George J. Mandellos

e-SCP-ECG+ protocol: an expansion on SCP-ECG protocol for health telemonitoring—pilot implementation

Standard Communication Protocol for Computer-assisted Electrocardiography (SCP-ECG) provides standardized communication among different ECG devices and medical information systems. This paper extends the use of this protocol in order to be included in health monitoring systems. It introduces new sections into SCP-ECG structure for transferring data for positioning, allergies, and five additional biosignals: noninvasive blood pressure (NiBP), body temperature (Temp), Carbon dioxide (CO2), blood oxygen saturation (SPO2), and pulse rate. It also introduces new tags in existing sections for transferring comprehensive demographic data. The proposed enhanced version is referred to as e-SCP-ECG+ protocol. This paper also considers the pilot implementation of the new protocol as a software component in a Health Telemonitoring System.

A phase II study of non-platinum based chemotherapy with paclitaxel and vinorelbine in non-small cell lung cancer

INTRODUCTION Paclitaxel and vinorelbine combination in previous untreated patients with stage IIIb-IV non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) as a phase II study. PATIENTS AND METHODS Thirty-four patients (4 patients with stage IIIb, 30 patients in stage IV), with median age 66 and performance status 0-1, were administered paclitaxel, 175 mg/m(2) in a 3-h infusion rate on day 1 and vinorelbine, 25 mg/m(2) in a 10-min infusion rate on days 1, and 8 with G-CSF and EPO support. RESULTS Among our 33 evaluable patients for toxicity 16 patients (48.4%) presented leukopenia and 15 patients (45.4%) presented anemia despite G-CSF and EPO administration. Two patients (6%) presented Grade III-IV peripheral neuropathy. The overall response rate was 67.7%; 5 patients (16.1%) showed complete response (2 patients stage IIIb) and 16 patients (51.6%) showed partial response (1 patient stage IIIb). The overall median survival time was 10 months (range 3-18 months) and the median disease-free survival was 9 months (range 3-15 months) with an 1-year survival time of 45.1% (14 patients). CONCLUSION The results of the combination as 1st line treatment for patients with non-operable NSCLC are promising and should be further investigated.

Dynamic biosignal management and transmission during telemedicine incidents handled by mobile units over diverse network types

Early and specialized pre-hospital patient treatment improves outcome in terms of mortality and morbidity, in emergency cases. This paper focuses on the design and implementation of a telemedicine system that supports diverse types of endpoints including moving transports (MT) (ambulances, ships, planes, etc.), handheld devices and fixed units, using diverse communication networks. Target of the above telemedicine system is the pre-hospital patient treatment. While vital sign transmission is prior to other services provided by the telemedicine system (videoconference, remote management, voice calls etc.), a predefined algorithm controls provision and quality of the other services. A distributed database system controlled by a central server, aims to manage patient attributes, exams and incidents handled by different Telemedicine Coordination Centers (TCC).

Structuring the e-SCP-ECG+ protocol for multi vital-sign handling

Standard Communication Protocol for Computer-assisted Electrocardiography (SCP-ECG) has been standardized in order different ECG devices to be able to communicate with computers through the same language. This paper proposes specific extensions on SCP-ECG protocol structure and introduces the enhanced SCP-ECG+ (e-SCP-ECG+) protocol. e-SCP-ECG+ is backward compatible to the SCP-ECG protocol while it is able to handle more vital sign and demographic data. It also overrides some limits of the original protocol. The proposed extension has been implemented both as new tags in existing sections and as new sections of the SCP-ECG protocol appended to the original file format.

Application of JPEG 2000 compression in medical database image data

A medical database has been developed in the pediatric clinic of the University Hospital of Alexandroupolis in order to organize and manipulate all clinical information in digital form. A compression technique that trades between the amount of data stored/transmitted and the quality of the image may be used in order to reduce the amount of stored/transmitted image data. A comparative evaluation of JPEG and JPEG2000 compression standards by means of both subjective and objective criteria was performed in order to select the appropriate compression technique for the database medical images. JPEG 2000 proves to be an ideal file format for the pediatric DB application, since it compresses the image data up to 98.4% without any loss in the diagnostic information of the image.