Comparison of Instruments for Measuring Health-Related Quality of Life and Their Applicability to Ehealth Applications.

Health-related Quality of Life (HRQoL) assessment has proven as a good means for assessing treatment options or impact of applications supporting the patient in adherence, monitoring and better understanding of health issues. While most of the HRQoL instruments were designed several years ago, their capability to assess the impact of ehealth application is in question. The objective of this paper is to assess HRQoL instruments including a focus on the ehealth domain.

Identifcation of FHIR Usage Patterns in IHE Profiles.

IHE profiles have been enhanced by FHIR based functionality, however relying on different approaches. Based on an analysis of the 33 IHE profiles using FHIR five patterns have been identified reflecting the approaches, namely (i) wrapping, (ii) adding of FHIR based actors and transactions, (iii) resource operation extension, (iv) purely FHIR based profiles and (v) content profiles relying on FHIR resources. In addition, both the maturity and the development of these profiles over time have been assessed.

Advancing Towards a CDA-Based Trauma Registry Data Submission.

This poster presents an assessment to which extent the data submission to one of the largest trauma registries worldwide can be structured compliant to the clincial document architecture (CDA) and semantically annotated. Overall, complete annotation was achieved for 75% of the items, for the remaining ones annotation failed due to missing codes or concepts for individual items or values of value sets.

Quality Requirements for Electronic Health Record Systems*. A Japanese-German Information Management Perspective.

Background: For more than 30 years, there has been close cooperation between Japanese and German scientists with regard to information systems in health care. Collaboration has been formalized by an agreement between the respective scientific associations. Following this agreement, two joint workshops took place to explore the similarities and differences of electronic health record systems (EHRS) against the background of the two national healthcare systems that share many commonalities.

Ad hoc Participation in Professional Tele-Collaboration Platforms.

Tele-collaboration between medical professionals is well established for specialties like radiology, cardiology or pathology. Typically these applications do not allow for ad hoc participation of non-registered users like patients and / or medical professionals. This paper describes an approach for extending these tele-applications to non-registered users and providing ad hoc participation with means for providing and accessing data.

Enhancing tele-collaboration Networks by Patient Participation.

This paper decribes an approach for extending tele-collaboration to the patient and allowing the patient's participation by accessing and providing data and thereby keeping the responsibilty for maintaining a personal health record with the patient. The approach has been implemented and is in use with the nationwide tele-collaboration network TKmed.

Establishing end-to-end security in a nationwide network for telecooperation.

Telecooperation is used to support care for trauma patients by facilitating a mutual exchange of treatment and image data in use-cases such as emergency consultation, second-opinion, transfer, rehabilitation and out-patient aftertreatment. To comply with data protection legislation a two-factor authentication using ownership and knowledge has been implemented to assure personalized access rights. End-to-end security is achieved by symmetric encryption in combination with external trusted services which provide the symmetric key solely at runtime.

Service delivery for e-Health applications.

E-Health applications have to take the business perspective into account. This is achieved by adding a fourth layer reflecting organizational and business processes to an existing three layer model for IT-system functionality and management. This approach is used for designing a state-wide e-Health service delivery allowing for distributed responsibilities: clinical organizations act on the fourth layer and have established mutual cooperation in this state-wide approach based on collectively outsourced IT-system services.

Towards sustainable e-health networks: does modeling support efficient management and operation?

e-Health Networks require cost-effective approaches for routine operation to achieve long-lasting sustainability. By using a model to represent (i) the network's enterprise functions, (ii) the applications used and (iii) the physical implementations, the tasks of management, adapting to changes and providing continued maintenance can be effectively supported. The paper discusses approaches for modeling, assesses their usefulness for the above tasks and decides on the use of the 3LGM meta model.

Modeling a health telematics network: does the 3LGM2 approach assist in its management and operation ?

Health Telematics Networks (HTN) are characterized by a complex setup and interrelations. Using available tools and methods focusing on mainly one aspect, e.g.

Rapid species and strain differentiation of non-tubercoulous mycobacteria by Fourier-Transform Infrared microspectroscopy.

Rapid identification of non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) species is important in clinical laboratories to stipulate the appropriate therapy and to offer a comprehensive infection control. We applied Fourier-Transform Infrared microspectroscopy to evaluate, whether the most frequent species of NTM can be rapidly and uniformly identified by this method using microcolonies of NTM growing on solid nutrient agar plates. To establish a standardized protocol, the heterogeneity of cell growth within the microcolonies and the reproducibility of measuring the IR spectra from whole mycobacterial microcolonies were first studied.

Evaluation of phenotypic markers for selection and identification of Candida dubliniensis.

Candida dubliniensis is often associated with C. albicans in cultures. Easy-to-perform selective isolation procedures for these closely related species do not exist.

Principles of multimodal imaging.

Current medical practice deals with a variety of multimodal information (X-ray film, ultrasound, CT, MR, ECG and EEG, laboratory results, medical records, etc.) Diagnosis and treatment demand an integrated view of this information including the patient's record and history. This paper describes multimodal imaging approaches to such a system with regard to (i) user interface, (ii) data management (including access control), (iii) registration and modality matching based on reference models, and (iv) interface to the modalities.

A generic approach to the management of time-related signals and images in medicine.

A framework concept for design and implementation of medical workstations is described by (a) its underlying principles, (b) the handlers provided by the concept, (c) the available data structures and (d) the graphical user interface (GUI). The design principle takes care of a modular approach both for the framework and for the applications. The GUI provides a coherent look and feel for applications based on toolkits for displaying data objects and application control.

Multiexponential proton relaxation processes of compartmentalized water in gels.

The proton relaxation times, T1 and T2, of water in Sephadex gels, exhibiting pores of varying size (i.e., with exclusion limits of molecular weight between 10(3) and 10(5)) and water contents in the range 30 to 70% (w/w, weight of water to total weight), were measured at 20 MHz in the temperature range 5 to 50 degrees C.

Echo shape analysis and image size adjustment on the level of echoes: improvement of parameter-selective proton images.

Parameter-selective imaging for tissue characterization is performed at low magnetic fields (0.24-0.28 T) employing echo trains with a large number of echoes (less than or equal to 50), high-power pulses, and the projection reconstruction method.