IBM avatars to visualize and interact with medical records in 3D

IBM announced on 26 September 2007 the creation of the Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME), a prototype software that allows medical doctors to visualize medical records as a 3D avatar and to interact with it. The system enables intuitive anatomical queries for a specific patient, with e.g. zooming used to narrow the query space. Possible results include related text records, results of laboratory analyses or medical images such as radiographs. One IBM Researcher compared the service to Google Earth, which is currently dedicated to geographical and astronomical data.

Using advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art 3-D modeling techniques, the IBM researchers are working to overcome key technical challenges including integrating heterogeneous data sources and complex text-based information—so-called unstructured data—and linking that data to the anatomical model in a meaningful and easy-to-navigate way. ASME also uses SNOMED, the systemized nomenclature of medicine that encompasses approximately 300,000 medical terms, to create a bridge between graphical concepts and text documents...
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HIS seminar #8 - Linguistic Support: annotation of multilingual biomedical texts and dictionary reversal for German-Japanese, in 東京 (Tokyo, Japan)

Source: Horizons <http://horizons.free.fr/his/eng/seminars/2007-06-14_his-seminar_8.htm>

The 8^th seminar dealt with linguistic support. Dr 川添 (Kawazoe) (NII) and Dr Doan (NII) presented their research on the annotation of multilingual biomedical texts, then Dr Apel (NII) introduced his research on dictionary reversal for German-Japanese at the 国立情報学研究所 (National Institute of Informatics).

Slides of the presentations:

• Dr 川添愛 (KAWAZOE Ai): Semantic Annotation in BioCaster: its Design and Challenges (PDF)
• Dr DOAN Son: The Roles of Named Entities and Their Roles in Classifying Annotated Biomedical Texts (PDF)
• Dr APEL Ulrich: Dictionary Reversal – Building a German-Japanese Dictionary from Japanese-German Data, Using Vocabulary Analysis, User Cooperation and Approaches from Natural Language Processing (PDF)
  

Date: 14 June 2007 (15:00-17:00)
Location: 国立情報学研究所 (National Institute of Informatics), Tokyo, Japan
Language: English
Registration fees: None
Attendees: 19 persons
Organization: Dr DUVAL Sébastien (国立情報学研究所 (National Institute of Informatics))

Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature

Source: TED Talks <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/18>

With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with. In this inspiring talk, Janine Benyus provides fascinating examples of biomimicry -- the way humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement... [View the video]