Computer Science Department News

There will be a Colloquium on June 13, 2011 at 11:00 AM by Iyad Al Khatib.

Title: Health Information Technology (HIT) and ICT: Applications, Computation and Communication
Location: E&CS Building First Floor Auditorium
Student: Iyad Al Khatib
Advisor: N/A

Abstract:
Human health remains by far the most significant issue in our everyday life. Even when we invest in environmental friendly work, it is for the sake toprotect health at first. In this respect, many fields can aid in taking care of health. Biomedical engineering has given tremendous advance to medicine, i.e. aid in care for health. In the current years, we witness the immediate interest of governments, public and private institutions, and even people in healthcare related political bills and development. One major problem in this field remains to be the cost. This calls for innovative solutions that leverage the quality of medical services while keeping costs low. ICT, if used pedantically in the right direction, can help reach such goals.

In this talk, we discuss the field of Health Information Technology and its relationship to ICT and how we differentiate between computation and communications. We look in a top down view from Application to technology. We take a realistic example in the medical field: heart disease applications and the need for innovative HIT solutions. From a statistical viewpoint, the biggest diseases in number of deaths are heart diseases, namely Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) and Stroke. The application with the largest market for CVD is the electrocardiogram (ECG/EKG) analysis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2003, 29.2% of global deaths are due to CVD and Stroke, half of which could be prevented if there was proper monitoring. We find in HIT a chance of a solution for such a big problem. We look at the communication technologies, wireless networks, and HW/SW codesign. These projects have a medical impact as well as economic and social impacts. Technically, we aim at rendering more computations in less time and with less expense. The performance demand and the vision of having a market success, i.e. contributing to lower healthcare costs, pose many challenges on the hardware/software and communication designs. This calls upon the development of new integrated circuits also featuring increased energy efficiency while providing higher computation capabilities, i.e. better performance. We present two novel HIT algorithms for ECG analysis that fit such modern technologies from the medical and IT sides, namely the Autocorrelation-Function (ACF) based algorithm and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based algorithm. We also show how HIT can be applied to such a field of in order to converge to a solution that is acceptable from a performance viewpoint, meets the real-time demands, and can be implemented with the present technologies.


Biography:
Dr. Iyad Al Khatib is the Chief Technology Officer of Solidux Telecom AB, a Telephony company, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. He held the position of R&D Product Manager and Chief of Industry-Academia Cooperation at Sting Networks AB, a company that delivers Telephony and data technology services to Healthcare and medical centers in Sweden. Iyad was also the General Adviser for business development in the EMEA and North American regions for the British company Unified Networks Ltd., whose core business is in infrastructure networks. He was the Chief Scientist and Founder of iITC, a Swedish IT company for innovation in IT and Biomedical Engineering, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.

He has helped many companies to startup in Sweden and to expand to the EMEA region. He is the project leader for the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) project entitled "Young Scientists in Communications and Networking Technologies," in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region. Iyad holds patents in the field of ICT. Iyad is also a member of the Swedish Union of Inventors and a member of the Young Inventors International (YII) Association. He was nominated to the MIT Technology Review Top 100 Innovators under 35. The main fields that Iyad Al Khatib has been working on are: R&D, Information and Communication Technology-ICT (microelectronics, computer and communications), Healthcare Information Technology (HIT), biomedical engineering, and business development.

He has papers and publications in these fields. Iyad received his Ph.D. in ICT for Healthcare Applications from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden. He has a Licentiate of Technology (a Swedish degree between the Master and Ph.D. degrees) in Networking and Wireless Communications from KTH. He received his Master of Engineering (M.E.) from the American University of Beirut (AUB) majoring in Biomedical Engineering within the field of Computer and Communications Engineering (CCE). He received his Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in CCE from the AUB also. Iyad's current research interests include: Healthcare Information Technology (HIT), wireless communications, networking, biomedical networks, Network on Chip (NoC), and multiprocessor chip design for medical purposes, some of which have been published in international journal and conference papers. Currently, Iyad is working on building a worldwide consortium for ICT in Healthcare, food (and water) safety, and environment.