Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
munication among the health care providers, clinical trial sponsors, the media,
and the public to overcome real and perceived barriers to clinical research
participation.
Advancement of technologies and wide adoption of the World Wide Web
and the Internet provide many possibilities and opportunities for online edu-
cation of prospective participants, online patient enrollment, remote visits, and
data capture: for example, medical devices connected to personal computers
(PCs) or mobile phones that can be used to transmit data to a central control
point in near-real time and across time zones and geographical boundaries,
Web-based self-assessment and reporting instruments, text messaging to
remind patients of things they need to do and collecting data from patients,
remote patient visits using PCs and Web-based collaboration tools that enable
visual inspections and video communications.
18.4
TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH
The term “translational” quite often refers to high-speed utilization of the
latest high-throughput research, such as discovering new biomarkers in a
rather narrow defi nition, but one would argue that it is in effect an extension
of the principles of evidence-based medicine and involves passing from
advanced medical research to clinical applications. The primary concept is to
bridge the patient care domain and the clinical research domain to allow the
medical researchers to leverage the clinical outcomes observed by the health
care practitioners. It will also allow the health care practitioners to leverage
the research outcomes derived by the medical researchers.
Through full leverage of IT for facilitating translational research, we can
realize and enable the concept of the proactive, patient-centered, outcome-
driven, wellness-oriented continuum of healthcare service.
Translational research can be enabled by leveraging IT and other related
technologies such as artifi cial intelligence, robotics, cybernetics (e.g., machine
learning and autonomous computing), and nanoscience (e.g., nanobots).
Translational research is anticipated to help us realize a personalized health
care in consideration of an individual's genotypic, phenotypic, environmental,
and lifestyle variances and to help the health care professionals improve the
accuracy of diagnosis, the effi cacy of treatment, and patient safety (i.e., minimal
adverse drug responses). Translational research may also help us realize a
preventative or predictive health care through in silico disease modeling and
organ simulation to complement experiments based on animal models. Other
industries, such as the automobile and aircraft industries, as well as the U.S.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have long been
exploiting IT for modeling and simulation for design of automobiles, aircraft,
and space shuttles, while the health care industry has relied on experiments
based on animals and observation of only external symptoms.
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