Improving Osteoblast Response In Vitro by a Nanostructured Thin Film with Titanium Carbide and Titanium Oxides Clustered around Graphitic Carbon.

Introduction: Recently, we introduced a new deposition method, based on Ion Plating Plasma Assisted technology, to coat titanium implants with a thin but hard nanostructured layer composed of titanium carbide and titanium oxides, clustered around graphitic carbon. The nanostructured layer has a double effect: protects the bulk titanium against the harsh conditions of biological tissues and in the same time has a stimulating action on osteoblasts.

Results: The aim of this work is to describe the biological effects of this layer on osteoblasts cultured in vitro.

Towards a decision support system for hand dermatology.

The complexity of the medical diagnosis is faced by practitioners relying mainly on their experiences. This can be acquired during daily practices and on-the-job training. Given the complexity and extensiveness of the subject, supporting tools that include knowledge extracted by highly specialized practitioners can be valuable.

Implementing the lifelong personal health record in a regionalised health information system: the case of Lombardy, Italy.

Background: The use of personal health records (PHRs) can help people make better health decisions and improves the quality of care by allowing access to and use of the information needed to communicate effectively with others concerning their health care.

Objective: This work presents the lifelong PHR system of the Lombardy region as an example of the implementation of an e-health solution that is capable of providing personal clinical documents from a lifelong perspective, integrating different healthcare providers over a large territory.

Methods: The lifelong PHR is embedded in the regional healthcare information system of Lombardy, which is characterised by a large and heterogeneous territory, a large number of different healthcare providers and organisations, and a significant population.

Challenges of the e-Health curricular education in bio-medical engineering and in medicine.

Curricular recommendations coming from highly respectable associations are highly useful. Nevertheless, they show fatigue in keeping the pace of any fast evolution, as in the ICT happens. So we do the attempt to disclose the emerging challenges affecting e-Health curricular education.

Implementing standards for the interoperability among healthcare providers in the public regionalized Healthcare Information System of the Lombardy Region.

Information technologies (ITs) have now entered the everyday workflow in a variety of healthcare providers with a certain degree of independence. This independence may be the cause of difficulty in interoperability between information systems and it can be overcome through the implementation and adoption of standards. Here we present the case of the Lombardy Region, in Italy, that has been able, in the last 10 years, to set up the Regional Social and Healthcare Information System, connecting all the healthcare providers within the region, and providing full access to clinical and health-related documents independently from the healthcare organization that generated the document itself.

An experience of "learning by doing": the hand surface images archive.

For a common user, bioimages seem to be very easy to treat, to read, to understand and, therefore, to archive. Conversely, bioimage archiving requires a complex design and implementation process. We proposed to a class of bioengineering students the implementation of a hand image repository specifically designed for highlighting the main features that should be taken into account when treating bioimage archives.

Education in biomedical informatics: learning by doing bioimage archiving.

For a common user, bioimages seem to be very easy to treat, to read, to understand and, therefore, to archive. Conversely, bioimage archiving require a very complex design and implementation process that needs skilled and trained technicians. We proposed to a class of bioengineering students at the Politecnico University of Milan the implementation of a hand image repository specifically designed for highlighting the main features that should be taken into account when treating bioimage archives.

PLARIS: a Web framework for offering automatically classified biomedical multimedia resources.

PLARIS, a software environment connected to a streaming server, allows classifying all multimedia resources stored in the server. This allows searching into the media-pool with a controlled set of keywords. The system exploits generated data to automatically propose multimedia resources considered most relevant for the user and to obtain general learning paths.