004 Datenverarbeitung; Informatik
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Background: Due to the importance of radiologic examinations, such as X-rays or computed tomography scans, for many clinical diagnoses, the optimal use of the radiology department is 1 of the primary goals of many hospitals.
Objective: This study aims to calculate the key metrics of this use by creating a radiology data warehouse solution, where data from radiology information systems (RISs) can be imported and then queried using a query language as well as a graphical user interface (GUI).
Methods: Using a simple configuration file, the developed system allowed for the processing of radiology data exported from any kind of RIS into a Microsoft Excel, comma-separated value (CSV), or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file. These data were then imported into a clinical data warehouse. Additional values based on the radiology data were calculated during this import process by implementing 1 of several provided interfaces. Afterward, the query language and GUI of the data warehouse were used to configure and calculate reports on these data. For the most common types of requested reports, a web interface was created to view their numbers as graphics.
Results: The tool was successfully tested with the data of 4 different German hospitals from 2018 to 2021, with a total of 1,436,111 examinations. The user feedback was good, since all their queries could be answered if the available data were sufficient. The initial processing of the radiology data for using them with the clinical data warehouse took (depending on the amount of data provided by each hospital) between 7 minutes and 1 hour 11 minutes. Calculating 3 reports of different complexities on the data of each hospital was possible in 1-3 seconds for reports with up to 200 individual calculations and in up to 1.5 minutes for reports with up to 8200 individual calculations.
Conclusions: A system was developed with the main advantage of being generic concerning the export of different RISs as well as concerning the configuration of queries for various reports. The queries could be configured easily using the GUI of the data warehouse, and their results could be exported into the standard formats Excel and CSV for further processing.
Mobile 3D fluoroscopes have become increasingly available in neurosurgical operating rooms. We recently reported its use for imaging cerebral vascular malformations and aneurysms. This study was conducted to evaluate various radiation settings for the imaging of cerebral aneurysms before and after surgical occlusion. Eighteen patients with cerebral aneurysms with the indication for surgical clipping were included in this prospective analysis. Before surgery the patients were randomized into one of three different scan protocols according (default settings of the 3D fluoroscope): Group 1: 110 kV, 80 mA (enhanced cranial mode), group 2: 120 kV, 64 mA (lumbar spine mode), group 3: 120 kV, 25 mA (head/neck settings). Prior to surgery, a rotational fluoroscopy scan (duration 24 s) was performed without contrast agent followed by another scan with 50 ml of intravenous iodine contrast agent. The image files of both scans were transferred to an Apple PowerMac(R) workstation, subtracted and reconstructed using OsiriX(R) MD 10.0 software. The procedure was repeated after clip placement. The image quality regarding preoperative aneurysm configuration and postoperative assessment of aneurysm occlusion and vessel patency was analyzed by 2 independent reviewers using a 6-grade scale. This technique quickly supplies images of adequate quality to depict intracranial aneurysms and distal vessel patency after aneurysm clipping. Regarding these features, a further optimization to our previous protocol seems possible lowering the voltage and increasing tube current. For quick intraoperative assessment, image subtraction seems not necessary. Thus, a native scan without a contrast agent is not necessary. Further optimization may be possible using a different contrast injection protocol.
Background: Natural language processing (NLP) is a powerful tool supporting the generation of Real-World Evidence (RWE). There is no NLP system that enables the extensive querying of parameters specific to multiple myeloma (MM) out of unstructured medical reports. We therefore created a MM-specific ontology to accelerate the information extraction (IE) out of unstructured text. Methods: Our MM ontology consists of extensive MM-specific and hierarchically structured attributes and values. We implemented “A Rule-based Information Extraction System” (ARIES) that uses this ontology. We evaluated ARIES on 200 randomly selected medical reports of patients diagnosed with MM. Results: Our system achieved a high F1-Score of 0.92 on the evaluation dataset with a precision of 0.87 and recall of 0.98. Conclusions: Our rule-based IE system enables the comprehensive querying of medical reports. The IE accelerates the extraction of data and enables clinicians to faster generate RWE on hematological issues. RWE helps clinicians to make decisions in an evidence-based manner. Our tool easily accelerates the integration of research evidence into everyday clinical practice.
LoRaWAN Network Planning in Smart Environments: Towards Reliability, Scalability, and Cost Reduction
(2022)
The goal in this work is to present a guidance for LoRaWAN planning to improve overall reliability for message transmissions and scalability. At the end, the cost component is discussed. Therefore, a five step approach is presented that helps to plan a LoRaWAN deployment step by step: Based on the device locations, an initial gateway placement is suggested followed by in-depth frequency and channel access planning. After an initial planning phase, updates for channel access and the initial gateway planning is suggested that should also be done periodically during network operation. Since current gateway placement approaches are only studied with random channel access, there is a lot of potential in the cell planning phase. Furthermore, the performance of different channel access approaches is highly related on network load, and thus cell size and sensor density. Last, the influence of different cell planning ideas on expected costs are discussed.
Towards LoRaWAN without data loss: studying the performance of different channel access approaches
(2022)
The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is one of the fastest growing Internet of Things (IoT) access protocols. It operates in the license free 868 MHz band and gives everyone the possibility to create their own small sensor networks. The drawback of this technology is often unscheduled or random channel access, which leads to message collisions and potential data loss. For that reason, recent literature studies alternative approaches for LoRaWAN channel access. In this work, state-of-the-art random channel access is compared with alternative approaches from the literature by means of collision probability. Furthermore, a time scheduled channel access methodology is presented to completely avoid collisions in LoRaWAN. For this approach, an exhaustive simulation study was conducted and the performance was evaluated with random access cross-traffic. In a general theoretical analysis the limits of the time scheduled approach are discussed to comply with duty cycle regulations in LoRaWAN.
Uplink vs. Downlink: Machine Learning-Based Quality Prediction for HTTP Adaptive Video Streaming
(2021)
Streaming video is responsible for the bulk of Internet traffic these days. For this reason, Internet providers and network operators try to make predictions and assessments about the streaming quality for an end user. Current monitoring solutions are based on a variety of different machine learning approaches. The challenge for providers and operators nowadays is that existing approaches require large amounts of data. In this work, the most relevant quality of experience metrics, i.e., the initial playback delay, the video streaming quality, video quality changes, and video rebuffering events, are examined using a voluminous data set of more than 13,000 YouTube video streaming runs that were collected with the native YouTube mobile app. Three Machine Learning models are developed and compared to estimate playback behavior based on uplink request information. The main focus has been on developing a lightweight approach using as few features and as little data as possible, while maintaining state-of-the-art performance.
In this work, we describe the network from data collection to data processing and storage as a system based on different layers. We outline the different layers and highlight major tasks and dependencies with regard to energy consumption and energy efficiency. With this view, we can outwork challenges and questions a future system architect must answer to provide a more sustainable, green, resource friendly, and energy efficient application or system. Therefore, all system layers must be considered individually but also altogether for future IoT solutions. This requires, in particular, novel sustainability metrics in addition to current Quality of Service and Quality of Experience metrics to provide a high power, user satisfying, and sustainable network.
Around 4.9 billion Internet users worldwide watch billions of hours of online video every day. As a result, streaming is by far the predominant type of traffic in communication networks. According to Google statistics, three out of five video views come from mobile devices. Thus, in view of the continuous technological advances in end devices and increasing mobile use, datasets for mobile streaming are indispensable in research but only sparsely dealt with in literature so far. With this public dataset, we provide 1,081 hours of time-synchronous video measurements at network, transport, and application layer with the native YouTube streaming client on mobile devices. The dataset includes 80 network scenarios with 171 different individual bandwidth settings measured in 5,181 runs with limited bandwidth, 1,939 runs with emulated 3 G/4 G traces, and 4,022 runs with pre-defined bandwidth changes. This corresponds to 332 GB video payload. We present the most relevant quality indicators for scientific use, i.e., initial playback delay, streaming video quality, adaptive video quality changes, video rebuffering events, and streaming phases.
This short letter proposes more consolidated explicit solutions for the forces and torques acting on typical rover wheels, that can be used as a method to determine their average mobility characteristics in planetary soils. The closed loop solutions stand in one of the verified methods, but at difference of the previous, observables are decoupled requiring a less amount of physical parameters to measure. As a result, we show that with knowledge of terrain properties, wheel driving performance rely in a single observable only. Because of their generality, the formulated equations established here can have further implications in autonomy and control of rovers or planetary soil characterization.
This article presents an immersive virtual reality (VR) system for training classroom management skills, with a specific focus on learning to manage disruptive student behavior in face-to-face, one-to-many teaching scenarios. The core of the system is a real-time 3D virtual simulation of a classroom populated by twenty-four semi-autonomous virtual students. The system has been designed as a companion tool for classroom management seminars in a syllabus for primary and secondary school teachers. This will allow lecturers to link theory with practice using the medium of VR. The system is therefore designed for two users: a trainee teacher and an instructor supervising the training session. The teacher is immersed in a real-time 3D simulation of a classroom by means of a head-mounted display and headphone. The instructor operates a graphical desktop console, which renders a view of the class and the teacher whose avatar movements are captured by a marker less tracking system. This console includes a 2D graphics menu with convenient behavior and feedback control mechanisms to provide human-guided training sessions. The system is built using low-cost consumer hardware and software. Its architecture and technical design are described in detail. A first evaluation confirms its conformance to critical usability requirements (i.e., safety and comfort, believability, simplicity, acceptability, extensibility, affordability, and mobility). Our initial results are promising and constitute the necessary first step toward a possible investigation of the efficiency and effectiveness of such a system in terms of learning outcomes and experience.
Constraining graph layouts - that is, restricting the placement of vertices and the routing of edges to obey certain constraints - is common practice in graph drawing.
In this book, we discuss algorithmic results on two different restriction types:
placing vertices on the outer face and on the integer grid.
For the first type, we look into the outer k-planar and outer k-quasi-planar graphs, as well as giving a linear-time algorithm to recognize full and closed outer k-planar graphs Monadic Second-order Logic.
For the second type, we consider the problem of transferring a given planar drawing onto the integer grid while perserving the original drawings topology;
we also generalize a variant of Cauchy's rigidity theorem for orthogonal polyhedra of genus 0 to those of arbitrary genus.
Effects of Acrophobic Fear and Trait Anxiety on Human Behavior in a Virtual Elevated Plus-Maze
(2021)
The Elevated Plus-Maze (EPM) is a well-established apparatus to measure anxiety in rodents, i.e., animals exhibiting an increased relative time spent in the closed vs. the open arms are considered anxious. To examine whether such anxiety-modulated behaviors are conserved in humans, we re-translated this paradigm to a human setting using virtual reality in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) system. In two studies, we examined whether the EPM exploration behavior of humans is modulated by their trait anxiety and also assessed the individuals’ levels of acrophobia (fear of height), claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces), sensation seeking, and the reported anxiety when on the maze. First, we constructed an exact virtual copy of the animal EPM adjusted to human proportions. In analogy to animal EPM studies, participants (N = 30) freely explored the EPM for 5 min. In the second study (N = 61), we redesigned the EPM to make it more human-adapted and to differentiate influences of trait anxiety and acrophobia by introducing various floor textures and lower walls of closed arms to the height of standard handrails. In the first experiment, hierarchical regression analyses of exploration behavior revealed the expected association between open arm avoidance and Trait Anxiety, an even stronger association with acrophobic fear. In the second study, results revealed that acrophobia was associated with avoidance of open arms with mesh-floor texture, whereas for trait anxiety, claustrophobia, and sensation seeking, no effect was detected. Also, subjects’ fear rating was moderated by all psychometrics but trait anxiety. In sum, both studies consistently indicate that humans show no general open arm avoidance analogous to rodents and that human EPM behavior is modulated strongest by acrophobic fear, whereas trait anxiety plays a subordinate role. Thus, we conclude that the criteria for cross-species validity are met insufficiently in this case. Despite the exploratory nature, our studies provide in-depth insights into human exploration behavior on the virtual EPM.
The ongoing digitization of historical photographs in archives allows investigating the quality, quantity, and distribution of these images. However, the exact interior and exterior camera orientations of these photographs are usually lost during the digitization process. The proposed method uses content-based image retrieval (CBIR) to filter exterior images of single buildings in combination with metadata information. The retrieved photographs are automatically processed in an adapted structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline to determine the camera parameters. In an interactive georeferencing process, the calculated camera positions are transferred into a global coordinate system. As all image and camera data are efficiently stored in the proposed 4D database, they can be conveniently accessed afterward to georeference newly digitized images by using photogrammetric triangulation and spatial resection. The results show that the CBIR and the subsequent SfM are robust methods for various kinds of buildings and different quantity of data. The absolute accuracy of the camera positions after georeferencing lies in the range of a few meters likely introduced by the inaccurate LOD2 models used for transformation. The proposed photogrammetric method, the database structure, and the 4D visualization interface enable adding historical urban photographs and 3D models from other locations.
Einleitung:
Multiple-Choice-Klausuren spielen immer noch eine herausragende Rolle für fakultätsinterne medizinische Prüfungen. Neben inhaltlichen Arbeiten stellt sich die Frage, wie die technische Abwicklung optimiert werden kann. Für Dozenten in der Medizin gibt es zunehmend drei Optionen zur Durchführung von MC-Klausuren: Papierklausuren mit oder ohne Computerunterstützung oder vollständig elektronische Klausuren. Kritische Faktoren sind der Aufwand für die Formatierung der Klausur, der logistische Aufwand bei der Klausurdurchführung, die Qualität, Schnelligkeit und der Aufwand der Klausurkorrektur, die Bereitstellung der Dokumente für die Einsichtnahme, und die statistische Analyse der Klausurergebnisse.
Methoden:
An der Universität Würzburg wird seit drei Semestern ein Computerprogramm zur Eingabe und Formatierung der MC-Fragen in medizinischen und anderen Papierklausuren verwendet und optimiert, mit dem im Wintersemester (WS) 2009/2010 elf, im Sommersemester (SS) 2010 zwölf und im WS 2010/11 dreizehn medizinische Klausuren erstellt und anschließend die eingescannten Antwortblätter automatisch ausgewertet wurden. In den letzten beiden Semestern wurden die Aufwände protokolliert.
Ergebnisse:
Der Aufwand der Formatierung und der Auswertung einschl. nachträglicher Anpassung der Auswertung einer Durchschnittsklausur mit ca. 140 Teilnehmern und ca. 35 Fragen ist von 5-7 Stunden für Klausuren ohne Komplikation im WS 2009/2010 über ca. 2 Stunden im SS 2010 auf ca. 1,5 Stunden im WS 2010/11 gefallen. Einschließlich der Klausuren mit Komplikationen bei der Auswertung betrug die durchschnittliche Zeit im SS 2010 ca. 3 Stunden und im WS 10/11 ca. 2,67 Stunden pro Klausur.
Diskussion:
Für konventionelle Multiple-Choice-Klausuren bietet die computergestützte Formatierung und Auswertung von Papierklausuren einen beträchtlichen Zeitvorteil für die Dozenten im Vergleich zur manuellen Korrektur von Papierklausuren und benötigt im Vergleich zu rein elektronischen Klausuren eine deutlich einfachere technische Infrastruktur und weniger Personal bei der Klausurdurchführung.
The Internet sees an ongoing transformation process from a single best-effort service network into a multi-service network. In addition to traditional applications like e-mail,WWW-traffic, or file transfer, future generation networks (FGNs) will carry services with real-time constraints and stringent availability and reliability requirements like Voice over IP (VoIP), video conferencing, virtual private networks (VPNs) for finance, other real-time business applications, tele-medicine, or tele-robotics. Hence, quality of service (QoS) guarantees and resilience to failures are crucial characteristics of an FGN architecture. At the same time, network operations must be efficient. This necessitates sophisticated mechanisms for the provisioning and the control of future communication infrastructures. In this work we investigate such echanisms for resilient FGNs. There are many aspects of the provisioning and control of resilient FGNs such as traffic matrix estimation, traffic characterization, traffic forecasting, mechanisms for QoS enforcement also during failure cases, resilient routing, or calability concerns for future routing and addressing mechanisms. In this work we focus on three important aspects for which performance analysis can deliver substantial insights: load balancing for multipath Internet routing, fast resilience concepts, and advanced dimensioning techniques for resilient networks. Routing in modern communication networks is often based on multipath structures, e.g., equal-cost multipath routing (ECMP) in IP networks, to facilitate traffic engineering and resiliency. When multipath routing is applied, load balancing algorithms distribute the traffic over available paths towards the destination according to pre-configured distribution values. State-of-the-art load balancing algorithms operate either on the packet or the flow level. Packet level mechanisms achieve highly accurate traffic distributions, but are known to have negative effects on the performance of transport protocols and should not be applied. Flow level mechanisms avoid performance degradations, but at the expense of reduced accuracy. These inaccuracies may have unpredictable effects on link capacity requirements and complicate resource management. Thus, it is important to exactly understand the accuracy and dynamics of load balancing algorithms in order to be able to exercise better network control. Knowing about their weaknesses, it is also important to look for alternatives and to assess their applicability in different networking scenarios. This is the first aspect of this work. Component failures are inevitable during the operation of communication networks and lead to routing disruptions if no special precautions are taken. In case of a failure, the robust shortest-path routing of the Internet reconverges after some time to a state where all nodes are again reachable – provided physical connectivity still exists. But stringent availability and reliability criteria of new services make a fast reaction to failures obligatory for resilient FGNs. This led to the development of fast reroute (FRR) concepts for MPLS and IP routing. The operations of MPLS-FRR have already been standardized. Still, the standards leave some degrees of freedom for the resilient path layout and it is important to understand the tradeoffs between different options for the path layout to efficiently provision resilient FGNs. In contrast, the standardization for IP-FRR is an ongoing process. The applicability and possible combinations of different concepts still are open issues. IP-FRR also facilitates a comprehensive resilience framework for IP routing covering all steps of the failure recovery cycle. These points constitute another aspect of this work. Finally, communication networks are usually over-provisioned, i.e., they have much more capacity installed than actually required during normal operation. This is a precaution for various challenges such as network element failures. An alternative to this capacity overprovisioning (CO) approach is admission control (AC). AC blocks new flows in case of imminent overload due to unanticipated events to protect the QoS for already admitted flows. On the one hand, CO is generally viewed as a simple mechanism, AC as a more complex mechanism that complicates the network control plane and raises interoperability issues. On the other hand, AC appears more cost-efficient than CO. To obtain advanced provisioning methods for resilient FGNs, it is important to find suitable models for irregular events, such as failures and different sources of overload, and to incorporate them into capacity dimensioning methods. This allows for a fair comparison between CO and AC in various situations and yields a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of both concepts. Such an advanced capacity dimensioning method for resilient FGNs represents the third aspect of this work.
In recent years, satellite communication has been expanding its field of application in the world of computer networks. This paper aims to provide an overview of how a typical scenario involving 5G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) for vehicle to everything (V2X) applications is characterized. In particular, a first implementation of a system that integrates them together will be described. Such a framework will later be used to evaluate the performance of applications such as Vehicle Monitoring (VM), Remote Driving (RD), Voice Over IP (VoIP), and others. Different configuration scenarios such as Low Earth Orbit and Geostationary Orbit will be considered.
This paper presents a prototypical implementation of the In-band Network Telemetry (INT) specification in P4 and demonstrates a use case, where a Tofino Switch is used to measure device and network performance in a lab setting. This work is based on research activities in the area of P4 data plane programming conducted at the network lab of HTW Berlin.
This work is subdivided into two main areas: resilient admission control and resilient routing. The work gives an overview of the state of the art of quality of service mechanisms in communication networks and proposes a categorization of admission control (AC) methods. These approaches are investigated regarding performance, more precisely, regarding the potential resource utilization by dimensioning the capacity for a network with a given topology, traffic matrix, and a required flow blocking probability. In case of a failure, the affected traffic is rerouted over backup paths which increases the traffic rate on the respective links. To guarantee the effectiveness of admission control also in failure scenarios, the increased traffic rate must be taken into account for capacity dimensioning and leads to resilient AC. Capacity dimensioning is not feasible for existing networks with already given link capacities. For the application of resilient NAC in this case, the size of distributed AC budgets must be adapted according to the traffic matrix in such a way that the maximum blocking probability for all flows is minimized and that the capacity of all links is not exceeded by the admissible traffic rate in any failure scenario. Several algorithms for the solution of that problem are presented and compared regarding their efficiency and fairness. A prototype for resilient AC was implemented in the laboratories of Siemens AG in Munich within the scope of the project KING. Resilience requires additional capacity on the backup paths for failure scenarios. The amount of this backup capacity depends on the routing and can be minimized by routing optimization. New protection switching mechanisms are presented that deviate the traffic quickly around outage locations. They are simple and can be implemented, e.g, by MPLS technology. The Self-Protecting Multi-Path (SPM) is a multi-path consisting of disjoint partial paths. The traffic is distributed over all faultless partial paths according to an optimized load balancing function both in the working case and in failure scenarios. Performance studies show that the network topology and the traffic matrix also influence the amount of required backup capacity significantly. The example of the COST-239 network illustrates that conventional shortest path routing may need 50% more capacity than the optimized SPM if all single link and node failures are protected.
The ITS2 Database
(2012)
The internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) has been used as a phylogenetic marker for more than two decades. As ITS2 research mainly focused on the very variable ITS2 sequence, it confined this marker to low-level phylogenetics only. However, the combination of the ITS2 sequence and its highly conserved secondary structure improves the phylogenetic resolution1 and allows phylogenetic inference at multiple taxonomic ranks, including species delimitation.
The ITS2 Database presents an exhaustive dataset of internal transcribed spacer 2 sequences from NCBI GenBank accurately reannotated. Following an annotation by profile Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), the secondary structure of each sequence is predicted. First, it is tested whether a minimum energy based fold (direct fold) results in a correct, four helix conformation. If this is not the case, the structure is predicted by homology modeling. In homology modeling, an already known secondary structure is transferred to another ITS2 sequence, whose secondary structure was not able to fold correctly in a direct fold.
The ITS2 Database is not only a database for storage and retrieval of ITS2 sequence-structures. It also provides several tools to process your own ITS2 sequences, including annotation, structural prediction, motif detection and BLAST search on the combined sequence-structure information. Moreover, it integrates trimmed versions of 4SALE and ProfDistS for multiple sequence-structure alignment calculation and Neighbor Joining tree reconstruction. Together they form a coherent analysis pipeline from an initial set of sequences to a phylogeny based on sequence and secondary structure.
In a nutshell, this workbench simplifies first phylogenetic analyses to only a few mouse-clicks, while additionally providing tools and data for comprehensive large-scale analyses.
In recent years several community testbeds as well as participatory sensing platforms have successfully established themselves to provide open data to everyone interested. Each of them with a specific goal in mind, ranging from collecting radio coverage data up to environmental and radiation data. Such data can be used by the community in their decision making, whether to subscribe to a specific mobile phone service that provides good coverage in an area or in finding a sunny and warm region for the summer holidays.
However, the existing platforms are usually limiting themselves to directly measurable network QoS. If such a crowdsourced data set provides more in-depth derived measures, this would enable an even better decision making. A community-driven crowdsensing platform that derives spatial application-layer user experience from resource-friendly bandwidth estimates would be such a case, video streaming services come to mind as a prime example. In this paper we present a concept for such a system based on an initial prototype that eases the collection of data necessary to determine mobile-specific QoE at large scale. In addition we reason why the simple quality metric proposed here can hold its own.