The "Ethical guidelines for biomedical research on human participants" prepared by the Indian Council of Medical Research in 2006 came as a welcome step in the process of regulation of research on human subjects, since clear cut Indian guidelines were absent earlier. The guidelines have been accepted as the standard operating manual by Institutional Ethics Committees (IEC) in India. However, ov...

Sharing individual-level data from clinical and public health research is increasingly being seen as a core requirement for effective and efficient biomedical research. This article discusses the results of a systematic review and multisite qualitative study of key stakeholders' perspectives on best practices in ethical data sharing in low- and middle-income settings. Our research suggests that...

We would like to welcome you to Journal of Biomedical Semantics (JBMS), a new openaccess, peer-reviewed inter-disciplinary journal that addresses novel theoretical and practical advances in biomedical semantics research. The main focus of JBMS is the development and integration of semantics resources into the biomedical research practice. The journal therefore aims at providing a forum for diss...

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of attending the traditional closing dinner of the 119th semiannual meeting of The Salt and Water Club*– held for the first time in Pittsburgh, and attended for the first time by a Club member from Cleveland (although elected while in New Haven). The dinner conversation–at first rather wide ranging– became focused when Mark Knepper of the NIH raised the casu...

NEWS NEWS aND ViEWS Biomimicry (literally defined as the imitation of life or nature) has sparked a variety of human innovations and inspired countless cutting-edge designs. From spider silk-made artificial skin to lotus leaf-inspired self-cleaning materials , biomimicry endeavors to solve human problems. Biomimetic approaches have contributed significantly to advances biomedical research durin...

Transmission of compressed medical images is becoming a vital tool in telemedicine. Thus new methods are needed for efficient image compression. This study discovers the best design parameters for a data compression scheme applied to digital magnetic resonance (MR) images. The proposed technique aims at reducing the transmission cost while preserving the diagnostic information. By selecting the...

A new method for the analysis of heart rate variability in short-term recordings is presented which consists of an analysis of the respiratory sinus arrhythmia in the time domain by means of a polar representation. Its main advantage is that it is applicable in experiments in which the respiration of the subject is not controlled. The algorithm is applied to data recorded on two astronauts duri...

Medical observations of leukemia or Hodgkin's disease clusters in time and space have led statisticians to invent techniques to evaluate the probability that these occurrences were due to chance. A difficult computation in human genetics was simplified by a matrix devised by a non-genetical statistician, and readily adapted to newly emerging computer-processing. The experiences exemplify the sp...