Editorial
Advanced computing solutions for health care and medicine

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocs.2012.07.002Get rights and content

Abstract

This guest editorial introduces the special issue on “Advanced Computing Solutions for Health Care and Medicine”. The goal of this special issue was to collect high quality papers describing the application of computer science methods and techniques to main health care and clinical problems, resulting in high performance applications or prototypes for medical and clinical environments. The special issue touched different health informatics hot topics and is organized in four sections: (i) clinical decision support systems; (ii) biomedical imaging; (iii) high performance computing and biomedical simulations; (iv) bioinformatics data analysis.

Introduction

Computer science and Health care are two large science areas that are sharing common interests and research topics. This is always more relevant since communication, algorithms and data management applications have been using for practical clinical applications and clinical process management. This is also demonstrated by the sharing of common interest topics and multidisciplinary scientific collaborations and projects. Recently, many interdisciplinary conferences and workshops have been organized where both computer scientists and physicians discussed about research problems and results of common interests. Among those, we recall the recent International Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems (CBMS) and its Special Track on Computational Proteomics and Genomics, and the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS) and its Workshop on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science [1], [2], [3], [4]. These conferences resulted in an increasing interdisciplinary scientific production, as demonstrated by different journal special issues and books, such as [5], [6], [7], [8].

Recently, also scientific communities such as the ones referencing to ACM and Euro-Par, are favouring communication among computer science, database, and parallel computing scientists with researchers in biology and clinical applications, as demonstrated by some emerging interdisciplinary conferences and journals, such as the ACM SIGHIT1 International Health Informatics Symposium, the ACM SIGHIT Special Interest Group Newsletter, and the Euro-Par Workshop on High Performance Bioinformatics and Biomedicine [9], [10], to cite a few.

Similarly, measurements, communication and electronic engineering communities are presenting their results to medical doctors and biologists communities for health care and life quality applications (see for instance the IEEE International Workshop series on Medical Measurement and Applications). There are research problems in computer science that are critical while addressing issues related to health care, and there are research topics in biomedicine and in health care that cannot be addressed without ad-hoc computer science solutions or applications.

For instance, in the first direction (computer science supporting health care), high performance computing (HPC) and communications, (large) database management techniques, data quality and real time communications pose research problems that find application and validation in health care management systems where performance cannot accept any compromise. In other words, the health care domain can be considered as a realistic validation platform for many new applied computer science techniques.

On the other hand, information systems and healthcare management systems are currently considered principal solutions for managing data and processes in health care management, both in clinical services and in financial optimization solutions (i.e., to maximize services while minimizing costs). Moreover, considering information and communication technology (ICT) solutions, significant improvements both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness of health care strategies, have been obtained by using new frontiers and applications of ICT solutions, such as broadband communication solutions and data streaming. Finally, high-performance and large-scale health care applications pose different challenges to computer science such as in distributed management of medical images, high-performance multi-scale simulation of organs or biological systems, data mining and warehousing of large health care data stores, just to name a few.

The goal of this special issue is to collect high quality papers containing results in computer science applications for health care and medical environments. In particular, we selected papers describing solutions and software prototypes that have already demonstrated their usefulness in clinical houses or in biomedical laboratories, either in patient front solutions (such as surgery room, advanced electronic patient records, medical decision support systems), or in back office solutions (such as in biological laboratory, off line clinical data analysis, health care administration).

We distributed the call for paper through main computer science, biomedical and clinical communities, by following mailing lists, newsgroup and by involving the organizers of the most important interdisciplinary computer science symposiums and workshops. We received 38 submissions, all of good quality. Each manuscript was reviewed by at least 3 international reviewers. Finally, 10 out of 38 papers have been accepted with an acceptance rate of 26.31%. The accepted papers have been revised two or three times before final acceptance, to improve quality.

The accepted papers can be mostly considered as proposals and results of computer scientists that have been working in cooperation with physicians or biologists. In the rest of this Guest Editorial, we summarize the accepted contributions that have been grouped according to the following health informatics hot topics: (i) clinical decision support systems; (ii) biomedical imaging; (iii) high performance computing and biomedical simulations; (iv) bioinformatics data analysis.

Section snippets

Clinical decision support systems

The area of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) includes methodologies and computer-based systems for supporting medical decision. A broad classification includes computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) and computer-aided surgery (CAS) systems.

CDSSs are mainly based on decisional trees, where tree nodes contain information about a described environment. Each node contains variables and, depending on the current instances values, by visiting the tree from root to leaves, it is possible to map

Biomedical imaging

The analysis and management of biomedical images for supporting clinical diagnosis and surgical room operation is another challenging hot topic of biomedical research. Thanks to high-throughput image acquisition devices, the storage of clinical images is increasing rapidly. Thus automatic systems are required for performing data management and analysis, e.g. by automatically supporting clinical diagnosis by classifying and proposing the (part of) images containing relevant information. We

High performance computing and biomedical simulations

High performance computing (HPC) can help scientists to improve execution time and to face huge volumes of data available in clinical settings. We gathered mature contributions on the application of HPC solutions for solving high demanding problems in clinical areas. In the paper titled “Solutions for Biomedical Grid Computing – Case Studies from the D-Grid Project Services@MediGRID”, Frank Dickmann et al. give an overview of the results of the Services@MediGRID project. The Services@MediGRID

Bioinformatics data analysis

A further interesting topic that has been captured by this special issue regards tools for clinical and biological data analysis. This area can be often considered as the pre-processing phase for clinical data analysis. Bioinformatics and data analysis tools are mainly used in biological laboratories connected to clinical operation units producing data from hosted patients. In the paper titled “The Voronoi Diagram for Graphs and Its Application in the Sickle Cell Disease Research”, Marko

Conclusions

The experience of serving as Guest Editors for this special issue on “Advanced Computing Solutions for Health Care and Medicine”, helped us in enriching our knowledge on health informatics and on requirements of clinicians on using and being supported by computer based-solutions. We claim that still many efforts should be done both in designing new architectural solutions for ICT and HPC applied to medicine, and for new algorithms allowing to support physicians in diagnosis and interventional

Acknowledgements

This special issue originates as a follow-up of the last editions of the workshop on Biomedical and Bioinformatics Challenges to Computer Science, held in conjunction with the ICCS conference. We wish to thank the organizers of ICCS and especially Peter Sloot and Dick van Albada for helping us in making this special issue. Finally, we wish to thank all the authors who submitted their manuscripts to this special issue and especially the Reviewers that helped us in selecting high quality

References (12)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (2)

  • Monte Carlo simulation of brain sensing by optical diffuse spectroscopy

    2012, Journal of Computational Science
    Citation Excerpt :

    In this situation numerical methods of light propagation in media with complex geometry can provide a beneficial solution to predict probing light distribution and to determine the measurement volume from which the useful signal is detected. Owing to modern development of computational technologies numerical methods have found numerous applications in the areas of biomedicine and health care [4]. The existing numerical methods which are currently applied for calculation of light propagation in turbid media can be separated into two classes: finite element methods and ray tracing techniques.

  • Assessment in the Context of Licensure and Certification

    2013, Teaching and Learning in Medicine
View full text