Integrating clinical information in National Biobank of Korea.

The National Biobank of Korea (NBK) is a government supported project that aims at consolidating various human-originated biomedical resources collected by individual hospitals nation-wide and integrating them with their donors' clinical information which researchers can take advantage of. In this paper, we present our experiences in developing the Clinical Information Integration System (CIIS) for NBK. The system automatically extracts clinical data from hospital information systems as much as possible to avoid errors from manual entry by human errors.

Dynamic load balancing data centric storage for wireless sensor networks.

In this paper, a new data centric storage that is dynamically adapted to the work load changes is proposed. The proposed data centric storage distributes the load of hot spot areas to neighboring sensor nodes by using a multilevel grid technique. The proposed method is also able to use existing routing protocols such as GPSR (Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing) with small changes.

The implementation and effects of a clinical laboratory accreditation program in Korea from 1999 to 2006.

Background: The Korean Laboratory Accreditation Program (KLAP) by the Korean Society of Laboratory Medicine (KSLM) was started in 1999. We summarized history and achievement of KLAP for the last 8 yr.

Methods: We analyzed 8 yr data (1999-2006) of historical events, trends of participating laboratories, and scores according to the impact of the question to the outcome of the tests.

Development of an HL7 interface engine, based on tree structure and streaming algorithm, for large-size messages which include image data.

A basic assumption of Health Level Seven (HL7) protocol is 'No limitation of message length'. However, most existing commercial HL7 interface engines do limit message length because they use the string array method, which is run in the main memory for the HL7 message parsing process. Specifically, messages with image and multi-media data create a long string array and thus cause the computer system to raise critical and fatal problem.

Clinical pathologist in Korea--training program and its roles in laboratories.

A rapid development of practice of laboratory medicine in Korea owes its success to the clinical pathologists (CP), who have played a role of a pathfinder for laboratories. The Korean CP postgraduate education (residency) program is unique in that it is exclusively for laboratory medicine. The training program for clinical pathologists includes diagnostic hematology, diagnostic immunology, clinical microbiology, clinical chemistry, blood bank, diagnostic genetics, informatics and laboratory management.