Information Technology
Here you can find a summary of innovations in the fields of information and data processing and up-to-date developments on IT equipment and hardware.
This area covers topics such as IT services, IT architectures, IT management and telecommunications.
Online auction to lower hospital costs
A ’fast, easy and confidential’ online hospital order system was recently successfully tested in hospitals in Belgium, Greece and Italy.
Apostolos Kontogeorgis, coordinator of the IST programme-funded project OPUS, saw a great need for such a technology. “The pharmaceutical industry has a wasteful problem. Over 10 per cent of products are slow moving or completely stagnant… Furthermore, healthcare providers are looking forward to lowering their costs and to enforcing more transpar
Fault tolerance: a "technological lifejacket"
As more and more industries use complex technologies, their designers see the need to adopt systems that continue to function even if a component fails – an adoption that promises to be made considerably easier by the work of AMATISTA.
The IST project AMATISTA resulted in the development of what are possibly the first automatic fault tolerance (FT) insertion and simulation tools for the computer-aided design (CAD) of integrated circuits, or microchips. Now, some of the project partners are
NC State Scientists Develop Breakthrough Internet Protocol
Researchers in North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today’s high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic.
The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined
New computer-aided approach tailors drug dose to patient needs
A computer-aided approach — based on software-that-learns — promises to provide a new tool that helps doctors tailor the dosage of abciximab, a medicine frequently used before angioplasty to lessen the chance of heart attack.
Dr. Mirna Urquidi-Macdonald, professor of engineering science and mechanics, says, “While we tried our approach first with abciximab, it may be applicable to other medicines that have a narrow therapeutical range between under dosing and overdosing.”
The appr
Successfully visualising multimodal biomedicine data
Picturing complex data may become considerably easier as a solution to display combined information from multiple data formats, currently applied to biomedicine, emerges.
In November 2003, partners in the IST project MULTIMOD succeeded in registering and animating the bone model of a young patient. They developed the DataManager system, whereby the 3D bone models, as derived from CT data, were registered and animated with kinematical data derived from the patient’s gait analysis (walking m
Ear print identification – new breakthrough
Experts at the University of Leicester working with a Northampton company have made a breakthrough in developing a computerised system for ear image and ear print identification, for use by police agencies, immigration and intelligence services.
The Forensic Pathology Unit, University of Leicester, in conjunction with K9 Forensic Services Limited, Northampton, England, have developed what they believe to be the first computerised system for ear image and ear print identification. This system