Articles

BioAGE is the codename of a project started by BINETIX LLC in November 2012 and accomplished in January 2015. Its goal was to create new product – an innovative software and hardware environment for development and deployment of distributed applications. A proprietary grid technology's purpose is to virtualize the access to heterogeneous resources, to coordinate them in an optimal manner and to execute simultaneously parallel and legacy applications. The environment is designed to generalize the results received from geographically dispersed nodes.

STATEMENT OF WORK

This platform is designed to be used by experts who do not posses knowledge in the field of parallel computations in order to help them construct specialized programs, embedded solutions or just to conduct tests and experiments in distributed environment. The project includes the implementation of a software tool, named Visual Grid Orchestrator (VGO), for interactive graphical development of asynchronous applications. These applications should be considered as a bag of components interconnected with internal or external resources. The components are ready to use existing legacy algorithms (as a stub to external libraries written on standard programming languages such as C, C++ or Java) and to implement completely new native tasks on functional programming language. Once created and deployed into the grid, these components have to be ready for execution or for visual design, remaining completely transparent to the regular users.

As a final product, BioAGE is equipped with a bundle of components deployed for stand-alone usage (machine-to-machine) within the grid environment or ready for development of new distributed applications using the VGO.

The following components and applications are developed:

Image processing components for point, local and global (Fourier high and low frequency filters) operations;
Image processing components for regional segmentation (Medical image diagnostics);
Component for indexing unstructured data from files or EHR (Medical);
Component for semantic search throughout unstructured information for text based documents and XML files;
Demo application for processing medical images – contour recognition or IR temperature extraction;
Demo application for processing EHR – semantic search in health records (Health-care providers, Hospitals).

INNOVATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY IMPROVEMENTS

The project brings opportunities and advancements to our existing technologies as fallows :

Visual Development – The VGO simplifies the development and the deployment of distributed applications in complex heterogeneous environment for experts in Medical, Information management, Intelligence and other professional or scientific fields.
Legacy Algorithms in Parallel – BioAGE is simultaneously managing native applications and linear legacy code. This approach is of great benefit to medical laboratories, scientific institutions and companies which would like to keep their existing and proven software libraries in action and to harness them in both concurrent and redundant network environment.
Virtual Nodes – The nodes in the grid are publishing functions and data in the unified way despite the hardware architecture like PC and ARM. They are planned to be stub units between the application logic and the hardware.

KEY FEATURES

Improved software and hardware platform for development and deployment of distributed applications or parallel algorithms;
Computer virtualization of data resources and computations in different hardware architectures in particular PC AMD/Intel and ARM Cortex based computers-on-module;
Visual tool for rapid and flexible construction of legacy and native components and parallel applications;
Support of legacy code for PC or ARM embedded directly into the platform infrastructure;
Library of component for image processing, sample biometric analysis and extraction of temperature data from infrared images;
Library of components for powerful semantic search in unstructured information encoded in ASCII, Unicode, XML;
Ready-to-use distributed application for medical image processing;
Ready-to-use distributed application for specialized search in personal/electronic health records (EHR) in accordance with CEN/ISO EN13606 or HL7 standards.

REFERENCES

HL7 Austria, August 2011

"One of the biggest challenges for IT in Healthcare sector in the coming years will be the availability and accessibility of healthcare, treatment and clinical data and documentation. Currently, huge amounts of information are in a little more structured and difficult maschinenauswertbarer form in various Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, which can not be semantically evaluated in an appropriate manner...

The concept presented by BioAGE promises a very interesting way to link this information through semantic algorithms and make usable biometric and epidemiological evaluations... Currently relying on document standards based on XML, such as CEN / ISO EN13606 or the Health Level Seven Clinical Document Architecture (HL7 CDA) become increasingly important in the storage and exchange of clinical data... BioAGE is conceptually already prepared for this development, which increases the future sustainability and security of the project."

Bulgarian Academy of Science, Institute of Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering, June 2011

"BioAGE project is of interest to people in the field of biomedical engineering. One of Its important applications is the processing and analysis of medical images. In particular, in the results of studies with conventional X-ray technique, images obtained by digital subtraction angiography, CT, with apparatus for MRI, for positron emission tomography, as well as in different isotopic studies ...

These important medical imaging objectives can be achieved and solved by BioAGE software and hardware products for distributed applications. Key future of this product is that in its concept, it doesn’t require special knowledge in the field of parallel programming. This will greatly facilitate its use for routine purposes in clinics, education institutes and universities and scientific research. "

Close Panel