Transesophageal echocardiography offers a noninvasive technique for the continuous monitoring of cardiac performance. The combination of 2-dimensional echocardiography and Doppler velocitometry provide assessment of cardiac anatomy, valve function and, ventricular loading conditions. Although transesophageal echocardiography has become accepted for perioperative monitoring, it is typically used...

SWAN – a Semantic Web Application in Neuromedicine – is a project to develop an effective, integrated scientific knowledge infrastructure for the Alzheimer Disease (AD) research community, using the energy and self-organization of that community, enabled by Semantic Web technology. This infrastructure may later be deployed for research communities in other neuromedical disorders. SWAN incorpora...

Developing cures for highly complex diseases, such as neurodegenerative disorders, requires extensive interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange of biomedical information in context. Our ability to exchange such information across sub-specialties today is limited by the current scientific knowledge ecosystem's inability to properly contextualize and integrate data and discourse in machine-int...

Swan neck deformity in patients with cerebral palsy can result from hand intrinsic muscle spasticity or overpull of the digital extensors. After accurate identification of the etiology of the deformity, surgical treatment is directed at correcting the underlying muscle imbalance. Intrinsic lengthening can be used to treat intrinsic muscle spasticity, whereas central slip tenotomy is employed wh...

We show how the SWAN system has been implemented using a multi-agent system. SWAN is peer-to-peer look-up system that functions by letting the participating nodes self-organise in a virtual Small World Network. The multi-agent system we are using is DIET, a lightweight ecologically inspired agent platform. We describe how the test application can be implemented, and present experiments in which...

Immortalization of primary cells with telomerase is thought to maintain normal phenotypic properties and avoid chromosomal abnormalities and other cancer-associated changes that occur following simian virus 40 tumor antigen (SV40 Tag) induced immortalization. However, we report that the human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT)-immortalized SWAN-71 trophoblast cell line has a near pentaplo...