Managing Systems in Remote Monitoring - A Complex Challenge Turned into an Important Clinical Tool
Mário Oliveira, Independent Researcher, Portugal
Of Bats and Men
Patrick Flandrin, , France
Frontiers of Surgical Robotics
Cesare Stefanini, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy
GWAS Across Space and Time - What Have We Learned?
Arcadi Navarro, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
GWAS Across Space and Time - What Have We Learned?
Arcadi Navarro, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Image Analysis Challenges in Translational Molecular Imaging Research
Boudewijn Lelieveldt, Leiden University Medical Center, Netherlands
Managing Systems in Remote Monitoring - A Complex Challenge Turned into an Important Clinical Tool
Mário Oliveira
Independent Researcher
Portugal
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Brief Bio
Mário Oliveira, MD, PhD, FESC, FHRS, Cardiology/Electrophysiology, graduated from Lisbon University, Portugal (1988) and trained in Cardiology at St Marta’s Hospital in Lisbon. During his training he also worked in echocardiography at Gregorio Marãnon Hospital, Madrid (Dr M. Garcia Fernandez), risk stratification after myocardial infarction at St George Hospital, London (Dr John Camm) and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators at Ann Arbor Medical Center (Dr Fred Morady). In 1997, he became a staff cardiologist at Sta Marta’s Hospital. He also held appointment as Consultant Cardiologist at St Portuguese Red Cross Hospital, in Lisbon. Dr Mario Oliveira has a particular interest in clinical cardiac electrophysiology, cardiac rhythm disorders and its control by catheter ablation and implantable devices. His post-graduation mastership was in Sports Medicine and his major research activities involve autonomic nervous system and arrhythmogenesis, particularly related to paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, and prevention of sudden cardiac death. Author of more than 90 papers and member of several scientific societies is also currently Coordenator of the Cardiac Pacing Unit at Santa Marta Hospital, Assistant Professor of Physiology at Lisbon Faculty of Medicine and PI at Cardiovascular Autonomic Lab of the Faculty of Medicine & Instituto de Medicina Molecular.
Abstract
With the increasing awareness of indications for cardiac devices, especially related to the clinical benefits of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators and cardiac resynchronization therapy, the number of patients with implanted devices has been growing steadily. These equipments require long-term regular follow-up interrogation in dedicated clinics. However, due to the increasing population referred for implantation and the resources required, routine in-clinic follow-up contribute with a significant burden to the already over-strained electrophysiology teams and hospital services. Remote monitoring is being widely used in for chronic follow-up. It may represent a safe and effective alternative to conventional follow-up programmes, and contribute to cost savings in healthcare. This technology has been proven to be reliable, allowing early identification of device malfunction and minimizing the risk of underreporting. It is useful in clinical conditions, such as arrhythmic events or heart failure hospitalizations. Also, is has the potential to improve quality of care, and to reduce the number of out-patient clinic visits, hospital stays related to cardiac events, and healthcare costs. Future studies are needed to determine how to best allocate this new technology in a cost-effective manner, and how to adapt new legislation regarding the use of remote monitoring in clinical practice. We shall discuss the current systems, review the technical and clinical evidence in the literature regarding remote monitoring of implantable cardiac devices, and expand on outstanding questions related to remote monitoring in cardiovascular diseases.
Of Bats and Men
Brief Bio
Patrick Flandrin graduated from ICPI Lyon (Engineer Degree in 1978) and INPG Grenoble (PhD in 1982). He is currently a CNRS "Research Director" at ENS de Lyon. His research interests are mostly in nonstationary signal processing (time-frequency/time-scale methods), self-similar stochastic processes and complex systems. He published over 200 journal or conference papers, contributed several chapters to collective books and authored one monograph. Former Director of CNRS-GdR ISIS (2002-2005), he is President of GRETSI, the French Association for Signal and Image Processing, since 2009. Dr Flandrin has been awarded the Philip Morris Scientific Prize in Mathematics (1991), the SPIE Wavelet Pioneer Award (2001) and the Prix Michel Monpetit from the French Academy of Sciences (2001). Fellow of IEEE (2002) and EURASIP (2009), he has been elected member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2010.
More at http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/patrick.flandrin
Abstract
Bats are known to use a sophisticated sonar system whose study is interesting from at least two complementary perspectives. On the one hand, getting a better understanding of how bat sonar systems work is a clue for designing man-made systems operating along similar lines. On the other hand, the specific structure of the signals emitted by bats calls for the development of new tools aimed at their analysis and processing. The present talk is not intended to be a comprehensive overview of bat sonar studies, but rather to highlight some features of the back and forth interaction between “bats as natural signal processors” and “bat-inspired artificial systems”.
Frontiers of Surgical Robotics
Cesare Stefanini
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna
Italy
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Brief Bio
Cesare Stefanini [M.Sc. in Mech. Eng. (honors): 1997, PhD in Microengineering (honors): 2002)] is tenured Assistant Professor at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, where he is Area Leader in “Creative Engineering Design”. His research activity is in the field of small scale biorobotics, actuators for compliant robots, mechatronics and micromechatronics. He received international recognitions for the development of novel actuators for microrobots: as undergraduate and graduate student he took part in four editions of the International Micro Robot Maze Contest in Nagoya, Japan, receiving three first prizes and one second prize in the category “Climbing Microrobots”, thanks to the design and the fabrication of a novel rotary micromotor equipping a 1 cubic centimeter teleoperated machine. He is recently addressing the issue of eco-sustainable energy sources in the small scale. He has been visiting researcher at the University of Stanford, Center for Design Research where he focused his activity on the issue of high-efficient, high performance mechanisms for robotics.Prof. Stefanini has been the project manager of two European Projects, the first one addressing new bioinspired robotic artefacts, the second one aimed at developing new high precision manufacturing technologies for flexible, cost efficient and eco-friendly mass production of complex shape parts at the micro/meso-scale level. Prof. Stefanini is also founder of a spin-off company active in the field of micro-scale energy and actuation.Prof. Stefanini is the author of more than thirty articles on refereed international journals, of more than sixty papers published in international conferences proceedings and of seven international patents, two of which industrially exploited by world-leading companies. He is member of the IEEE Societies RAS (Robotics and Automation), EMBS (Engineering in Medicine and Biology) and PES (Power and Energy).
Abstract
Medical Robotics in general, and Surgical Robotics in particular, represent a paradigm of the challenges and accomplishments of Robotics in the last three decades. Considered as little less than science fiction and a field for visionaries in the 80’, they have emerged gradually and reached the status of clinical acceptability and of a success story of how research can lead to industrial exploitation. In this lecture, the main achievements and the successful adoption of robotics in different fields of surgery are illustrated. In particular, the challenges, the solutions, the failures and the successes of robots in surgical applications will be presented. Such aspects as the usability of robotics in surgery, the evolution from early solutions using large external robots, to the emerging field of endoluminal surgery, to the frontier of ultra-minimally invasive surgery, will be discussed. Attention will be given to the emerging field of ultra-miniature robots, that anticipate the fusion of robotics surgery with a wide range of imaging technologies and of novel and powerful techniques for localized, high precision intervention based on functionalized nano-carriers, such as nano-particles, nano-tubes, nano-shells and nano-films.
GWAS Across Space and Time - What Have We Learned?
Arcadi Navarro
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Spain
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Brief Bio
Arcadi Navarro was an undergraduate, and later a graduate student, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he started a PhD in Biology in 1992. After quitting the academic world for a few years, he finished my PhD and went back to basic research in 1999 as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. He entered the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2002 as a research fellow within the Ramón y Cajal program and was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the UPF in 2006 and Professor of Genetics in 2010.
Currently, Arcadi Navarro leads a research group in Evolutionary Genomics within the Department of Experimental and Heath Sciences of the UPF (DCEXS) and the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE). He was the vice-Director of the IBE during the 2008-2013 period and, since 2013, he is the director of the DCEXS. Additionally, he is the director of the Population Genomics Node of the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics (INB). Finally, he has recently entered into a double appointment with the CRG (Center for Genomic Regulation) to carry out studies linking Genotypes and Phenotypes, in particular, co-managing the EGA (European Genome and Phenome Archive). He has authored more than 100 papers and books on the subjects of his research.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Life as we see it in our planet today has been shaped by many different biological processes during billions of years. These processes leave a signature in our genomes in the form of differences between species, or between individuals of the same species. Interrogating these patterns of genome diversity we can infer what are the forces that affect living organisms, how and when they act and how do they affect such various things as biodiversity, human emotions or the differential susceptibility of different persons to certain diseases. All this knowledge empowers us to control our future but, above all, it is fun to obtain.
Abstract
After seven years of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS, he most popular approach to understand the genetic architecture of human complex disease) both the initial enthusiasm and the subsequent panic have subsided. What have we really learned? And what are the steps ahead?
GWAS have detected hundreds, or even thousands, of associations between genomic variants and diseases. However, the reported variants tend to explain small fractions of risk, and there are serious doubts about issues such as the portability of findings over different ethnic groups or the relative roles of rare versus common variants in the genetic architecture of disease.
Some light can be shed on these issues by studying the degree of sharing of disease-associated variants across populations (GWAS across space) and by analysing how the results of GWAS have bee n modified with the increased statistical power afforded by larger sample sizes (GWAS across time).
GWAS Across Space and Time - What Have We Learned?
Arcadi Navarro
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Spain
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Brief Bio
Arcadi Navarro was an undergraduate, and later a graduate student, at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he started a PhD in Biology in 1992. After quitting the academic world for a few years, he finished my PhD and went back to basic research in 1999 as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. He entered the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in 2002 as a research fellow within the Ramón y Cajal program and was appointed ICREA Research Professor at the UPF in 2006 and Professor of Genetics in 2010.
Currently, Arcadi Navarro leads a research group in Evolutionary Genomics within the Department of Experimental and Heath Sciences of the UPF (DCEXS) and the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (IBE). He was the vice-Director of the IBE during the 2008-2013 period and, since 2013, he is the director of the DCEXS. Additionally, he is the director of the Population Genomics Node of the Spanish National Institute for Bioinformatics (INB). Finally, he has recently entered into a double appointment with the CRG (Center for Genomic Regulation) to carry out studies linking Genotypes and Phenotypes, in particular, co-managing the EGA (European Genome and Phenome Archive). He has authored more than 100 papers and books on the subjects of his research.
RESEARCH INTERESTS: Life as we see it in our planet today has been shaped by many different biological processes during billions of years. These processes leave a signature in our genomes in the form of differences between species, or between individuals of the same species. Interrogating these patterns of genome diversity we can infer what are the forces that affect living organisms, how and when they act and how do they affect such various things as biodiversity, human emotions or the differential susceptibility of different persons to certain diseases. All this knowledge empowers us to control our future but, above all, it is fun to obtain.
Abstract
After seven years of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS, he most popular approach to understand the genetic architecture of human complex disease) both the initial enthusiasm and the subsequent panic have subsided. What have we really learned? And what are the steps ahead?
GWAS have detected hundreds, or even thousands, of associations between genomic variants and diseases. However, the reported variants tend to explain small fractions of risk, and there are serious doubts about issues such as the portability of findings over different ethnic groups or the relative roles of rare versus common variants in the genetic architecture of disease.
Some light can be shed on these issues by studying the degree of sharing of disease-associated variants across populations (GWAS across space) and by analysing how the results of GWAS have bee n modified with the increased statistical power afforded by larger sample sizes (GWAS across time).
Image Analysis Challenges in Translational Molecular Imaging Research
Boudewijn Lelieveldt
Leiden University Medical Center
Netherlands
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Brief Bio
Boudewijn P.F. Lelieveldt is a Professor of Biomedical Imaging at the Department of Radiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, where he is heading the Division of Image Processing (www.lkeb.nl). He is also appointed at the Department of Intelligent Systems, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands in the context of a faculty exchange in the Medical Delta consortium (www.medicaldelta.nl). His main research interest is the integration of a-priori knowledge into segmentation and registration algorithms, with main applications to cardiac imaging and multi-modal pre-clinical imaging and fluorescence-guided surgery. He also serves as a member of the Editorial Board of Medical Image Analysis and the International Journal of Cardiovascular Imaging, and is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. He is program and organization committee member for several international conferences, among others IPMI 2007 and ISBI 2016.
Abstract
The rapid developments in in-vivo molecular imaging modalities such as fluorescence and bioluminescence imaging enables the live imaging of gene expression, cell fate and protein interactions. Combined with detailed structural imaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging, the biochemical onset of disease and therapy can be monitored in combination with structural and functional consequences over time. This presentation discusses a number of image analysis challenges emerging from longitudinal pre-clinical molecular imaging studies. Three steps towards a quantitative 3D analysis of follow-up small animal imaging will be presented: whole-body registration, change visualization in follow-up data and fusion of optical and 3D structural imaging data. Several application examples will be presented in the context of translational molecular imaging research.