Content about Health

Feature - In this case, it is brain surgery New, grid-based imaging technology has the potential to change neurosurgery. Image courtesy of Phil Beard, sxc.hu To the edge Branching through your brain, a complex system of arteries, capillaries and veins feeds the organ that allows you to think. While the shape of each person’s network is similar in the basics to everyone else’s, it is unique in the particulars. This presents a challenge for neurosurgeons. A new type of three-dimensional imaging and processing tool, based upon grid-computing, stands ready to change the way doctors perform neurosurgery. Called HemeLB, it won the Transformational Science Challenge Award at TeraGrid ’08 in Las Vegas, US, last month. The current technology neurologists use allows for a patient’s vasculature to mapped by the processing of MRI scans. These scans, created with magnetic resonance imaging, use magnetic fields and radio waves to create pictures of bodily tissues. Typically these are two-dimensional images:

Feature - The U.S. embraces HealthGrid HealthGrid 2008 at University of Chicago's Gleacher Center Image courtesy of Y. Legré - www.healthgrid.org (c) 2008. Solutions to cutting-edge problems in biomedical science and health care will require the combined efforts of many kinds of experts.  Forward-looking leaders from the U.S. public health and computing domains are promoting HealthGrid.US as a forum for collaborative bio-health modeling, simulation and visualization. HealthGrid.US is affiliated with the Europe-based, international HealthGrid Association. The University of Chicago hosted HealthGrid 2008 in early June at its downtown Gleacher Center, the first non-European venue for the conference. HealthGrid.US organized the meeting, signaling its readiness to collaborate fully with its European colleagues and begin the process of defining a roadmap. “We’re discussing strategies for moving forward. We’ve had lots of activity by individual researchers, a bit like

Feature - Biomedical informatics: Vision and challenges Dan ReedImage courtesy of Microsoft Corp. Imagine your cell phone ringing at 6:00 a.m.: “Please telecommute today and keep children home from school. We are attempting to contain a sudden and dangerous outbreak of influenza that has already affected 30% of the population within ten miles of (your address).”  Dan Reed, a computational scientist known for his leadership in developing technology and science policy, currently director of scalable computing and multicore at Microsoft Research, envisions such a device in every pocket, hooked into a distributed data infrastructure. In his keynote address to the HealthGrid 2008 conference in Chicago on June 3, Reed invoked Vannevar Bush’s post World War II vision of an “intelligence amplifying device.”  Admitting we’re not there yet, he offered his vision of tools and practices to advance the field of public health informatics. He also laid out the challenges.&ldqu

Feature - Proofing an ancient wisdom: medicinal herbs meet grid technology

What will the meeting of ancient wisdom with hi-tech science reveal about the disease-fighting activity of Thailand’s medicinal herbs?Images courtesy of ThaiGrid

Medicinal herbs have been part of Thailand’s way of life since ancient times. This is especially true in remote rural areas, where drugs are expensive and ancient wisdom still has an effect on people’s lives. Now, thanks to the efforts of Thai researchers, this wisdom is meeting the hi-tech world.
“Thailand has a large number of medicinal herbs, and many drugs are produced based on medicinal herbs,” reveals Chak Sangma of the Cheminformatics Research Unit at Kasetsart University, Thailand.
“However, many of these drugs are not tested at the chemical level. Hence, it is not very certain which drugs contain which chemical substances, and how they actually cure disease.”
Searching for molecular secre

  Opinion - International Summer School on Grid Computing: looking back, one year on Thanks to his ISSGC’07 experience, Andrew Jamieson and his colleagues are actively pursuing the possibility of gridifying aspects of their medical research work.Image courtesy of Andrew Jamieson Deadlines for the 2008 International Summer School on Grid Computing close on 5 May. Here, former student Andrew Jamieson reflects on his experiences at the 2007 summer school, held in Sweden. In 2007, with the aid of the Open Science Grid, I attended the International Summer School on Grid Computing in Sweden. Today, just over a year later, I am still involved in grid computing.My scientific background as a medical physicist researcher involves developing accurate computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) algorithms for breast mass lesions in X-ray mammography, ultra sound and MRI images. My colleagues and I are interested in using grid computing to push CAD and image analysis to a new level of exploratory power and scientific evalua

  Image of the week - The micro-world of muscle cells These four visualizations show four sections of a muscle cell, each comprising several saromeres. Different colours indicate different organelles, including the myofibrillar system, sarcoplasmic reticulum, mitochondria and t-tubules. The cell envelope is rendered transparently.Image courtesy of GeomCell Enter the micro-world of your muscle cells, and you’ll find the entire length of a muscle “fiber” is actually a single cell. Called “skeletal muscle cells,” these giants are comprised of a number of repeating units, called sarcomeres, which contain cellular organelles such as myofibrils, mitochondria, t-tubules and sarcoplasmic reticulum.These organelles, even if of the same type, vary widely in their size, shape and location within the cell. Moreover, they often display complex spatial relationships. To understand the complexity of a muscle cell, realistic computer models are instrumental and may serve as a virtual cell

Announcement - Call for participants: Biomed Grid School 2008, May, Italy

Biomed GRID School 2008 will be held 12-16 May 2008 on Lake Como in Italy. Image courtesy of Biomed GRID School

After the success of the Biomed Grid School 2007 last spring, a second edition, Biomed Grid School 2008, will be held in Varenna on Lake Como, Italy from 12-16 May 2008. Participants must register in order to attend.The Biomed Grid School is aimed at biomedical research students, post-docs, and senior researchers with an interest in using or developing applications for distributed computing environments. The aim of the school is to provide bioinformatics and biomedical developers the opportunity:•    to learn to use new services and functionalities made available by new middleware releases (gLite)•    to implement applications in the EGEE GRID environments •    to build high level interfaces for GRID and Web Services for data provisi

Link of the week - Defibrillation of the heart What happens to the heart under the influence of electric shock? Defibrillation may be well used in hospitals, but the mechanisms behind it are still not fully understood.Image courtesy of National Grid ServiceStep inside the heart as part of the Integrative Biology Project, a consortium of researchers using e-science to combat fatal diseases.Members of this project, Blanca Rodriguez and her colleagues from the Computational Biology Group at the University of Oxford, are using the National Grid Service to power simulations of the application of electric shocks to both healthy and diseased hearts.Rodriguez hopes the simulations will help improve understanding of exactly how defibrillation, a common but poorly understood medical technique, works.The research involves running many sequential simulations, including parameter sweeps of variables such as shock strength and timing.250 milliseconds of data; 28 CPU hours of workTo obtain just 250 milliseconds of animated data, Rodriguez chu

Link of the week - SHARE: who, what, when, how and in what order Tony Solomonides speaks on behalf of the SHARE project at the opening plenary of this week’s EGEE User Forum in Clermont-Ferrand, France.Image courtesy of Yannick Legré, HealthGrid More than physics, more than astronomy, it is human health that captures the imagination of people across the planet. Whether it’s cancer or AIDS, aging or depression, health-related issues have an immediate and universal appeal that has powered the rise of several healthgrid-related projects. Now, a new project has arrived to bond and unite heathgrid projects from around the globe.SHARE and share alike  Called SHARE, or Structuring and supporting Healthgrids Activities and Research in Europe, the project unites collaborators working towards a common goal: better healthcare through the development of grid-powered e-science. “SHARE aims to develop a roadmap for the wide adoption and deployment of grid technology for health in Europe,” explain

  Feature - Forget me not: brain scans on a grid for Alzheimer’s diagnosis The results of a SPM analysis in a patient with dementia: red areas represent areas of impaired brain function.Images courtesy of Ivan Porro Early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease relies on access to a distributed collection of treasured data. Now, a team of Italian scientists is creating a way for hospitals to share these data jewels.“We had doctors with a real-world problem—they were not able to share data,” says Ivan Porro of the University of Genova, Italy. “With distributed data resources, this is intrinsically a grid problem.” A grid solution Doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease by comparing the brain scans of “normal” people not suspected of Alzheimer’s with a patient’s scan, looking for significant differences or signs of neural degeneration.  This test, known as Statistical Parametric Mapping Analysis, is a valuable tool—but one that is difficult to use. The firs

  Feature - Fighting the flu: grids help solve the mystery of proton transport The M2 channel with the proton-conducting water wire disrupted by the presence of the anti-flu drug amantadine. The lipid bi-layer membrane is not shown so that the channel can be seen more clearly. Image courtesy of Hanning Chen  The symptoms appear suddenly and often—a continuous fever, shaking chills, body aches, muscle pain, fatigue, loss of appetite and nausea. In most cases, home treatment of the viral illness influenza is all that is needed for recovery, but sometimes “the flu” can lead to life-threatening complications. University of Utah chemistry professor Gregory Voth and his team are using the TeraGrid to further drug design and virology, studying the influenza A M2 channel and its effect on proton transport and viral replication. Gateway to viral replicationThe M2 channel is believed to play a key role in the viral life cycle, acting as a conduit for transport of the protons that facilitate viral replication. T

  Feature - Grids work like a CHARMM for molecular dynamics X-ray crystallography at room temperature revealed only one water molecule (shown as a red sphere) near the protein residue of interest (shown in the box). The protein is a variant of staphylococcal nuclease. Images courtesy of Johns Hopkins University In 1963, Richard Feynman said that “everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jiggling and wiggling of atoms.” (1)  Molecular dynamics aims to better understand these jiggles and wiggles, using numerical methods to simulate the ways in which atoms and molecules move. One tool facilitating this work is CHARMM—or Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics—a software application developed at Harvard University for modeling the structure and behavior of molecular systems.CHARMM has multiple applications, but for Ana Damjanovic of the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., molecular dynamics simulations are the name o