Douglas Goldstein and Peter Groen have an informative article with a wide ranging perspective of FOSS in medicine. ‘…It is important to recognize that a wide range of OSS solutions are already in use in health care, generally consisting of technical tools and business applications – Linux, Apache, Open Office, mySQL, FireFox, and other fairly well known products. In addition, there are a large number of health care specific OSS solutions that have also been developed and are being widely deployed, such as OSCAR, FreeMed, MedLine, BLAST, Epi-X, SaTScan, VistA, and many more…’

Medical software development is very difficult to do and pushes the limits of computer science and programming. Here is a 40 minute Quicktime webcast that is an entertaining, practical side by side comparison of 6 popular development environments by a Jet Propulsion Lab engineer. The conclusion is that ZOPE-based Plone is the best for web development. Some of the metrics are: 225 minutes for a J2EE web application versus about 10 minutes for a web application in Plone that is more functional than the J2EE one. He also likes Rails and Django but the winner is Plone. The webcast is a large download. I’m seeing if it is available in slide form. Disclaimer: Linux Medical News has run ZOPE since its inception in 2000.

Several sources have reported on the upcoming formation of a new Journal: Source Code for Biology and Medicine. From the website announcement: ‘Source Code for Biology and Medicine is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal soon to be launched by BioMed Central.

Source Code for Biology and Medicine will encompass all aspects of workflow for information systems, decision support systems, client user networks, database management, and data mining.

Source Code for Biology and Medicine aims to publish source code for distribution and use in the public domain in order to advance biological and medical research. Through this dissemination, it may be possible to shorten the time required for solving certain computational problems for which there is limited source code availability or resources…’ It also says it will be a source code repository. I’m not sure how or if this will work with Bioinformatics.org

Web Content Management Systems (CMS) can make your life easier. Here’s a white-paper discussing Free and Open Source CMS’s. As well, the CMS Matrix website seems to be a useful tool. Linux Medical News has been in the Python/ZOPE universe since its inception and also recommends the incomparable Plone. However, there are also many noteworthy LAMP based ones as well like Drupal and Joomla.

Pablo Sau writes:

The aim of this new CDMEDIC Live CD is to make a free distribution for complex medical data such as PET-CT, with the possibility of creating, reviewing, manipulating and distributing medical images and reports accessible from any operating system.
New fusion-2.iso has the following features:

• Live CD created with Linux Live Scripts, based on Debian Sid and uses UnionFS.

Continue reading →

An ideal project management software ideally should be Free and Open Source and have:

• Web collaboration.
• Export to multiple formats.
• Cross Platform.
• Robust enough to handle large complex projects.
• Gantt chart, Pert chart and resource linking.There are several applications that could fit the bill, but in the end, one of them shines. 

  Among applications that are specifically for project management, there are two standouts: dot-project which is a web-based collaborative environment based on PHP and Gantt Project a Java-based, cross platform, stand alone application.

   

  Before we move on to the two contenders, a digression is in order to discuss the thought process. The obvious MS Project application seems like a lot of money to pay for a program that, while vital, doesn’t do that much. On a complicated project with workers widely dispersed geographically, the lowest common denominator comes into play which at first glance is simply a spreadsheet file. There are a multitude of hacked together spreadsheet bastardizations of project management. In addition to their cumbersome nature, many of them are expensive, over $100. A possible strength is that they may be easily intraconverted to other file formats, or not. There is also the likely proprietary spreadsheet application that it sits on.

  Dot-project’s strength is that it is web-based and can provide a truly collaborative environment. Its weaknesses are that it seems to has serious errors that we could not fix in our installation. This greatly limited its use. As well, it did not appear to have usable export capabilities from its MySQL back-end.

  Gantt-project is a robust application that provides an excellent cross-platform GUI experience. In addition, it exports to multiple formats: MS project, jpeg snapshot, pdf, html and is stored in a native XML format. The MS project export capability is attractive to management types who may want an ‘upgrade’ path. Drawbacks are that it is a single user file application that does not enable web collaboration.

  For our project, we chose Gantt Project because of its export capability and the ability of multiple users to download the application free of charge and view it even though they were unlikely to actually edit the document. Had dot-project not had a serious error that we could not fix and been able to export to external formats easily, it would have been the application of choice. Gantt project is working great for the present, but web-based collaborative applications like dot-project appear to be the future. With these two FOSS project management applications, there is simply no need for a spreadsheet project management kludge.

Not exactly news since it was published in 2003, however, this article outlines characteristics of successful and un-successful software projects. An interesting allusion to another paper is: ‘…two attributes that appeared equally for projects that succeeded or failed. These two were: Use of Consultants, and Well Qualified Personnel. Equal numbers of successful and failed projects used consultants, and the same was true for well-qualified personnel. It is perhaps disappointing that these two attributes did not portend project success…’ Thanks to Cory for this link.

According to this article: ‘The gpl-violations.org project has
uncovered and resolved violations of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in
the Austrian electronic health card (e-card) system.

Specifically, those license violations originate by SV-Chipkarten Betriebs- und
Errichtungs GmbH, the company in charge of setting up the Austrian electronic
health card system…”While there is nothing wrong with using GPL licensed software in commercial
products, it is only permitted under certain obligations, such as passing
on the license agreement, and making available the full corresponding
source code”, says Mr. Harald Welte, Linux kernel developer and founder of the
gpl-violations.org project…’ Thanks to Tim Churches on the OpenHealth list for this link.

I write medical software. When I talk to people and they inevitably ask what I do, that�s what I say. When I say this, a look comes across their face. They make some assumptions that on the surface would appear to be very sound. Assumptions: Medical Software means cutting edge. It means that what I do affects life and death situations. They believe working in this field requires education, experience, and an understanding of two completely different fields, computers and medicine. The Medical Software field is big, scary and has important medical procedures and tests and anyone who understands it must be smarter than the average person. Unfortunately almost none of this is true.

Continue reading →

After the podcast call to action Jordan Glogau and Fred Trotter have decided to announce the Open Source EHR Katrina Relief Network.

The idea is to use groups of open source volunteers to get clinics and hopsitals in Katrina effected areas up and running using open source medical software.

If you are an open source hacker and were wondering how you could help, then this is it! Please get in touch with us!