesis of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) and AgNPs-loaded chitosan-alginate constructs with biomedical potentialities is reported. The UV-vis spectroscopic profile confirmed the synthesis of AgNPs using methanolic leaves extract of Euphorbia helioscopia. The newly developed AgNPs were characterized using various analytical and imaging techniques including UV-vis and FT-IR spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The optimally yielded AgNPs at 24h reaction period were loaded onto various chitosan-alginate constructs. A maximum of 95% loading efficiency (LE) was recorded with a chitosan: alginate ratio at 2:1, followed by 81% at 2:2 ratios. The anti-bacterial activities of AgNPs and AgNPs loaded chitosan-alginate constructs were tested against six bacterial strains i.e. Staphylococcus aureus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Morganella morganii and Haemophilus influenza. A significant reduction in the log values was recorded for all test constructs, in comparison to the initial bacterial count (control value, i.e., 1.5×10 8 CFU/mL). The cytotoxicity profile revealed complete biocompatibility against normal cell line i.e. L929. Almost all constructs showed considerable cytotoxicity up to certain extant against human epithelial cells (HeLa) cancer cells. In summary, the highest antibacterial activities along with anti-cancer behavior both suggest the biomedical potentialities of newly engineered AgNPs and AgNPs-loaded chitosan-alginate constructs. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  11. Career development in Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering: a student's roadmap.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Abu-Faraj, Ziad O

    2008-01-01

    Bioengineering/biomedical engineering education has progressed since the late 1950s and is still evolving in leading academic institutions worldwide. Today, Bioengineering/Biomedical Engineering is acclaimed as one of the most reputable fields within the global arena, and will likely be the catalyst for any future breakthroughs in Medicine and Biology. This paper provides a set of strategies and recommendations to be pursued by individuals aiming at planning and developing careers in this field. The paper targets the international student contemplating bioengineering/biomedical engineering as a career, with an underlying emphasis on the student within developing and transitional countries where career guidance is found deficient. The paper also provides a comprehensive definition of the field and an enumeration of its subdivisions.

  12. Biomedical Big Data Training Collaborative (BBDTC): An effort to bridge the talent gap in biomedical science and research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Purawat, Shweta; Cowart, Charles; Amaro, Rommie E; Altintas, Ilkay

    2017-05-01

    The BBDTC (https://biobigdata.ucsd.edu) is a community-oriented platform to encourage high-quality knowledge dissemination with the aim of growing a well-informed biomedical big data community through collaborative efforts on training and education. The BBDTC is an e-learning platform that empowers the biomedical community to develop, launch and share open training materials. It deploys hands-on software training toolboxes through virtualization technologies such as Amazon EC2 and Virtualbox. The BBDTC facilitates migration of courses across other course management platforms. The framework encourages knowledge sharing and content personalization through the playlist functionality that enables unique learning experiences and accelerates information dissemination to a wider community.

  13. Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering in Clinical Environment and Legal Surrounding

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Medvedec, M.

    2013-01-01

    An application of radiation in medicine is essentially associated with medical physics and biomedical engineering. The purpose of this study is to analyze the perception and the status of clinical medical physicists and biomedical engineers within the current international and Croatian legal framework. The International Labour Organization (ILO) in its International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-08) notes that medical physicists and biomedical engineers are an integral part of the health workforce, alongside those occupations classified as health professionals. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in its basic safety standards for radiation protection and safety of radiation sources also defines medical physicists as health professional. The World Health Organization (WHO) urges member states to include biomedical engineers in assessment, planning, procurement, implementation and management of health technologies, in particular biomedical devices. The Council of the European Union (EU) in its directives defines qualified professionals, especially experts in medical physics, as workers who carry out physical, technical and radiochemical work in regard to dosimetry, radiation protection, quality assurance and quality control, equipment management, etc. According to the U.S. Office of Labor Statistics, biomedical engineer is an occupation with the third-fastest growth rate in the economy, as projected for the period 2010-2020. It is expected that the role and the importance of medical physics and biomedical engineering profession in Croatia, a member state of ILO, WHO, IAEA and EU, will be soon fully regulated in a way comparable to the career paths of other health professionals within a clinical environment, primarily for the benefit of patients and hospital staff, healthcare facilities and healthcare system in general.(author)

  14. Are Graduate Students Rational? Evidence from the Market for Biomedical Scientists

    Science.gov (United States)

    Blume-Kohout, Margaret E.; Clack, John W.

    2013-01-01

    The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget expansion from 1998 through 2003 increased demand for biomedical research, raising relative wages and total employment in the market for biomedical scientists. However, because research doctorates in biomedical sciences can often take six years or more to complete, the full labor supply response to such changes in market conditions is not immediate, but rather is observed over a period of several years. Economic rational expectations models assume that prospective students anticipate these future changes, and also that students take into account the opportunity costs of their pursuing graduate training. Prior empirical research on student enrollment and degree completions in science and engineering (S&E) fields indicates that “cobweb” expectations prevail: that is, at least in theory, prospective graduate students respond to contemporaneous changes in market wages and employment, but do not forecast further changes that will arise by the time they complete their degrees and enter the labor market. In this article, we analyze time-series data on wages and employment of biomedical scientists versus alternative careers, on completions of S&E bachelor's degrees and biomedical sciences PhDs, and on research expenditures funded both by NIH and by biopharmaceutical firms, to examine the responsiveness of the biomedical sciences labor supply to changes in market conditions. Consistent with previous studies, we find that enrollments and completions in biomedical sciences PhD programs are responsive to market conditions at the time of students' enrollment. More striking, however, is the close correspondence between graduate student enrollments and completions, and changes in availability of NIH-funded traineeships, fellowships, and research assistantships. PMID:24376573

  15. Full text clustering and relationship network analysis of biomedical publications.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Renchu Guan

    Full Text Available Rapid developments in the biomedical sciences have increased the demand for automatic clustering of biomedical publications. In contrast to current approaches to text clustering, which focus exclusively on the contents of abstracts, a novel method is proposed for clustering and analysis of complete biomedical article texts. To reduce dimensionality, Cosine Coefficient is used on a sub-space of only two vectors, instead of computing the Euclidean distance within the space of all vectors. Then a strategy and algorithm is introduced for Semi-supervised Affinity Propagation (SSAP to improve analysis efficiency, using biomedical journal names as an evaluation background. Experimental results show that by avoiding high-dimensional sparse matrix computations, SSAP outperforms conventional k-means methods and improves upon the standard Affinity Propagation algorithm. In constructing a directed relationship network and distribution matrix for the clustering results, it can be noted that overlaps in scope and interests among BioMed publications can be easily identified, providing a valuable analytical tool for editors, authors and readers.

  16. Full text clustering and relationship network analysis of biomedical publications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Guan, Renchu; Yang, Chen; Marchese, Maurizio; Liang, Yanchun; Shi, Xiaohu

    2014-01-01

    Rapid developments in the biomedical sciences have increased the demand for automatic clustering of biomedical publications. In contrast to current approaches to text clustering, which focus exclusively on the contents of abstracts, a novel method is proposed for clustering and analysis of complete biomedical article texts. To reduce dimensionality, Cosine Coefficient is used on a sub-space of only two vectors, instead of computing the Euclidean distance within the space of all vectors. Then a strategy and algorithm is introduced for Semi-supervised Affinity Propagation (SSAP) to improve analysis efficiency, using biomedical journal names as an evaluation background. Experimental results show that by avoiding high-dimensional sparse matrix computations, SSAP outperforms conventional k-means methods and improves upon the standard Affinity Propagation algorithm. In constructing a directed relationship network and distribution matrix for the clustering results, it can be noted that overlaps in scope and interests among BioMed publications can be easily identified, providing a valuable analytical tool for editors, authors and readers.

  17. Navigating the Path to a Biomedical Science Career

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zimmerman, Andrea McNeely

    The number of biomedical PhD scientists being trained and graduated far exceeds the number of academic faculty positions and academic research jobs. If this trend is compelling biomedical PhD scientists to increasingly seek career paths outside of academia, then more should be known about their intentions, desires, training experiences, and career path navigation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand the process through which biomedical PhD scientists are trained and supported for navigating future career paths. In addition, the study sought to determine whether career development support efforts and opportunities should be redesigned to account for the proportion of PhD scientists following non-academic career pathways. Guided by the social cognitive career theory (SCCT) framework this study sought to answer the following central research question: How does a southeastern tier 1 research university train and support its biomedical PhD scientists for navigating their career paths? Key findings are: Many factors influence PhD scientists' career sector preference and job search process, but the most influential were relationships with faculty, particularly the mentor advisor; Planned activities are a significant aspect of the training process and provide skills for career success; and Planned activities provided skills necessary for a career, but influential factors directed the career path navigated. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

  18. PERIODIC SIGNALS IN BINARY MICROLENSING EVENTS

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Guo, Xinyi; Stefano, Rosanne Di; Esin, Ann; Taylor, Jeffrey

    2015-01-01

    Gravitational microlensing events are powerful tools for the study of stellar populations. In particular, they can be used to discover and study a variety of binary systems. A large number of binary lenses have already been found through microlensing surveys and a few of these systems show strong evidence of orbital motion on the timescale of the lensing event. We expect that more binary lenses of this kind will be detected in the future. For binaries whose orbital period is comparable to the event duration, the orbital motion can cause the lensing signal to deviate drastically from that of a static binary lens. The most striking property of such light curves is the presence of quasi-periodic features, which are produced as the source traverses the same regions in the rotating lens plane. These repeating features contain information about the orbital period of the lens. If this period can be extracted, then much can be learned about the lensing system even without performing time-consuming, detailed light-curve modeling. However, the relative transverse motion between the source and the lens significantly complicates the problem of period extraction. To resolve this difficulty, we present a modification of the standard Lomb–Scargle periodogram analysis. We test our method for four representative binary lens systems and demonstrate its efficiency in correctly extracting binary orbital periods

  19. Additive Manufacturing of Biomedical Constructs with Biomimetic Structural Organizations.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Li, Xiao; He, Jiankang; Zhang, Weijie; Jiang, Nan; Li, Dichen

    2016-11-09

    Additive manufacturing (AM), sometimes called three-dimensional (3D) printing, has attracted a lot of research interest and is presenting unprecedented opportunities in biomedical fields, because this technology enables the fabrication of biomedical constructs with great freedom and in high precision. An important strategy in AM of biomedical constructs is to mimic the structural organizations of natural biological organisms. This can be done by directly depositing cells and biomaterials, depositing biomaterial structures before seeding cells, or fabricating molds before casting biomaterials and cells. This review organizes the research advances of AM-based biomimetic biomedical constructs into three major directions: 3D constructs that mimic tubular and branched networks of vasculatures; 3D constructs that contains gradient interfaces between different tissues; and 3D constructs that have different cells positioned to create multicellular systems. Other recent advances are also highlighted, regarding the applications of AM for organs-on-chips, AM-based micro/nanostructures, and functional nanomaterials. Under this theme, multiple aspects of AM including imaging/characterization, material selection, design, and printing techniques are discussed. The outlook at the end of this review points out several possible research directions for the future.

  20. Compensatory neurofuzzy model for discrete data classification in biomedical

    Science.gov (United States)

    Ceylan, Rahime

    2015-03-01

    Biomedical data is separated to two main sections: signals and discrete data. So, studies in this area are about biomedical signal classification or biomedical discrete data classification. There are artificial intelligence models which are relevant to classification of ECG, EMG or EEG signals. In same way, in literature, many models exist for classification of discrete data taken as value of samples which can be results of blood analysis or biopsy in medical process. Each algorithm could not achieve high accuracy rate on classification of signal and discrete data. In this study, compensatory neurofuzzy network model is presented for classification of discrete data in biomedical pattern recognition area. The compensatory neurofuzzy network has a hybrid and binary classifier. In this system, the parameters of fuzzy systems are updated by backpropagation algorithm. The realized classifier model is conducted to two benchmark datasets (Wisconsin Breast Cancer dataset and Pima Indian Diabetes dataset). Experimental studies show that compensatory neurofuzzy network model achieved 96.11% accuracy rate in classification of breast cancer dataset and 69.08% accuracy rate was obtained in experiments made on diabetes dataset with only 10 iterations.

  1. A Novel Approach to Physiology Education for Biomedical Engineering Students

    Science.gov (United States)

    DiCecco, J.; Wu, J.; Kuwasawa, K.; Sun, Y.

    2007-01-01

    It is challenging for biomedical engineering programs to incorporate an indepth study of the systemic interdependence of cells, tissues, and organs into the rigorous mathematical curriculum that is the cornerstone of engineering education. To be sure, many biomedical engineering programs require their students to enroll in anatomy and physiology…

  2. Journal of Medical and Biomedical Sciences

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    PROMOTING ACCESS TO AFRICAN RESEARCH ... The Journal of Medical and Biomedical Science publishes original, novel, peer-reviewed reports that pertain to medical and allied health sciences; confirmatory reports of previously ...

  3. Distributed System for Spaceflight Biomedical Support

    Data.gov (United States)

    National Aeronautics and Space Administration — Our project investigated whether a software platform could integrate as wide a variety of devices and data types as needed for spaceflight biomedical support. The...

  4. Carbon-based nanomaterials: multifunctional materials for biomedical engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Cha, Chaenyung; Shin, Su Ryon; Annabi, Nasim; Dokmeci, Mehmet R; Khademhosseini, Ali

    2013-04-23

    Functional carbon-based nanomaterials (CBNs) have become important due to their unique combinations of chemical and physical properties (i.e., thermal and electrical conductivity, high mechanical strength, and optical properties), and extensive research efforts are being made to utilize these materials for various industrial applications, such as high-strength materials and electronics. These advantageous properties of CBNs are also actively investigated in several areas of biomedical engineering. This Perspective highlights different types of carbon-based nanomaterials currently used in biomedical applications.

  5. Electrical circuits in biomedical engineering problems with solutions

    CERN Document Server

    Keskin, Ali Ümit

    2017-01-01

    This authored monograph presents a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of electrical circuit theory in biomedical engineering, ideally suited as textbook for a course program. The book contains methods and theory, but the topical focus is placed on practical applications of circuit theory, including problems, solutions and case studies. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in electrical engineering who intend to embark on biomedical applications. The book is also very well suited for graduate students in the field. .

  6. Slow extraction control system of HIRFL-CSR

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Liu Wufeng; Qiao Weimin; Yuan Youjin; Mao Ruishi; Zhao Tiecheng

    2013-01-01

    For heavy-ion radiotherapy, HIRFL-CSR (Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou-Cooler Storage Ring) needs a long term uniform ion beam extraction from HIRFL-CSR main ring to high energy beam transport line to meet the requirement of heavy-ion radiotherapy's ion beam. Slow extraction control system uses the synchronous signal of HIRFL-CSR control system's timing system to realize process control. When the synchronous event data of HIRFL-CSR control system's timing system trigger controlling and changing data (frequency value, tune value, voltage value), the waveform generator will generate waveform by frequency value, tune value and voltage value, and will amplify the generated waveform by power amplifier to electrostatic deflector to achieve RF-KO slow extraction. The synchronous event receiver of slow extraction system is designed by using FPGA and optical fiber interface to keep high transmission speed and anti-jamming. HIRFL-CSR's running for heavy-ion radiotherapy and ten thousand seconds long period slow extraction experiments show that slow extraction control system is workable and can meet the requirement of heavy-ion radiotherapy's ion beam. (authors)

  7. A smart modules network for real time data acquisition: application to biomedical research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Logier, R; De jonckheere, J; Dassonneville, A; Chaud, P; Jeanne, M

    2009-01-01

    Healthcare monitoring applications require the measurement and the analysis of multiple physiological data. In the field of biomedical research, these data are issued from different devices involving data centralization and synchronization difficulties. In this paper, we describe a smart hardware modules network for biomedical data real time acquisition. This toolkit, composed of multiple electronic modules, allows users to acquire and transmit all kind of biomedical signals and parameters. These highly efficient hardware modules have been developed and tested especially for biomedical studies and used in a large number of clinical investigations.

  8. Development and Evaluation of Thesauri-Based Bibliographic Biomedical Search Engine

    Science.gov (United States)

    Alghoson, Abdullah

    2017-01-01

    Due to the large volume and exponential growth of biomedical documents (e.g., books, journal articles), it has become increasingly challenging for biomedical search engines to retrieve relevant documents based on users' search queries. Part of the challenge is the matching mechanism of free-text indexing that performs matching based on…

  9. Evaluating the operational risks of biomedical waste using failure mode and effects analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Chen, Ying-Chu; Tsai, Pei-Yi

    2017-06-01

    The potential problems and risks of biomedical waste generation have become increasingly apparent in recent years. This study applied a failure mode and effects analysis to evaluate the operational problems and risks of biomedical waste. The microbiological contamination of biomedical waste seldom receives the attention of researchers. In this study, the biomedical waste lifecycle was divided into seven processes: Production, classification, packaging, sterilisation, weighing, storage, and transportation. Twenty main failure modes were identified in these phases and risks were assessed based on their risk priority numbers. The failure modes in the production phase accounted for the highest proportion of the risk priority number score (27.7%). In the packaging phase, the failure mode 'sharp articles not placed in solid containers' had the highest risk priority number score, mainly owing to its high severity rating. The sterilisation process is the main difference in the treatment of infectious and non-infectious biomedical waste. The failure modes in the sterilisation phase were mainly owing to human factors (mostly related to operators). This study increases the understanding of the potential problems and risks associated with biomedical waste, thereby increasing awareness of how to improve the management of biomedical waste to better protect workers, the public, and the environment.

  10. Photoreconfigurable polymers for biomedical applications: chemistry and macromolecular engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Zhu, Congcong; Ninh, Chi; Bettinger, Christopher J

    2014-10-13

    Stimuli-responsive polymers play an important role in many biomedical technologies. Light responsive polymers are particularly desirable because the parameters of irradiated light and diverse photoactive chemistries produce a large number of combinations between functional materials and associated stimuli. This Review summarizes recent advances in utilizing photoactive chemistries in macromolecules for prospective use in biomedical applications. Special focus is granted to selection criterion when choosing photofunctional groups. Synthetic strategies to incorporate these functionalities into polymers and networks with different topologies are also highlighted herein. Prospective applications of these materials are discussed including programmable matrices for controlled release, dynamic scaffolds for tissue engineering, and functional coatings for medical devices. The article concludes by summarizing the state of the art in photoresponsive polymers for biomedical applications including current challenges and future opportunities.

  11. Biomedical Engineering Education in Perspective

    Science.gov (United States)

    Gowen, Richard J.

    1973-01-01

    Discusses recent developments in the health care industry and their impact on the future of biomedical engineering education. Indicates that a more thorough understanding of the complex functions of the living organism can be acquired through the application of engineering techniques to problems of life sciences. (CC)

  12. Determination of death: Metaphysical and biomedical discourse

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Irayda Jakušovaitė

    2016-01-01

    Full Text Available The prominence of biomedical criteria relying on brain death reduces the impact of metaphysical, anthropological, psychosocial, cultural, religious, and legal aspects disclosing the real value and essence of human life. The aim of this literature review is to discuss metaphysical and biomedical approaches toward death and their complimentary relationship in the determination of death. A critical appraisal of theoretical and scientific evidence and legal documents supported analytical discourse. In the metaphysical discourse of death, two main questions about what human death is and how to determine the fact of death clearly separate the ontological and epistemological aspects of death. During the 20th century, various understandings of human death distinguished two different approaches toward the human: the human is a subject of activities or a subject of the human being. Extinction of the difference between the entities and the being, emphasized as rational–logical instrumentation, is not sufficient to understand death thoroughly. Biological criteria of death are associated with biological features and irreversible loss of certain cognitive capabilities. Debating on the question “Does a brain death mean death of a human being?” two approaches are considering: the body-centrist and the mind-centrist. By bridging those two alternatives human death appears not only as biomedical, but also as metaphysical phenomenon. It was summarized that a predominance of clinical criteria for determination of death in practice leads to medicalization of death and limits the holistic perspective toward individual's death. Therefore, the balance of metaphysical and biomedical approaches toward death and its determination would decrease the medicalization of the concept of death.

  13. e-Science platform for translational biomedical imaging research: running, statistics, and analysis

    Science.gov (United States)

    Wang, Tusheng; Yang, Yuanyuan; Zhang, Kai; Wang, Mingqing; Zhao, Jun; Xu, Lisa; Zhang, Jianguo

    2015-03-01

    In order to enable multiple disciplines of medical researchers, clinical physicians and biomedical engineers working together in a secured, efficient, and transparent cooperative environment, we had designed an e-Science platform for biomedical imaging research and application cross multiple academic institutions and hospitals in Shanghai and presented this work in SPIE Medical Imaging conference held in San Diego in 2012. In past the two-years, we implemented a biomedical image chain including communication, storage, cooperation and computing based on this e-Science platform. In this presentation, we presented the operating status of this system in supporting biomedical imaging research, analyzed and discussed results of this system in supporting multi-disciplines collaboration cross-multiple institutions.

  14. Biomedical information retrieval across languages.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Daumke, Philipp; Markü, Kornél; Poprat, Michael; Schulz, Stefan; Klar, Rüdiger

    2007-06-01

    This work presents a new dictionary-based approach to biomedical cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) that addresses many of the general and domain-specific challenges in current CLIR research. Our method is based on a multilingual lexicon that was generated partly manually and partly automatically, and currently covers six European languages. It contains morphologically meaningful word fragments, termed subwords. Using subwords instead of entire words significantly reduces the number of lexical entries necessary to sufficiently cover a specific language and domain. Mediation between queries and documents is based on these subwords as well as on lists of word-n-grams that are generated from large monolingual corpora and constitute possible translation units. The translations are then sent to a standard Internet search engine. This process makes our approach an effective tool for searching the biomedical content of the World Wide Web in different languages. We evaluate this approach using the OHSUMED corpus, a large medical document collection, within a cross-language retrieval setting.

  15. Inorganic nanolayers: structure, preparation, and biomedical applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Saifullah, Bullo; Hussein, Mohd Zobir B

    2015-01-01

    Hydrotalcite-like compounds are two-dimensional inorganic nanolayers also known as clay minerals or anionic clays or layered double hydroxides/layered hydroxy salts, and have emerged as a single type of material with numerous biomedical applications, such as drug delivery, gene delivery, cosmetics, and biosensing. Inorganic nanolayers are promising materials due to their fascinating properties, such as ease of preparation, ability to intercalate different type of anions (inorganic, organic, biomolecules, and even genes), high thermal stability, delivery of intercalated anions in a sustained manner, high biocompatibility, and easy biodegradation. Inorganic nanolayers have been the focus for researchers over the last decade, resulting in widening application horizons, especially in the field of biomedical science. These nanolayers have been widely applied in drug and gene delivery. They have also been applied in biosensing technology, and most recently in bioimaging science. The suitability of inorganic nanolayers for application in drug delivery, gene delivery, biosensing technology, and bioimaging science makes them ideal materials to be applied for theranostic purposes. In this paper, we review the structure, methods of preparation, and latest advances made by inorganic nanolayers in such biomedical applications as drug delivery, gene delivery, biosensing, and bioimaging.

  16. A semantic-based method for extracting concept definitions from scientific publications: evaluation in the autism phenotype domain.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Hassanpour, Saeed; O'Connor, Martin J; Das, Amar K

    2013-08-12

    A variety of informatics approaches have been developed that use information retrieval, NLP and text-mining techniques to identify biomedical concepts and relations within scientific publications or their sentences. These approaches have not typically addressed the challenge of extracting more complex knowledge such as biomedical definitions. In our efforts to facilitate knowledge acquisition of rule-based definitions of autism phenotypes, we have developed a novel semantic-based text-mining approach that can automatically identify such definitions within text. Using an existing knowledge base of 156 autism phenotype definitions and an annotated corpus of 26 source articles containing such definitions, we evaluated and compared the average rank of correctly identified rule definition or corresponding rule template using both our semantic-based approach and a standard term-based approach. We examined three separate scenarios: (1) the snippet of text contained a definition already in the knowledge base; (2) the snippet contained an alternative definition for a concept in the knowledge base; and (3) the snippet contained a definition not in the knowledge base. Our semantic-based approach had a higher average rank than the term-based approach for each of the three scenarios (scenario 1: 3.8 vs. 5.0; scenario 2: 2.8 vs. 4.9; and scenario 3: 4.5 vs. 6.2), with each comparison significant at the p-value of 0.05 using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Our work shows that leveraging existing domain knowledge in the information extraction of biomedical definitions significantly improves the correct identification of such knowledge within sentences. Our method can thus help researchers rapidly acquire knowledge about biomedical definitions that are specified and evolving within an ever-growing corpus of scientific publications.

  17. The Impact of Regulating Social Science Research with Biomedical Regulations

    Science.gov (United States)

    Durosinmi, Brenda Braxton

    2011-01-01

    The Impact of Regulating Social Science Research with Biomedical Regulations Since 1974 Federal regulations have governed the use of human subjects in biomedical and social science research. The regulations are known as the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, and often referred to as the "Common Rule" because 18 Federal…

  18. Are we studying what matters? Health priorities and NIH-funded biomedical engineering research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rubin, Jessica B; Paltiel, A David; Saltzman, W Mark

    2010-07-01

    With the founding of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) in 1999, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) made explicit its dedication to expanding research in biomedical engineering. Ten years later, we sought to examine how closely federal funding for biomedical engineering aligns with U.S. health priorities. Using a publicly accessible database of research projects funded by the NIH in 2008, we identified 641 grants focused on biomedical engineering, 48% of which targeted specific diseases. Overall, we found that these disease-specific NIH-funded biomedical engineering research projects align with national health priorities, as quantified by three commonly utilized measures of disease burden: cause of death, disability-adjusted survival losses, and expenditures. However, we also found some illnesses (e.g., cancer and heart disease) for which the number of research projects funded deviated from our expectations, given their disease burden. Our findings suggest several possibilities for future studies that would serve to further inform the allocation of limited research dollars within the field of biomedical engineering.

  19. Biomedical informatics and the convergence of Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno (NBIC) technologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martin-Sanchez, F; Maojo, V

    2009-01-01

    To analyze the role that biomedical informatics could play in the application of the NBIC Converging Technologies in the medical field and raise awareness of these new areas throughout the Biomedical Informatics community. Review of the literature and analysis of the reference documents in this domain from the biomedical informatics perspective. Detailing existing developments showing that partial convergence of technologies have already yielded relevant results in biomedicine (such as bioinformatics or biochips). Input from current projects in which the authors are involved is also used. Information processing is a key issue in enabling the convergence of NBIC technologies. Researchers in biomedical informatics are in a privileged position to participate and actively develop this new scientific direction. The experience of biomedical informaticians in five decades of research in the medical area and their involvement in the completion of the Human and other genome projects will help them participate in a similar role for the development of applications of converging technologies -particularly in nanomedicine. The proposed convergence will bring bridges between traditional disciplines. Particular attention should be placed on the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by the NBIC convergence. These technologies provide new directions for research and education in Biomedical Informatics placing a greater emphasis in multidisciplinary approaches.

  20. Synthesis of Keratin-based Nanofiber for Biomedical Engineering.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Thompson, Zanshe S; Rijal, Nava P; Jarvis, David; Edwards, Angela; Bhattarai, Narayan

    2016-02-07

    Electrospinning, due to its versatility and potential for applications in various fields, is being frequently used to fabricate nanofibers. Production of these porous nanofibers is of great interest due to their unique physiochemical properties. Here we elaborate on the fabrication of keratin containing poly (ε-caprolactone) (PCL) nanofibers (i.e., PCL/keratin composite fiber). Water soluble keratin was first extracted from human hair and mixed with PCL in different ratios. The blended solution of PCL/keratin was transformed into nanofibrous membranes using a laboratory designed electrospinning set up. Fiber morphology and mechanical properties of the obtained nanofiber were observed and measured using scanning electron microscopy and tensile tester. Furthermore, degradability and chemical properties of the nanofiber were studied by FTIR. SEM images showed uniform surface morphology for PCL/keratin fibers of different compositions. These PCL/keratin fibers also showed excellent mechanical properties such as Young's modulus and failure point. Fibroblast cells were able to attach and proliferate thus proving good cell viability. Based on the characteristics discussed above, we can strongly argue that the blended nanofibers of natural and synthetic polymers can represent an excellent development of composite materials that can be used for different biomedical applications.

  1. Discovering gene annotations in biomedical text databases

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ozsoyoglu Gultekin

    2008-03-01

    Full Text Available Abstract Background Genes and gene products are frequently annotated with Gene Ontology concepts based on the evidence provided in genomics articles. Manually locating and curating information about a genomic entity from the biomedical literature requires vast amounts of human effort. Hence, there is clearly a need forautomated computational tools to annotate the genes and gene products with Gene Ontology concepts by computationally capturing the related knowledge embedded in textual data. Results In this article, we present an automated genomic entity annotation system, GEANN, which extracts information about the characteristics of genes and gene products in article abstracts from PubMed, and translates the discoveredknowledge into Gene Ontology (GO concepts, a widely-used standardized vocabulary of genomic traits. GEANN utilizes textual "extraction patterns", and a semantic matching framework to locate phrases matching to a pattern and produce Gene Ontology annotations for genes and gene products. In our experiments, GEANN has reached to the precision level of 78% at therecall level of 61%. On a select set of Gene Ontology concepts, GEANN either outperforms or is comparable to two other automated annotation studies. Use of WordNet for semantic pattern matching improves the precision and recall by 24% and 15%, respectively, and the improvement due to semantic pattern matching becomes more apparent as the Gene Ontology terms become more general. Conclusion GEANN is useful for two distinct purposes: (i automating the annotation of genomic entities with Gene Ontology concepts, and (ii providing existing annotations with additional "evidence articles" from the literature. The use of textual extraction patterns that are constructed based on the existing annotations achieve high precision. The semantic pattern matching framework provides a more flexible pattern matching scheme with respect to "exactmatching" with the advantage of locating approximate

  2. Power corrections and event shapes at LEP

    CERN Document Server

    Sanders, Michiel P

    2000-01-01

    Measurements of event shape variables from hadronic events collected by the LEP experiments, corresponding to hadronic center of mass energies between 30 GeV and 202 GeV are presented. Fits are performed to extract a, and the effective infrared strong coupling o with the power correction ansatz. Universality is observed for the effective coupling and comparisons are made with fragmentation models.

  3. Constructing the Web of Events from Raw Data in the Web of Things

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Yunchuan Sun

    2014-01-01

    Full Text Available An exciting paradise of data is emerging into our daily life along with the development of the Web of Things. Nowadays, volumes of heterogeneous raw data are continuously generated and captured by trillions of smart devices like sensors, smart controls, readers and other monitoring devices, while various events occur in the physical world. It is hard for users including people and smart things to master valuable information hidden in the massive data, which is more useful and understandable than raw data for users to get the crucial points for problems-solving. Thus, how to automatically and actively extract the knowledge of events and their internal links from the big data is one key challenge for the future Web of Things. This paper proposes an effective approach to extract events and their internal links from large scale data leveraging predefined event schemas in the Web of Things, which starts with grasping the critical data for useful events by filtering data with well-defined event types in the schema. A case study in the context of smart campus is presented to show the application of proposed approach for the extraction of events and their internal semantic links.

  4. Legal capacity and biomedicine: Biomedical discrimination

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Cvetić Radenka

    2011-01-01

    Full Text Available The article begins with the overview of the legal capacity as a general legal qualification recognized by the legal order guaranteeing the right to be a holder of rights and obligations. The article is then focused on the scope of the absolute Constitutional guarantee of the right to legal personality as well as on the Constitutional prohibition of discrimination which gives rise to the general equality before the Constitution and the law. The focus of this article is the moment when the legal capacity, or legal personality, is considered to be acquired. It then moves to the issue whether limiting the access to techniques of assisted reproduction (biomedical conception is contrary to the general rules on legal capacity, and whether this is a genuine form of biomedical discrimination.

  5. Application of infrared to biomedical sciences

    CERN Document Server

    Etehadtavakol, Mahnaz

    2017-01-01

    The book covers the latest updates in the application of infrared to biomedical sciences, a non-invasive, contactless, safe and easy approach imaging of skin and tissue temperatures. Its diagnostic procedure allows practitioners to identify the locations of abnormal chemical and blood vessel activity such as angiogenesis in body tissue. Its non-invasive approach works by applying the technology of the infrared camera and state-of-the-art software, where high-resolution digital infrared imaging technology benefits highly from enhanced image production, standardized image interpretation protocols, computerized comparison and storage, and sophisticated image enhancement and analysis. The book contains contributions from global prominent scientists in the area of infrared applications in biomedical studies. The target audience includes academics, practitioners, clinicians and students working in the area of infrared imaging in biomedicine.

  6. Biomedical imaging graduate curricula and courses: report from the 2005 Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Educational Summit.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Louie, Angelique; Izatt, Joseph; Ferrara, Katherine

    2006-02-01

    We present an overview of graduate programs in biomedical imaging that are currently available in the US. Special attention is given to the emerging technologies of molecular imaging and biophotonics. Discussions from the workshop on Graduate Imaging at the 2005 Whitaker Educational Summit meeting are summarized.

  7. 78 FR 22622 - Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science Research and...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2013-04-16

    ... DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical... the panels of the Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science Research... biomedical, behavioral and clinical science research. The panel meetings will be open to the public for...

  8. 77 FR 64598 - Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science Research and...

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-10-22

    ... DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical...) that the panels of the Joint Biomedical Laboratory Research and Development and Clinical Science... areas of biomedical, behavioral and clinical science research. The panel meetings will be open to the...

  9. Resource for the Development of Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Turteltaub, K. W. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Bench, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Buchholz, B. A. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Enright, H. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Kulp, K. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); McCartt, A. D. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Malfatti, M. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Ognibene, T. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Loots, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Stewart, B. J. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

    2016-04-08

    The NIH Research Resource for Biomedical AMS was originally funded at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999 to develop and apply the technology of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in broad- based biomedical research. The Resource’s niche is to fill needs for ultra high sensitivity quantitation when isotope-labeled agents are used. The Research Resource’s Technology Research and Development (TR&D) efforts will focus on the needs of the biomedical research community in the context of seven Driving Biomedical Projects (DBPs) that will drive the Center’s technical capabilities through three core TR&Ds. We will expand our present capabilities by developing a fully integrated HPLC AMS to increase our capabilities for metabolic measurements, we will develop methods to understand cellular processes and we will develop and validate methods for the application of AMS in human studies, which is a growing area of demand by collaborators and service users. In addition, we will continue to support new and ongoing collaborative and service projects that require the capabilities of the Resource. The Center will continue to train researchers in the use of the AMS capabilities being developed, and the results of all efforts will be widely disseminated to advance progress in biomedical research. Towards these goals, our specific aims are to:1.) Increase the value and information content of AMS measurements by combining molecular speciation with quantitation of defined macromolecular isolates. Specifically, develop and validate methods for macromolecule labeling, characterization and quantitation.2.) Develop and validate methods and strategies to enable AMS to become more broadly used in human studies. Specifically, demonstrate robust methods for conducting pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics studies in humans and model systems.3.) Increase the accessibility of AMS to the Biomedical research community and the throughput of AMS through direct coupling to separatory

  10. Resource for the Development of Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS)

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Tuerteltaub, K. W. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Bench, G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Buchholz, B. A. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Enright, H. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Kulp, K. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Loots, G. G. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); McCartt, A. D. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Malfatti, M. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Ognibene, T. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Stewart, B. J. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)

    2017-03-21

    The NIH Research Resource for Biomedical AMS was originally funded at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1999 to develop and apply the technology of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in broad- based biomedical research. The Resource’s niche is to fill needs for ultra high sensitivity quantitation when isotope-labeled agents are used. The Research Resource’s Technology Research and Development (TR&D) efforts will focus on the needs of the biomedical research community in the context of seven Driving Biomedical Projects (DBPs) that will drive the Center’s technical capabilities through three core TR&Ds. We will expand our present capabilities by developing a fully integrated HPLC AMS to increase our capabilities for metabolic measurements, we will develop methods to understand cellular processes and we will develop and validate methods for the application of AMS in human studies, which is a growing area of demand by collaborators and service users. In addition, we will continue to support new and ongoing collaborative and service projects that require the capabilities of the Resource. The Center will continue to train researchers in the use of the AMS capabilities being developed, and the results of all efforts will be widely disseminated to advance progress in biomedical research. Towards these goals, our specific aims are to:1.) Increase the value and information content of AMS measurements by combining molecular speciation with quantitation of defined macromolecular isolates. Specifically, develop and validate methods for macromolecule labeling, characterization and quantitation.2.) Develop and validate methods and strategies to enable AMS to become more broadly used in human studies. Specifically, demonstrate robust methods for conducting pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamics studies in humans and model systems.3.) Increase the accessibility of AMS to the Biomedical research community and the throughput of AMS through direct coupling to separatory

  11. Biochemical and biomedical applications of multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles: a review

    International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

    Huang, Shih-Hung; Juang, Ruey-Shin

    2011-01-01

    Nanotechnology offers tremendous potential for future medical diagnosis and therapy. Various types of nanoparticles have been extensively studied for numerous biochemical and biomedical applications. Magnetic nanoparticles are well-established nanomaterials that offer controlled size, ability to be manipulated by an external magnetic field, and enhancement of contrast in magnetic resonance imaging. As a result, these nanoparticles could have many applications including bacterial detection, protein purification, enzyme immobilization, contamination decorporation, drug delivery, hyperthermia, etc. All these biochemical and biomedical applications require that these nanoparticles should satisfy some prerequisites including high magnetization, good stability, biocompatibility, and biodegradability. Because of the potential benefits of multimodal functionality in biomedical applications, in this account highlights some general strategies to generate magnetic nanoparticle-based multifunctional nanostructures. After these magnetic nanoparticles are conjugated with proper ligands (e.g., nitrilotriacetate), polymers (e.g., polyacrylic acid, chitosan, temperature- and pH-sensitive polymers), antibodies, enzymes, and inorganic metals (e.g., gold), such biofunctional magnetic nanoparticles exhibit many advantages in biomedical applications. In addition, the multifunctional magnetic nanoparticles have been widely applied in biochemical fields including enzyme immobilization and protein purification.

  12. Institute for Scientific Information-indexed biomedical journals of Saudi Arabia

    Science.gov (United States)

    Rohra, Dileep K.; Rohra, Vikram K.; Cahusac, Peter

    2016-01-01

    Objectives: To compare the journal impact factor (JIF) and Eigenfactor score (ES) of Institute for Scientific Information (ISI)-indexed biomedical journals published from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) over the last 8 years. Methods: This is a retrospective study, conducted at Alfaisal University, Riyadh, KSA from January to March 2016. The Journal Citation Reports of ISI Web of Knowledge were accessed, and 6 Saudi biomedical journals were included for analysis. Results: All Saudi journals have improved their IF compared with their baseline. However, the performance of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Neurosciences has been exceptionally good. The biggest improvement in percent growth in JIF was seen in the Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal (approximately 887%) followed by Neurosciences (approximately 462%). Interestingly, the ES of all biomedical journals, except Saudi Journal of Gastroenterology and Saudi Medical Journal, increased over the years. The greatest growth in ES (more than 5 fold) was noted for Neurosciences and Saudi Pharmaceutical Journal. Conclusion: This study shows that the overall quality of all Saudi biomedical journals has improved in the last 8 years. PMID:27761565

  13. Data driven analysis of rain events: feature extraction, clustering, microphysical /macro physical relationship

    Science.gov (United States)

    Djallel Dilmi, Mohamed; Mallet, Cécile; Barthes, Laurent; Chazottes, Aymeric

    2017-04-01

    The study of rain time series records is mainly carried out using rainfall rate or rain accumulation parameters estimated on a fixed integration time (typically 1 min, 1 hour or 1 day). In this study we used the concept of rain event. In fact, the discrete and intermittent natures of rain processes make the definition of some features inadequate when defined on a fixed duration. Long integration times (hour, day) lead to mix rainy and clear air periods in the same sample. Small integration time (seconds, minutes) will lead to noisy data with a great sensibility to detector characteristics. The analysis on the whole rain event instead of individual short duration samples of a fixed duration allows to clarify relationships between features, in particular between macro physical and microphysical ones. This approach allows suppressing the intra-event variability partly due to measurement uncertainties and allows focusing on physical processes. An algorithm based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Self Organising Maps (SOM) is developed to obtain a parsimonious characterisation of rain events using a minimal set of variables. The use of self-organizing map (SOM) is justified by the fact that it allows to map a high dimensional data space in a two-dimensional space while preserving as much as possible the initial space topology in an unsupervised way. The obtained SOM allows providing the dependencies between variables and consequently removing redundant variables leading to a minimal subset of only five features (the event duration, the rain rate peak, the rain event depth, the event rain rate standard deviation and the absolute rain rate variation of order 0.5). To confirm relevance of the five selected features the corresponding SOM is analyzed. This analysis shows clearly the existence of relationships between features. It also shows the independence of the inter-event time (IETp) feature or the weak dependence of the Dry percentage in event (Dd%e) feature. This confirms

  14. Recent progress in biomedical applications of magnetic nanoparticles

    KAUST Repository

    Giouroudi, Ioanna

    2010-06-01

    Magnetic nanoparticles have been proposed for biomedical applications for several years. Various research groups worldwide have focused on improving their synthesis, their characterization techniques and the specific tailoring of their properties. Yet, it is the recent, impressive advances in nanotechnology and biotechnology which caused the breakthrough in their successful application in biomedicine. This paper aims at reviewing some current biomedical applications of magnetic nanoparticles as well as some recent patents in this field. Special emphasis is placed on i) hyperthermia, ii) therapeutics iii) diagnostics. Future prospects are also discussed. © 2010 Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.

  15. The distribution of biomedical research resources and international justice.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Resnik, David B

    2004-05-01

    According to some estimates, less than 10% of the world's biomedical research funds are dedicated to addressing problems that are responsible for 90% of the world's burden of disease. This paper explains why this disparity exists and what should be done about it. It argues that the disparity exists because: 1) multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies do not regard research and development investments on the health problems of developing nations to be economically lucrative; and 2) governmental agencies that sponsor biomedical research face little political pressure to allocate funds for the problems of developing nations. This paper argues that developed nations have an obligation to address disparities related to biomedical research funding. To facilitate this effort, developed countries should establish a trust fund dedicated to research on the health problems of developing nations similar to the Global AIDS Fund.

  16. NIH/NSF accelerate biomedical research innovations

    Science.gov (United States)

    A collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health will give NIH-funded researchers training to help them evaluate their scientific discoveries for commercial potential, with the aim of accelerating biomedical in

  17. The next generation of similarity measures that fully explore the semantics in biomedical ontologies.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Couto, Francisco M; Pinto, H Sofia

    2013-10-01

    There is a prominent trend to augment and improve the formality of biomedical ontologies. For example, this is shown by the current effort on adding description logic axioms, such as disjointness. One of the key ontology applications that can take advantage of this effort is the conceptual (functional) similarity measurement. The presence of description logic axioms in biomedical ontologies make the current structural or extensional approaches weaker and further away from providing sound semantics-based similarity measures. Although beneficial in small ontologies, the exploration of description logic axioms by semantics-based similarity measures is computational expensive. This limitation is critical for biomedical ontologies that normally contain thousands of concepts. Thus in the process of gaining their rightful place, biomedical functional similarity measures have to take the journey of finding how this rich and powerful knowledge can be fully explored while keeping feasible computational costs. This manuscript aims at promoting and guiding the development of compelling tools that deliver what the biomedical community will require in a near future: a next-generation of biomedical similarity measures that efficiently and fully explore the semantics present in biomedical ontologies.

  18. Acquiring Information from Wider Scope to Improve Event Extraction

    Science.gov (United States)

    2012-05-01

    film ”. 2.3.2 Argument Constraint Even if the scenario is well detected, there is no guarantee of identifying the event correctly. Think about words...from 2003 newswire, with the same genre and time period as ACE 2005 data to avoid possible influences of variations in the genre or time period on the

  19. Biogenic silver and gold nanoparticles synthesized using red ginseng root extract, and their applications.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Singh, Priyanka; Kim, Yeon Ju; Wang, Chao; Mathiyalagan, Ramya; El-Agamy Farh, Mohamed; Yang, Deok Chun

    2016-05-01

    In the present study, we report a green methodology for the synthesis of silver and gold nanoparticles, using the root extract of the herbal medicinal plant Korean red ginseng. The silver and gold nanoparticles were synthesized within 1 h and 10 min respectively. The nanoparticles generated were not aggregated, and remained stable for a long time, which suggests the nature of nanoparticles. The phytochemicals and ginsenosides present in the root extract assist in reducing and stabilizing the synthesized nanoparticles. The red ginseng root extract-generated silver nanoparticles exhibit antimicrobial activity against pathogenic microorganisms including Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, and Candida albicans. In addition, the silver nanoparticles exhibit biofilm degrading activity against S. aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Thus, the present study opens up a new possibility of synthesizing silver and gold nanoparticles in a green and rapid manner using Korean red ginseng root extract, and explores their biomedical applications.

  20. Misconduct Policies in High-Impact Biomedical Journals

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bosch, Xavier; Hernández, Cristina; Pericas, Juan M.; Doti, Pamela; Marušić, Ana

    2012-01-01

    Background It is not clear which research misconduct policies are adopted by biomedical journals. This study assessed the prevalence and content policies of the most influential biomedical journals on misconduct and procedures for handling and responding to allegations of misconduct. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study of misconduct policies of 399 high-impact biomedical journals in 27 biomedical categories of the Journal Citation Reports in December 2011. Journal websites were reviewed for information relevant to misconduct policies. Results Of 399 journals, 140 (35.1%) provided explicit definitions of misconduct. Falsification was explicitly mentioned by 113 (28.3%) journals, fabrication by 104 (26.1%), plagiarism by 224 (56.1%), duplication by 242 (60.7%) and image manipulation by 154 (38.6%). Procedures for responding to misconduct were described in 179 (44.9%) websites, including retraction, (30.8%) and expression of concern (16.3%). Plagiarism-checking services were used by 112 (28.1%) journals. The prevalences of all types of misconduct policies were higher in journals that endorsed any policy from editors’ associations, Office of Research Integrity or professional societies compared to those that did not state adherence to these policy-producing bodies. Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell had the most journals included (22.6% and 14.8%, respectively), with Wiley journals having greater a prevalence of misconduct definition and policies on falsification, fabrication and expression of concern and Elsevier of plagiarism-checking services. Conclusions Only a third of top-ranking peer-reviewed journals had publicly-available definitions of misconduct and less than a half described procedures for handling allegations of misconduct. As endorsement of international policies from policy-producing bodies was positively associated with implementation of policies and procedures, journals and their publishers should standardize their policies globally in order to

  1. Determination of death: Metaphysical and biomedical discourse.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Jakušovaitė, Irayda; Luneckaitė, Žydrunė; Peičius, Eimantas; Bagdonaitė, Živilė; Riklikienė, Olga; Stankevičius, Edgaras

    2016-01-01

    The prominence of biomedical criteria relying on brain death reduces the impact of metaphysical, anthropological, psychosocial, cultural, religious, and legal aspects disclosing the real value and essence of human life. The aim of this literature review is to discuss metaphysical and biomedical approaches toward death and their complimentary relationship in the determination of death. A critical appraisal of theoretical and scientific evidence and legal documents supported analytical discourse. In the metaphysical discourse of death, two main questions about what human death is and how to determine the fact of death clearly separate the ontological and epistemological aspects of death. During the 20th century, various understandings of human death distinguished two different approaches toward the human: the human is a subject of activities or a subject of the human being. Extinction of the difference between the entities and the being, emphasized as rational-logical instrumentation, is not sufficient to understand death thoroughly. Biological criteria of death are associated with biological features and irreversible loss of certain cognitive capabilities. Debating on the question "Does a brain death mean death of a human being?" two approaches are considering: the body-centrist and the mind-centrist. By bridging those two alternatives human death appears not only as biomedical, but also as metaphysical phenomenon. It was summarized that a predominance of clinical criteria for determination of death in practice leads to medicalization of death and limits the holistic perspective toward individual's death. Therefore, the balance of metaphysical and biomedical approaches toward death and its determination would decrease the medicalization of the concept of death. Copyright © 2016 The Lithuanian University of Health Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier Urban & Partner Sp. z o.o. All rights reserved.

  2. Misconduct policies in high-impact biomedical journals.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Xavier Bosch

    Full Text Available It is not clear which research misconduct policies are adopted by biomedical journals. This study assessed the prevalence and content policies of the most influential biomedical journals on misconduct and procedures for handling and responding to allegations of misconduct.We conducted a cross-sectional study of misconduct policies of 399 high-impact biomedical journals in 27 biomedical categories of the Journal Citation Reports in December 2011. Journal websites were reviewed for information relevant to misconduct policies.Of 399 journals, 140 (35.1% provided explicit definitions of misconduct. Falsification was explicitly mentioned by 113 (28.3% journals, fabrication by 104 (26.1%, plagiarism by 224 (56.1%, duplication by 242 (60.7% and image manipulation by 154 (38.6%. Procedures for responding to misconduct were described in 179 (44.9% websites, including retraction, (30.8% and expression of concern (16.3%. Plagiarism-checking services were used by 112 (28.1% journals. The prevalences of all types of misconduct policies were higher in journals that endorsed any policy from editors' associations, Office of Research Integrity or professional societies compared to those that did not state adherence to these policy-producing bodies. Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell had the most journals included (22.6% and 14.8%, respectively, with Wiley journals having greater a prevalence of misconduct definition and policies on falsification, fabrication and expression of concern and Elsevier of plagiarism-checking services.Only a third of top-ranking peer-reviewed journals had publicly-available definitions of misconduct and less than a half described procedures for handling allegations of misconduct. As endorsement of international policies from policy-producing bodies was positively associated with implementation of policies and procedures, journals and their publishers should standardize their policies globally in order to increase public trust in the

  3. Public accessibility of biomedical articles from PubMed Central reduces journal readership--retrospective cohort analysis.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Davis, Philip M

    2013-07-01

    Does PubMed Central--a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles--compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals' websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers.

  4. The National Center for Biomedical Ontology: Advancing Biomedicinethrough Structured Organization of Scientific Knowledge

    Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

    Rubin, Daniel L.; Lewis, Suzanna E.; Mungall, Chris J.; Misra,Sima; Westerfield, Monte; Ashburner, Michael; Sim, Ida; Chute,Christopher G.; Solbrig, Harold; Storey, Margaret-Anne; Smith, Barry; Day-Richter, John; Noy, Natalya F.; Musen, Mark A.

    2006-01-23

    The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (http://bioontology.org) is a consortium that comprises leading informaticians, biologists, clinicians, and ontologists funded by the NIH Roadmap to develop innovative technology and methods that allow scientists to record, manage, and disseminate biomedical information and knowledge in machine-processable form. The goals of the Center are: (1) to help unify the divergent and isolated efforts in ontology development by promoting high quality open-source, standards-based tools to create, manage, and use ontologies, (2) to create new software tools so that scientists can use ontologies to annotate and analyze biomedical data, (3) to provide a national resource for the ongoing evaluation, integration, and evolution of biomedical ontologies and associated tools and theories in the context of driving biomedical projects (DBPs), and (4) to disseminate the tools and resources of the Center and to identify, evaluate, and communicate best practices of ontology development to the biomedical community. The Center is working toward these objectives by providing tools to develop ontologies and to annotate experimental data, and by developing resources to integrate and relate existing ontologies as well as by creating repositories of biomedical data that are annotated using those ontologies. The Center is providing training workshops in ontology design, development, and usage, and is also pursuing research in ontology evaluation, quality, and use of ontologies to promote scientific discovery. Through the research activities within the Center, collaborations with the DBPs, and interactions with the biomedical community, our goal is to help scientists to work more effectively in the e-science paradigm, enhancing experiment design, experiment execution, data analysis, information synthesis, hypothesis generation and testing, and understand human disease.

  5. Biomedical photonics handbook

    CERN Document Server

    Vo-Dinh, Tuan

    2003-01-01

    1.Biomedical Photonics: A Revolution at the Interface of Science and Technology, T. Vo-DinhPHOTONICS AND TISSUE OPTICS2.Optical Properties of Tissues, J. Mobley and T. Vo-Dinh3.Light-Tissue Interactions, V.V. Tuchin 4.Theoretical Models and Algorithms in Optical Diffusion Tomography, S.J. Norton and T. Vo-DinhPHOTONIC DEVICES5.Laser Light in Biomedicine and the Life Sciences: From the Present to the Future, V.S. Letokhov6.Basic Instrumentation in Photonics, T. Vo-Dinh7.Optical Fibers and Waveguides for Medical Applications, I. Gannot and

  6. Extraction of relations between genes and diseases from text and large-scale data analysis: implications for translational research.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Bravo, Àlex; Piñero, Janet; Queralt-Rosinach, Núria; Rautschka, Michael; Furlong, Laura I

    2015-02-21

    Current biomedical research needs to leverage and exploit the large amount of information reported in scientific publications. Automated text mining approaches, in particular those aimed at finding relationships between entities, are key for identification of actionable knowledge from free text repositories. We present the BeFree system aimed at identifying relationships between biomedical entities with a special focus on genes and their associated diseases. By exploiting morpho-syntactic information of the text, BeFree is able to identify gene-disease, drug-disease and drug-target associations with state-of-the-art performance. The application of BeFree to real-case scenarios shows its effectiveness in extracting information relevant for translational research. We show the value of the gene-disease associations extracted by BeFree through a number of analyses and integration with other data sources. BeFree succeeds in identifying genes associated to a major cause of morbidity worldwide, depression, which are not present in other public resources. Moreover, large-scale extraction and analysis of gene-disease associations, and integration with current biomedical knowledge, provided interesting insights on the kind of information that can be found in the literature, and raised challenges regarding data prioritization and curation. We found that only a small proportion of the gene-disease associations discovered by using BeFree is collected in expert-curated databases. Thus, there is a pressing need to find alternative strategies to manual curation, in order to review, prioritize and curate text-mining data and incorporate it into domain-specific databases. We present our strategy for data prioritization and discuss its implications for supporting biomedical research and applications. BeFree is a novel text mining system that performs competitively for the identification of gene-disease, drug-disease and drug-target associations. Our analyses show that mining only a

  7. Mixed Methods in Biomedical and Health Services Research

    Science.gov (United States)

    Curry, Leslie A.; Krumholz, Harlan M.; O’Cathain, Alicia; Plano Clark, Vicki L.; Cherlin, Emily; Bradley, Elizabeth H.

    2013-01-01

    Mixed methods studies, in which qualitative and quantitative methods are combined in a single program of inquiry, can be valuable in biomedical and health services research, where the complementary strengths of each approach can yield greater insight into complex phenomena than either approach alone. Although interest in mixed methods is growing among science funders and investigators, written guidance on how to conduct and assess rigorous mixed methods studies is not readily accessible to the general readership of peer-reviewed biomedical and health services journals. Furthermore, existing guidelines for publishing mixed methods studies are not well known or applied by researchers and journal editors. Accordingly, this paper is intended to serve as a concise, practical resource for readers interested in core principles and practices of mixed methods research. We briefly describe mixed methods approaches and present illustrations from published biomedical and health services literature, including in cardiovascular care, summarize standards for the design and reporting of these studies, and highlight four central considerations for investigators interested in using these methods. PMID:23322807

  8. NCBO Ontology Recommender 2.0: an enhanced approach for biomedical ontology recommendation.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Martínez-Romero, Marcos; Jonquet, Clement; O'Connor, Martin J; Graybeal, John; Pazos, Alejandro; Musen, Mark A

    2017-06-07

    Ontologies and controlled terminologies have become increasingly important in biomedical research. Researchers use ontologies to annotate their data with ontology terms, enabling better data integration and interoperability across disparate datasets. However, the number, variety and complexity of current biomedical ontologies make it cumbersome for researchers to determine which ones to reuse for their specific needs. To overcome this problem, in 2010 the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) released the Ontology Recommender, which is a service that receives a biomedical text corpus or a list of keywords and suggests ontologies appropriate for referencing the indicated terms. We developed a new version of the NCBO Ontology Recommender. Called Ontology Recommender 2.0, it uses a novel recommendation approach that evaluates the relevance of an ontology to biomedical text data according to four different criteria: (1) the extent to which the ontology covers the input data; (2) the acceptance of the ontology in the biomedical community; (3) the level of detail of the ontology classes that cover the input data; and (4) the specialization of the ontology to the domain of the input data. Our evaluation shows that the enhanced recommender provides higher quality suggestions than the original approach, providing better coverage of the input data, more detailed information about their concepts, increased specialization for the domain of the input data, and greater acceptance and use in the community. In addition, it provides users with more explanatory information, along with suggestions of not only individual ontologies but also groups of ontologies to use together. It also can be customized to fit the needs of different ontology recommendation scenarios. Ontology Recommender 2.0 suggests relevant ontologies for annotating biomedical text data. It combines the strengths of its predecessor with a range of adjustments and new features that improve its reliability

  9. Design and analysis of biomedical studies

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Hansen, Merete Kjær

    been allocated this field. It is utterly important to utilize these ressources responsibly and efficiently by constantly striving to ensure high-quality biomedical studies. This involves the use of a sound statistical methodology regarding both the design and analysis of biomedical studies. The focus...... have conducted a literature study strongly indicating that this structure commonly is neglected in the statistical analysis. Based on this closed-form expressions for the approximate type I error rate are formulated. The type I error rates are assessed for a number of factor combinations as they appear...... in practice and in all cases the type I error rates are demonstrated to be severely inflated. Prior to conducting a study it is important to perform power and sample size determinations to ensure that reliable conclusions can be drawn from the statistical analysis. We have formulated closed-form expressions...

  10. Diamond-based materials for biomedical applications

    CERN Document Server

    Narayan, Roger

    2013-01-01

    Carbon is light-weight, strong, conductive and able to mimic natural materials within the body, making it ideal for many uses within biomedicine. Consequently a great deal of research and funding is being put into this interesting material with a view to increasing the variety of medical applications for which it is suitable. Diamond-based materials for biomedical applications presents readers with the fundamental principles and novel applications of this versatile material. Part one provides a clear introduction to diamond based materials for medical applications. Functionalization of diamond particles and surfaces is discussed, followed by biotribology and biological behaviour of nanocrystalline diamond coatings, and blood compatibility of diamond-like carbon coatings. Part two then goes on to review biomedical applications of diamond based materials, beginning with nanostructured diamond coatings for orthopaedic applications. Topics explored include ultrananocrystalline diamond for neural and ophthalmologi...

  11. A Formal Framework on the Semantics of Regulatory Relations and Their Presence as Verbs in Biomedical Texts

    DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

    Zambach, Sine

    2009-01-01

    Relations used in biomedical ontologies and expressed in biomedical texts can be very general or very specific. Regulatory relations are used widely in regulatory networks, for example, and therefore they appear systematically and highly frequently in biomedical texts. This work focuses on the lo......Relations used in biomedical ontologies and expressed in biomedical texts can be very general or very specific. Regulatory relations are used widely in regulatory networks, for example, and therefore they appear systematically and highly frequently in biomedical texts. This work focuses...

  12. RetroMine, or how to provide in-depth retrospective studies from Medline in a glance: the hepcidin use-case

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Cadeville Bertrand Ameline de

    2015-09-01

    Full Text Available The rapid expansion of biomedical literature has provoked an increased development of advanced text mining tools to rapidly extract relevant events from the continuously increasing amount of knowledge published periodically in PubMed. However, bioinvestigators are still reluctant to use these tools for two reasons: i a large volume of events is often extracted upon a query, and this volume is hard to manage, and ii background events dominate search results and overshadow more pertinent published information, especially for domain experts. In this paper, we propose an approach that incorporates the temporal dimension of published events to the process of information extraction to improve data selection and prioritize more pertinent periodically published knowledge for scientists. Indeed, instead of providing the total knowledge associated with a PubMed query, which is usually a mix of trivial background information and nonbackground information, we propose a method that incorporates time and selects non background and highly relevant biological entities and events published over time for bioinvestigators. Before excluding background events from the total knowledge extracted, a quantification of their amount is also provided. This work is illustrated by a case study regarding Hepcidin gene publications over a decade, a duration that is sufficiently long enough to generate alternative views on the overall data extracted.

  13. Welcome to Biomedical Research and Therapy

    OpenAIRE

    Phuc Van Pham

    2014-01-01

    On behalf of the Laboratory of Stem Cell Research and Application (SCL) and the Biomedical Research and Therapy' editorial team, we would like to extend a warm welcome to you. [Biomed Res Ther 2014; 1(1.000): 1-1

  14. Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    MHRL

    Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research. (A publication of the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences, University of Sierra Leone). ©Sierra Leone Journal .... was used to. She seemed to have had a change of mind after ingesting.

  15. A knowledge representation view on biomedical structure and function.

    Science.gov (United States)

    Schulz, Stefan; Hahn, Udo

    2002-01-01

    In biomedical ontologies, structural and functional considerations are of outstanding importance, and concepts which belong to these two categories are highly interdependent. At the representational level both axes must be clearly kept separate in order to support disciplined ontology engineering. Furthermore, the biaxial organization of physical structure (both by a taxonomic and partonomic order) entails intricate patterns of inference. We here propose a layered encoding of taxonomic, partonomic and functional aspects of biomedical concepts using description logics. PMID:12463912

  16. Switchable and responsive surfaces and materials for biomedical applications

    CERN Document Server

    Zhang, Johnathan

    2015-01-01

    Surface modification of biomaterials can ultimately determine whether a material is accepted or rejected from the human body, and a responsive surface can further make the material ""smart"" and ""intelligent"". Switchable and Responsive Surfaces and Materials for Biomedical Applications outlines synthetic and biological materials that are responsive under different stimuli, their surface design and modification techniques, and applicability in regenerative medicine/tissue engineering,  drug delivery, medical devices, and biomedical diagnostics. Part one provides a detailed overview of swit

  17. SOA-BD: Service Oriented Architecture for Biomedical Devices

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    João Marcos Teixeira Lacerda

    2017-05-01

    Full Text Available Introduction: The communication of information systems with biomedical devices has become complex not only due to the existence of several private communication protocols, but also to the immutable way that software is embedded into these devices. In this sense, this paper proposes a service-oriented architecture to access biomedical devices as a way to abstract the mechanisms of writing and reading data from these devices, thus contributing to enable the focus of the development team of biomedical software to be intended for its functional requirements, i.e. business rules relevant to the problem domain. Methods The SOA-BD architecture consists of five main components: A Web Service for transport and conversion of the device data, Communication Protocols to access the devices, Data Parsers to preprocess data, a Device Repository to store data and transmitted information and Error handling, for error handling of these information. For the development of SOA-BD, technologies such as the XML language and the Java programming language were used. Besides, Software Engineering concepts such as Design Patterns were also used. For the validation of this work, data has been collected from vital sign monitors in an Intensive Care Unit using HL7 standards. Results The tests obtained a difference of about only 1 second in terms of response time with the use of SOA-BD. Conclusion SOA-BD achieves important results such as the reduction on the access protocol complexity, the opportunity for treating patients over long distances, allowing easier development of monitoring applications and interoperability with biomedical devices from diverse manufacturers.

  18. Text Mining Genotype-Phenotype Relationships from Biomedical Literature for Database Curation and Precision Medicine.

    Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

    Ayush Singhal

    2016-11-01

    Full Text Available The practice of precision medicine will ultimately require databases of genes and mutations for healthcare providers to reference in order to understand the clinical implications of each patient's genetic makeup. Although the highest quality databases require manual curation, text mining tools can facilitate the curation process, increasing accuracy, coverage, and productivity. However, to date there are no available text mining tools that offer high-accuracy performance for extracting such triplets from biomedical literature. In this paper we propose a high-performance machine learning approach to automate the extraction of disease-gene-variant triplets from biomedical literature. Our approach is unique because we identify the genes and protein products associated with each mutation from not just the local text content, but from a global context as well (from the Internet and from all literature in PubMed. Our approach also incorporates protein sequence validation and disease association using a novel text-mining-based machine learning approach. We extract disease-gene-variant triplets from all abstracts in PubMed related to a set of ten important diseases (breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, acute myeloid leukemia, Alzheimer's disease, hemochromatosis, age-related macular degeneration (AMD, diabetes mellitus, and cystic fibrosis. We then evaluate our approach in two ways: (1 a direct comparison with the state of the art using benchmark datasets; (2 a validation study comparing the results of our approach with entries in a popular human-curated database (UniProt for each of the previously mentioned diseases. In the benchmark comparison, our full approach achieves a 28% improvement in F1-measure (from 0.62 to 0.79 over the state-of-the-art results. For the validation study with UniProt Knowledgebase (KB, we present a thorough analysis of the results and errors. Across all diseases, our approach returned 272 triplets

  19. Mathematics and physics of emerging biomedical imaging

    National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

    Committee on the Mathematics and Physics of Emerging Dynamic Biomedical Imaging, National Research Council

    .... Incorporating input from dozens of biomedical researchers who described what they perceived as key open problems of imaging that are amenable to attack by mathematical scientists and physicists...

  20. Some Aspects of the State-of-the-Arts in Biomedical Science ...

    African Journals Online (AJOL)

    Summary: In the biomedical sciences, there is need to generate solutions for Africa's health and economic problems through the impact of university research. To guide organizational transformation, the author here presents some aspects of the state-of-the-arts of biomedical science research in advanced countries using a ...