The GreenLight laser and Taprobane

Yesterday evening, I was at SLAUS meeting and Gordon Muir talked about Phallus and Viagra and Cialis. He also showed us a video of GreenLight Laser prostatectomy. Bloodless and just like a TURP, with a side working industry strength laser. The nice thing it it has little affinity to water and a lot to blood. This makes it particularly suitable for this operation. Stones are better dealt with by the Holmium laser.

The trouble wih the green laser is that it is expensive to use. The laser fibre is $1000 and disposable. Hopefully i can try this out soon at ASH, provided someone is ready to pay the extra amount....

I also got a copy of Taprobane Linux 0.3. It is available with bittorrent, but preferring human interaction I got it from the toon in IT times.

It has a great deal of self configration and detection going on at startup, but booted up without probs. Looks smooth with KDE and a nice selection of software, manageable menus. The Konsole is not visible though (gasp!), in the desktop icons or the panel at the bottom.....

I am looking at trying out an additional CD. i will get the debs and make some tar.gzs and see how it works. Apt-CD-ROM and apt-get most...

autostart when inserted and give some info to user.

What goes in?

Zope/Plone/OIO
OIO plug and play forms collection
Clear Health - may need pemission from them?
GNUMED
OpenHealth
OpenEMR
The Canadian Java based system - OSCAR?
Health Imaging using DICOM with conversion of formats
Documentation
Standards - including DICOM systems
Clasification Systems - coding systems
Drugref database
Minimal datasets in different fields including Histopathology?

That is huge!!
:-)

I need to ask them if they are agreeable to this, despite the FOSS freedom to take and make philosophy.....

Taprobane - medical companion

`What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, `if they won't answer to them?'

`No use to them,' said Alice; `but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?'

Taprobane is an old name for Lanka, but a new name for Linux. Started by a fellow lklugger AND another Alice lover ;-) with Bud the Baby tux with Brains, there is every possibility of it becoming something Sri Lankans can be quite proud of.

People may not anwswer to Taprobane Linux yet, but they will. AnuBud combination is pretty strong stuff, like mixing Arrack and Brandy.

I have also got involved to develop a companion CD that will have FOSS medical apps. Medical Software HAS to be under Open Source licence for moral reasons above anything else. Therefore the promotion of FOSS in HIT.

Back to sourceforge after a few years, with the same intention as when I joined to get OIO full steam ahead.

Hmm.

I am ready....

COSSL

The College of Surgeons Inauguration was held today at the Water's Edge. Nice place, with a mini golf course. The event was OK, food was good, and the oration was on Carotid Artery Endarterectomy. as a part of this research, the use of computers to identify the features of the inside of a plaque, it's accurate measurements, the analysis of Ultrasonic pictures of it in both colour and grey scale was discussed. This was interesting. Medical imaging is going to play an important role in the future, as it is now already showing us, with the incredible detail of anatomy that we can get with CT and MRI scans and then, what the software can do with them - like virtual endoscopy.

I missed the LKLUG meeting today though, and that was bad.

I am looking into the CDMEDIC PACS WEB that is all about medical imaging using DICOM standards and the creation of image databases based on FLOSS. Full featured free PACS based on ctn, dcmtk and mysql,with remote administration using apache mod perl and imaging processing capabilities using ImageMagick, Grevera's dcm2pgm DICOM converter and AFNI. There is a live CD that can be used to try the whole thing out. It is a large download but well worth it.

Picture Archiving and Communication System or PACS are computers or networks dedicated to the storage, retrieval, distribution and presentation of images. The term 'PACS' was first used by Dr
Andre Duerinckx (pronounced Dur-inks), MD, PhD, is now director of cardiac MR and CT and nuclear medicine at Forsyth Radiological Associates in Winston-Salem, NC.

The images from varuious sources are stored in a central database usually in an open file format - most commonly DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). Steven C. Horii, MD, who is now a professor of radiology and clinical director of medical informatics at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphi, is the man who was mainly, not solely, responsible for this standard. The filmless world has arrived!

I must plan setting up such a server and also try open source software for detailed analysis. AFNI (Analysis of Functional Neuro Imaging) is one such.

TINA is an open source environment developed to accelerate the process of image analysis research. It is usable in medical image analysis.

Now, there is a LiveCD of this too. It is going to be an important project as it is sponsored by the EU.

http://www.tina-vision.net/tina-knoppix/software.html

HIT and FLOSS

Health Information Technology (HIT) and Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) go hand in hand. In other words, finding FOSS to work with HIT is in itself a HIT!

HIT is going to be of real value to the Healthcare Industry as a whole, and this is an area where everyone must be inquisitive about.

WHY everyone?

Because everyone will have a health encounter if one lives long enough. This will mean that your health record will become digitalised in the future. Hopefully it will not be posted in a blog....

:-)

There are other areas of interest like research, audit and continuing education. This area is where HIT has an even more important, and les controversial role.

This blog will be mostly on this stuff, but you never know, because I have some friends who do influence me.....