With the recent release of Debian Etch, the Debian-Med project strengthened its current three main areas of activity: imaging, bioinformatics, and medical practice. Progresses are summarized on the Debian web site and in this article here.
What is new for Debian-Med in etch?
April 19th, 2007
The Debian-Med project strenghtened its current three main areas of
activity: imaging, bioinformatics, and medical practice. But of course,
it also benefits of all the other improvements of Debian etch, such as
increased security with signed packages, a new way of exploring the
18,000 available packages — the Debtags, or the official support of
the amd64 architecture.
More possibilities for neuroscience research
Debian-Med offers tools to work with medical imaging data obtained from
various techniques such as magnetic resonance (MRI) or computer tomography
(CT) for instance. These tools are useful to pre-clinical research in
neuroscience as well and with the release of etch, Debian-Med expanded
its support with the addition of the NIfTI library, which is
particularly focused on magnetic imaging. Other areas of neuroscience
are also being covered, such as experimental psychology with packages
for the Python Experiment-Programming Library.
Increased support of bioinformatics and molecular biology
The number of programs available for multiple sequence alignment in
Debian-Med has more than doubled, giving a broad choice of algorithms.
Thanks to a collaboration with the upstream author of Seaview, we could
move this alignment editor in the main Debian archive. We also expanded
the support for phylogenetic analysis by adding to our collection
TreeView X, a viewer which can export in SVG format. Molecular
biologists will find a new primer design program in Debian-Med, Primer3,
and a new version of perlprimer. These two programs nicely complement as
the latter a graphical user interface and the former is well suited for
high-throughput design.
First release with the GNUmed client
GNUmed is an electronic medical record management system. Using it with
Debian-Med, you will benefit from the robustness of the package
dependencies in Debian. Just install the gnumed-client package (or the
med-practice metapackage), and the system will take care of adding
whatever else you need: HTML browser, spellchecker, scanner support …