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News U27

News U27

Computing in Cardiology President’s Newsletter – 2017

Pablo Laguna, Scientific Director of Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS and President of  CinC (2015-2018), presents the details of CinC 2017 in the Computing in Cardiology, which shall be held in Rennes, France, September 24-27

Dear CinC Attendee,

One more year has passed and the time to plan the annual conference has arrived.  To help you with this, I would like to bring you an update on relevant aspects related to CinC-2017, including dates, deadlines and events.  I would also like to update you on initiatives, some just consolidating recent developments, such as the Clinical Needs Translational Award (CTA), the Special Sessions Proposals, and the Mortara Travel Fellowships, together with other well established activities such as the CinC Challenge and the Young Investigator Award (YIA) (see below)

First, the Board of Directors and I wish to express our sincere gratitude to The Local Organising Committee and their team in Vancouver, headed by Dr. Andrew Blaber and Dr. Kouhyar Tavakolian. They put on a very successful conference in September 2016 with a record number of attendees in the American Continent. Our sincere thanks!

I would now like to bring your attention to the following information:

Conference Proceedings
The 2016 Proceedings are now available on line with direct access from the CinC web site http://www.cinc.org/archives/2016/. This year we have arranged to have our personalized doi (digital object identifier) for the proceedings. This identification will be of the form DOI:10.22489/CinC.2016.001-107, where the number 10.22489 is the prefix given to our organization, and the suffix CinC.2016.001-107 refers to our name (CinC), year (2016), and internal reference of each paper at the conference (eg 001-107). The doi will point directly to our CinC web Proceedings repository. The whole process has been finished later than in other years, due to the doi definition process itself, the required tool adaptation and the agenda fitting of the people involved in the elaboration, for which we apologize. Also, the papers will soon be available at the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. We are indebted to our Editor Alan Murray, and the CinC IT team, particularly Sheri Prucka, for all of the effort and hard work they have put into the production of the Proceedings.

CinC 2017: 24-27 September, Rennes, France
As you probably already know, the 2017 meeting will be held in Rennes, France. Rennes is the capital of Brittany, North West France, very well known for its university and cultural dynamism. The conference will be held at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs de Rennes (ESIR), campus de Beaulieu, Rennes, https://esir.univ-rennes1.fr. Further details can be found at http://www.cinc2017.org. In particular the Sunday symposium will be devoted to the fields of Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) and vagus nerve stimulation.

Joint WG e-Cardiology ESC – CinC: Clinical Needs Translational Award (CTA)
This year, following its successful introduction last year, the CTA will be offered for a second time. Remember that its aim is the promotion and further stimulation of the translational component of CinC attendees’ research, a joint initiative between the Working Group on e-Cardiology of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) and CinC. The paper which best addresses current clinical needs will receive the award, consisting of $500 dollars + €500 (funded by CinC and ESC WG e-Cardiology) which will be granted to the research team. To participate, a full 4-page paper must be submitted no later than April 15, 2017. A panel composed of researchers with a clinically oriented profile will assess the submitted papers. The announcement to the winning team will be made at the time of abstract acceptance. One member of the winning team will have to present the paper at the plenary session on the last day of the conference. There is no conflict between the YIA and CTA as the first author can participate in the YIA competition if he or she is eligible as a young researcher and, at the same time be part of a research team entering the CTA. The prize and a diploma to each member of the team will be given at the awards ceremony.

Special Sessions
The Special Sessions initiative will be organized this year for the second time. It is an effort to stimulate the dynamic nature of research, offering conference attendees a window for promoting an emerging research topic. You are therefore invited to propose a special session by submitting the following information:

  • Names, email addresses, affiliations, and short biographies of the organisers who are expected to have a PhD or MD degree and a relevant publication track record in the proposed area.
  • Title of the session.
  • Aim and rationale for the special session.
  • A list of proposed speakers, together forming an oral session with 4 presentations. It should be emphasised that abstracts submitted for a special session will be subject to review just like any other submission.

Proposals should be emailed to the secretary of the CinC Board, Leif Sörnmo, leif.sornmo@bme.lth.se, no later than March 1, 2017. All proposals received will be evaluated by the Board based on the timeliness of the topic, its uniqueness, and the ability to bring together key researchers. The Secretary will notify the proposers about the outcome no later than March 15th.

Rosanna Degani Young Investigator Award (YIA)
Since 1992, this award has been designed to encourage young investigators to present their work at CinC and have it discussed with experts. As an incentive every entrant in the YIA competition receives a 50% reduction in the CinC conference fee. The finalists can present their results in a plenary session and receive valuable cheques. You just need to have excellent results, be eligible for YIA, apply with a 4 page paper before April 15th, and attend CinC conference with a senior co-author.

Mortara FellowshipsIn
For last three CinC conference editions, fellowship support has been provided by Mortara Instrument Inc. When available, these Fellowships take the form of financial awards which allow young presenters to participate in the CinC meeting when travel costs might otherwise limit abstract submission and attendance. The Fellowships are intended to offset up to $2000 of the cost of attending CinC for successful applicants who a) should be 32 years old or younger, b) do not reside in the country of the current year’s conference, c) have previously presented their work at CinC, and d) submit acceptable papers on the topics of ECG or Patient Monitoring, which may include mathematical modelling. Full details can be found on the website, but please note that applications for these fellowships require a full 4-page paper to be submitted by the time of the conference abstract deadline. If awards become available this year, it will be an excellent opportunity for young investigators not to have the distance to Rennes as a barrier for attending CinC 2017.

CinC Challenge
Similar to previous years, there will be an exciting PhysioNet Challenge, organized in co-operation with PhysioNet. The topic of the the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2017 will be announced soon at the web page. Those wishing to participate will need to submit an abstract describing their work on the Challenge no later than April 15th, 2017, and must attend the conference to present it. Details on the challenge are expected to become public in early February, at http://www.cinc.org/  and, later in http://physionet.org/challenge/2017/.

CinC 2017 – Abstract Deadline
Please note that the abstract deadline is April 15th, 2017, and remember that all young investigators submitting a 4-page paper by the time of the abstract deadline, and attending the conference with their mentor/supervisor, will receive a 50% discount in registration, even if their paper is not submitted for YIA.

Facebook and Twitter
You can access and follow the CinC profiles via https://www.facebook.com/ComputingInCardiology  and https://twitter.com/CinC_tweets where timely information is distributed about the conference.

Board Membership
An announcement was made at the closing of CinC 2016 that there would be four vacancies on the Board of CinC in September 2017. The Board invited expressions of interest from those who would be willing to work towards the aims of the organisation.  The rest of the current members of the Board, who have not yet completed their 3 periods, each with a 3-year mandate, will most likely remain to provide experience and continuity. If you have attended a good number of previous meetings of CinC, feel you could bring some managerial experience to the Board, and you have not yet done so,    please write to the past president, Peter Macfarlane, Peter.Macfarlane@glasgow.ac.uk, who will coordinate the process and provide you with a form to fill in your data and submit a short statement about your qualifications and skills. Please remember to provide that information no later than April 1st 2017.

See you in Rennes!
I sincerely hope that you are planning to submit an abstract for CinC 2017 so that we can continue to ensure that Computing in Cardiology remains the top conference for those interested in the field. The Board of Directors looks forward to seeing you in Rennes, France, in September 2017.

Pablo Laguna
President

Computing in Cardiology President's Newsletter - 2017
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4 Units of NANBIOSIS hosted in three Universities among the 200 best in the world in science.

The University of Zaragoza is one of the 200 best universities in the world in science research, according to the latest Shanghai ranking of 2016 in a specific analysis by macro areas.

In order to elaborate this ranking by macroareas indicators such as the number of students and professors who have obtained the Nobel prize or Fields medal, the number of researchers highly cited in the scientific literature, the number of scientific articles indexed in the Science Citation Index and the Percentage of articles published in the most cited 20% scientific journals are used.

Only six Spanish universities are among the 200 best in the world in the field of science, such as the Autonomous University of Madrid, University of Barcelona, University of Santiago de Compostela, Polytechnic University of Valencia, University of Valencia and Zaragoza.

The list of the world’s top 200 universities in science is headed by American universities in Berkeley (California), Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California, which rank the top six. In the seventh one appears the first European university, Cambridge, followed by the one of Tokyo, Technological Institute of Switzerland and the University of Los Angeles.

NANBIOSIS contributes to this success through the elite researchers that coordinate three of its Units located in the University of Zaragoza: Unit 9 that offers services for sciences research as Synthesis of Nanoparticles biomedicine, micronanotechnology or microfluidics biomedicine, Unit 13 with services as tissue and biomaterial characterization or mechanical tests of tissues and Unit 27 which offers services for sciences research on biomedical computer simulation, modelling of biomedical systems or large simulation multicore and multiserver, among other aspects.

In addition, the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Valencia provides the scientific management and part of the equipment to Unit 26 of NANBIOSIS that offers services for research as molecular imaging metabolomics by NMR or metabolic profiling of biofluids by NMR

Three Universities among the 200 best in the world in science, hosting 4 Units of NANBIOSIS.
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Final Report of European project ITECH accepted by the Commission.

ITECH (Roadmap for Research and Innovation in Health Technologies) is a project of the 7th Framework Programme for research, technological development and dissemination in order to define a strategic plan on Health Technologies to contribute to the Common Strategic Framework for EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation.

Pablo Laguna, Scientific Director of Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS has participated in ITECH Committee since the inaugural meeting and kick-off of the project in September 2013. Since then, ITECH has focused on research and innovation in health technologies, medical devices and eHealth applications, it has identified barriers for ideas reaching the market and has proposed some recommendations to overcome them.

For more information:

ITECH final results
A synthesis of the ITECH Project
The final report of the project

 

Final Report of European project ITECH accepted by the Commission.
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Multi-scale physiology-driven computational tools to assist cardiac disfunctions

Researchers from the unit 27 of NANBIOSIS are developing a Multi scale physiology-driven computational tools to assist cardiac dysfunctions. They have been granted a project of the R+D+I 2016 call of Spanish National Program of “INVESTIGACIÓN, DESARROLLO E INNOVACIÓN ORIENTADA A LOS RETOS DE LA SOCIEDAD”. The project DPI2016-75458-R entitled MULTI-SCALE PHYSIOLOGY-DRIVEN COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS TO ASSIST IN THE ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF CARDIAC DYSFUNCTIONS is led by Juan Pablo Martinez and Esther Pueyo, of the BSICDoS-i3A and CIBER-BBN group.

Both, multi-scale computational modelling, necessary to reproduce the experimental and clinical observations and the signal analysis (cellular, intracardiac and surface), shall  be developed using the computing platform, Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS.

MULTI-SCALE PHYSIOLOGY-DRIVEN COMPUTATIONAL TOOLS TO ASSIST CARDIAC DYSFUNCTIONS
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Pablo Laguna and Jordi Aguilo, Scientific Directors of the Units 27 and 8 of NANBIOSIS participate in the European program Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse in Central Nervous System Disorders (RADAR-CNS)

RADAR-CNS is an important European research program supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) focused to develop new ways of monitoring patients affected by major depression, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, with the use of wearable technology and smart mobile phones.

This program brings together experts from various disciplines in clinical research, engineering, computer and data analysis, as well as health services. RADAR-CN aims to improve symptoms and quality of life of patients and treatment of these and other chronic diseases. This program is jointly led by King’s College London and the pharmaceutical company Janssen and is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (a public-private agreement EFPIA and the European Union). RADAR-CNS involves 24 organizations in Europe and US, including CIBER through its thematic areas of Mental Health (CIBERSAM) and Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN)

“In recent years, the quality and quantity of data that can be collected with the wearable technology and smart phones has increased a lot. The information generated with this large amount of data will help to improve clinical care by providing greater detail of the patient’s condition and prognosis of its evolution. Moreover, it will be possible to detect whether a patient is beginning to have problems before there is clinical evidence of it” says Dr. Jordi Aguilo, scientific coordinator of the Unit 8 of NANBIOSIS.

This huge generate data sets, suitable to be stored and treated so to retrieve the relevant information hidden in the data, frequently require computing systems and information systems of high performance. The Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS will be the platform in which this analysis will be performed.

Pablo Laguna and Jordi Aguilo, Scientific Directors of the Units 27 and 8 of NANBIOSIS participate in the European program Remote Assessment
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Last Friday, 27th May, the "Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón" held the "V Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores" where phD students presented their works related to different areas: Industrial Technologies, Biomedical Engineering, Processes and Recycling and Information and Communications Technology.

Last Friday, 27th May, the “Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón” held the “V Jornada de Jóvenes Investigadores” where phD students presented their works related to different areas: Industrial Technologies, Biomedical Engineering, Processes and Recycling and Information and Communications Technology.

David Adolfo Sampedro Puente, member of the BSICoS, group coordinator of Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS, presented the work entitled “Unscented Kalman Filter for Unobservable Parameter Estimation in Heart Cell Signals”, supervised by Jesús Fernández Bes and Esther Pueyo Paules. This work shows a methodology to estimate unobservable parameters, such as the number of the different ion channel typologies located in the cardiomyocyte membrane, from action potential (AP) signals. This methodology was validated using synthetic AP signals simulated by stochastic computational cell models. In future, this methodology will be used to real signals, recorded in human cardiomyocytes, to help to the study of the AP temporal variability characterization.

Nanbiosis U27-Unscented Kalman Filter for Unobservable Parameter Estimation in Heart Cell Signals by David Sampedro
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Esther Pueyo nominated for the awards Aragonese of the Year 2015 for her research on aging heart, carried through the computational capabilities of Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS  

Esther Pueyo, researcher at the group of CIBER-BBN, BSICoS, which coordinates Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS, has been nominated for awards Aragonese of the Year  in the category of science and research. Esther develops a project considered of reference by European Union that studies aging heart through mathematical and computational tools combined with experimental and clinical work aimed at proposing new markers of risk for arrhythmias.

The Newspaper El Periódico de Aragon calls for the twenty second consecutive year Aragonese of the Year, a competition that recognizes the personal and professional Aragonese citizens and groups who develop their work in different fields, always with social significance merits.

The Aragonese of the Year contest is divided into five categories, with four nominations each. One that gets the most votes will rise to the Aragonese Year award in the cathegories: Company, Sports, Human Values, Science and Research and Culture

Esther Pueyo (U27 Nanbiosis) nominated for Aragonese of the Year 2015 for her research on aging heart
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Government of Aragón, Spain, paid tribute to the seven scientists who have a grant of European excellence and develop their projects at the University of Zaragoza: Jesús Santamaría, Diego Gutierrez, Igor Irastorza, Esther Pueyo, Manuel Arruebo, José Manuel García Aznar and Jesús Martínez de la Fuente.

President of the Government of Aragon, Javier Lambán, has personally expressed his gratitude and appreciation for the work of seven researchers from the University of Zaragoza who have been granted with projects of excellence funded by the European Research Council.

Jesús Santamaría, Scientific Director of Unit 9 of NANBIOSIS, with an Advanced Grant funded with 1.85 million euro, is working on a project to develop a microreactor that enables the industry to save energy and raw materials.

Esther Pueyo, member of the research group BSICoS of CIBER-BBN, which coordinates Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS, has a Starting Grant of 1.5 million and is studying the aging of the heart to propose new markers of risk for arrhythmias in the aging population.

Manuel Arruebo member of the research group Nanostructured films and particles of CIBER-BBN, which coordinates Unit 9 of NANBIOSIS, with a Grant Consolidator 1.5 million for the project Nanohedonism, develops injectable nanoparticles created with microfluidic reactors for the controlled and remote delivery of drugs in the treatment of chronic pain.

 

Nanbiosis_U27_U9_Three researchers of NANBIOSIS among the seven Aragonese scientists granted with an ERC.
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Pablo Laguna, Scientific Director of the Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS, presents in the Neocom Days the research lines of the group Biomedical Signal Interpretation & Computational Simulation (BSICoS) of CIBER-BBN and I3A of University of Zaragoza.

NEOCOM DAYS are organized by the Alumni Association of Telecommunications at the University of Zaragoza (AATUZ) in order to gather once a year companies, students and teachers to pool developments in the sector of new technologies in the field of Communications.

Nanbiosis U27_Biomedical Signal Interpretation & Computational Simulation (BSICoS)_Zaragoza
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On March 2, 2016 Esther Pueyo, Tenured Professor at the University of Zaragoza and member of the research group BSICoS of CIBER-BBN, presented the research lines of this group, that coordinates Unit 27 of NANBIOSIS, and described the ERC MODELAGE project, which was awarded with a 'Starting Grant' of the European Union funded with 1.5 million euros.

The project progresses in the characterization of human heart aging and the prevention of cardiac arrhythmias. Juan Pablo Martínez, coordinator of the BSICoS group, introduced and moderated the talk, which is incardinated in the series of seminars “Ateneo de la Escuela de Ingeniería y Arquitectura”, where ideas on science, technology, scientific thinking, social and human sciences, etc, are presented and discussed.

Current technology allows addressing multi-factorial and multi-scale research of cardiac electrophysiological behavior to improve arrhythmic risk stratification in aged hearts, both on a population basis but also on an individual basis. Esther Pueyo presented the methodologies proposed in the MODELAGE project for this purpose, which integrate in silico modeling with in vitro cell and tissue analysis and in vivo assessment of electrocardiographic recordings. All these investigations will be made possible thanks to the computational capabilities of Unit 27 High Performance Computing of NANBIOSIS.

Nanbiosis_U27-Esther Pueyo presents- Engineering at the service of health-study of human heart aging
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