Development And Evaluation Of Teleophthalmic Systems For Screening Of Common Blinding Eye Diseases
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$263,918.00
Summary
Portable ophthalmic instruments will provide digital images for storage and telemetric transmission to a disease control centre. We will be assessing and developing new portable ophthalmic imaging instruments, and validating them for common blinding eye conditions. The aim is to assess the ability of various health personal to document glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, active trachoma, corneal scarring and cataract in rural screenings using digital imaging technology. A network of ophthalmologists ....Portable ophthalmic instruments will provide digital images for storage and telemetric transmission to a disease control centre. We will be assessing and developing new portable ophthalmic imaging instruments, and validating them for common blinding eye conditions. The aim is to assess the ability of various health personal to document glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, active trachoma, corneal scarring and cataract in rural screenings using digital imaging technology. A network of ophthalmologists, health department personnel and aboriginal health workers in Western Australia will be involved. The project will also examine the quality of images obtained by health workers with various levels of skills and compare this with conventional photographs currently obtained by the screening network. Finally, the project will demonstrate practicality of the large scale storage of digital images of patient eyes. Preliminary evaluations have been performed on our teleophthalmology system using different portable instruments namely a handheld fundus camera, slit-lamp and indirect ophthalmoscope. We have also tested our teleophthalmology system at the Dr. Soetomo Hospital (Airlangga University) in Surabaya, Indonesia. Images captured using the handheld fundus camera were successfully transmitted to Lions Eye Institute through satellite, mobile and Internet lines. This pilot project has been sponsored by the Western Australian Department of Trade and Commerce and Telstra.Read moreRead less
The Southern Sky Survey. The Southern Sky Survey will create the first digital map of the southern sky, providing a community available database of a billion objects. This database will be used by entire community, with our group targetting four key areas including: studying the creation of our solar system through a census of distant asteroids, exploring how stars and planets form by observing nearby young stars, probing the shape and extent of the Galaxy's dark matter halo, and discovering whe ....The Southern Sky Survey. The Southern Sky Survey will create the first digital map of the southern sky, providing a community available database of a billion objects. This database will be used by entire community, with our group targetting four key areas including: studying the creation of our solar system through a census of distant asteroids, exploring how stars and planets form by observing nearby young stars, probing the shape and extent of the Galaxy's dark matter halo, and discovering when the first stars in the Universe formed. This data set will also be used as a staging ground for a Virtual Observatory.
Read moreRead less
A Single Digital Handheld Imaging Device For Use In Both Ophthalmology And Dentistry
Funder
National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Amount
$431,221.00
Summary
Our aim is to produce and validate a single digital imaging device which can be used in ophthalmology (both for retinal and anterior segment imaging) and dentistry. This device will be low-cost, easy-to-operate and portable. Our planned development of the novel screening tool should help in bringing high quality, lower cost health care to those without easy access to it, firstly to residents of rural areas in Australia and then in developing countries in our region. This can be achieved by more ....Our aim is to produce and validate a single digital imaging device which can be used in ophthalmology (both for retinal and anterior segment imaging) and dentistry. This device will be low-cost, easy-to-operate and portable. Our planned development of the novel screening tool should help in bringing high quality, lower cost health care to those without easy access to it, firstly to residents of rural areas in Australia and then in developing countries in our region. This can be achieved by more efficient screening methods and redirecting resources to target those with treatable eye disease only. The detection process can be progressively transferred to less expensive health workers while ophthalmologist input can be redirected to monitoring the screening results and performing surgery. The dentists travel infrequently to rural and remote WA. If the dentist can pre plan their treatment then it will be more efficient and possible to treat more people at each visit to remote and rural WA. With the help of the proposed imaging device for dentistry, the nurses and other allied personnel should be able to send the digital images in advance to dentist over Internet and therefore help dentist pre-plan their treatment. As a result, improved dental care for rural, remote and underserved communities will occur.Read moreRead less
Privacy Preserving Data Sharing in Electronic Health Environment. This project aims to improve access to electronic health data (EHD) while still ensuring patient privacy. EHD can provide important information for medical research and health-care resource allocations. However, data sharing in electronic health environments is challenging because of the privacy concerns of customers. Large-scale unauthorised access from internal staff has been reported in Medicare. This project aims to develop ne ....Privacy Preserving Data Sharing in Electronic Health Environment. This project aims to improve access to electronic health data (EHD) while still ensuring patient privacy. EHD can provide important information for medical research and health-care resource allocations. However, data sharing in electronic health environments is challenging because of the privacy concerns of customers. Large-scale unauthorised access from internal staff has been reported in Medicare. This project aims to develop new privacy-preserving algorithms on EHD database federations, which can provide efficient data access yet block inside attacks. It will significantly improve the data available for medical research, while reducing the cost of EHD system management and providing visualised decision supports to medical staff and the government health resource planners.Read moreRead less
Transaction Oriented Computational Models for Multi Agent Systems. Agent systems are a very promising technology for constructing complex, large-scale software. Australian researchers have made key
contributions in this area, particularly with reference to one mature and commonly adopted agent architecture known as BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention). To make this technology suitable for use in advanced applications, it has to be provided with robust and predictable behaviour. This project wil ....Transaction Oriented Computational Models for Multi Agent Systems. Agent systems are a very promising technology for constructing complex, large-scale software. Australian researchers have made key
contributions in this area, particularly with reference to one mature and commonly adopted agent architecture known as BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention). To make this technology suitable for use in advanced applications, it has to be provided with robust and predictable behaviour. This project will address that need by designing and implementing a novel agent language for BDI, based on contributions using transactional concepts for agents developed at The University of Melbourne. This will contribute to the development of robust and predictable agent software, that can be used in complex and large scale applications of the future.
Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE140100387
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$349,179.00
Summary
Mining Patterns and Changes of Wave Shapes for Efficiently Querying Periodic Data Streams. Many data streams change periodically, such as vital physiological parameters (for example, heart rate, arterial pressure and respiratory impedance) and seasonal environmental data streams (for example, temperature and turbidity of river water). However, the querying of periodic data streams faces great challenges, including the issue of critical signals being generally buried within massive data while cri ....Mining Patterns and Changes of Wave Shapes for Efficiently Querying Periodic Data Streams. Many data streams change periodically, such as vital physiological parameters (for example, heart rate, arterial pressure and respiratory impedance) and seasonal environmental data streams (for example, temperature and turbidity of river water). However, the querying of periodic data streams faces great challenges, including the issue of critical signals being generally buried within massive data while critical changes between similar wave shapes are difficult to recognise due to shifting, scaling and noise. This project will develop new mining algorithms to resolve these challenges by segmenting periodic wave shapes, discovering shape patterns and shape changes, and summarising raw data streams so that the summarised data can directly answer various user queries for efficiency.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE130100911
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$339,434.00
Summary
Accurate and online abnormality detection in multiple correlated time series. This study will develop a new kernel-based and online support vector regression method for real-time and correlated multiple time series and promote their use in critical applications, which will save money and lives. Examples include the detection of stock market crisis events and detection of patients' condition deterioration in the operating theatre.
Investigation and Development of Parallel Large Scale Record Linkage Techniques. Record linkage aims at matching records of the same entity (like customer or patient) in large (administrative) databases. The outcomes of the proposed research will improve current techniques in terms of efficiency, accuracy and the need for human intervention. Through experimental studies and stochastic modelling the performance of traditional and new methods for data cleaning, standardisation and linkage will be ....Investigation and Development of Parallel Large Scale Record Linkage Techniques. Record linkage aims at matching records of the same entity (like customer or patient) in large (administrative) databases. The outcomes of the proposed research will improve current techniques in terms of efficiency, accuracy and the need for human intervention. Through experimental studies and stochastic modelling the performance of traditional and new methods for data cleaning, standardisation and linkage will be assessed. The effect of the statistical dependency of attribute values will be studied. New methods using clustering for blocking large datasets, and predictive models including interaction terms will be implemented, analysed and evaluated on high-performance computers and office-based PC clusters.
Read moreRead less
A painless approach to support efficient querying and mining of spatial data through smart transformations. This project will develop spatial data retrieval methods that are not only highly efficient but also easy to implement ('painless'). It will help businesses such as digital map providers, location based service providers and medical researchers quickly possess this key enabling technique for their large scale spatial querying and mining needs.
Mining multi-typed and dynamic graphs. Large volumes of data collected nowadays from real-world applications are often represented as graphs. The nodes and the edges of such graphs represent different types of entities and interactions, and they have time information. This project will develop algorithms that mine efficiently such multi-typed and dynamic graphs.