Abstract

Abstract
Health information technologies are becoming more common in the health care practice and electronic health records are considered a keystone. However, there is also an increasing concern of keeping secure the patient's data and assure privacy. The aim of this paper was to perceive and illustrate by what means Portugal, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom intend to keep their electronic health information secure and assure patient privacy. Based in official documents collected in the health department's websites of the three selected countries, it was used an analysis model framework previously published that includes 14 topic areas of health records security policies. Analyzing 14 official documents of the subject countries, it was possible to design an illustrative table of the 14 topic areas regarding security and privacy issues. This table allows comparing the different security measures adopted by the three countries to keep the patient privacy, such as a network security and access control to system resources. Given the analysis of the official documents of the three countries, it was verified that none of them has a very thorough approach of how electronic health records should be implemented with regard to privacy and security. © 2011 ACM.

Abstract
In a multidisciplinary approach, geological, geomorphologic, structural, hydrogeochemical and isotopic surveys were conducted on the Serra da Estrela groundwater system (central Portugal) in order to establish/develop a conceptual circulation model of the Caldas de Manteigas thermomineral system. A detailed study of the isotopic and geochemical composition of surface waters (e.g. Zzere River), shallow groundwaters (cold dilute springs), and thermomineral waters was carried out to characterize the distribution of isotopes in waters of this mountainous region, and to determine the origin and possible recharge locations of the thermomineral system. Special attention was dedicated to isotopic tracers and their role in the definition of the thermomineral waters' conceptual model, considering: (1) the delta(18)O fractionation gradient; (2) the mean isotopic composition of the thermomineral waters in the region; and (3) the estimation of snowmelt contribution as a source of groundwater recharge at Serra da Estrela. The recharge of the thermomineral aquifer takes place on the more permeable zones of the granitic massif, associated with the main tectonic structures, whereas the recharge of the shallow aquifers seems to take place mostly in the plateaus, although another part of the recharge may occur in the slopes of the Zzere River valley.

Abstract
Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a revolutionary, patient-friendly imaging technique that enables non-invasive visual inspection of the patient's digestive tract, especially small intestine. However, the time-consuming task of reviewing the endoscopic data a burden for the physicians. This limitation was the propose a novel strategy for automatic discrimination of WCE images related to ulcer, the most common finding of digestive tract Towards this direction, WCE data are processed with Bidimensional Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition to reveal their inherent structural components, and also to reconstruct a new refined image. Then, texture information is extracted by analyzing the intrinsic second/higher-order correlation of the original image and by calculating the lacunarity index of the refined image. Experimental results demonstrated promising classification accuracy (97%) exhibiting high potential towards a complete computer-aided diagnosis system.

Abstract
This paper addresses research development regarding the adoption of natural user interfaces (NUI) in the Serious Games for Rehabilitation area of application. From previous studies, we identified as a research opportunity the potential benefits of the adoption of more natural interaction modalities. This paper describes the main problems and how serious games and NUI can benefit the process of rehabilitation. We describe our recent work on this subject, including the design of a game prototype using alternative (in respect to the conventional WIMP) interaction. We conducted a playability study in order to make it possible to evaluate and measure the benefits of the newer forms of interaction. From the results study, we concluded that the introduction of the natural interaction modalities has increased the attractiveness and intuitiveness of the prototyped Serious Game. Lastly, we report some conclusions and identify research opportunities and open problems in this area. © 2011 AISTI.

Abstract
High-resolution computed tomography (HRCT) became an essential tool in detection, characterization and follow-up of lung diseases. In this paper we focus on lung emphysema, a long-term and progressive disease characterized by the destruction of lung tissue. The lung patterns are represented by different features vectors, extracted from statistical texture analysis methods (spatial gray level dependence, gray level run length method and gray level difference method). Support vector machine (SVM) was trained to discriminate regions of healthy lung tissue from emphysematous regions. The SVM model optimization was performed in the training dataset through a cross validation methodology, along a grid search. Three usual kernel functions were tested in each of the features sets. This study highlights the importance of the kernel choice and parameters tuning to obtain models that allow high level performance of the SVM classifier.