Giuseppe De Pietro

3D interaction with volumetric medical data: experiencing the Wiimote

Three-dimensional virtual environments are becoming more and more important for the inspection of volumetric medical data reconstructed from slices of images coming from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computer Tomography (CT), Positron Emission Tomography (PET) instrumentations. The possibility to visualize and interact with three-dimensional reconstructed organs while being immersed into a virtual environment, provides doctors a very naturalistic way to investigate patients anatomy. However, most 3D user interfaces for immersive and semi-immersive virtual reality applications lack in usability or make not possible a user-friendly interaction. In this paper we present new flavors of existing 3D interaction techniques specifically designed for interacting with volumetric medical data in a semi-immersive virtual environment by using the Nintendo Wiimote controller as 3D user interface.

Formal specification of wireless and pervasive healthcare applications

Wireless and pervasive healthcare applications typically present critical requirements from the point of view of functional correctness, reliability, availability, security, and safety. In contrast to the case of classic safety critical applications, the behavior of wireless and pervasive applications is affected by the movements and location of users and resources. This article presents a methodology to formally express requirements in safety critical wireless and pervasive healthcare applications in order to achieve a higher degree of dependability. In particular, it will be shown how it is possible to formalize and constrict mobility characteristics by combining, and in some cases extending, several formal methods. The article also describes a rigorous specification process. Finally, it concludes with a case study of a real safety critical pervasive healthcare application that is going to be deployed in a city hospital.

MiPeG : A middleware infrastructure for pervasive grids

Grid computing and pervasive computing have affirmed respectively as the paradigm for high performance computing and the paradigm for user-friendly computing. The conjunction of such paradigms are now generating a new one: the Pervasive Grid Computing. This paper presents a middleware for pervasive grid applications. It consists of a set of basic services that aim to enhance classic grid environments with mechanisms for: (i) integrating mobile devices in a pervasive way; (ii) providing context-awareness; (iii) handling mobile users’ sessions; and, (iv) distributing and executing user tasks on the devices (even mobile) active in the environment. c 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services

KES International (KES) is a worldwide organisation that provides a professional community and association for researchers, originally in the discipline of Kno- edge Based and Intelligent Engineering Systems, but now extending into other related areas. Through this, KES provides its members with opportunities for publication and beneficial interaction. The focus of KES is research and technology transfer in the area of Intelligent Systems, i.e. computer-based software systems that operate in a manner analogous to the human brain, in order to perform advanced tasks. Recently KES has started to extend its area of interest to encompass the contribution that intelligent systems can make to sustainability and renewable energy, and also the knowledge transfer, innovation and enterprise agenda. Involving several thousand researchers, managers and engineers drawn from universities and companies world-wide, KES is in an excellent position to faci- tate international research co-operation and generate synergy in the area of arti- cial intelligence applied to real-world Smart systems and the underlying related theory. The KES annual conference covers a broad spectrum of intelligent systems t- ics and attracts several hundred delegates from a range of countries round the world. KES also organises symposia on specific technical topics, for example, Agent and Multi Agent Systems, Intelligent Decision Technologies, Intelligent Interactive Multimedia Systems and Services, Sustainability in Energy and Bui- ings and Innovations through Knowledge Transfer. KES is responsible for two peer-reviewed journals, the International Journal of Knowledge based and Intel- gent Engineering Systems, and Intelligent Decision Technologies: an International Journal.

Temporal Denoising of Kinect Depth Data

The release of the Microsoft Kinect has attracted the attention of researchers in a variety of computer science domains. Even though this device is still relatively new, its recent applications have shown some promising results in terms of replacing current conventional methods like the stereo-camera for robotics navigation, multi-camera system for motion detection and laser scanner for 3D reconstruction. While most work around the Kinect is on how to take full advantage of its capabilities, so far only a few studies have been carried out on the limitations of this device and fewer that provide solutions to enhance the precision of its measurements. In this paper, we review and analyse current work in this area, and present and evaluate a temporal denoising algorithm to reduce the instability of the depth measurements provided by the Kinect over different distances.

Formal Design of Ambient Intelligence Applications

The design of ambient intelligence applications in critical systems requires rigorous software-engineering-oriented approaches. Drawing on practical experience, the authors propose a set of formal tools and a specification process for AmI design activities and artifacts.

A multimodal semantic location service for intelligent environments: an application for Smart Hospitals

This paper presents semantic models, mechanisms and a service to locate mobile entities in Smart and Intelligent Environments. The key feature of the service is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the environment to handle transparently such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine it to obtain higher context information. Indeed, the service relies on the use of ontologies and rules to define a uniform, unambiguous and well-defined model for the location information, independently of the particular positioning system. Moreover, the location service performs logic and reasoning mechanisms to provide both physical and semantic locations of mobile objects and to infer the finest granularity in the case when a mobile object is located by more than one positioning system. Finally, we present an application of the proposed approach to the case of a Smart Hospital.

Formal Specification and Verification of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Systems

This article presents a methodology to formally express requirements in safety-critical ubiquitous and pervasive applications in order to achieve a higher degree of dependability. In particular, it will be shown how it is possible to formalize and constrict mobility characteristics by combining and extending several formal methods. The article also discusses some issues concerning both static and dynamic verification.

A rule-based mHealth system for cardiac monitoring

mHealth systems are becoming very attractive for the home care monitoring and, in particular, for the monitoring of patients with heart failure. Knowledge-based technologies can be profitably used to design advanced software system able to provide efficient and dependable service to patients and physicians. In this paper we present a Rule-based Decision Support System for mHealth environments; the designed intelligent system is devised to the detection and signaling of abnormal or emergency situations by using contextual information, i.e. by correlating data coming from a wearable electrocardiography (ECG) device with information regarding patients posture and his/her physical activities. The whole system has been developed in Java.

An evolutionary-fuzzy DSS for assessing health status in multiple sclerosis disease

Assisted Living provides a long-term care option that combines supportive systems and services for monitoring and assessing the health status with activities of daily living and health care. Daily monitoring of the health status in subjects characterized by chronic and/or degenerative conditions is not possible in all those cases where the disease progression has to be evaluated only by a direct interaction between the patients and the healthcare structures on a regular basis, over time and for life. In this respect, this work proposes an evolutionary-fuzzy decision support system (DSS) for assessing the health status of subjects affected by multiple sclerosis (MS) during the disease progression over time. Such a DSS has been defined and implemented exploiting a novel approach devised to facilitate the design of fuzzy DSSs for medical problems. The approach is aimed at: (i) introducing a set of design criteria to encode the medical knowledge elicited from clinical experts in terms of linguistic variables, linguistic values and fuzzy rules with the final aim of granting the interpretability; (ii) defining a fuzzy inference technique to best fit the structure of medical knowledge and the peculiarities of the medical inference; (iii) defining an evolutionary technique to tune the formalized knowledge by optimizing the shapes of the membership functions for each linguistic variable involved in the rules. An experimental session has been carried out for evaluating, first of all, the approach on five medical databases commonly diffused in literature and for comparing it with other systems. After that, the evolutionary-fuzzy DSS for assessing MS patients health status has been quantitatively evaluated on 120 patients affected by MS and compared with other approaches. The achieved results have shown that our approach is very effective on the five databases, since it provides, on average, the second highest accuracy when compared to eight tools. Furthermore, as far as the classification of multiple sclerosis lesions is considered, the proposed system has turned out to outperform nine popular tools.