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The 4th Annual OSHCA Meeting: University Hospital of Geneva, December 7-9, 2003 List of Speakers
Speaker	Time	Topic / Abstract
	Sunday P.M.	Welcome and Introductions
Dr. Adrian Midgley	Sunday P.M.	Points on the curve I propose to talk about the development of the movement over a few years, pointing among other things to the simple increase in use of FLOSS for our day to day business as a clear indicator of progress, mentioning some developments in the UK and attempting to point toward a couple of directions for efforts in the next few years.
Vincenzo Della Mea Dept. of Maths & Computer Science University of Udine Italy	Sunday P.M.	Teaching Medical Informatics using open source software In many countries, Informatics is being taught to medicalstudents mainly as basic computer science, with some practical session to develop generic computer skills. Teaching medical informatics, which a more specialised topic, is more rare and difficult because practical activities are not easy to be carried out, yet they are useful to better understand the topics.In fact, where real medical information systems are available, they cannot be used just for students exercisesfor security problems. In the design of the course of Basic Computer Science and Medical Informatics for 1st year students of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Udine, special attention has been posed on practice related to medical informatics. To avoid problems with the scarce real systems available in the University Hospital, a "virtual" laboratory ofMedical Informatics has been developed as a web site hostinginstances of some medical open source software, to which students have free access. In the last three years (since the introduction of Computer science in the italian medical curriculum), the following tools have been used: FreePM as example of GP health record, then substituted by OpenEMR; myPACS as example of PACS; an ICD9 database implemented through Mysql and PHP; ImageJ for biomedical image analysis; since this academic year, Care2x as a sample HIS. The tools allowed to explain students real systems, although with somesimplification and not without problems. However, to have the samevariety of systems starting from commercial products would have involved an unsustainable expense.
Joseph Dal Molin / Dr. Adrian Midgley	Sunday P.M.	OSHCA 2003 Objectives Group workshop to define participant objectives for this year's meeting and related additions and changes to agenda.
Tristan Zand	Monday A.M.	TBA
David Whitten Houston VAMC, USA	Monday A.M.	Medical ontologies with open source tools
Dr. Henning Muller University Hospitals of Geneva Division of Medical Informatics , Switzerland	Monday A.M.	medGIFT - Using the GNU image finding tool for medical image retrieval Content-based image retrieval is still in itsinfancy in the medical domain although often demanded by medical doctors [1,5] as a tool to manage the rising amount of visual data produced digitally in medical departments. Especially in the context of evidence-based medicine and case-based reasoning, the retrieval of similar medical cases to the one being diagnosed is important. Content-based visual information retrieval can supply visually similar. This can help in several domains where the diagnostics depend on the visual characteristics of medical images such as dermatology, pathology and also high-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) images of the lung [4]. The availability of the GIFT (GNU Image finding tool,http://www.gnu.org/software/gift/) as open source that permits content-based access to image databases reduces the effort to create content-based access to medical image databases because several components of the GIFT system can directly be used such as the query engine and the user interfaces. It is clear that the visual descriptors used in GIFT are insufficient for the retrieval of medical images but already small changes in the feature space such as the use of a smaller number of colours and a larger number of grey levels and the adaptation of the Gabor filters can lead to significantly better retrieval results. The availability of a communication interface to the retrieval engine called MRML (Multimedia Retrieval Markup Language, http://www.mrml.net/) allows for an easy integration of the visual retrieval techniques into other applications. Currently, the retrieval functionalities of medGIFT are being integrated into the medical case database system casImage (http://www.casimage.com/, [3]), an in-house radiological case database system that is used in daily practice and already counts more than 40,000 images in the radiology department alone. More information about the medGIFT project can befound at (http://www.dim.hcuge.ch/medgift/, [2]). Program changes for the use with medical images and a new user interface that includes the display of diagnoses on screen and that includes casImage into the content-based retrieval system can be obtained directly by email from the author.
Chris Richardson, WorldVista, USA	Monday P.M.	Advances in Open VistA technology WorldVistA has been holding the Open Source Licenses for the Open VistA releases. As such, the evolution of the VistA model has begun to ramp up with a lot of new functionality which includes Internationalization, increased interconnectivity, new execution models, new web access methods, new application areas and encouragement to add even more problem solving capabilities to the Open Source Open VistA package and its community. While this technology has evolved from the medical specialty, Open VistA is now beginning to move outside the hospital into near and distant application areas outside the hospital which will increase the efficiency and coordination of the hospital with its vendors. The Open VistA community also includes veteranary services. The veteranary specialty adds several new wrinkles to the medical record. Many of these new challenges open new possibilities for applications back into the medical community. A number of current Veterans Administration VistA vertical applications when applied outside the VA engender a whole spectrum of new solutions for larger problems. This talk will illustrate some of the new solutions which are coming to reality now and soon
Dee Knapp CSSI , USA	Tuesday A.M.	TBA
Philippe Ameline Nautilus,France	Tuesday A.M.	TBA
Etienne Saliez CRISNET,Belgium	Tuesday A.M.	Virtual Care Team Network in Open Source Patient centered medical record, sharing medical informationbetween all the care providers in charge of the same patient, accrossorganizational boundaries. - Support of the role of the GP for coordinationand continuity. - Structured medical information allowing navigation alonglinks between problems (Health Issues), service requests and resultingobservations. - Very modular network architure.Synchronization betweenobjects (e.g. Python objects, presentation objects in PHP, ...) and betweenlocal and remote regional databases.
Dr. Wilfried Gödert Care2x.de,Germany	Tuesday P.M.	Care2x an OPEN SOURCE hospitalinformation system CARE2x is a smart software for hospitals and health care organizations. It is designed to integrate the different information systems existing in these organizations into one single efficient system. CARE2x solves the problems inherent in anetwork of multiple programs that are noncompatible with each other. It can integrate almost any type of services, systems, departments, clinic, processes, data, communication, etc. that exist in a hospital. Its design can even handle non-medical services or functions like security, maintenance, etc. It is modularand highly scalable. CARE2x uses a standard SQL database format for storingand retrieving data. The use of a single data format solves the problem of data redundancy. When configured accordingly, it can support multiple database configuration to enhance data security and integrity. It is a web basedsoftware and all its functions can be accessed with a common web browser thus there is no need for a special user interface software. All program modules are processed on the server side. Module updates and extensions do not require changes on the browsers thus there are no network interruptions and downtimes. Its design supports multiple server configuration to distribute traffic and improve speed and efficiency. In the Workshop we bring a presentation ofCare2x and discuss the future ways and problems to integrade Open Source in medicine professional systems. The canadian based publisher of php|architectpicked Care2x for the first place in its 2003 grant program. Highlight atthe 10th Anniversary Interdisciplinary Workshop HIS/RIS/PACS (Infos in German) Political guests at this workshop e.g. the President of Germany Johannes Rau Care2x is nominated for the 2003 Linux Medical News Achievement Award
Joseph Dal Molin e-cology corporation	Tuesday P.M.	Nurturing FLOSS Collaboration The session will review the presenter's experience and lessons learned in establishing collaborative initiatives for open source in health over the last 5 years: openhealth, SPIRIT, WorldVistA etc. It will examine the critical success factors, pitfalls and suggest a general approach for success in the health sector and the e-cology of collaboration.
Dr. Benno Sauter Swiss Medical Informatics Society	Tuesday P.M.	Funding and Collaboration of FLOSS EPR InitiativesDiscussion and workshop.
	Tuesday P.M.	Conference Wrap-up