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Welcome to the Medical Informatics and Telemedicine group
Presentation of MI&T

The work within this area started in 1997-1998. The research in the Medical informatics & telemedicine group mainly focuses on (1) telemedicine systems for private homes and telecare/telehomecare systems, (2) distributed electronic health record (3), patient diary / EHR for children and (4) electronic health surveillance. All projects are done in cooperation with, or closely connected to, the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine, University Hospital of North Norway. Students in the MI&T group participate in construction of medical & telemedicine systems from a computer science perspective.

In addition to bachelor, masters and PhD degrees in computer science, the department offers two years international master’s degree in telemedicine and e-health.

 
Research Seminars

Always at 11:30, at NST, Vrimleområdet

30 May

Basic statistics in medical research: Pitfalls and characteristics of high quality statistics. How do you explain a significant p value? What is a confidence interval? What characterizes a good m&m chapter in a medical research paper?

By Stein Olav Skøvseth

20 June

An introduction to databases and database research with examples from the Tromsø study. What is a database? Can databases give us answers regarding epidemiology and medical treatment?

By Anne Helene Hansen

 
 
20 Years of Telemedicina in Tromsø

Wed 30. March, 14:15-17:45, at NST and Thu 31. March 12:15-15:45 at A016 CS dept.

The tutorial gives an overview of telemedicine in Tromsø and North Norway since the first telemedicine projects were started in 1987-1988. The first projects were initiated at Televerket's research institute (later Telenor Research) together with Norut IT (research centre at University of Tromsø), Tromsø Regional Hospital (later University Hospital of North Norway - UNN), Kirkenes Hospital and Troms Military Hospital.

In 1993, Department of Telemedicine at UNN was established. In 1999, it became the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST), and was labelled as a Centre of expertise in telemedicine. In 2002, NST was appointed as the first World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Telemedicine. Today, NST is with its more than 100 employees a driving force in telemedicine research and development.

The tutorial offers a historical review of the pioneering activity in telemedicine and includes a presentation of the following telemedicine services: Teleradiology, Otorhinolaryngology, Telepathology, Ophthalmology, Teledermatology, Telecardiology, Teledialysis, Prenatal, Emergency service, Teleoncology, Telecare, Teleodontology, Teleendocrinology, Telesurgery, Psychiatry, (Solutions for) Patient empowerment, Maritime telemedicine, Distant education, Videoconference in telemedicine, Messages and electronic communication, Electronic Health Records, and Intelligent tools. For each service, problem, solution, and lessons learned will be presented.

Duration: 8-10 hours tutorial (1-1,5 day)

Gunnar Hartvigsen, PhD, Professor

 
 
Point-of-care devices for healthy consumers
Medical devices are used not only in the clinical setting but also for the health status monitoring of any consumers located in their own environment. The primary goal of this feasibility study was to evaluate the use of specific point-of-care devices in this context. A set of four approved and/or clinically validated devices that measure specific physiology parameters (white blood cell count, blood glucose, blood pressure, temperature and other) were selected for this study. Three healthy subjects used the devices and collected their physiology data for one month. In semi-structured interviews and a subsequent qualitative analysis of the results it was shown that the procedure was time-consuming and that it would not be feasible to follow it for a long period. They users were particularly concerned for one of the devices and quite skeptical about the reliability of some measurements. Even though they did not face any difficulties with using the devices, they reported some important usability problems.The conclusion is that approved and validated point-of-care devices must be also evaluated for their usability before being included in any system.

The results of this study have been published recently as a short communication paper in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare: http://jtt.rsmjournals.com/cgi/content/full/15/8/419

 
 
Principles and Principals for Authorization in Nexus

When: Wednesday 8. December, 13.00 - 14.00


Abstract


Ultimately, authorization should be based on the extent to which the principal making a request is trusted.  We will describe a language, logic, and mechanims used for implementing this approach to authorization in the Nexus operating system and in some document-management applications.  The roles of analytic, axiomatic, and constructive bases for trust will be
discussed.

Biography


Fred B. Schneider is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, where he has been on the faculty since 1978.  He also serves as Chief Scientist for the NSF "TRUST" Science and Technology Center and has been Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso (Norway) since 1996.

Schneider's research concerns trustworthy systems, most recently focusing on computer security.  His early work was in formal methods and fault-tolerant distributed systems.  He is author of the graduate textbook "On Concurrent Programming", co-author (with David Gries) of the undergraduate text "A Logical Approach to Discrete Math", and the editor of "Trust in Cyberspace" which reports findings from the US National Research Council's study committee on information systems trustworthiness that Schneider chaired.

A fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, Schneider was awarded a D.Sc. [honoris causa] by the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003.  His survey paper on state machine replication received a SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award in 2007.

Schneider is a member of the board for the Computing Research Association and the council of the Computing Community Consortium.  He serves on the US congressionally mandated Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, and he is a member of the Defense Science Board. A frequent consultant to industry, he co-chairs Microsoft's TCAAB advisory board on trustworthy computing besides serving on the technical advisory boards for Fortify Software.
 
Disease Surveillance
The main idea of the project (as this was set in March/April 2007) was to work on novel directions in the disease surveillance field targeting the early detection of infections. In the context of the existing disease surveillance systems that have been studying mainly the general population, our approach was to work with groups having special interest in infections such as patients suffering from chronic diseases, elderly individuals and infants. We defined these groups as Sensitive Population Groups – SPGs (new term introduced by our group) considering that these people may be at heightened risk even in non-outbreak settings. We also supported the identification of a threat before people even know that they have been infected, i.e. before the onset of the first symptoms, through the continuous monitoring of certain physiology parameters, e.g. blood glucose, white blood cell count. This is also in contrast to the current systems that are mainly based on people’s awareness of their health status reported either as pre-clinical and pre-diagnostic data (syndromic surveillance) or as diagnostic data (diagnosis-based surveillance).
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