A comprehensive e-prescribing model to allow representing, comparing, and analyzing available systems.

Background: Even though ePrescribing systems are now available in many healthcare systems and have been a crucial milestone of the roadmaps towards eHealth in the last years, there is still a large heterogeneity among functionalities and performances of different systems.

Objective: In this paper, we propose an updated comprehensive model for the ePrescribing process able to represent, analyze, and compare current systems and to support the design of new, more general, systems suitable also to sustain the ePrescription process in National Healthcare Systems.

Methods: After a preliminary literature review, we identified six main phases of the ePrescribing process, namely Assign, Transmit, Dispense, Administer, Monitor, and Analysis Decision.

Biphasic finite element simulation of the TMJ disc from in vivo kinematic and geometric measurements.

Understanding the biomechanical nature of the degeneration of the temporomandibular joint requires a coupling between experimental measurements and numerical simulation. In this study, geometry measured from MRI, and motion obtained from a specially designed optoelectronic system are fed into a three-dimensional biphasic finite element analysis to generate the spatial and temporal mechanical response of the disc. This study demonstrates how this coupling can effectively predict the biomechanical response of the temporomandibular joint disc to physiological loading.

An evaluation of three-dimensional diarthrodial joint contact using penetration data and the finite element method.

We have developed an approximate method for simulating the three-dimensional contact of soft biphasic tissues in diarthrodial joints under physiological loading. Input to the method includes: (i) kinematic information describing an in vitro joint articulation, measured while the cartilage is deformed under physiological loads, (ii) geometric properties for the relaxed (undeformed) cartilage layers, obtained for the analyses in this study via stereophotogrammetry, and (iii) material parameters for the biphasic constitutive relations used to represent cartilage. Solid models of the relaxed tissue layers are assembled in physiological positions, resulting in a mathematical overlap of the cartilage layers.

Real-time in vivo loading in the lumbar spine: part 1. Interbody implant: load cell design and preliminary results.

Study Design: Instrumented interbody implants were placed into the disc space of a motion segment in two baboons. During the animal's activities, implants directly measured in vivo loads in the lumbar spine by telemetry transmitter.

Objectives: Develop and test an interbody implant-load cell and use the implant to measure directly loads imposed on the lumbar spine of the baboon, a semiupright animal.

A mixed-penalty biphasic finite element formulation incorporating viscous fluids and material interfaces.

The fluid viscosity term of the fluid phase constitutive equation and the interface boundary conditions between biphasic, solid and fluid domains have been incorporated into a mixed-penalty finite element formulation of the linear biphasic theory for hydrated soft tissue. The finite element code can now model a single-phase viscous incompressible fluid, or a single-phase elastic solid, as limiting cases of a biphasic material. Interface boundary conditions allow the solution of problems involving combinations of biphasic, fluid and solid regions.