Medical multimedia for presentations

I get a lot of traffic on my blogs for search terms-”Medical multimedia“.

During one such back-links search, i came upon this neat list of medical multimedia links for use in your presentations.

Medical Multimedia Resources

Medical Multimedia Resources

Do you need a piece of clip art to spice up your PowerPoint or web presentation? Or an image of heart rupture, post-infarction? These links will take you to sites containing medicine/health related multimedia. Please note that most of the sites listed permit use of media for educational purposes. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that you comply with each site’s terms of use.

Clip art

• Cheryl’s Image Gallery has nice clip art related to disabilities: people in wheelchairs, crutches, sign language alphabet, parking signs etc.
• Clips Ahoy has some cartoon-like but well done clip art related to medicine and health.
• Cool Archive’s Science collection.
• Cool Archive’s Medicine/Health collection.
• Discovery School’s Clip Art Gallery has good cartoon-like black and white images (health and safety category).
• Disability access symbols from Medword.
• GEWIS, Clip art gallery–scroll down to medical.

Photographs and Realistic Illustrations

• Bristol BioMed Image Archive is an excellent resource. Search or browse by alphabetical listing. Requires free registration to view full size images.
• Vesalius Image Archive, a resource for surgical education. Images contain Vesalius watermark.

Others

• HONmedia has over 1,950 medical images and videos, pertaining to 1,350 topics and themes. Easy to use.
• Medical Images and Illustrations list from the Karolinska Institutet–nicely categorized.

Related article

The Best Websites For Free Clipart Downloads (makeuseof.com)

Better imaging with Optofluidics

What is Optofluidics ?

Optofluidics refers to manipulation of light using fluids, or vice-verse, on the micro to nano meter scale. Optical devices which incorporate liquids as a fundamental part of the structure can be traced at least as far back as the eighteenth century when rotating pools of mercury were proposed as a simple technique to create smooth mirrors for use in reflecting telescopes. The field of optofluidics is a “marriage” of nano-photonics and micro-fluidics! The introduction of liquids in the optical structure enables flexible fine-tuning and even reconfiguration of circuits such that they may perform tasks optimally in a changing environment.This allows for enhanced optical detection in lab-on-a-chip systems with a potentially strong impact on bio-technology, life-sciences, and bio-medical/health-care industries.It is used in a broad spectrum of military and civilian applications for imaging, spectroscopy, communications, sensing, and displays.

The technology has now allowed the introduction of an inexpensive and high-resolution microscope that has been engineered to fit onto a single chip ( See Optofluidic microscope shrinks to fit on a chip.) The performance of the device is comparable to a 20x microscope, but in terms of size, cost and ability to mass produce, the device has significant advantages.

• The lack of optical elements in the arrangement implies that there are no aberrations to worry about.
  
• This is an intrinsically space-conserving method.
  
• The entire chip is illuminated from above; sunlight is sufficient.

This portable and cheap device is particularly appealing for third-world applications where it could be used in the field to analyse blood samples for malaria or check water supplies for pathogens. In the future, the microscope chips could be incorporated into devices that are implanted into the human body. Pretty good.

An on-chip implementation of the optofluidic microscope.

In the set-up, a voltage of 25 V is applied across the inlet and outlet of a microfluidic channel that is 2.4 mm long, 40 µm wide and 13 µm high. The electric field draws the specimen across the aperture array in a steady stream. The array consists of 120 holes with a diameter of 0.5 µm and separation of 10.4 µm, fabricated on a 2D CMOS imaging sensor. The sensor comprises a grid lattice of 1280 x 1024 square pixels with a pixel size of 5.2 µm.

Also see – Developing optofluidic technology through the fusion of microfluidics and optics

Heres a list of microfluidics research groups

Why US needs healthcare Reforms.

Health care reform is a hot topic these days. What is health care reform? The President, Congress and people like you are talking about it. The simple answer is well, there is no simple answer.

Most Americans i know are not even sure if Healthcare is a fundamental human right ! So talking about “Health care for all” seems too far fetched for them.The argument i hear commonly says that only taxpayers should be given health care assistance and the 46 million or so people without Health insurance can go to Hell ! It seems like a weeding out plan for poverty. ” You don’t have money to buy insurance? Too bad, go sit there in a corner and die”.

All of us shall soon have to come to the conclusion that health rights are equal to Right to life and inability to pay for it cannot be a hurdle. The real problem is not the poor, it is the absurdly rising COST of health care!

A few ways to reduce healthcare costs include

• More Use of Technology
• Empower people with More information
• Payment to care providers to be based on Quality rather than the number of investigations performed. ( This is very basic actually)
• Promote healthier Lifestyle.

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Related articles

• -Why American healthcare is so expensive? (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)
• Healthcare and emerging technologies (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)
• Better E.M.Rs to attain “Health Rights for All”. (neeleshbhandari.blogspot.com)

Visual map of Dermatitis management

An Inflammation of the Skin is called dermatitis. It is a very generic diagnosis and means different things and

does not really point to any one specific disorder.

Above is the Visual map of the disease and the drugs used for its management.

This is a poor image of a lovely interactive application.You should access curehunter.com and try it out yourself.

Healthcare and emerging technologies

OBBeC.com: Healthcare and Emerging Rich Web Technologies – The WEB 2.0/Semantic Web Challenge and Opportunity

With the advent of 2009, I was looking for something to overview the present situation in Health Informatics. Healthcare related use of the internet is a common phenomenon and an estimated 80% of internet users have used it for obtaining health information. Knowledge body in Health sciences is large and fragmented, and even a treating physician may not have all the data he requires.

There is an urgent need for tools that can aggregate information from
multiple sources to improve health care decision making, enhance health
management, and produce better patient outcomes. This is one of the
main drivers for the use of the Internet in healthcare.

Semantic Web applications and Web 2.0 technologies have yet to be applied to health care.  Privacy issues are of concern, but use of cloud computing within health care delivery system just cannot be held back. Every person has a fundamental right to health, which includes easy access to high quality and best possible care and access to medical information, besides other parameters.

-A Fantastic Medical Informatics conference in India

Just back from the Meditel 2008, the fifth International conference on Medical informatics and Telemedicine. The theme of the conference this year was “ICT for Medical Education and Research” and there were some pretty sharp presentations in Medical e.learning. Hopefully, as promised, most of the presentations would be available on the MCSI website soon.

The few presentations i thoroughly enjoyed included,

• E-Learning- Current trends in India- by Dr.Balasubramanyam, Prof. ans head, Dept. of Anatomy, SJMC, Bangalore.

• Cochrane Collaboration- Informed healthcare in South Asia- Dr.Pratap Tharyan

• Improving Healthcare via Transparent monitoring- Mr.Bill Thies, MIT and Microsoft ( use of microchip within pill boxes to monitor compliance in National health programs like DOTS India.)

• World”s first prepaid service for Doctors consultation from any Phone- by Mr.Sunil Kulkarni, Group President, Oxigen Services (India) Pvt. Ltd.( a beautiful concept to allow pre-paying for telephonic medical consultations)

There were a number of other interesting ones, like this Virtual conference using Webex services, via a lowly Tata Indicom plug2surf device !!

To keep in touch with other happenings regarding Medical Informatics in India, subscribe to my Friendfeed . or connect to my Del.icio.us account.

-Medical Informatics and Telemedicine conference-

Meditel 2008
The use of ICT ( Information and communication technologies) for Health care in India is still very limited. Most of the efforts in this direction are sporadic and rudderless.There is no dearth of skilled manpower in this field, but a unified plan of action is still awaited.

Medical computer society of India has taken the lead to organize a national conference on Medical informatics and Telemedicine. Under the leadership of Dr.Sunil Shroff, eminent Nephrologist and President of MCSI, the fifth national conference on Medical informatics and telemedicine is scheduled to take place at Sri Ramchandra Medical College & Research Institute, Chennai on 19th-20th December, 2008.

“The conference (as in the past) will bring together decision makers, policy makers, practicing clinicians, healthcare educators and researchers, health administrators, health technologists and IT vendors.Meditel 2008 offers a platform to meet, interact and network with qualified specialists, users, buyers, healthcare providers, industry representatives, researchers and policy makers from India and abroad.“

I was a part of Meditel 2006 and can vouch for the quality of discussions held at Centre for Digital Health, Amrita institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi, Kerala.It proved extremely useful to me then and I expect a similar experience this year.

- No green beards in path labs @ John Hopkins University

The pathology department at my medical college was very strict with us Resident doctors. All our activities were constantly noted by our seniors, and being reprimanded  frequently for “unprofessional conduct” was the norm. Our seniors made sure we were always properly dressed and behaved.

But what i read on John Hopkins university, Dept. of Pathology website takes the cake. They have a detailed list of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” conduct. Sample a few,

1) Acceptable- Knee length culottes and dress shorts; Unacceptable- Mini skirts, blue jeans, baseball caps.

2) Acceptable- Fingernails that are of “professional length”, whatever that means; Unacceptable- Applying cosmetics in the laboratory.

3) Acceptable- Short/ Tied back hair of natural color ; Unacceptable- Purple and Green beards and mustaches!!

4) Acceptable- Socks/ Hose/ Tights ; Unacceptable- Printed underwear showing through outer garments.

5) Acceptable- Jewelery in moderation ; Unacceptable- Badges promoting causes/products/slogans NOT endorsed by the Institution/department.

Its definitely a good read. Click here to access the pdf file of acceptable appearance standards at John Hopkins University.

-Why American healthcare is so expensive?

That the American healthcare delivery system is out of control and wasteful is a no-brainer.

Needless battery of investigations and over diagnosis, branded drugs, impractical insurance laws, free-markets approach to health care and sedentary lifestyle are all major factors in creating the current scenario.Its like a bad spiraling black hole which only sucks you into unnecessary and wasteful consumption of health services.

Keeping the whole machinery ticking seems to be the raison d’itre de patient existence.

This video below touches on a few reasons on why health care is so expensive in America. Features like this convince that India must be doing something right in its public health policy. I have been a member of Public health delivery system for about 10 years, in a wide range of positions and institutions. I fully appreciate Indian obstacles (population) and limitations (poverty) in public health delivery. A good step has been taken with the Swasthya bima (govt. sponsored health insurance with private partners). This Indian central govt scheme for BPL (Below poverty line) families is built on sound understanding of indian conditions and mindset. Eighteen states, including Rajasthan, have already launched this scheme. What is needed now is to make sure ALL BPL families OBTAIN an insurance smartcard. NGOs need to come forward to ensure all BPL families get their smartcards. The cost of the insurance is Ruppees 750/- annualy, 75% paid by central govt. and 25% state govt. The consumer would have to pay an annual Ruppees (Thirty) 30/- as registration/renewal fees. Then they would able to use all public hospitals, many private hospitals and most specialist health care institutions all over the country with the help of a single smartcard!! The claims section of the scheme still has to show efficiency. But all in all, its a very well thought out scheme and should work wonders in more ways than one.This would also have a trigerring effect for adoption of EMR(Electronic medical records).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYC2DJWU41s

-Where are the Doctors?, says “Assocham”, Indian industries.

India lags in primary health, lacks specialists : iGovernment

New Delhi: About 50 per cent of sanctioned posts of specialists
at various community health centres (CHCs) throughout India are vacant,
which shows that the primary health still remains the lowest priority
of state governments including union territories, reveals an industry
lobby report.

According to the Associated Chamber of Commerce
and Industries (Assocham) Paper ‘Role of Health Insurance in Medical
Care in India’, 59.2 per cent of posts of surgeons, 46.4 per cent of
obstetricians and gynaecologists, 56.6 per cent of physicians and 51.9
per cent of pediatricians are vacant in the 4,500 CHCs in the country.

Releasing
the paper, Assocham President Sajjan Jindal said that 2,525 CHCs should
have been added to current operational community health centres that
number around 5,000 by end of 2007-08 which did not happen at all,
speaks of utter apathy that state governments observed towards them.
 
The
CHCs are supposed to provide specialised medical care in the form of
facilities of surgeons, obstetricians and gynaecologists, physicians
and paediatricians throughout the country to promote rural health.

Even
out of the sanctioned posts, a significant percentage of posts are
vacant at other levels. For instance, about 8.8 per cent of the
sanctioned posts of female health worker are vacant as compared to
about 32 per cent of the male health worker.

At primary health
centres (PHCs), about 13.8 per cent of the sanctioned posts of female
health assistant and 22.1 per cent of male health assistant are vacant.
 
At
the sub centre level, the extent of existing manpower can be assessed
from the fact that about five per cent of the sub centres were without
a female health worker, about 37.2 per cent sub centres were without a
male health worker and about 4.7 per cent sub centres were without both
female health worker as well as male health worker.

This
indicates a large shortfall in male health workers, resulting in poor
male participation in family welfare and other health programmes, the
Assocham paper said.
 
About 5.6 per cent of the PHCs were
without a doctor, about 40 per cent were without a lab technician and
about 17 per cent were without a pharmacist.

The chamber has,
therefore, recommended that states who manage these centres should
attach equal priority to their well being just as they take up issues
of creating infrastructure such as roads, ports and aviation.