Stefano Mininel

O3-DPACS Open-Source Image-Data Manager/Archiver and HDW2 Image-Data Display: An IHE-compliant project pushing the e-health integration in the world

After many years of study, development and experimentation of open PACS and Image workstation solutions including management of medical data and signals (DPACS project), the research and development at the University of Trieste have recently been directed towards Java-based, IHE compliant and multi-purpose servers and clients. In this paper an original Image-Data Manager/Archiver (O3-DPACS) and a universal Image-Data Display (HDW2) are described. O3-DPACS is also part of a new project called Open Three (O3) Consortium, promoting Open Source adoption in e-health at European and world-wide levels. This project aims to give a contribution to the development of e-health through the study of Healthcare Information Systems and the contemporary proposal of new concepts, designs and solutions for the management of health data in an integrated environment: hospitals, Regional Health Information Organizations and citizens (home-care, mobile-care and ambient assisted living).

A customizable game engine for mobile game-based learning

The use of computers in education has greatly increased during the last two decades. At the same time, technology advances have opened new spaces and possibilities for the field of computer-based edutainment-education in the form of entertainment — where learners can achieve their learning goals while having fun. Games on mobile phones have become a significant part of the contemporary culture experienced by young people. Research indicates the potential of mobile games to encourage learning in young adults. The 3-year EC-supported project mGBL (mobile Game-Based Learning) had the objective to prototype a platform for the development and deployment of mobile learning and guidance games, able to support the learning process and the support of decision making in critical situations not only in a cognitive but also in an emotional way. This paper describes key issues emerged in development phase of the Mogabal game engine within mGBL framework in both technical and pedagogical aspects, showing technologies, strategies and methodology adopted. A number of game prototypes based on such engine were devised and some were tested during the project user-trials. These games prototypes demonstrate the capabilities of the devised engine to cover a wide range of different games types and educational contents.

An Integrated System for Production Scheduling in Steelmaking and Casting Plants

This paper presents an integrated system (IS) devoted to solve the complex scheduling problems in steel-making and casting (SMC) plants. The presented IS is composed of four modules: data base, optimization, simulation modules, and the user interface. In particular, we develop the two main components of the IS: the optimization and simulation modules. The optimization module is based on a mixed-integer linear programming formulation with the objective of minimizing the makespan, i.e., the completion time of the last job. Moreover, a discrete-event simulation module is used to validate and assess the proposed schedules. By designing the IS for a real case study, we show how it can be applied off-line to schedule the daily operations of the SMC, as well as online in order to face unpredictable events such as failures and blocks of the machines. Note to Practitioners-This paper is motivated by the necessity of solving the complex scheduling problems in steel-making and casting (SMC) plants. To this aim, the paper presents an integrated system (IS) that is devoted to help decision makers in selecting the optimal schedules of the operations also in the cases in which unpredictable events may occur. The main modules of the presented IS are an optimization module, based on a mixed-integer linear programming model, and a simulation module, able to verify and validate the proposed schedules by what if analyses and stochastic input parameters. Because of the complexity of the problem, some approximations referring to the transportation system planning are considered. However, the results show the efficiency of the proposed scheduling approach for real industrial applications. Future research aims at investigating about more efficient mathematical programming models in order to solve larger problems involving the planning of one or more weeks and a more detailed description of the plant.

Modelling alarm management workflow in healthcare according to IHE framework by coloured Petri Nets

Ensuring patient safety in medical device networks by managing alarms and related clinical data is a life-critical issue. The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative emerged to discuss and solve the interoperability and integration problems among medical information systems, vendors and users in order to improve patient care and healthcare system dependability. This paper models and analyzes the IHE Alarm Communication Management by using the Unified Modelling Language and Coloured Timed Petri nets. Aiming at generality, the model does not refer to a specific healthcare context but it is based on a general scheme where the message transactions are integrated with the nurse responses. In order to show the potentialities of the model, a real case study is simulated and different scenarios with different levels of workload are analyzed. The results illustrate that the model is able to provide support for structured and comprehensive analysis of the healthcare system management.

Effects of weather condition on aircraft emissions in climb phase

Aircraft trajectory optimization is highly sensitive to atmospheric conditions; pressure, relative humidity, temperature, wind intensity and direction have various influences on thrust needed and the resulting air pollutant emissions. The airline flight plans are generally pre-calculated before take off in order to optimize fuel consumption, using information from weather predictions that may not be accurate enough. In this paper an evaluation of weather prediction accuracy and, in the case of inaccurate predictions, a comparison of estimated emissions of some flights in climb phase for different weather conditions are presented. Weather data used are from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) public domain data, specifically the GRIB (Gridded Binary) files of the 20 Km RAP (Rapid Refresh) model, containing the analysis of real weather of a certain day/hour and the forecasts of the following 18 hours. In order to better understand the relation between weather conditions and aircraft emissions we report a comparison between estimated emissions (fuel, CO2 and NOX) of a real trajectory calculated with real weather data and with predicted weather data (forecasts for 1h, 3h and 6h). In order to evaluate accuracy of forecasts we consider radar reflectivity and wind. Regarding evaluation of the presence of potentially dangerous clouds (level 2 or more), a threshold filter has been used to select regions above 36 dBZ in the weather analysis and in a previous forecast related to the same hour. In the first step, the radar reflectivity and wind of real USA weather data from four days of June 2012 were compared with the forecasts, using the Tanimoto Similarity Index for measuring accuracy. Given the exact shape on a grid of the region (in this case, the current weather analysis) and its approximation (in this case the forecast), the Tanimoto Index (TI) is defined as the number of “pixels” of intersection on the number of pixels of the union of the two images. Then each one of the weather analyses for the 4 days considered (96 hours total) was compared with the forecasts for that time from 1 to 6 hours before, computing the Tanimoto index and the total cloud coverage with a threshold at 36 dBz. Furthermore, the wind intensity and direction forecasts were analyzed, and the mean value and variance of the difference between real weather condition and forecasts are presented. In a second step, from the analysis of the results of the first step, we selected some regions where cloud and wind analysis were substantially different from forecasts. In this scenario, the climb phases from real aircraft trajectories were collected from the FlightAware database. In the region of bad weather, we selected the trajectories that were significantly different from those made from the same aircraft in days of good weather. The related emissions were estimated and compared with the emissions of the same trajectory using forecasted weather. The emission estimation model is based on BADA (Base of Performance Data) from EUROCONTROL, ICAO and weather data.

Design of a domain model for clinical engineering within the HL7 Reference Information Model

The Health Level 7 (HL7) Reference Information Model (RIM) was introduced as an object oriented information model to harmonize the definition of HL7 messages across different application domains. On the heels of HL7s successful version 2, the last version 3, including the RIM, which forms its centerpiece, has received significant attention, but it has in turn also been subjected to criticism, addressing important questions about the usability in specialist domains. The RIM defines ‘normative’ classes such as Act, Role, Entity, etc. each of which is associated with a rich stock of attributes. When the RIM is applied to a new domain, one then needs to select and code these attributes. This paper reports the exploratory efforts that have been made to evaluate the feasibility of representing clinical engineering information in the HL7 RIM, with the purpose of developing a new HL7 v3 RIM based domain information model (DIM) dedicated to clinical engineering. This paper describes specifically the domain information analysis and the modeling phases of the proposed clinical engineering DIM development, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The proposed approach follows the reuse of standard healthcare information models for representation of clinical engineering information model, basing on the UML extensibility mechanisms and providing several advantages such us tooling support, graphical notation, exchangeability, extensibility, etc., which are also deployable in the next generation of HL7 tools.

Actors interactions and needs in the European electromobility network

The standardization of services in the European electromobility network is becoming one of the main goal of researchers and practitioners. In this context, the objective of the paper is proposing a general view of the main needs and functions of the involved actors and stakeholders, and to state their interactions within the electromobility network. In particular, actors and stakeholders are grouped in so called macro-areas, and the interoperability and cooperation at both macro-areas and actors levels are provided by means of Unified Modeling Language (UML) diagrams.

Flight path optimization for minimizing emissions and avoiding weather hazard

This paper presents a methodology to determine the optimal path of airplanes in order to avoid weather hazard and reduce pollutant emissions. To this aim, the aircraft movement is modeled as a finite state automaton: the state is a vector describing the space aircraft position, its airspeed and heading; the outputs are the aircraft emissions of CO2 and NOx. In the described framework, the aircraft path planning problem is defined as a finite-horizon open loop optimization problem that searches for an optimal transition state path of the automaton by minimizing CO2 and NOx emissions. To this aim, an integer multi-objective programming problem is formulated and solved. Experimental results show an example of a path optimization and a comparison with a real airplane trajectory.

Modelling and Validation of Alarm Management Workflow in Healthcare Integrating IHE-PCD Profile and Coloured Petri Nets

The application of discrete event simulation modeling techniques for studying healthcare systems is a relatively new but rapidly growing field of research and service improvement. This paper discusses the application of discrete event simulation in modeling the complex relationship between Patient Care Device (PCD) in healthcare enterprises in an Alarm Communication Management (ACM) system for more efficient, integrated and validated implementation. In particular, we analyze and test healthcare processes in which a large number of different medical devices is used, at hospital departmental level with an alarm management system. Aiming at generality, the model does not refer to a specific healthcare context but is based on the general modeling schemes proposed in this field within the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative. To this aim, we model and simulate an alarm management system implemented according to the IHE Technical Framework PCD ACM profile in a Colored Timed Petri Net framework. The model is used to test scenarios of alarm management of healthcare devices with different levels of workload and resources to demonstrate the potential of using Colored Timed Petri Net and simulation as cost effective methods for understanding the issues of healthcare operations management.

Proposal and validation of a framework for High Performance 3D True Electrical Brain Activity Mapping

This paper presents an original problem solving framework named TEBAM, specifically conceived and designed to achieve high performance 3D True Electrical Brain Activity Mapping. We describe the integrated framework that has been proposed and developed, specifying TEBAM’s design characteristics, implementation and tools interconnections (pipelines). TEBAM relays on patient’s specific realistic head modeling for the EEG forward and inverse problem evaluation and is implemented and optimized with a very flexible approach to solve in short time, by means of High Performance Computing resources, the large scale computations needed. Results of 3D True Electrical Brain Activity Mapping can be visualized in TEBAM framework in different multimodal ways, combining the anatomical information with the computed results to give an optimal insight of computation output, relying also on stereographic visualization.