Open Source in Medical Imaging and Collaboration.

iPath is providing an free and open platform for "case based collaboration", especially designed for medical applications (telemedicine, etc). The iPath-Server package provides a sort of medical BBS to discuss/consult cases online. Additional modules may be added.

I have been using their free web-based service for the past few years and found it very flexible and usable. It is also quite popular amongst many pathologists i know, who use the iPath server to collaborate on difficult Cytology/Histopathology cases. 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipath/

Aardvark- Human Powered Social Search Engine

Found a new search engine which searches through so-called experts who can answer the question to give a human touch to your online queries.

Aardvark was conceived as the first Social Search engine: a way to find people, not web pages, that have specific information. So people are hooked up as experts on a few self chosen subjects, and they are the ones who answer your questions!!

In February 2010 Aardvark was acquired by Google, and continues to operate as part of the Google family of products. You can ask any question to  on vark.com , and you shall get a crowd-sourced answer online/ on your iPhone/ via Gmail or MSN chat/ through Twitter and many other social media channels.

It claims to find someone to answer your question within 5- 10 minutes.

What should I use Aardvark for?

• Recommendations
• Research help
• Advice and second opinions
• Tips and discoveries
• And more…

Questions come up every day…

• When you need a quick answer, but don’t want to search through a bunch of web pages.
• When you want information but don’t know who to ask or where to start.
• When you don’t have time for a long conversation with someone.
• When you want someone who knows what they’re talking about.

They sure have got a lot of press, though when i asked a question, it took aardvark.com about 7 minutes to put me in touch with a dumbo who hadn't really understood the question. I guess it needs more people on board to make a bigger impact.

• 2/5/2010 - New York Times: A Search Engine That Relies on Humans
• 2/2/2010 - TechCrunch: Aardvark Publishes A Research Paper Offering Unprecedented Insights Into Social Search
• 2/2/2010 - O'Reilly Radar: Forget Google, social search is all about mobile
• 1/19/2010 - MacWorld: Aardvark Mobile
• 1/14/2010 - PBS: Q&A 2.0: There's More Than One Way to Answer a Question
• 1/1/2010 - Scobleizer: Hot Startups to Watch in 2010

Mapping Asthma - GPS in Clinical and Preventive Medicine

Came across this wonderful use of Global Positioning System in medicine. 

The Spiroscout inhaler tracker on Asthmapolis.

By tracking the use of inhalers, Asthmapolis aims to help patients and physicians improve management of asthma and provide a valuable new source of aggregated, anonymous and voluntarily shared data for scientists and public health.

The tracker can simply be attached to the top of the inhaler . It records the times and locations when the inhaler is used and this data can be viewed in real time over handheld devices like phones to create a complete clinical diary of events.This lets you map and track your asthma.

Besides, Physicians who remotely monitor asthma symptoms and the use of medications by their patients can identify those in need of additional attention, and help them achieve better asthma control.  This would also provide very valuable real time data on trends in Asthma attacks amongst various populations and in specific geographical areas.

You can find them on Facebook  and also follow their efforts on Twitter.

Related articles

• Here come the healthcare apps (radar.oreilly.com)
• Are over the counter asthma meds acceptable? (respiratorytherapycave.blogspot.com)

Online Collaboration in Proteomic Research

Antigen-Antibody reactions are the basis of many physiochemical experiments. The primary step in producing antibodies is identifying a potential epitope. Epitopes are distinctive markers that protrude from the surface of an antigen, and that alert the immune system to the antigen's presence. Finding suitable epitopes is a tough task and many months may be wasted searching for the elusive target .Researchers at Germany’s Heidelberg University have now set up an open access web portal to aid proteomic research through the exploration of epitopes. This portal lets you conduct a 'virtual experiment' to find out how many antibodies you need and against which targets.

EpiC (The Epitope Choice Resource) aims to provide physio chemical predictions of antigenicity together with functional annotation in order to provide the user with adequate information in order to make a decision about the best location of an epitope for an antibody based experiment. The project connects to a wide range of servers throughout Europe and was funded by the EU Framework 6 networking action ProteomeBinders.

Related articles

• Plastic antibody works in first tests in living animals (scienceblog.com)
• Harnessing the immune system's diagnostic power (scienceblog.com)