Diggery is a research and software project, investigating the extraction of concepts from well-written documents, with the idea of automating factoid search. The project is in its early to middle phases, and all information presented herein should be taken in light that this research is based on young software using new algorithms. In January 2006, after significant tuning, the software could a...

Software upgrades of the treatment management system (TMS) sometimes require that all data be migrated from one version of the database to another. It is necessary to verify that the data are correctly migrated to assure patient safety. It is impossible to verify by hand the thousands of parameters that go into each patient's radiation therapy treatment plan. Repeating pretreatment QA is costly...

How early in the software development cycle are most performance defects found? Before or after QA? Industry pundits have long sought to reduce costs by fixing software defects earlier in the cycle. The path to these cost reductions, however, is fraught with road blocks. This paper focuses on a concrete testing regimen that works around these longstanding obstacles. It empowers developers to fi...

E very enterprise now lives and dies by the data stored on its computers and networks, and none can long survive if that data isn’t accurate and reliable. In addition to the damage that can come from the actual alteration of data, the impact on a company’s reputation can be substantial if customers are faced with unreliable, poor-quality products. Quality assurance (QA) and information assuranc...

Despite decades of research, healthcare information systems have been characterised by cost over-runs, poor specifications and lack of user uptake. A new approach is required which provides organisations with a reason to invest in this type of software. W Edwards Deming argues that quality is not an entity but derives from using feedback, iteratively to seek improvement to processes, in order t...

This paper introduces L2F’s (INESC-ID) question/answering system and presents its results in the QA@CLEF07 evaluation task. QA@LF bases its performance on a high-quality deep linguistic analysis of the question, which is strongly based on named entity recognition. However, if a precise analysis is not possible or if no answer is found in previous processed data, the system is also capable of re...

A simple phantom was designed, constructed, tested, and clinically implemented for daily quality assurance (QA) of an ultrasound-image-guided radiation therapy (US-IGRT) system, the Restitu Ultrasound system (Resonant Medical, Montreal, QC). The phantom consists of a high signal echogenic background gel surrounding a low signal hypoechoic egg-shaped target. Daily QA checks involve ultrasound im...

One of the most important aspects of quality assurance (QA) in radiation therapy is redundancy of patient treatment dose calculation. This work is focused on the patient-specific time and 3D dose treatment plan verification for stereotactic radiosurgery using Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion (LGK PFX). The virtual model of LGK PFX was developed in MATLAB, based on the physical dimensions provided ...

PURPOSE Consistency verification between the data from treatment planning system (TPS), record and verification system (R&V), and delivered recorder with visual inspection is time consuming and subject to human error. The purpose of this work is to develop a software tool to automatically perform such verifications. METHODS Using Microsoft visual C++, a quality assurance (QA) tool was develop...