Monica Gemo

Versatile clinical information system design for emergency departments

Compared to other hospital units, the emergency department presents some distinguishing characteristics of its own. Emergency health-care delivery is a collaborative process involving the contribution of several individuals who accomplish their tasks while working autonomously under pressure and sometimes with limited resources. Effective computerization of the emergency department information system presents a real challenge due to the complexity of the scenario. Current computerized support suffers from several problems, including inadequate data models, clumsy user interfaces, and poor integration with other clinical information systems. To tackle such complexity, we propose an approach combining three points of view, namely the transactions (in and out of the department), the (mono and multi) user interfaces and data management. Unlike current systems, we pay particular attention to the user-friendliness and versatility of our system. This means that intuitive user interfaces have been conceived and specific software modeling methodologies have been applied to provide our system with the flexibility and adaptability necessary for the individual and group coordinated tasks. Our approach has been implemented by prototyping a web-based, multiplatform, multiuser, and versatile clinical information system built upon multitier software architecture, using the Java programming language.

Focus-based design of mixed reality systems

Currently very few techniques are available to support the design of Augmented and Mixed Reality (MR) systems. Task elicitation is more complex for MR systems than for traditional information systems. Having multiple sources of information and two worlds of interaction (real and virtual) involves making choices about what to attend to and when. Interaction based on traditional input and output devices is not effective in a mixed scenario. It distracts the user from the task at hand and may create a severe cognitive seam. Understanding, formalizing and modeling such aspects can help designers to assess interaction at all the stages of development. We are interested in focused applications that require the users hand free for real world tasks and to understand how the users task focus drives designing MR systems. The contribution of this paper is twofold: it first illustrates the specific requirements posed by such systems and then it shows through a study case that there is currently no complete support to model these aspects among the tools commonly employed for task modeling.

A versatile knowledge-based clinical imaging annotation system for breast cancer screening

Medical information is evolving towards more complex multimedia data representation, as new imaging modalities are made available by sophisticated devices. Features such as segmented lesions can now be extracted through analysis techniques and need to be integrated into clinical patient data. The management of structured information extracted from multimedia has been addressed in knowledge based annotation systems providing methods to attach interpretative semantics to multimedia content. Building on these methods, we develop a new clinical imaging annotation system for computer aided breast cancer screening. The proposed system aims at more consistent, efficient and standardised data mark-up of digital and digitalised radiology images. The objective is to provide detailed characterisation of abnormalities as an aid in the diagnostic task through integrated annotation management. The system combines imaging analysis results and radiologist diagnostic information about suspicious findings by mapping well-established visual and low-level descriptors into pathology specific profiles. The versatile characterisation allows differentiating annotation descriptors for different types of findings. Our approach of semi-automatic integrated annotations supports increased quality assurance in screening practice. This is achieved through detailed and objective patient imaging information while providing user-friendly means for their manipulation that is oriented to relieving the radiologists workload.