Content about Health

Feature - Achilles tendon a blessing, not a curse

Sprinters lining up for the start of the Women’s 100-meter at the Beijing Olympics. Image courtesy LIM CK, under Creative Commons license.

Compared with other runners on this planet, humans are feeble.
If Olympic sprinters competed against mammals of comparable size, they would never even qualify for the finals. The top speed for an in-shape male human is normally between 15 and 18 miles per hour (24 to 29 kilometers per hour). The world record is 27 mph (43kmh), and that was sustainable for only a few seconds.
Meanwhile, horses have been clocked at about 48 miles per hour, wolves about 42, and the speed champion — the cheetah — at 70 miles per hour. (That’s about 77 kmh, 68 kmh, and 113 kmh, respectively.)
Even warthogs are faster than us.
But in the field of endurance racing however, we leave everyone else in the dust. Over long distances, a well-trained human can outrun a horse.
What is the ke

Feature - RadiotherapyGrid

Gamma-ray map for treatment. Image courtesy BEinGRID

Cancer is Europe’s second largest cause of death. One of the most common and effective treatments is external radiotherapy, where a Linear Accelerator (Linac) attacks the cancerous tissue with radiation delivered from several different directions. The treatment plan — the direction, size and length of dosages — has to be carefully calculated to avoid damaging healthy tissue. These calculations can take a long time — speeding up this process would allow earlier treatment and more patients to be treated.RadiotherapyGrid is a solution based on grid technology that helps hospitals plan the best possible treatment for each patient. It has two core functions: verification of plans using accurate — but computationally expensive — techniques; and searching for the optimal treatments. These tools improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planned treatm

Feature - Computing a way out of poverty

In northwest Bangladesh, 72% of the population live below the poverty line, according to the Asian Development Bank. Photo here and on front page courtesy of ADB and Eric Sales, from an ADB Photo Essay entitled New Hope for Bangladesh’s Extreme Poor. 

In the Philippines, the Asian Development Bank and grid specialists are getting together to figure out best investment strategies for Asia’s poorest regions.
One of the outcomes of the EUAsiaGrid Project, funded by the European Commission under Framework Program 7, has been to spark new grid-based collaborations in Southeast Asia.
One example is the result of a meeting that occurred last October, when representatives from EUAsiaGrid partners went to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Headquarters in Manila, The Phillipines, to explore ways to model the impact of poverty alleviation investments that ADB makes.
In the past, investments by development banks such as the ADB and the

Feature - Cancer researchers speed crystallography

Scientists have trained a system to recognize the formation of 3-D protein crystals, automating a time-intensive, manual process necessary for scrutinizing the structure of cancer-related proteins.
Image courtesy of IBM and the World Community Grid.

Using the World Community Grid, scientists at the Help Conquer Cancer Project have found a way to automate and speed up protein crystallography, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Structural and Functional Genomics.
X-ray crystallography is the process of using x-rays to map the structure of crystals. Although biological molecules such as proteins and DNA are not normally crystalline in form, they can be prompted to form crystals through exposure to the right chemical compounds. Once crystallized, the scientists can use x-rays to map the protein; knowing the structure of a protein is invaluable to scientists who are trying to understand how a protein interacts with the human

SAFE-BioPharma - A new domain standard for secure identity

Mollie Shields-Uehling, pictured above, is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association. Image courtesy Mollie Shields-Uehling.

In medical and pharmaceutical research, researchers deal with sensitive private information on a daily basis. That makes secure identity management a crucial need. Mollie Shields-Uehling is the CEO of the SAFE-BioPharma Association, a non-profit organization charged with creating a standard that meets that need.
iSGTW: Thank you for joining us for this discussion, Mollie. Could you tell us a little bit about SAFE-BioPharma?
Shields-Uehling: SAFE-BioPharma Association is a non-profit industry collaboration established by the world's leading biopharmaceutical companies to develop and maintain a global interoperable digital identity and signature standard for the biopharmaceutical and healthcare communities. The purpose of the standard is to allow the transformation of business and regulatory process to

Feature - Dealing with dengue

Close-up of the Aedis aegypti mosquito that carries dengue. Image courtesy Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

First, you get a bad headache. Then your joints feel like they are being crushed. This is followed by fever and a bright red rash on your legs and chest. You may also start vomiting or have diarrhea. This is dengue fever, and it affects two-fifths of the planet’s population. Thanks to the EUAsiaGrid project, grid technology is doing its part to help reduce the burden of this devastating disease.
For most, dengue fever passes after a very unpleasant week, but for some it leads to dengue haemorrhagic fever, which is often fatal. Like malaria, dengue is borne by mosquitoes. Unlike malaria, though, it affects people in cities as much as in the countryside. As a result, it has a particularly high incidence in heavily populated parts of South–East Asia, where it is a significant source of infant mortality in several countrie

Announcement - US eHealth Collaborative seeks board members

Image courtesy NeHC.

National eHealth Collaborative is now accepting nominations for leaders in the health and healthcare fields to serve on the NeHC Board of Directors.
National eHealth Collaborative is a public-private partnership developed through an open, multi-year, multi-stakeholder process and operates under a cooperative agreement with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). As NeHC turns the corner into its second year, NeHC leaders are looking to their many stakeholders for recommendations on who should be asked to fill vacancies on the NeHC Board of Directors.
“By encouraging the broad adoption and use of health information technologies and electronic health information exchange, we help to create a true patient-centered health system. Public and private sector efforts to expand funding and develop policies and standards are having a significant impact in driving this mo

Feature - Big science facilities meet the cloud

Dylan Maxwell explains the Science Studio system to a bystander at Summit 2009 in Banff, Alberta. Photo by Miriam Boon.

Lab notebooks are so passé. In the brave new world of cloud computing, the entire experimental process will take place in your web browser.
And if a team of Canadian researchers at the University of Western Ontario and the Canadian Light Source in Saskatchewan has anything to say about it, researchers around the world will be using a web platform called Science Studio.
“One of the aims of Science Studio is to be able to access big science facilities such as the Canadian Light Source,” said Marina Fuller, a chemistry researcher with the project. “It’s a complete experiment management system.”
The test case for Science Studio is the VESPERS beamline at the Canadian Light Source synchrotron. When Science Studio is complete in 2011, researchers will be able to use the platform to apply

Feature - A SLiM chance for viruses

Viruses hijack the replication machinery of cells. Image courtesy Simon Hettrick

Viruses have evolved a clever way of reproducing. They hijack the replication machinery of their host cell, which is controlled and regulated by a variety of signaling pathways, and fool them into producing copies of the virus.
Richard Edwards, head of the Bioinformatics and Molecular Evolution group at the University of Southampton, UK, is trying to better understand signaling pathways in order to develop treatments for viruses — and for diseases that operate similarly.  This is an enormous task, because to understand signaling pathways in the human body requires studying the interactions between the 20,000 or so proteins contained within the cells.
To do so, Edwards is focusing on short, linear motifs known as SLiMs. “A protein can be thought of as a sequence of amino acids, like beads on a string” explains Edwards. “[SLiMs] consist o

Feature - Improving Alzheimer’s research, a million scans at a time

Alzheimer’s is one of the most feared diseases associated with aging. Fortunately, early detection can slow its development. Image courtesy stock.xchng

As you read this, your brain is busily working. In a complex but unconscious process, it scans the pixels on your screen, analyzes the images and turns them into meaningful information.
This week, a similar work began, neuGRID, that might help keep our minds whirring wonderfully as we (alas) age.
This massive scanning project will feed 6,300 magnetic resonance (MR) scans from more than 700 patients — a bit less than 200 images per patient, making for an impressive total of 1,260,000 images — through an automated series of calculations. This “pipeline” will analyze the cortical thickness of the brain (a measurement aligned with brain health) and its deterioration over time. The images are from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neur

News of the Week - HealthGrid roundup

Brandenburg Gate. Image courtesy stock.xchng 

Last week, Berlin hosted the 7th HealthGrid conference, from 29 June – 1 July. The feeling pervading the event was that the HealthGrid community had progressed a long way — and yet for grids to reach their full promise in the area of health care, a lot of work remains.“I first participated in the conference three years ago in 2006,” said Xin Zhou, a conference presenter and maintainer of the grid infrastructure inside the University of Geneva Hospital. He added, “Back then, we were talking about ‘the plan.’ Many people then presented what they were going to do; now they are presenting the applications. This represents real progress in the research domain and shows movement towards practice.”Simple intuitive interfaces, appealing to non-specialist users, were an oft-called for commodity. In a demonstration of just such an interface, Tobi