Eleni Kaldoudi

On the Classification of Emotional Biosignals Evoked While Viewing Affective Pictures: An Integrated Data-Mining-Based Approach for Healthcare Applications

Recent neuroscience findings demonstrate the fundamental role of emotion in the maintenance of physical and mental health. In the present study, a novel architecture is proposed for the robust discrimination of emotional physiological signals evoked upon viewing pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Biosignals are multichannel recordings from both the central and the autonomic nervous systems. Following the bidirectional emotion theory model, IAPS pictures are rated along two dimensions, namely, their valence and arousal. Following this model, biosignals in this paper are initially differentiated according to their valence dimension by means of a data mining approach, which is the C4.5 decision tree algorithm. Then, the valence and the gender information serve as an input to a Mahalanobis distance classifier, which dissects the data into high and low arousing. Results are described in Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, thereby accounting for platform independency, easy interconnectivity, and information exchange. The average recognition (success) rate was 77.68% for the discrimination of four emotional states, differing both in their arousal and valence dimension. It is, therefore, envisaged that the proposed approach holds promise for the efficient discrimination of negative and positive emotions, and it is hereby discussed how future developments may be steered to serve for affective healthcare applications, such as the monitoring of the elderly or chronically ill people.

Linked education: interlinking educational resources and the Web of data

Research on interoperability of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) repositories throughout the last decade has led to a fragmented landscape of competing approaches, such as metadata schemas and interface mechanisms. However, so far Web-scale integration of resources is not facilitated, mainly due to the lack of take-up of shared principles, datasets and schemas. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has emerged as the de-facto standard for sharing data on the Web and offers a large potential to solve interoperability issues in the field of TEL. In this paper, we describe a general approach to exploit the wealth of already existing TEL data on the Web by allowing its exposure as Linked Data and by taking into account automated enrichment and interlinking techniques to provide rich and well-interlinked data for the educational domain. This approach has been implemented in the context of the mEducator project where data from a number of open TEL data repositories has been integrated, exposed and enriched by following Linked Data principles.

A chemical shift selective inversion recovery sequence for fat-suppressed MRI: Theory and experimental validation

Fat-suppression techniques are used extensively in routine proton nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to produce images free from chemical shift artifacts and dynamic range problems. A hybrid fat-suppression sequence is studied which combines the principle of short time inversion recovery with chemical shift selective imaging. The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical understanding of the role of the sequence parameters, as well as to compare this hybrid sequence with its most closely related conventional fat-suppression techniques, namely selective pre-saturation and short time inversion recovery (STIR) imaging. The hybrid technique is shown to be robust in normal use, and more tolerant than the conventional methods to mis-settings of parameters such as inversion time, as well as tip angle and frequency bandwidth of the fat selective pulse.

Problem-Based Learning via Web 2.0 Technologies

During the last few decades, medical education is shifting is increasingly embracing active learning approaches. This shift from teaching to learning is also strongly related to an involvement of information and communication technology, and especially the Internet and the Web. The emergence of Internet 2.0 is indeed being stressed as a promising tool for advanced support of medicine and medical education. Although Web 2.0 emphasizes on participation, in its early days is still used in the majority of cases to hold and provide content (albeit created dynamically and via peer participation and collaboration) and then systematically deliver it to students. In this paper, we propose the use of wikis and blogs not just for creation and promotion of information, but as active tools to support problem based learning in medicine. In this approach, students and instructors use the Web as a virtual place to collaborate and create new knowledge and new educational experiences.

mEducator: A Best Practice Network for Repurposing and Sharing Medical Educational Multi-type Content

Although there is an abundance of medical educational content avail- able in individual EU academic institutions, this is not widely available or easy to discover and retrieve, due to lack of standardized content sharing mecha- nisms. The mEducator EU project will face this lack by implementing and ex- perimenting between two different sharing mechanisms, namely, one based one mashup technologies, and one based on semantic web services. In addition, the mEducator best practice network will critically evaluate existing standards and reference models in the field of e-learning in order to enable specialized state- of-the-art medical educational content to be discovered, retrieved, shared, repurposed and re-used across European higher academic institutions. Educa- tional content included in mEducator covers and represents the whole range of medical educational content, from traditional instructional teaching to active learning and experiential teaching/studying approaches. It spans the whole range of types, from text to exam sheets, algorithms, teaching files, computer programs (simulators or games) and interactive objects (like virtual patients and electronically traced anatomies), while it covers a variety of topics. In this paper, apart from introducing the relevant project concepts and strategies, em- phasis is also placed on the notion of (dynamic) user-generated content, its ad- vantages and peculiarities, as well as, gaps in current research and technology practice upon its embedding into existing standards.

Technological advances in teleradiology

Teleradiology consists of a set of added-value telematic services, implemented over an advanced telecommunications infrastructure and supported by different information technologies and related applications. The main goal of teleradiology is to provide different levels of support for remote diagnostic imaging procedures. This paper considers technological advances in this important area, including a discussion of the various added-value telematic services, applications supporting these services, and the required information technology and telecommunications infrastructure. Teleradiology is also considered in the general context of an integrated regional health telematics network, emphasizing its role and its interaction with other information and networking services.

Information organization on the internet based on heterogeneous social networks

The social Web has become an important trend during the last few years with a thriving number of social networking sites that currently address a variety of information needs. Following a first generation of human-centered social networks, the notion of object-centered sociality has been introduced to describe the fact that strong social relationships are built mainly when individuals are grouped together around a shared object. In this paper we attempt to further enhance the notion of the social object and present the concept of heterogeneous social network, where humans and social objects are uniformly treated as equal actors. The paper discusses how this notion can be exploited in different application domains and presents in more detail a particular example from the field of medical education.

A service based approach for medical image distribution in healthcare Intranets

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) protocol is currently the ubiquitous standard for the communication of medical images and related data within the radiology department. However, seamless image distribution within the healthcare enterprise and especially with research and educational information systems is still hard to achieve, as software developers of such third-party applications have to go through the rather cumbersome task of adapting the DICOM communication model and implementing the DICOM protocol. This paper gives a brief outline of current trends in medical image distribution in the healthcare enterprise, and proposes a new technological approach for distributing DICOM images and related data through commonplace Internet technologies, based on the emerging web services software paradigm. In particular, the paper describes the DICOM Image Management (DIM) web service which acts as a façade for conventional DICOM sources allowing DICOM image data and related information, to be transformed into XML documents encapsulated in SOAP messages, enabling integration at the application level through general purpose standardized web technologies. Implementation issues are discussed and a demonstration of engaging the DIM web service is included.

Thermoluminescence dose response of quartz as a function of irradiation temperature

The thermoluminescence (TL) response of pure Norwegian quartz as a function of irradiation temperature (Tirr) and dose has been investigated. The TL response of the (150-230 degrees C) and (230-350 degrees C) glow curve intervals shows a strong dependence on Tirr between 77 and 373 K in the dose range from 54 to 8.4*104 Gy. Both glow curve intervals also show temperature dependent dose response properties. The 150-230 degrees C interval is supralinear from the lowest dose (54 Gy). Its maximum supralinearity factor appears at Tirr=293 K. The 230-350 degrees C interval shows sublinear behaviour below Tirr=193 K, while at Tirr>or=273 K it shows the well known dose response curves. Its maximum supralinearity factor appears at Tirr=323 K. The linear response is extended up to 460 Gy at Tirr=273 K and falls to 80 Gy at Tirr=373 K.

Depicting Educational Content Repurposing Context and Inheritance

Educational content is often shared among different educators and is enriched, adapted, and, in general, repurposed so that it can be reused in different contexts. This paper discusses educational content and content repurposing in medical education, presenting different repurposing contexts. Finally, it proposes a novel approach to content repurposing via Web 2.0 social networking of learning resources. The proposed social network is augmented by a graphical representation module in order to capture and depict the relationships among different repurposed medical educational resources, based on educational resource “families” and inheritance. The ultimate goal is to provide a conceptually different approach to educational resource organization and retrieval via “social” associations among learning resources.