The efficacies of two tranquilizers and a placebo in reducing tension and related complaints were studied at three clinics over a period of six weeks. There was a considerable amount of missing data in this drug trial. The purposes of this project were: (1) To estimate the missing values by the regression technique and (2) to analyse the data by the multivariate analyses of variance method A significant time trend in changes of severity during the six-week period was found in all three clinics. The predominant trend was linear. But quadratic and cubic trends were also found in some clinics. As far as effectiveness of tranquilizers was concerned there was no conclusive answer. In two clinics, the tranquilizers were not proved to be better than the placebo. In the third clinic, however the 2 active drugs were significantly different from the placebo. This inconsistant result of drug effects among the 3 clinics might be due to (1) non-random allocation of subjects to the clinics and (2) the fact that a large proportion of subjects failed to complete the study / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

The efficacies of two anti-inflammatory drugs in ankylosing spondylitis and related complaints were studied at a single medical clinic over a period of twenty-eight weeks. The purposes of this project were: (1) -To determine .any significant differences within and between the two drug groups using well-known nonparametric procedures, and (2) To illustrate the use of the bootstrap method and determine whether it is appropriate and useful for this data set. Some statistically significant changes indicative of improvement occurred among both groups of patients for primary efficacy variables. No definite trend was found for most of the laboratory variables. Both drugs demonstrated effective pain relief. Regarding the variables of day and night pain relief as well as pulse, the Experimental Drug proved to be clinically but not statistically superior to the other commonly used drug. Analyses of safety data indicated some statistically significant changes in both drug groups. There was a statistically significant difference between drug groups at baseline. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

Medical datasets have reached enormous capacities. This data may contain valuable information that awaits extraction. The knowledge may be encapsulated in various patterns and regularities that may be hidden in the data. Such knowledge may prove to be priceless in future medical decision making. The data which is analyzed comes from the Polish National Breast Cancer Prevention Program ran in Poland in 2006. The aim of this master's thesis is the evaluation of the analytical data from the Program to see if the domain can be a subject to data mining. The next step is to evaluate several data mining methods with respect to their applicability to the given data. This is to show which of the techniques are particularly usable for the given dataset. Finally, the research aims at extracting some tangible medical knowledge from the set. The research utilizes a data warehouse to store the data. The data is assessed via the ETL process. The performance of the data mining models is measured with the use of the lift charts and confusion (classification) matrices. The medical knowledge is extracted based on the indications of the majority of the models. The experiments are conducted in the Microsoft SQL Server 2005. The results of the analyses have shown that the Program did not deliver good-quality data. A lot of missing values and various discrepancies make it especially difficult to build good models and draw any medical conclusions. It is very hard to unequivocally decide which is particularly suitable for the given data. It is advisable to test a set of methods prior to their application in real systems. The data mining models were not unanimous about patterns in the data. Thus the medical knowledge is not certain and requires verification from the medical people. However, most of the models strongly associated patient's age, tissue type, hormonal therapies and disease in family with the malignancy of cancers. The next step of the research is to present the findings to the medical people for verification. In the future the outcomes may constitute a good background for development of a Medical Decision Support System.

Title: Vessel segmentation Author: Ján Dupej Department / Institute: Department of Software and Computer Science Education Supervisor of the master thesis: RNDr. Josef Pelikán, KSVI Abstract: In this thesis we researched some of the blood vessed segmentation and visualization techniques currently available for angiography on CT data. We then designed, implemented and tested a system that allows both semi-automatic and automatic vessel segmentation and visualization. For vessel segmantation and tracking we used a region-growing algorithm that we overhauled with several heuristics and combined with centerline detection. We then automated this algorithm by automatic seed generation. The visualization part is accomplished with an adaptation of the well-known straightened CPR method that we enhanced so that it visualizes the whole cross-section of the blood vessel, instead of just one line of it. Furthermore, we used the Bishop frame to maintain minimal twist of the curve-local coordinate system along the whole vessel. Keywords: vessel segmentation, medical data analysis, volume data

<p> Methotrexate had been suspected to be harmful to the liver in psoriatic patients. The data of a prospective study to find out whether the drug affected the acquisition and worsening of various liver pathology was analysed. Personal particulars which would have adverse effect on the liver were also investigated. Log-linear models were fitted to this set of categorical data in the form of multidimensional contingency tables. It was found that methotrexate would be hepatotoxic if the drug was taken over a prolonged period and/or if the cumulative dose taken was large. Otherwise, methotrexate could be administered to psoriatic patients without causing much harm to the liver.</p> / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

published_or_final_version / Clinical Oncology / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Σκοπός αυτής της εργασίας είναι η αναφορά και ανάλυση των υπαρχουσών τεχνολογιών με τις οποίες είναι δυνατή η κατασκευή ενός web service. Η γλώσσα XML καθώς και οι WSDL, UDDI και SOAP είναι οι βασικές τεχνολογίες που χρησιμοποιούνται για την κατασκευή των web services και αναλύονται λεπτομερώς με παραδείγματα, για την πλήρη κατανόησή τους / Τhe aim of this paper is to to analyse the current technology, we can construct a web service. XML, WSDL, UDDI and SOAP are the main tools we use to built a web service

E-health is a growing eld which utilizes wireless sensor networks to enable access to effective and efficient healthcare services and provide patient monitoring to enable early detection and treatment of health conditions. Due to the proliferation of e-health systems, security and privacy have become critical issues in preventing data falsification, unauthorized access to the system, or eavesdropping on sensitive health data. Furthermore, due to the intrinsic limitations of many wireless medical devices, including low power and limited computational resources, security and device performance can be difficult to balance. Therefore, many current networked medical devices operate without basic security services such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. In this work, we survey recent work on e-health security, including biometric approaches, proximity-based approaches, key management techniques, audit mechanisms, anomaly detection, external device methods, and lightweight encryption and key management protocols. We also survey the state-of-the art in e-health privacy, including techniques such as obfuscation, secret sharing, distributed data mining, authentication, access control, blockchain, anonymization, and cryptography. We then propose a comprehensive system model for e-health applications with consideration of battery capacity and computational ability of medical devices. A case study is presented to show that the proposed system model can support heterogeneous medical devices with varying power and resource constraints. The case study demonstrates that it is possible to signicantly reduce the overhead for security on power-constrained devices based on the proposed system model.

South Africa is a developing country with great potential to be leaders in technology and research, especially in the medical field. Rural areas in many countries do not have access to basic healthcare services due to the distance and inaccessibility of these services. Currently people living in the rural areas in South Africa are required to rely on the people within the area, who may not be trained; on doctors who make house calls, who may not be able to access the patient in time or on finding transport to the nearest hospital, which may be hundreds of kilometres away. This leads to many rural residents not seeking aid for aliments thereby often lowering life expectancy. South Africa has many world-renowned medical practitioners who would be able to assist the residents in these areas if there were methods for observation and recording of health statuses without the need for either party to travel. This dissertation studied and developed a method to assist not only the residents in rural areas, but also urban residents to record their vital signs without the assistance of a licenced medical practitioner, to upload the data to a database and to then allow the data to be viewable by the medical practitioner who may be situated elsewhere in South Africa or the world. This system allows for the elimination of human error when recording vital sign data as recording is not done through human intervention. Through the use of communications technologies such as Bluetooth, NFC and Wi-Fi a system was designed which ensures that a patient can record medical data without the presence of a medical practitioner, the patient can access previous health records and readings and the patient can give a new medical practitioner a full medical history. The patient's data has been secured using AES and RSA encryption as well as verification through hash values at all points of transfer and access is granted to the patients' medical data only through the patient or a licenced medical practitioner. The data recording and transfer has been completed taking into consideration all the medical legislation and laws in South Africa. This system allows the South African medical health sector to service all South Africa residents, including the residents in rural areas. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / MEng / Unrestricted

Medical data exchange between medicine institutions is very important subject. In Lithuania at this time hasn’t installed united medical system which allows doctors to check patient’s case-history from all hospitals. For example abroad, in Canada for example has united medical system in all country hospitals. Canada hospitals has a lot of different medical data store systems installed, and to exchange data between them, they need to accept one united standard, which allows to get and perceive accepted data in all the country. They accepted to use HL7 standard for medical data exchange. I will try to research, can we use Canada practice in Lithuania, some data and other’s research. Our object to create HL7 system which will send HL7 message answers to HL7 message queries. All queries and answers must follow the requirements of HL7 standard. We will use KMU Heart center database which is in operation for data capture. The fact that database is in operation, adds additional data analysing. Analyzing involves how data met, the HL7 requirements and there they must be put in HL7 message. The data coding in HL7 message is defined in HL7 standard, so this part is clear. But the data exchange and events processing part lets user to take his own decisions. In the analytical part of our work we will try to touch questions about data capture from database and coding it to HL7 message. Also we will touch questions about data exchange methods, what tools or solutions must be used to... [to full text]