19 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2024
    1. Millions of Patient Records at Risk: The Perils of Legacy Protocols

      Sina Yazdanmehr | Senior IT Security Consultant, Aplite GmbH Ibrahim Akkulak | Senior IT Security Consultant, Aplite GmbH Date: Wednesday, December 6, 2023

      Abstract

      Currently, a concerning situation is unfolding online: a large amount of personal information and medical records belonging to patients is scattered across the internet. Our internet-wide research on DICOM, the decade-old standard protocol for medical imaging, has revealed a distressing fact – Many medical institutions have unintentionally made the private data and medical histories of millions of patients accessible to the vast realm of the internet.

      Medical imaging encompasses a range of techniques such as X-Rays, CT scans, and MRIs, used to visualize internal body structures, with DICOM serving as the standard protocol for storing and transmitting these images. The security problems with DICOM are connected to using legacy protocols on the internet as industries strive to align with the transition towards Cloud-based solutions.

      This talk will explain the security shortcomings of DICOM when it is exposed online and provide insights from our internet-wide research. We'll show how hackers can easily find, access, and exploit the exposed DICOM endpoints, extract all patients' data, and even alter medical records. Additionally, we'll explain how we were able to bypass DICOM security controls by gathering information from the statements provided by vendors and service providers regarding their adherence to DICOM standards.

      We'll conclude by providing practical recommendations for medical institutions, healthcare providers, and medical engineers to mitigate these security issues and safeguard patients' data.

  2. Oct 2023
    1. Neural operators are guaranteed to be discretization invariant, meaning that they can work on any discretization of inputs and converge to a limit upon mesh refinement. Once neural operators are trained, they can be evaluated at any resolution without the need for re-training. In contrast, the performance of standard neural networks can degrade when data resolution during deployment changes from model training.

      Look this up: anyone familiar with this? sounds complicated but very promising for domains with a large range of resolutions (medical-imaging, wildfire-management)

  3. May 2022
    1. what happens when you see one of these so-called pictures of the brain you've all seen these things they have red and blue and yellow and so on there's no red 00:01:21 and blue and yellow in the brain what happens is this if the pictures are not pictures of the brain they're pictures of gia the ratio of oxygenated to 00:01:35 deoxygenated blood in certain places and when neurons fire they need to be getting some oxygen back in there too so they can fire again and it turns out that they have different magnetic 00:01:49 properties if their oxygen if the blood is oxygenated or not and what you see actually is a bunch of pixels and each little pixel is actually 3 millimeters 00:02:03 by 3 millimeters by 3 millimeters 3 millimeters cubed and it goes over anywhere between one second and several seconds now if you ask how many neurons are in there the answer is about 125 00:02:17 million per pixel each neuron is connected to between a thousand and 10,000 other neurons so there are tens of billions of connections lots of circuitry in that one little 00:02:30 pixel and that picture doesn't show you what's going on in that circuitry very important you know we cannot see that we can say hey something is happening there

      Each pixel is an output from 125 million cells. It's similar to a country that votes for a president or prime minister. If you try to figure out how that leader was voted into power without analyzing all the voters, that is quite an impossible task!

  4. Jan 2022
    1. Douaud, G., Lee, S., Alfaro-Almagro, F., Arthofer, C., Wang, C., McCarthy, P., Lange, F., Andersson, J. L. R., Griffanti, L., Duff, E., Jbabdi, S., Taschler, B., Winkler, A. M., Nichols, T. E., Collins, R., Matthews, P. M., Allen, N., Miller, K. L., & Smith, S. M. (2021). Brain imaging before and after COVID-19 in UK Biobank (p. 2021.06.11.21258690). https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690

  5. Nov 2021
    1. (the VTA is also part ofthis system, but is too small to image with standard fMRImethods, but see [35] for successful imaging methods).

      All imaging studies face questions of validity and should (and many do) link to comprehensive details on instrumentation, methodology, and interpretation. Apparently, the professional consensus remains that, properly executed and interpreted, fMRI and other functional imaging techniques based on detection of oxygenation can lead to highly valid conclusions. (See Nautil.us article.)

    2. imaging the brain of an individual who claims to generatejoy without any external rewards or cues could point the waytoward improved training in joy and greater resilience in theface of external difficulties. Of particular interest is the neuralmechanisms by which happiness is generated.

      Such a self-administered neural 'technology' of happiness should be driving much more related research but I see no other neuroscientific studies delving into jhanas.

    3. We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a rolein the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports:(1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highlyfocused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditatorshow changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptlyafter jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activationof the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject mightstimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparentlynovel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

      I can find no other research on this particular matter. It would be helpful to have other studies to validate or invalidate this one. This method of reward requires a highly-trained participant and involves no external means.

  6. Jun 2021
  7. Apr 2021
  8. Mar 2021
  9. Apr 2020
    1. In terms of radiologic findings, bilateral pneumonia (75 of 82 patients [91.5%] vs 236 of 334 patients [70.7%]) and multiple mottling and ground-glass opacity (53 [64.6%] vs 15 [4.5%]) were more prevalent in patients with than those without cardiac injury (both P < .001, Table 1).
    1. CMR (day 7) showed a recovery of systolic function (from 52% by CTA to 64% by CMR), although with persistence of a mild hypokinesia at basal and mid left ventricular segments; at the same sites, diffuse myocardial oedema, determining wall pseudo-hypertrophy, was observed on short T1 inversion recovery (STIR) sequences (Panel D) and confirmed by T1 and T2 mapping (average native T1 = 1188 ms, normal value <1045; average T2 = 61 ms, normal value <50). Late gadolinium enhancement sequences demonstrated absence of detectable myocardial scar/necrotic foci.
    1. Chest radiography was repeated on day 4 and showed no thoracic abnormalities. Transthoracic echocardiography, performed on day 6, revealed a significant reduction of LV wall thickness (interventricular septum, 11 mm; posterior wall, 10 mm), an improvement of LVEF to 44%, and a slight decrease of pericardial effusion (maximum, 8-9 mm). At the time of submission, the patient was hospitalized with progressive clinical and hemodynamic improvement.
    2. Transthoracic echocardiography revealed normal left ventricular (LV) dimensions with an increased wall thickness (interventricular septum, 14 mm, posterior wall, 14 mm) and a diffuse echo-bright appearance of the myocardium. There was diffuse hypokinesis, with an estimated LV ejection fraction (LVEF) of 40%. There was no evidence of heart valve disease. Left ventricular diastolic function was mildly impaired with mitral inflow patterns, with an E/A ratio of 0.7 and an average E/e′ ratio of 12. There was a circumferential pericardial effusion that was most notable around the right cardiac chambers (maximum, 11 mm) without signs of tamponade. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) confirmed the increased wall thickness with diffuse biventricular hypokinesis, especially in the apical segments, and severe LV dysfunction (LVEF of 35%) (Video 1 and Video 2). Short tau inversion recovery and T2-mapping sequences showed marked biventricular myocardial interstitial edema. Phase-sensitive inversion recovery sequences showed diffuse late gadolinium enhancement extended to the entire biventricular wall (Figure 2). The myocardial edema and pattern of late gadolinium enhancement fulfilled all the Lake Louise criteria for the diagnosis of acute myocarditis.6 The circumferential pericardial effusion was confirmed, especially around the right cardiac chambers (maximum, 12 mm).
    3. Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging showed increased wall thickness with diffuse biventricular hypokinesis, especially in the apical segments, and severe left ventricular dysfunction (left ventricular ejection fraction of 35%). Short tau inversion recovery and T2-mapping sequences showed marked biventricular myocardial interstitial edema, and there was also diffuse late gadolinium enhancement involving the entire biventricular wall. There was a circumferential pericardial effusion that was most notable around the right cardiac chambers. These findings were all consistent with acute myopericarditis.
  10. Jul 2019
  11. Dec 2017
  12. Dec 2016
    1. Vote for UniverCity!

      I've proposed a workshop to the Future Architecture platform, organised by the Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana. The idea is that the ideas arising from the UniverCity forum can be worked through in discussion about the possibility of a future form of architectural visualisation not tied down to images of completed buildings. Renderings of unpredictability, of occupation, of diverse public knowledges. Vote online: and browse the other projects too.

  13. Apr 2016