Specialized proteomic responses and an ancient photoprotection mechanism sustain marine green algal growth during phosphate limitation.

Marine algae perform approximately half of global carbon fixation, but their growth is often limited by the availability of phosphate or other nutrients. As oceans warm, the area of phosphate-limited surface waters is predicted to increase, resulting in ocean desertification. Understanding the responses of key eukaryotic phytoplankton to nutrient limitation is therefore critical.

Assessment of a personalized and distributed patient guidance system.

Objectives: The MobiGuide project aimed to establish a ubiquitous, user-friendly, patient-centered mobile decision-support system for patients and for their care providers, based on the continuous application of clinical guidelines and on semantically integrated electronic health records. Patients would be empowered by the system, which would enable them to lead their normal daily lives in their regular environment, while feeling safe, because their health state would be continuously monitored using mobile sensors and self-reporting of symptoms. When conditions occur that require medical attention, patients would be notified as to what they need to do, based on evidence-based guidelines, while their medical team would be informed appropriately, in parallel.

Exploration of patterns predicting renal damage in patients with diabetes type II using a visual temporal analysis laboratory.

Objective: To analyze the longitudinal data of multiple patients and to discover new temporal knowledge, we designed and developed the Visual Temporal Analysis Laboratory (ViTA-Lab). In this study, we demonstrate several of the capabilities of the ViTA-Lab framework through the exploration of renal-damage risk factors in patients with diabetes type II.

Materials And Methods: The ViTA-Lab framework combines data-driven temporal data mining techniques, with interactive, query-driven, visual analytical capabilities, to support, in an integrated fashion, an iterative investigation of time-oriented clinical data and of patterns discovered in them.

Daily and seasonal dynamics of remotely sensed photosynthetic efficiency in tree canopies.

The photosynthesis of various species or even a single plant varies dramatically in time and space, creating great spatial heterogeneity within a plant canopy. Continuous and spatially explicit monitoring is, therefore, required to assess the dynamic response of plant photosynthesis to the changing environment. This is a very challenging task when using the existing portable field instrumentation.

Remote chlorophyll fluorescence measurements with the laser-induced fluorescence transient approach.

The interaction of plants with their environment is very dynamic. Studying the underlying processes is important for understanding and modeling plant response to changing environmental conditions. Photosynthesis varies largely between different plants and at different locations within a canopy of a single plant.

Intelligent visualization and exploration of time-oriented data of multiple patients.

Objective: Clinicians and medical researchers alike require useful, intuitive, and intelligent tools to process large amounts of time-oriented multiple-patient data from multiple sources. For analyzing the results of clinical trials or for quality assessment purposes, an aggregated view of a group of patients is often required. To meet this need, we designed and developed the VISualizatIon of Time-Oriented RecordS (VISITORS) system, which combines intelligent temporal analysis and information visualization techniques.

A scalable architecture for incremental specification and maintenance of procedural and declarative clinical decision-support knowledge.

Clinical guidelines have been shown to improve the quality of medical care and to reduce its costs. However, most guidelines exist in a free-text representation and, without automation, are not sufficiently accessible to clinicians at the point of care. A prerequisite for automated guideline application is a machine-comprehensible representation of the guidelines.

Intelligent interactive visual exploration of temporal associations among multiple time-oriented patient records.

Objectives: To design, implement and evaluate the functionality and usability of a methodology and a tool for interactive exploration of time and value associations among multiple-patient longitudinal data and among meaningful concepts derivable from these data.

Methods: We developed a new, user-driven, interactive knowledge-based visualization technique, called Temporal Association Charts (TACs). TACs support the investigation of temporal and statistical associations within multiple patient records among both concepts and the temporal abstractions derived from them.

Intelligent querying and exploration of multiple time-oriented medical records.

Querying and analyzing multiple time-oriented patient data is a key task during medical research, clinical trials or the assessment of the quality of therapy. In this paper, we present several aspects of the VISITORS system, which includes knowledge-based tools for graphical querying and exploration of multiple longitudinal patient records. We focus on the syntax and semantics of the knowledge-based aggregation query language for multiple time-oriented patient records, and on the graphical query-construction interface.

A framework for intelligent visualization of multiple time-oriented medical records.

Management of patients, especially chronic patients, requires presentation and processing of very large amounts of time-oriented clinical data. Using regular means such as text or tables is often ineffective, thus we propose to use the visual presentation of the information in decision support, especially in the medical domain. Displaying only raw data is not sufficient, because it still requires the user to derive meaningful conclusions from large amount of data.

Measuring photosynthetic parameters at a distance: laser induced fluorescence transient (LIFT) method for remote measurements of photosynthesis in terrestrial vegetation.

We have developed a laser induced fluorescence transient (LIFT) technique and instrumentation to remotely measure photosynthetic properties in terrestrial vegetation at a distance of up to 50 m. The LIFT method uses a 665 nm laser to project a collimated, 100 mm diameter excitation beam onto leaves of the targeted plant. Fluorescence emission at 690 nm is collected by a 250 mm reflective telescope and processed in real time to calculate the efficiency of photosynthetic light utilization, quantum efficiency of PS II, and the kinetics of photosynthetic electron transport.