Open Medicine

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3D Design Contest for Medical Tools in Africa

The moment the open source RepRap 3D printer was created, its potential for helping the developing the world was evident. The distributed digital production of open source appropriate technology can make a real difference. Research in this area has been heating up with numerous applications from the Enabling the Future's prosthetic hands, to the Waterscope microscope, to more mundane things like organic farm tools. The ReFab Dar project hopes to accelerate this trend. It is a pilot program that explores how plastic waste can power entrepreneurship using 3D printers in Tanzania. They have built on the early work done by the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Laboratory's efforts with open source recyclebots to turn plastic waste into 3D printing filament and then into high-value products...

Build Your Own Open Source Artificial Pancreas System to Regulate Insulin Delivery

In her Day 2 OSCON keynote, Dana set out reminding us that Type I diabetes, suffered by millions of people around the world, is incredibly complicated to manage...The solution is an artificial pancreas, which acts to close that loop by monitoring and adjusting insulin levels, just as the normal pancreas does. But those devices are not yet available on the commercial market, and won't be for some years yet. Enter the OpenAPS project (Open Artificial Pancreas System); find it here on GitHub. "OpenAPS is a simplified Artificial Pancreas System (APS) designed to automatically adjust an insulin pump's basal insulin delivery to keep blood glucose (BG) in a safe range overnight and between meals"..

Canadian Journal Open Medicine Closes

Helen Branswell | The Canadian Press | November 4, 2014

Open Medicine, an open-access journal started after a crisis at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has closed.  The editors say that after seven years, they are ceasing their struggle to keep the journal afloat...

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eTRIKS 'open source' EU project for sharing vital disease information

Colin Smith | Imperial College News | March 15, 2013

Developing a software system that enables pharmaceutical companies, governments, academia and hospitals to share information to advance our understanding of diseases is the focus of a major European Union funded project, which is led by researchers from Imperial College London. Read More »

Europeans Joining Forces to Promote Open Source Software in Healthcare

Belgian, British and German advocates of open source in healthcare want to join efforts, hoping to raise interest, and to strengthen the network of healthcare software specialists. A conference is tentatively being planned in London (UK) early next year. “Hospitals and other healthcare organizations, medical specialists and general practitioners are reluctant to adopt open source software”, says Etienne Saliez, a Belgian retired medical IT systems specialist. “What is needed is a strong network of professional support services providers of open source solutions” he adds.

King's College Accelerates Synthetic Brain 3D Image Creation Using Open Source AI Models and Software Powered by Cambridge-1 Supercomputer

Press Release | King’s College London | July 26, 2021

King College London, along with partner hospitals and university collaborators, unveiled new details today about one of the first projects on Cambridge-1, the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer. The Synthetic Brain Project is focused on building deep learning models that can synthesize artificial 3D MRI images of human brains. These models can help scientists understand what a human brain looks like across a variety of ages, genders, and diseases. The AI models were developed by King's and NVIDIA data scientists and engineers as part of The London Medical Imaging & AI Centre for Value Based Healthcare research funded by UK Research and Innovation and a Wellcome Flagship Programme (in collaboration with University College London).

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Nature Journal on the Need for Clinical-Trial Data Sharing Regulations

Editorial | Nature | May 17, 2016

Governments need to tighten regulation if the sharing of clinical-trial data is to succeed. Clinical science has a compatibility problem. Although there are set protocols to test medicines and to treat patients, no such standards exist to compare clinical-trial data. The problem arises because each research group has a preferred method of collecting and categorizing results. Differences can be as great as omitting or including the gender and ethnicity of patients enrolled, or as mundane as the vocabulary used in medical records...

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Open Medicine: because health care information belongs to everybody

Terry Lavender | Vancouver Observer | September 2, 2011

...cracks are beginning to appear in the academic publishing oligopoly, thanks to dedicated volunteers like UBC professor Anita Palepu, an internal medicine specialist at St. Paul's Hospital. Read More »

Open Source Drug Discovery Test A Success

Press Release | University Of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine | July 28, 2016

In what is being called the first-ever test of open-source drug-discovery, researchers from around the world have successfully identified compounds to pursue in treating and preventing parasite-borne illnesses such as malaria as well as cancer...One-third of the labs reported their results in a paper published today in PLOS Pathogens, "Open source drug discovery with the Malaria Box compound collection for neglected diseases and beyond." The results have ignited more a dozen drug-development projects for a variety of diseases. "The trial was successful not only in identifying compounds to pursue for anti-malarials, but it also identified compounds to treat other parasites and cancer," said lead author Wesley Van Voorhis.

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Open Source Health announces launch of the first Women’s Precision Medicine Platform in Atlanta, USA

Press Release | Open Source Health Inc. | June 9, 2016

Open Source Health Inc....a cloud based precision medicine platform that puts control into the hands of women to educate, advocate and collaborate on their own healthcare is pleased to announce the launch of the myAva Precision Medicine Platform with it’s first cohort of women in Atlanta, GA. “After 2 years of development we are finally set to deliver precision medicine to women with PCOS” says Sonya Satveit, CEO of Open Source Health Inc. “By providing an in-depth molecular insight of each woman, myAva will help achieve a new understanding of PCOS and has the potential to provide precision treatment programs customized to each woman’s unique molecular makeup.”

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Open Source in the Worldwide COVID-19 Response

February marks the celebration of creation of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in 1998. OSI created the standard definition of the term Open Source that helped guide many of LPI's initiatives today. Through the past year, open source provided many opportunities to organizations to continue to work, implement their projects, and continue reaching out to communities. Here are just a few examples of how open source provides opportunities through the face of COVID-19. The COVID-19 crisis brought out all the creativity of the open source movement. In every area of innovation--open source software, open data, open collaboration, and even open equipment--companies and research institutes have addressed medical and public health needs quickly. This article highlights some of the initiatives in each area.

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Open Source Tools Provide An Economic Advantage For Science

Free and open source software (FOSS) and the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) have shown great promise for developing custom scientific tools. For some time now, FOSH has provided scientists a high return on investment. In fact, my previous research in the Open Source Labreported substantial economic savings from using these technologies. However, the open source design paradigm has since grown by orders of magnitude; now, there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines, and several resources, including the Journal of Open Hardware, are dedicated to publishing them.

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Open Targets: New Name, New Data

Press Release | Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, European Bioinformatics Institute | April 19, 2016

Following the successful launch of its Target Validation platform at the end of 2015, the Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation has released its first open experimental datasets. Now renamed Open Targets, the pioneering public–private initiative remains committed to speeding up the discovery of new medicines. Open Targets projects use genome-scale experiments and analysis to provide evidence on the biological validity of therapeutic targets – and to glean insights into the likely effectiveness of pharmacological intervention on these targets...

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OpenMRS Conference in Uganda Redefines Global Health IT Collaboration

Hundreds of developers and health experts gathered in Uganda this past December to attend the OpenMRS Implementers conference. This event has in many ways redefined the global health IT landscape. This is the first OpenMRS conference that has been officially sponsored by the government of a nation, setting the stage for future conferences that can bring together open source developers and government officials to build national health IT solutions. Read More »

Patients Join Advisory Board of Revolutionary Precision Medicine Study of PCOS Disease and Women's Health

Press Release | Open Source Health | July 14, 2016

Open Source Health Inc., a cloud based precision medicine platform that puts control into the hands of women to educate, advocate and collaborate on their own healthcare is pleased to announce the appointment of a 10 person Precision Medicine Patient Advisory Board. “Involving patients in the design of every aspect of their Precision Medicine care is revolutionary,” says Sonya Satveit, CEO of Open Source Health Inc., “Women with PCOS have been underserved in healthcare for a long time, and now for the first time, we have brought them to the forefront of innovation to trail blaze a new path to optimal health. Precision Medicine is the next paradigm shift in healthcare and it’s exciting to have an amazing group of women involved as we create a new standard of care.”

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