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Alpha Camera was developed that can identify 1.5-kBq alpha emitter in 30-sec from 1-m away. The alpha camera equips mirror optics so that the alpha-induced ultraviolet lights are transferred while gamma-ray backgrounds are removed.

An environment of information reuse on hospital information system have been discussed and some hospitals have introduced data warehouses or similar systems. In Kyoto University Hospital, we have a lot of requests from hospital colleagues that want to data of the hospital information system for clinical research or promotion of streamlining. Therefore, we introduced a environment of database users use freely, and a web service server in order to reuse data of the hospital information system. Consequently, users could do clinical researches and clinical practices on the same environment.

Recently, medical records can be accessible from Electric Health Record(EHR) in some regions such as e-maiko.net. EHR provides patient's records in patient's hands even though the authorized access requires the information literacy. Therefore, this research aims to provide an environment of short-step EHR access. The authors propose the EHR design to separate the data handling layer and the visualization layer. By the construction of the web access data interface and the visualization of the device optimized viewer, the system can select the visual interface depends on the situation and the viewer devices. Especially, the environment was implemented on the e-maiko.net. Also, the iPad application was provided for the experiment of the optimized visualization. The experiment was carried out with 9 subjects who are the expert of computers, are the novice of tablet terminals. The experiment compaired the perfomance of the access time to find a document between the conventional web interface and the iPad viewer interface. The result of experiment suggested that the iPad viewer makes the EHR access much more easier than the conventional web interface. Also, the result of interviews, the half of the subjects pointed out the security concerns to use mobile devices to access EHR. On the other hand, the rest of the subjects insisted the benefit of short-step access rather than the security issue. For the conclusion, the proposed system will be acceptable as an EHR browsing environment if the system is enough explained about the security issue.

The authors developed a support system for finding hypotheses about clinical knowledge from medical records accumulated electronically in hospital information systems. In order to support the development of various hypotheses, we matched a variety of medical and clinical information with each case and utilized the information comprehensively. This information includes clinical documents, examination information, medical practice information, and other minor factors. The system uses coverage-oriented views showing targeted medical records, in whole or in part. We selected appropriate methods to provide coverage-oriented views of natural language data, numerical data, and coded data, making use of snippets, graphs, and tag clouds, respectively. In addition, users can narrow the search results utilizing keywords, ranges of values, and labels of codes, respectively. The coverage-oriented views and the narrowing methods utilizing the views make the retrieval system interactive. We predicted that users could find hypotheses by grasping features of targeted cases using coverage-oriented views based on interactive retrieval. We evaluated the developed prototype in terms of its potential for helping users find hypotheses about clinical knowledge and we received positive responses from doctors.

Reduction of waiting time of patients and idle time of doctors is one of the most important factors of outpatient ward management. Although conventional in-hospital outpatient navigation and re-scheduling systems free the patients from waiting rooms, the systems often cause additional idle times for the doctors and even several clinical incidents. This paper designed a new patient navigation and re-scheduling system equips position tracking. The authors introduced the system into Kyoto University Hospital. As a result, the system decreased more than 100 hours a day of wasted time and irritations of the patients and the clinical staffs. The results tell that the context-aware feature makes not only the system user friendly but also the users friendly.

The research by Maliranta and Rouvinen based on the Finnish industrial statistics confirms that the productivity improvements in firms correlate to organizational and process changes (Maliranta and Rouvinen, 2003 and Maliranta and Rouvinen, 2004). These results implied a further question: Which types of process changes create the most beneficial productivity improvements in different environments. This question should be of major importance when new services are applied or developed. The research on process improvements has been done in ETLA and in the University of Oulu, where the Three Viewpoint Methodology (3VPM) (Martikainen, 2007) was developed for productivity analysis. In this paper we apply the 3VPM methodology to analyze the nursing documentation process and the impact of documentation process improvement by wireless services on core nursing process in Kyoto University Hospital. The information was collected by interviews and server logs. We have analyzed the benefit of introducing wireless PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) devices to update patient data on place instead of writing it down by hand and later storing it into the system on PC (Personal Computer) and consider other possible solutions like sensors, wireless tracking and touch by device paradigm. Nursing documentation process can be clearly improved and the improvement of the nursing process can be as much as 14%. This means that the same patient intensity can be achieved with less number of nurses.

This paper proposes vertex-preserving cutting methods on finite element models for interactive soft tissue simulation. Unlike existing methods, we aim to shape variety of incisions using only initial vertices of tetrahedral meshes. Neither tetrahedral decomposition nor vertex creation is used. The number of vertices is preserved. This avoids increase of computation cost as well as allows fast update of physical status of finite element models. To preserve 3D shape and sharp feature of initial meshes through on-the-fly mesh modification, constraints are introduced to the topological update scheme. In our model, the size of stiffness matrix is constant. Our framework efficiently simulates several varieties of smooth incisions with sufficient quality for surgical simulation, and also achieves interactive performance in complex meshes with thousands of elements.

The authors aim to make principles of expert's haptic interaction explicit on a virtual reality (VR) based simulator. Our approach is based on visualization of significant components of the interaction with consideration on their importance which acts as the foundation for manual skill. Delicate force exertion, which is the basis for various fine-motor skills, was chosen as an example. Expert's haptic interaction was recorded and presented to novices. Two visualization techniques were compared as a training aid by overlaying guidance on a simulator's screen: 1) tracking force curve (traditional technique), and 2) tracking the components of pre-defined "skill" (proposed technique). The visual presentation adapts to the components' importance: maximum power, duration, and force curve. The results support the possibility of using the proposed visualization technique for mediating principles of haptic interaction from experts to novices through a VR system