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VMW Monthly -
September 1998
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ISSN 1388-722X
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Breaking news - just a click away:
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Contents
September 1998
Issue
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| atlantic |
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| Abdominal Trauma Simulator probes frontiers of realistic modelling
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| Students take virtual journey into the inner ear with networking technology
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| MCell and NetSolve computer programmes to perform complex simulations of brain cell activity
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| Electronic patient records generated by doctor's dictation through speech recognition
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| Silicon Graphics launches Virtual Reality Initiative at SIGGRAPH '98
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| Euromed |
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| Presentation of the Telemedical Information Society in FGCS
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| New informatics course teaches nurses the ropes of computer aided care
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| hospital |
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| KISMET simulation software forms heart of the Karlsruhe Endoscopic Surgery Trainer
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| ATM backbone turns SSM Health Businesses computer system into fully distributed network
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| HIPERCIR to offer hospitals low-cost tool for 3D visualization and segmentation
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| CAREN helps patients to overcome balance disorders with Virtual Reality
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| CardiAssist to enable 3D ultrasound diagnosis, training and teleconsultation between cardiologists
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| industrial |
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| SensiCath technology licensed to measure arterial blood gas of patients in shock
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| Endovascular 3D imaging software for successful treatment of aortic aneurysms
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| New messaging framework DeCAF 1.2 also suited for remote medical monitoring
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| Shared Medical Systems to acquire Pyrénées
Informatique and sign marketing agreement with IBM
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| Telus to resell Tandberg videoconferencing solutions including health care tools
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| Fakespace's Virtual Model Display systems demonstrated at SIGGRAPH'98
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| SGI's OpenGL Volumizer handles volumetric and surface data on equal basis
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| planet |
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| Implementation of Electronic Patient Record far from easy in Dutch Health Care
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| Interactive Simulation Models to guide medical students from basic knowledge to real clinical practice
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| In search of the perfect voxel similarity measure for medical image registration
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| Promising IT companies welcome at IST 98 Investment Forum
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| DiabCare Q-Net to improve quality in diabetes care and disease management
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| MDT puts medical specialists on speaking terms with their computer
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| Endoscopic surgery simulator Virgy interconnects distant doctors and students for training
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| Multi-regional pilot project TEMeTeN to promote advanced telemedicine and teleworking
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| snap |
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| Soft second quarter for Lumisys but improved PACS supporting products sales ahead
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| Electronic patient chart unites developing nations into One World
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| Medi-Monitor helps oblivious patients to timely take their pills
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| Trimension showcases interactive virtual solutions at SIGGRAPH'98
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Leads
September 1998
Issue
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| atlantic |
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| Abdominal Trauma Simulator probes frontiers of realistic modelling
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The major challenge for virtual reality simulation of surgical procedures lies in the realistic rendering of organ deformation when touched by medical instruments, and the resulting degree of haptic feedback, that is experienced by the surgeon. This is especially true in the delicate case of abdominal trauma, where open surgery is required. At HT Medical, based in Maryland, Dr. Morten Bro-Nielsen and his team have developed a testbed for simulation of open surgery from the front to remove a shattered kidney. The experimental approach involved the most innovative technologies to generate deformable organ models and a lot of high performance computational power to simulate complex actions, like cutting, bleeding, and force feedback. Fully realistic virtual scenes are impossible to create at present, so some of the surgical steps have to be substituted or suggested with a set of multimedia interfaces. |
| Students take virtual journey into the inner ear with networking technology
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At the University of Illinois, the team of Dr. Mary Rasmussen has designed a three-dimensional model of the inner ear from serial histologic sections. A powerful ImmersaDesk system, which is normally used in CAVE technology, displays the complicated interrelationships of the vital anatomic structures, embedded within the dense temporal bone, by means of true stereoscopic visualization. Surgeons and students can use a wand to make an extensive tour within the virtual temporal bone. This is done either in the same room or through networking with multiple interlinked ImmersaDesks between remote sites. In the latter case, the participants communicate by voice over standard telephone lines. The virtual temporal bone provides a time and cost saving learning tool for students as well as an ideal means for physicians to plan surgical approaches and procedures. |
| MCell and NetSolve computer programmes to perform complex simulations of brain cell activity
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At the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory (CNL) of Dr. Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and at the University of Tennessee Computer Science Department, participants in the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) have united their forces to combine two innovative computer applications, in order to conduct extremely powerful simulations of microscopic cellular processes. With the assistance of the MCell and NetSolve systems, it might even be possible to simulate the functions of an entire organism, as stated by neurobiologists in the recent issue of the enVision magazine. If simulation techniques are integrated with distributed processing workload methods, scientists are able to study in detail what exactly is happening at the level of the various brain synapses. |
| Electronic patient records generated by doctor's dictation through speech recognition
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The recent development of advanced speech recognition systems is starting to obtain a serious foothold in health care environments. IBM, Philips and Kurzweil are already designing specific medical application packages, while other companies, like Voice Input Technologies and Voice Activated Systems Technologies, have adapted existing speech recognition software for practical use in Hospital Information Systems (HIS). The physician will soon be able to create a fully computerized patient record (CPR) by simple and direct dictation of the right data into the system for seamless transcription into an online chart. In the June 1998 issue of the Physicians and Computers Journal, Dr. John Leipsic presents a survey of the speech recognition tools, currently available. |
| Silicon Graphics launches Virtual Reality Initiative at SIGGRAPH '98
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There is more to virtual reality (VR) than games and science projects. In the past years, it has become a business tool in order to enhance productivity, reduce industrial costs, and increase the customer's satisfaction. This evolution has caught the attention of the Silicon Graphics experts. As a result, the company has taken up the idea to promote the adoption of virtual reality technology in a broader commercial range. In no time, the Silicon Graphics Virtual Reality Initiative has seen the light. |
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| Euromed |
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| Presentation of the Telemedical Information Society in FGCS
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The scientific journal Future Generation Computer Systems , referred to as FGCS, has dedicated a special double issue to the subject of "The Telemedical Information Society". Guest editor and Euromed project manager, Dr. Andy Marsh, has selected a range of authors from all over Europe and the USA to offer a view on their research with relation to the technical implications of building a 21st century technological health care infrastructure. Eleven contributions shed a light on what telemedicine might look like in virtual reality as well as Web-based environments. |
| New informatics course teaches nurses the ropes of computer aided care
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In Slovenia, a major health care reform has been announced to provide excellent quality of care at reasonable costs for the whole of the population. Nurses are constantly being challenged to meet new tasks and responsibilities. This evolution has encouraged Professor Viljem Brumec, dean of the University College of Nursing and Professor Peter Kokol from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Maribor, to start up a short cycle degree course for Nursing Informatics and Computer aided Education (NICE). The three year project resides under the European Commission's TEMPUS PHARE section. Results and achievements will be disseminated to interested parties in other European countries. |
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| hospital |
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| KISMET simulation software forms heart of the Karlsruhe Endoscopic Surgery Trainer
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At the Forschungzentrum Karlsruhe, researchers have developed a virtual reality based training system for the simulation of diverse minimally invasive surgical tasks. This endoscopic surgery trainer consists of a high performance graphics workstation as core unit, running on the multipurpose KISMET software, which stands for Kinematic Simulation, Monitoring and Off-line Programming Environment for Telerobotics. The KISMET package has been extended for medical applications with haptic feedback interfaces, in order to calculate in real time the interaction between deformable objects and surgical instruments. In this way, the trainee is able to accurately track both the manipulations of the virtual tissues and the physical force feedback resulting from the object manipulation. |
| ATM backbone turns SSM Health Businesses computer system into fully distributed network
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Large health care institutions increasingly rely on powerful and efficient computer networking to meet the ever more strong demands for high qualitative patient care, accessible to every citizen at an affordable cost. SSM Health Care (SSMHC), being one of the biggest Catholic health care providers in the United States, has turned to the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology, provided by FORE Systems, to replace the existing T-1 lines, which transmitted the administrative and medical data between six of its member hospitals in the St. Louis region, at a speed of 1.5 Mbps. SSM Health Businesses (SSMHB), an SSMHC division, is already making plans to extend the current services of the newly installed ATM network backbone, such as electronic file interchange (EFI), and both office and e-mail functions, to distance learning applications for remote training. |
| HIPERCIR to offer hospitals low-cost tool for 3D visualization and segmentation
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The Radiological Department of the Dr. Peset Aleixandre Hospital in Valencia will be the first user to test HIPERCIR, a new software package for 3D real time visualization and semi-automatic segmentation of medical images by means of high performance computing techniques. This helpful tool for both diagnosis and therapy has the great advantage of using low-cost parallel processing methods while running on standard Windows NT based PCs. The HIPERCIR (High Performance Computing Intergrated Radiology) project partners aim at offering an affordable but qualitative solution to small hospitals for easy to use 3D imagery without a need for expensive hardware. |
| CAREN helps patients to overcome balance disorders with Virtual Reality
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In Europe, there currently exist no standard rehabilitation and exercise methods for diagnostic and corrective treatment of balance disorder.
Some 40 European clinics have a specialized therapeutic programme, based on cause related classification of balance disorders, but there is no network communicative protocol available to exchange medical experiences on used equipment and procedures. In addition, progress assessment is performed visually, since generic tools are lacking to accurately measure the patient's balance behaviour. This has inspired the Dutch TTN (Technology Transfer Nodes) to develop CAREN, an interactive Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment. This real time virtual reality applied tool-platform will allow
the medical expert to monitor the actual patient's behaviour side by side with the perceived successful behaviour after rehabilitation, and to correct all deviations from optimum. |
| CardiAssist to enable 3D ultrasound diagnosis, training and teleconsultation between cardiologists
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Three hospitals, three industrial corporations specialized in ultrasound and echocardiography, and three research departments are gathered in a consortium, coordinated by GMD, the German National Research Centre for Information Technology to implement the CardiAssist project. This three year initiative, residing under the Health Telematics Programme of the European Union, has been set up to optimize the quality of 3D ultrasound images for more accurate cardiac diagnosis, and to design a system for both training and teleconsultation purposes, in order to improve the information exchange between physicians, attached to cardiological centres and peripheral hospitals in different countries. |
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| industrial |
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| SensiCath technology licensed to measure arterial blood gas of patients in shock
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The Institute of Critical Care Medicine in Palm Springs, a not for profit institution founded to advance both life-saving and life-sustaining medical care, has decided to sign a license agreement with Optical Sensors, a designer of arterial blood gas (ABG) monitoring systems, which is based in Minnesota. This gives the company a right to commercialize all pending and issued patents of the Californian Institute with regard to the techniques of sub-lingual measuring of intra-mucosal CO2. This method is used to assess tissue perfusion, which is extremely valuable for the diagnosis and treatment of patients in shock. |
| Endovascular 3D imaging software for successful treatment of aortic aneurysms
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Patients suffering from Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms (AAA) are submitted to the innovative endoluminal stent graft procedure. Several medical centres throughout the USA are currently participating in Phase II for the Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) trial of the customized TALENT stent graft, developed by the World Medical Manufacturing Corporation. In order to offer the best conditions for the minimally invasive endovascular repair of aortic aneurysms, the Florida based company decided to close an agreement with Medical Media Systems to deliver the 3D Preview Surgery Planning Software. This valuable tool allows the clinical trial investigators to accurately plan the intervention, as well as to correctly size the endovascular stent grafts. |
| New messaging framework DeCAF 1.2 also suited for remote medical monitoring
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Specialist in reusable frameworks since 1993, Etsee Soft, Inc. has launched the brandnew DeCAF 1.2 release of its Java enterprise messaging framework after a large number of positive beta tests in the United States, Europe and the Pacific Rim. DeCAF, reffering to Distributed Command Architecture Framework, also constitutes the software basis for LifeConnect, a telemedicine system for remote patient monitoring, gathering information from distant locations in real time for dissemination, analysis and storage in the doctor's office, the hospital or at home. In Japan, LifeConnect has been implemented at Kurosawa Hospital in Nagano to monitor the patients' vital signs data from their homes or from clinics, situated throughout the islands. |
| Shared Medical Systems to acquire Pyrénées
Informatique and sign marketing agreement with IBM
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SMS Corporation is a major solutions provider in the IT health
care industry. The marketing agreement with IBM will enable the company to offer and install IBM hardware and middleware for health care applications in Europe, where it constitutes a preferred platform. The interaction between the two companies will allow both parties to supply public as well as private hospitals, no matter what size they are, with state-of-the-art technologies, which will absolutely meet their requirements. |
| Telus to resell Tandberg videoconferencing solutions including health care tools
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Tandberg, a major designer of visual communications systems is partnering with Telus Corporation, one of the largest telecommunications service providers in Canada for both consumers and businesses. Previous satisfying experiences in the areas of distance education and telemedicine have convinced the Telus staff to select Tandberg as their videoconferencing supplier for the future. |
| Fakespace's Virtual Model Display systems demonstrated at SIGGRAPH'98
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At the SIGGRAPH'98 Exhibition in Orlando, which took place from July 21st till 23rd, the expert public could get an interactive taste of the 3D visualization potential offered by the Immersive WorkBench and VersaBench, two Virtual Model Display (VMD) systems that are developed by Fakespace. In collaboration with Sun Microsystems, the company first showcased the Immersive WorkBench, using a beta version of the Java 3D programming environment. Second, the power of the new VersaBench was demonstrated in a range of scientific and practical applications. |
| SGI's OpenGL Volumizer handles volumetric and surface data on equal basis
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The medical, scientific, and energy visualization markets soon are to benefit from the tremendous potential, that OpenGL Volumizer, the new Silicon Graphics application programming interface (API), is offering. The revolutionary graphics API will open commercial doors to unsuspected volume rendering capabilities in real time. For the first time, standard graphics applications will be activated to mix volume with geometric objects in the very same scene. A variety of sophisticated methods will be generated to provide scientists with immediate mode visualization and exploration tools to support their research. |
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| planet |
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| Implementation of Electronic Patient Record far from easy in Dutch Health Care
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Two years ago, the project "Zorg2000" (= Care2000) has been launched by the Dutch National Programme Campaign Electronic Highways (NAP). The initial purpose was to supply the building blocks for an Electronic Patient Record (EPR), to be used by general practitioners (GPs), medical specialists and home care providers for mutual data exchange, in order to promote the concept of shared care. The plan hasn't worked out the way it should be, due to lack of streamlined communication between the various physician organizations, the hospital information systems vendors, and the project managers. In addition, the introduction of standards, codes, and definitions by the CSIZ centre for data standardization management also has failed. Today, new initiatives are undertaken to transform the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) into a real individualized EPR. |
| Interactive Simulation Models to guide medical students from basic knowledge to real clinical practice
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Since 1997, researchers at GMD, the German National Center for Information Technology, are working on the InterSim project. This two year effort involves the building of a range of Interactive Simulation Models to support medical students in their learning process. These computer-based systems provide intelligent assistance to the user, so that he can gain a better understanding of the physiology and pathology of human organs, as well as learn to handle diagnostic technology in an efficient way. In fact, this kind of simulators have to bridge the gap between the theoretical lectures of university professors and the practical skills of surgeons, allowing students to explore an object without any restriction to a predetermined path and to undertake action according to their findings. |
| In search of the perfect voxel similarity measure for medical image registration
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Dr. David Hawkes is director of the Image Processing Group in the Division of Radiological Sciences at the United Medical and Dental Schools (UMDS) of Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospitals in London. Together with his colleagues, he has been occupied since the early nineties with the complex study of automatic medical image registration, using the method of voxel similarity measures. During the annual conference of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging (ASCI'98), last June at the Vossemeren in Lommel, he was invited to share the preliminary outcomes of his research with the participants of this three day event. |
| Promising IT companies welcome at IST 98 Investment Forum
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Selected companies seeking investment or equity finance are invited to present their business cases and Information Technology related products to venture capitalists, and both institutional and industrial investors at the IST 98 Investment Forum. This initiative forms an integral part of the Information Society Technologies Conference and Exhibition 1998, which will take place in Vienna from November 30th to December 2nd. Organizers are the European Commission and a pan-European consortium of partners. |
| DiabCare Q-Net to improve quality in diabetes care and disease management
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Started off in February 1996, DiabCare Q-Net, as a three year initiative, forms part of the European Commission's Telematics Applications Programme. The project's goal is threefold and consists in the development of a European quality network for diabetes benchmarking, the improvement of diabetes care and prevention, and the application of telemedicine in the form of image and video information to detect retinopathy and to remotely examine foot and leg ulcers. For this purpose, a telemedicine demonstrator has been designed. The project partners hope to achieve on all national, regional and local levels within Europe, the efficient functioning of a service centres' network for the evaluation and optimization of diabetes care. Health providers will be able to access and link the latest guidelines to their own data. |
| MDT puts medical specialists on speaking terms with their computer
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Are we about to move towards keyboardless hospital information systems (HIS) in the years to come? Speech recognition systems for English speaking health care professionals are already conquering the markets. The Dutch company, MDT Information Division BV, has now designed the first speech recognition software package for Dutch medical terminology. Other versions are being prepared for Germany, Belgium, and France. Italy and Spain soon will follow. MDT is working together with native speakers who are familiar with the vocabulary of the various medical specialities in the different countries. The Clinical Reporter system has been developed for use in orthopaedics, surgery, radiology and gynaecology. Managing Director, Dion Janssen, has set his mind on teaching European doctors to talk with the computer. |
| Endoscopic surgery simulator Virgy interconnects distant doctors and students for training
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Since a few years, researchers of the VRAI (Virtual Reality and Active Interface) Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, are working on the development of a laparoscopic surgery training system. The project, called Virgy, consists of two complementary design phases. The first one relates to the creation of a virtual environment by means of the Libptk, a 3D graphic sensor engine which generates the population of all the objects in the simulation. A so-called surgical ghost provides the physician with force feedback through the endoscopic tools, that are used for manipulation of the virtual organs. The second phase involves a multimedia communication platform, allowing surgeons at remote locations to co-operate and offering students an opportunity for distant learning. |
| Multi-regional pilot project TEMeTeN to promote advanced telemedicine and teleworking
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The regions of Crete in Greece, the Balearics in Spain, Sardegna in Italy and Tampere in Finland have set up a telematics applications and services initiative within the European Programme for International Co-operation and Regional Economic Innovation, in order to move " Towards a European Medical and Teleworking Network" (TEMeTeN). Rather than aiming to develop new technologies, the project partners prefer to use the already existing infrastructure of terrestrial, mobile and satellite communications, interoperable portable devices, multimedia information systems and computer supported co-operative worksystems to demonstrate what a future information society may look like in isolated areas, which are nevertheless becoming very attractive for tourists. |
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| snap |
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| Soft second quarter for Lumisys but improved PACS supporting products sales ahead
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The Californian developer of fully integrated soft- and hardware product suites for Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS), Lumisys, has issued its second quarter results for 1998. Compared to the turnover in 1997 for the same period, sales and earnings have slightly come down but there is no reason to get pessimistic, since six supplementary system integrators have signed up during the second quarter, including an important telemedicine provider in Canada. As such, they complete the success of the first quarter, in which eight new contracts were signed. |
| Electronic patient chart unites developing nations into One World
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Children and adults in developing regions who are isolated from medical services, far too often can only rely on care and relief workers sent by humanitarian organizations, international care agencies or foreign governments. The PhysiTel company is trying to meet the pressing health care needs in these areas through the One World programme. The Texas based manufacturer of telemedicine products wants to provide health care groups offering medical aid in developing and war-torn countries, with its ChartMailer software at little or no cost at all. The application has been designed to combine medical images and paper-based patient records into a single, streamlined electronic patient chart for transmission over the Internet by means of conventional telephone lines. |
| Medi-Monitor helps oblivious patients to timely take their pills
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Next October, a voluntary programme will start to encourage patients suffering from congestive heart failure (CHF), to take their prescriptions at regular times. The initiative is a joint effort between the Mid Atlantic Medical Services Inc. (MAMSI), one of the leading managed care organizations in the United States, and InforMedix Inc., a developer of interactive telemedicine devices and the inventor of the Medi-Monitor unit. This little portable data-collector alerts the patient when it is time to take his medication and assesses both his general health status and quality of life. Every night, the information is electronically being transmitted to the patient's physician for review and analysis. |
| Trimension showcases interactive virtual solutions at SIGGRAPH'98
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During the SIGGHRAPH'98 Exhibition in Orlando, last July, Trimension Systems presented the largest interactive computer workstation. This V-DESK10, a visualization system for collaborative real time design, enables immersive virtual reality viewing in high ambient light. In the expo's Digital Pavilion, the company provided the Enhanced Realities section with the Relocatable Reality Room, a self contained and portable Reality Center to simultaneously immerse fairly large groups of people into a virtual reality environment. |
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© 2006, Genias Benelux
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