Medical Research Technology Research Articles

Implementing a Redcap-based research data collection system for mental health

BackgroundThe implementation of new technologies in medical research, such as novel big storage systems, has recently gained importance. Electronic data capture is a perfect example as it powerfully facilitates medical research. However, its implementation in resource-limited settings, where basic clinical resources, internet access, and human resources may be reduced might be a problem. MethodsIn this paper we described our approach for building a network architecture for data collection to achieve our objectives using a REDCap® tool in Colombia and provide guidance for data collection in similar settings. ConclusionsREDCap is a feasible and efficient electronic data capture software to use in similar contexts to Colombia. The software facilitated the whole data management process and is a way to build research capacities in resourced-limited settings.

Tele-healthcare and the use of virtual communication technologies in medical research and application: the future of telemedicine is now!

Contemporary world events are demonstrating the need to embrace and further develop tele-health options for assessment and delivery of biopsychosocial healthcare services. This is now possible, given advances in communication technologies allowing virtual connections of medical personnel with constituents, as well as necessary, in light of recent challenges posed by infectious conditions and growing needs for travel restrictions, social distancing, and isolation of large portions of populations. Moreover, the opportunity to virtually connect with persons through ubiquitous computer-based and handheld communication devices allows comprehensive care provision to include underserved areas, where restricted, walk-in access to brick-and-mortar establishments has long been recognized as a limiting factor in healthcare. This review examines evolving approaches of tele-healthcare, with a specific focus on telemedicine as a bridge between traditional, in-person approaches to diagnose and treat medical conditions and new healthcare opportunities developing to meet changing societal needs. The three purposes of the review are: discuss background information, with a brief look at policy and procedure guiding applications of tele-techniques in healthcare practices; identify relevant scientific studies to show the breadth of new evidence-based research for telemedicine practices; and, discuss challenges for the further development of telemedicine as healthcare systems in the United States evolve to meet current and projected healthcare needs.

Diffusion of new technologies in medical research: the case of virtual reality

Recent developments in display technology and computation have strongly increased the operability of virtual reality applications, and both academic and commercial interest in the subject is on the increase. This paper studies publication patterns of VR in medicine and various medical subfields by analysing 9830 documents from 1991 to 2018 to put the rising publication numbers into context. The focus rests on identifying those areas that show exceptional growth. While scholars in surgery were the first to publish extensively on VR, psychology and psychiatry are now the only fields that show a relative increase in publication growth.

Review and prospect of the application of basic medical research technology in nursing research

Nursing research is a powerful driving force to promote the development of nursing discipline. The cross integration of basic medical research technology in nursing research lays a foundation for the nursing discipline to meet the realistic challenges and meet the contemporary needs. This paper reviews the practice process of basic medical research technology starting from parallel to cross development in nursing discipline research in Army Medical University (Third Military Medical University), looking forward to the future of in-depth integration of basic medical research technology and nursing research, social needs and core concepts of foot care. We hope to provide reference for the development and construction of nursing discipline for colleagues. Key words: Basic medicine; Experimental techniques; Nursing research; University

Identification of an unknown glycoprotein from whole cell lysate using conA and mass spectrometry.

Medical laboratory technology major was set up to meet rapid development of science and medical research technology in 2013. Students majoring in medical laboratory had learnt a lot of techniques distributed among different specialized courses. But, they did not understand why they had to learn these techniques and how they were applied in a real-world research setting. In a one-month innovation experimental practice described herein, students had learnt to induce, purify and identify an unknown glycoprotein from whole cell lysate using conA-based affinity chromatography and mass spectrometry. Unlike in a traditional cookbook-style experiment, students chose a research subject on their own and did experiment using their selected variables. Over the one-month laboratory periods, students used sterile technique to cultivate cells, induced glycoprotein expression using LPS and IFN-γ, purified glycoprotein from cell lysate using agarose-conA beads, identified a glycoprotein via mass spectrometry, and confirmed the result using western blotting. At end of the practice, students were asked to evaluate their experiences via an anonymous survey. All students declared that this experimental practice was interesting and meaningful to them. The process of completing the project was to apply the learnt techniques to real-world biochemistry research, so they became aware of the importance and significance of techniques. © 2018 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 46:373-381, 2018.

Long reads: their purpose and place.

In recent years long-read technologies have moved from being a niche and specialist field to a point of relative maturity likely to feature frequently in the genomic landscape. Analogous to next generation sequencing, the cost of sequencing using long-read technologies has materially dropped whilst the instrument throughput continues to increase. Together these changes present the prospect of sequencing large numbers of individuals with the aim of fully characterizing genomes at high resolution. In this article, we will endeavour to present an introduction to long-read technologies showing: what long reads are; how they are distinct from short reads; why long reads are useful and how they are being used. We will highlight the recent developments in this field, and the applications and potential of these technologies in medical research, and clinical diagnostics and therapeutics.

An integrative system biology approach to unravel potential drug candidates for multiple age related disorders

Aging, though an inevitable part of life, is becoming a worldwide social and economic problem. Healthy aging is usually marked by low probability of age related disorders. Good therapeutic approaches are still in need to cure age related disorders. Occurrence of more than one ARD in an individual, expresses the need of discovery of such target proteins, which can affect multiple ARDs. Advanced scientific and medical research technologies throughout last three decades have arrived to the point where lots of key molecular determinants affect human disorders can be examined thoroughly. In this study, we designed and executed an approach to prioritize drugs that may target multiple age related disorders. Our methodology, focused on the analysis of biological pathways and protein protein interaction networks that may contribute to the pharmacology of age related disorders, included various steps such as retrieval and analysis of data, protein-protein interaction network analysis, and statistical and comparative analysis of topological coefficients, pathway, and functional enrichment analysis, and identification of drug-target proteins. We assume that the identified molecular determinants may be prioritized for further screening as novel drug targets to cure multiple ARDs. Based on the analysis, an online tool named as ‘ARDnet’ has been developed to construct and demonstrate ARD interactions at the level of PPI, ARDs and ARDs protein interaction, ARDs pathway interaction and drug-target interaction. The tool is freely made available at http://genomeinformatics.dtu.ac.in/ARDNet/Index.html.

Systems Medicine: The Application of Systems Biology Approaches for Modern Medical Research and Drug Development.

The exponential development of highly advanced scientific and medical research technologies throughout the past 30 years has arrived to the point where the high number of characterized molecular agents related to pathogenesis cannot be readily integrated or processed by conventional analytical approaches. Indeed, the realization that several moieties are signatures of disease has partly led to the increment of complex diseases being characterized. Scientists and clinicians can now investigate and analyse any individual dysregulations occurring within the genomic, transcriptomic, miRnomic, proteomic, and metabolomic levels thanks to currently available advanced technologies. However, there are drawbacks within this scientific brave new age in that only isolated molecular levels are individually investigated for their influence in affecting any particular health condition. Since their conception in 1992, systems biology/medicine focuses mainly on the perturbations of overall pathway kinetics for the consequent onset and/or deterioration of the investigated condition/s. Systems medicine approaches can therefore be employed for shedding light in multiple research scenarios, ultimately leading to the practical result of uncovering novel dynamic interaction networks that are critical for influencing the course of medical conditions. Consequently, systems medicine also serves to identify clinically important molecular targets for diagnostic and therapeutic measures against such a condition.

Advances in paediatric cancer treatment.

Four out of five children diagnosed with cancer can be cured with contemporary cancer therapy. This represents a dramatic improvement since 50 years ago when the cure rate of childhood cancer was <25% in the pre-chemotherapy era. Over the past ten years, while improvement in overall survival (OS) has been marginal, progress in pediatric oncology lies with adopting risk-adapted therapeutic approach. This has been made possible through identifying clinical and biologic prognostic factors with rigorous research and stratifying patients using these risk factors, and subsequently modifying therapy according to risk group assignment. This review provides a perspective for eight distinct pediatric malignancies, in which significant advances in treatment were made in the last decade and are leading to changes in standard of care. This includes four hematologic malignancies [acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) and Hodgkin lymphoma (HL)] and four solid tumors [medulloblastoma (MB), low grade glioma (LGG), neuroblastoma (NB) and Ewing sarcoma (ES)]. Together, they comprise 60% of childhood cancer. Improved patient outcome is not limited to better survival, but encompasses reducing both short and long-term treatment-related complications which is as important as cure, given the majority of childhood cancer patients will become long-term survivors. Risk-adapted approach allows treatment intensification in the high-risk cohort while therapy can be de-escalated in the low-risk to minimize toxicity and late sequelae without compromising survival. Advances in medical research technology have also led to a rapid increase in the understanding of the genetics of childhood cancer in the last decade, facilitating identification of molecular targets that can potentially be exploited for therapeutic benefits. As we move into the era of targeted therapeutics, searching for novel agents that target specific genetic lesions becomes a major research focus. We provide an overview of seven novel agents (bevacizumab, bortezomib, vorinostat, sorafenib, tipifarnib, erlotinib and mTOR inhibitors), which have been most frequently pursued in childhood cancers in the last decade, as well as reporting the progress of clinical trials involving these agents.

Decision Technologies in Medical Research and Practice: Practical Considerations, Ethical Implications, and the Need for Dialectic Evaluation

Decision Technologies in Medical Research and Practice: Practical Considerations, Ethical Implications, and the Need for Dialectic Evaluation

Bridging the basic biomedical researches and clinical practices with biomedical informatics

The emergence of genome-wise high-throughput technologies have led to the creation of the interdisciplinary field between biotechnology and information technology, where bioinformatics came out. With the application of these technologies in medical research, the concept of has attracted more and more attentions and concerns. How can we translate the results of basic biomedical research into clinical practices? How should we promote basic research to meet the demands of modern medicine? These questions are the core issues in translational medicine. To solve these problems, information technology is the key. The integration and interaction among biotechnology, medicine and information technology leads to the formation of Biomedical Informatics. The challenges of building modern medical information systems are to reduce the redundancy of the data and functions, to seek the Inter-connection and Inter-communication technology for different data structures and system architectures in the complex business environment, and to build an efficient and flexible content management system. To meet these challenges, we need to build a high-quality information system integrating clinical data and basic biomedical research data, which is the core of translational medicine and the key to obtain the transformation “from the laboratory bench to hospital bed”. This information system should include three parts: de-identified clinical data repository (de-id CDR), “omics” databases including analysis platforms and tissue banks (diseases and normal controls) adhering to the requirements of research design. The health information technologies related to clinical data acquisition, storage, management, and applications are essential for the 21st century medical and health services. The automatic or semi-automatic form filling for research by importing and integrating data from different information systems, e.g. PACS, HIS, EMR and LIS, can significantly improve the data accuracy and work efficiency. However, in current medical information systems, a large number of important clinical data exist only in free text documents and reports. To extract these data, medical natural language processing technology has become a hot and challenging field in biomedical informatics research. The automatic processing of medical text in English has been studied for many years, and many tools have been developed. But in China, research on automatic processing of Chinese medical documents has rarely been reported. Considering the sheer size of the population in China, Chinese medical language processing technology may be an important subject in translational medicine research in China. Translational medicine research depends on a large cohort of human tissue samples. Tissue bank is the core of clinical research information platform. The efficiency of procedures about disease prediction, personalized treatment, and assessment studies will be judged on the protein or gene level using human tissue, blood and body fluids. The research results of these biological macromolecules in human tissues will directly determine their values in clinical practices and commercial prospects. The establishment of high-quality and high-level information systems is one of the foundations of translational medicine.

The Touch of Telesurgery: A Philosophical Perspective

This article raises philosophical issues concerning the relationship between the body and technology in contemporary telesurgery research. The article focuses on two technical concepts—simulation and telepresence—and describes how both inform research into the application of computer and network technologies in medical research. The article makes an argument for a simultaneous acknowledgement of the enabling capacities of such technologies while also emphasizing issues pertaining to the physician-patient relationship, accountability, and changes to the biomedical definition of the body.

A Training Program in Medical Research Technology

Abstract A training program in advanced and research technology in the anatomic sciences is being offered by the Department of Anatomic Pathology at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan. It is part of a degree program being offered by the Center for Health Sciences at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Students spend the last year of a four year baccalaureate course at the hospital, where they receive training in histologic technic, immunofluorescence microscopy, electron microscopy, autoradiography, and cytogenetics. This program prepares students to work with some of the advanced morphologic technics used in hospital and biomedical research laboratories.

A Training Program in Medical Research Technology

A Training Program in Medical Research Technology