Qatar Foundation Annual Research Forum Volume 2013 Issue 1

Next generation computerized healthcare services are destined to be knowledge-centric—i.e. leveraging best-evidence and best clinical practices to provide evidence-informed, patient-centered, safe, timely, and cost-effective care services. In this paper, we present an health informatics based clinical decision support infrastructure—termed as ADVICE (Agile Decisional Validation and Individualized Care Environment)—t Read More

Purpose: Owing to aggressiveness and chemo-resistance, pancreatic ductal adeno-carcinoma (PDAC) is characterised by a poor prognosis. At the advanced stage, which is characterised by metastasis into adjacent organs, especially the liver, all systemic treatment approaches have failed, so far. To address this disease spe¬cific dilemma we aimed to establish animal models, which mimic liver metastasis of PDAC and to identif Read More

Background: Neurodegenerative diseases like diabetes can significantly impair patients' postural balance and gait. These negative alterations in balance and gait coupled with peripheral neuropathy (PN) can dramatically reduce patients' ability to perform activities of daily living and also put them on high fall-risk. The purpose of this study is to treat balance deficit due to diabetes and PN using a home wearable technology ba Read More

Introduction: The Multidisciplinary team (MDT) is defined as a "group of people of different healthcare disciplines, which meets together at a given time (whether physically in one place, or by video or teleconferencing) to discuss a given patient and who are each able to contribute independently to the diagnostic and treatment decisions about the patient". These teams meet regularly, review investigation results an Read More

With recent advances in signal processing and very-low-power wireless communications, wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) are gaining wide popularity. A WBSN consists of multiple miniaturized sensors that are placed on the person's body and are capable of measuring and communicating different physiological signals over time. This study focuses on WBSNs that rely on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Read More

In recent years, the field of applied nonlinear dynamics has attracted scientists and engineers across many different disciplines to develop innovative ideas and methods to study complex behavior exhibited by relatively simple tools. In this study, we have investigated some of these tools together with some its applications. Among these applications, here we have chosen one of our resent research work in heart rate com Read More

Recently, new bioimaging techniques have been proposed to visualize the interaction of several proteins within individual cells. Such techniques could provide the key to understanding complex biological systems such as the protein interactions involved in cancer. Currently, there is a strong urge for sophisticated analytical methods to extract molecular signatures of diseases (such as cancer) in order to not only understand th Read More

Biomimetic nanofibers are essential to produce scaffolds for tissue engineering. The success of this strategy critically depends on the ability of the nanofibers to attract, interact and instruct the appropriate types of cells. This can be achieved through decorating the surface of the nanofibers with customised biomimetic peptides those holding cell-signalling motifs, which could assist nanofibers to engraft characteristics of extra Read More

Abstract: Prevalence of obesity and co-morbidities is increasing alarmingly in recent years with over 1 billion adults globally being classified as overweight. Importantly, this also applies to the population in Qatar where about 70% of the total population are expected to be overweight and nearly 20% diabetic by 2015. The profound increase in obesity has a severe socio-economic burden for public health systems worldwide Read More