Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Repeated palpatory training of medical students on the Virtual Haptic Back.
The effectiveness of simulation-based training has been accepted with great success in many fields including medicine. Most of the simulation research and development in medicine has focused on surgery. ⋯ The Virtual Haptic Back (VHB) is a simulator based on virtual reality and haptics that is currently being used to train medical students in palpatory diagnosis. This study examined the effect of repeating the training on the VHB.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Telemedicine in extreme conditions: disasters, war, remote sites.
Telemedicine has developed around certain assumptions about connectivity and format. From the pioneer work of Kenneth Bird in the 1970's medical events separated by distance were connected for videoconference interaction [1]. The connection implied well developed telecommunications tools at both ends of the interaction. ⋯ New solutions can meet the expectation of being wherever services are need whenever the need arises. This chapter looks at the experiences, successes and failures of telemedicine in natural disaster, war, and extreme remote sites. The presentation is concluded with recommendations to make telemedicine integral to any disaster response and a natural tool for any human endeavor that requires sending people to remote and hostile environments.
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Australia is a large country with a small and scattered population. Specialist dermatology services are concentrated in the capital cities and larger urban centers on the coast. This has meant access to these services for Australians in rural and remote areas has been limited to those able to travel the often long distances to their nearest dermatologist. ⋯ In any event Tele-Derm is not trying to provide a service that is necessarily better then the traditional mode of delivery. It wishes to provide a service where none currently exists. To this end, Tele-Derm provides teleconsultation and online education in dermatology to doctors Australia wide.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Using ESB and BPEL for evolving healthcare systems towards SOA.
Healthcare organizations often face the challenge of integrating diverse and geographically disparate information technology systems to respond to changing requirements and to exploit the capabilities of modern technologies. Hence, systems evolution, through modification and extension of the existing information technology infrastructure, becomes a necessity. This paper takes a process perspective of healthcare delivery within and across organizational boundaries and the presents a disciplined approach for evolving healthcare systems towards a service-oriented architecture using the enterprise system bus middleware technology for resolving integration issues and the business process execution language for supporting collaboration requirements.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2008
Concepts on the pathogenesis of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis. Bone growth and mass, vertebral column, spinal cord, brain, skull, extra-spinal left-right skeletal length asymmetries, disproportions and molecular pathogenesis.
There is no generally accepted scientific theory for the causes of adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS). Encouraging advances thought to be related to AIS pathogenesis have recently been made in several fields including anthropometry of bone growth, bone mass, spinal growth modulation, extra-spinal left-right skeletal length asymmetries and disproportions, magnetic resonance imaging of vertebral column, spinal cord, brain, skull, and molecular pathogenesis. These advances are leading to the evaluation of new treatments including attempts at minimally invasive surgery on the spine and peri-apical ribs. ⋯ From these concepts, a collective model for AIS pathogenesis is formulated. The central concept of this model includes the body schema of the neural systems, widely-studied in adults, that control normal posture and coordinated movements with frames of reference in the posterior parietal cortex. The escalator concept has implications for the normal development of upright posture, and the evolution in humans of neural control, the trunk and unique bipedal gait.