ALKHOBAR, 31 July 2007 — There’s a saying that the greatest wealth is health. Increasingly, information and communications technologies (ICT) are playing an important role in helping us all stay healthy. In ways big and small, ICT is making a difference to both public health and personal well being.
Last month IBM made available to the open source community an advanced software technology that can help predict the transmission of diseases across countries and around the globe. The tool will aid scientists and public health officials in understanding and planning more efficient responses to health crises, ultimately providing new tools for protecting population health.
The software, known as Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM), is now available for use through the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework Project (OHF), hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that guides the Eclipse open source community. STEM is one of the key technologies being utilized in the Global Pandemic Initiative, a collaborative effort formed by IBM and over twenty major worldwide public health institutions to help prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
STEM represents nearly three years of research from IBM scientists. The technology is designed to enable the rapid creation of epidemiological models for how an infectious disease, such as avian influenza or dengue fever, is likely to geographically spread over time. STEM, which runs on any operating system, creates a graphical representation of the spread of a disease based on a variety of parameters such as population, geographic and macro-economic data, roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns and bird migratory routes around the world.
“STEM will allow public health officials to model the spread of a disease much like modeling a storm or hurricane — it allows us to produce a public health ‘weather map’ for the spread of a particular disease,” said Joseph Jasinski, IBM Distinguished Engineer and program director, Healthcare and Life Sciences. “Until now, it has been difficult to simulate health crisis scenarios on a global scale. STEM gives us the power to do that.”
A basic epidemiological model framework will be provided to software developers, who can customize and configure the models based on their specific requirements. These models, which involve multiple populations and interactions between diseases, can help public health experts develop more effective preparedness plans. IBM’s donation is also intended to help facilitate collaboration between governments, scientific researchers and other players in the public health community. Users will have the ability to share the customized epidemiological models that they create in addition to the plug-ins they build using Eclipse.
Now, as we all know, not all public health crises are the result of a virus or other chance occurrence. War can produce terrible health consequences. The summer issue of Stanford Medicine magazine explores war’s impact on medicine and health. The magazine provides numerous points of view on the topic, considering it from both the historical perspective and the present situation in Iraq. One article provides a look ahead at military medicine of the future, including an ultrasound system for combat units that would locate and cauterize internal wounds. The magazine, including web-only features, is available online at http://stanmed.stanford.edu/.
Going from the body human to the body virtual, using a 3D CAD application called SolidWorks Software, Zygote Media Group is building hyper-accurate 3D models of the human body, including skeletons, the heart, arteries, nerves and muscle tissue for companies to develop better products in fields such as biomedical and athletic gear.
For example, biomedical companies use Zygote heart models to create stents to place in damaged arteries and skeletal models to design a brace that may straighten a crooked spine. The new Zygote models save companies the time, effort and cost of creating accurate models from scratch or relying on old fashioned prototyping. Zygote combines the SolidWorks 3D CAD software with detailed MRI and CT scan data to create extremely precise solid models. These 3D models enable companies to develop better products, faster.
Canadian medical device manufacturer Pega Medical uses Zygote tibia and femur models to develop orthopedic pins and devices that aid in treating brittle bone diseases. Other companies use Zygote models to create shin guards for children, athletic shoes for joggers and walkers for the elderly. These 3D models bring a new meaning to the phrase, “anatomically correct.” To view the Zygote 3D models click to www.zygote.com. Parental guidance is suggested for children who may find the site exciting, but frightening as well.
We leave you today by showing how ICT can play a personal role in the return to good health. A new study finds that victims of acquired brain injury, such as stroke can improve their attention by using a software-based program to train working memory. Eighty-nine percent of stroke victims who participated in the training reported that after training they were less easily distracted, less likely to daydream and less likely to lose focus when reading.
The study is the first of its kind to demonstrate that working memory training among stroke victims leads to improvements in daily life. Results of the research effort appeared in the January 2007 issue of the journal Brain Injury under the title “Computerized Working Memory Training After Stroke — A Pilot Study.”