NEWBURYPORT, MA–(Marketwired – May 6, 2013) – Entagen, a fast-growing software company providing Big Data analytics and collaboration solutions across the enterprise, announced today that the company has earned a spot on Gartner’s prestigious list of Cool Vendors in Life Sciences for 2013 according to the Gartner report published May 2^nd, 2013⁽¹⁾. Entagen was recognized for its TripleMap & Extera software platforms, which help life science & healthcare companies “Connect the Dots in Big Data.” Read more

Gary Hamilton of GovHealthIT recently wrote, “Today, the acquisition of patient information for population health management is typically done through Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs). Although the exchange of health information is possible via CCDs, the amount of information they contain can be overwhelming. As such, poring over CCDs to find information relevant to patient populations can be unwieldy and time consuming. With providers challenged to manage information in just one CCD, how can they hope to use these documents to effectively influence care at the population level? The key is to look for ways to use technology to target specific patient information, pinpoint new and relevant information and alert both patients and providers when updated information is available.” Read more

Shahid Qadri has written an article for Med City News about how to use WebID to create single sign-on access for health care systems. He writes, “The Simple Sign-on challenge sponsored by the ONC through the Health 2.0 challenge was an exciting opportunity for us to learn about a sophisticated technology protocol and then being able to hack several open source system to implement a single sign on solution based on the protocol. This was a challenge that was truly a ‘challenge’ for me, but an exciting and rewarding one (our solution was the second place winner!).” Read more

NEW YORK, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Researchers from LIONsolver, Inc. have won first prize in The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s $10,000 Parkinson’s Data Challenge, a contest leveraging “the wisdom of the crowd” to benefit people with Parkinson’s disease (PD).

The contest received an enthusiastic response from the scientific community — the winning entry was chosen following more than 630 downloads of the dataset from teams in 21 countries.

The LIONsolver team’s winning entry provided proof of concept for a “machine learning approach” that could unveil clues to PD onset and progression embedded in data collected on smartphones. LIONsolver’s project proved the feasibility and value of gathering mobile data for monitoring PD, while laying the groundwork for further analysis of larger, and potentially more powerful, datasets using LIONsolver’s machine learning platform. Read more

Kitware is pleased to announce the award of $149,983 in Phase I SBIR funding from the U.S. Army for the development of an adaptive healthcare exchange language [learn more about this at SemTechBiz] for interaction between patients and healthcare organizations. With the proposed system in place, the flow of healthcare information and knowledge between patients, healthcare providers, and researchers will be dramatically improved, facilitating better care; personalized, evidence-based medicine; and longitudinal research yielding medical breakthroughs. Read more

[UPDATED: April 18, 2013, 11:46am]

The upcoming Semantic Technology and Business Conference in San Francisco is set to host a thought-provoking panel on RDF as a Universal Healthcare Language. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) identified the need for a universal healthcare exchange language as a key enabler in addressing this problem by improving healthcare data portability. Many familiar with Semantic Web technology have recognized that RDF / Linked Data would be an excellent candidate to meet this need, for both technical and strategic reasons. Although RDF is not yet well known in conventional healthcare IT, it has been beneficially used in a wide variety of applications over the past ten years — including medical and biotech applications — and would exceed all of the requirements outlined in the PCAST report. Read more

Philipp Gratzel Von Gratz of Medical Xpress writes, “Imagine a hospital where patient data from numerous sources is made accessible to ward physicians with the help of hyperlinks and intelligent indexing. Imagine a healthcare system that hands its patients – not an envelope or a CD-ROM – but an integrated dataset that allows them to truly understand their illness, and even use the Internet to obtain additional information. Imagine a radiologist who uses semantic technologies to navigate smoothly through the myriad imaging data. Welcome to the future of semantic technologies in health information retrieval.” Read more

Jonathan Gray of the OKF reports, “On Tuesday President Obama unveiled a new $100 million research initiative to map the human brain. The BRAIN (Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) initiative will ‘accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought.’ As well as trying to vastly improve scientific understanding of ‘the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears’, it is hoped that this research will enable new forms of prevention and treatment for conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and epilepsy.” Read more

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache cTAKES has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles. Read more

Ashik Siddique of Medical Daily writes, “Dream interpretation is possible- in a groundbreaking new brain imaging study, researchers developed a computer model that predicted a person’s visual imagery during sleep with at least 60 percent accuracy. That brings us only slightly closer to ‘Inception’- this dream interpretation model is relatively basic. Researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Computational Laboratories in Kyoto told Wired that the dream decoder can only identify whether dreamers are seeing particular objects based on their previous brain scans, without any context like color, narrative, or emotion.” Read more