Dr. Wilfried Thoben

Dr. Marco Eichelberg

Oldenburger Forschungs- und Entwicklungs- Institut für Informatik -Werkzeuge und -Systeme
OFFIS
Bereichsleiter - IuK-Systeme im Gesundheitswesen
Escherweg 2 

D - 26121 Oldenburg

Germany

http://www.offis.de

Fon/Fax: +49 4 41 97 22- 1 31/1 11

Mobile: +49 1 79 - 7 85 14 89
thoben@offis.de  

eichelberg@offis.de

OFFIS Institute Profile

OFFIS, which is founded in 1991, is an application-oriented non-profit research and development   institute related to the Computer Science department of the University of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, north-western Germany.

Its primary mission is to:

• adopt the findings from university basic research in computer science and other relevant disciplines

• stay in touch with new market demands through its many years of experience in co-operation projects with the industry and

• bridge the gap between "basic research" and "application demands" through application-oriented research.

The content-related work at OFFIS is performed in projects within fixed time scales. The institute has  a wide spectrum of projects covered. Among them are projects which are financed through state funding from the Ministry for Science and Culture, publicly supported (e.g. by the EU or Federal Science Ministry), partly internationally-oriented third-party-funded projects or even specific development and consultancy projects. By 2001, third party funding ratio reached the amount of 73%. of the total yearly research budget of some 8 million €. With this ratio, OFFIS has a top ranking both among the other institutes in Lower Saxony as well as nationwide.

OFFIS staff counts at the moment about 150 employees. More than a hundred scientists (in their vast majority computer scientists, but also engineers, economists, physicists and from other disciplines as well) work in interdisciplinary teams. The rest is covered through the administrative staff, students, apprentices etc.

OFFIS focusses its R&D activities in five challenging application areas:

• Healthcare information and communication systems (IG)

• Business information and knowledge management (BI)

• Multimedia and internet information services (MI)

• Embedded Hardware/Software Systems (HS )

• Safety Critical Systems (SC)

The OFFIS R&D Division „Healthcare Information and Communication Systems“

In the health sector, patient-related data is recorded, processed and evaluated for various purposes. This requires I&C systems that allow optimal data processing and utilisation in daily hospital practice as well as in clinical and epidemiological research.  Taking this into account, the "Healthcare information and communication systems" R&D division among other things develops clinical information systems. The objective is to optimise and as far as possible automate documentation and processing methods in specialist departments (e.g. cardiac surgery and cardiology). Additional work focuses on integrating these department systems in extensive clinical I&C systems.  A further area of work is distributed cooperation in medical care, which allows a geographical breakdown of examination results (e.g. X-ray images). Furthermore, the division is working on software tools that can be used to create and analyse data records of epidemiological cancer registries or sensitive environment systems.

In particular, the following activities are currently carried out by researchers of the OFFIS R&D Division „Healthcare Information and Communication Systems“:

• Development of departmental information systems for cardiology that support doctors in their daily work and ensure swift access to all the necessary data, with a particular focus on the quality of the data and image material.

• Telemedicine: OFFIS has been involved in a number of telemedicine projects such as the EU projects RETAIN (http://www.offis.de/projekte/ig/retain/index_e.php) and SAMTA (http://samta.offis.de/). Technical expertise on WANs, usage patterns and data protection issues has been established.

• DICOM/PACS: OFFIS maintains an Open Source DICOM toolkit (http://dicom.offis.de/) which includes support for many recent additions to DICOM such as security, digital signatures or consistent presentation of images.

• Cancer registry and tools for epidemiological evaluation:  Since 1993, OFFIS has been involved in setting up and running the Epidemiological Cancer Registry of Lower Saxony. A wealth of tools supporting the operation of the confidence office and the registration office as well as statistical evaluation and data quality management have been developed.

• Mammography screening: The Weser-Ems region, technically and administratively supported by OFFIS, is involved in one of three pilot projects in Germany, in which doctors are trying out new, more intensive forms of co-operation in order to earlier identify signs of breast cancer, based on EU guidelines.

• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (http://ihe-europe.org/): A common initiative by medical industry and professional organisations addressing issues of interoperability and workflow support in medical IT. OFFIS supports the initiative by providing the German Technical Manager.

• Standardisation: OFFIS members have been actively contributing to medical informatics standardisation in CEN/TC 251, DIN (Normenausschuss Medizin) and the DICOM Committee.

CV of Researchers

research staff with at least 4 years of research experience or those in possession of a doctoral degree

Prof. Dr. Peter Jensch

-         received his Diplom and Doctor degrees in electrical engineering from the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH), Aachen, FRG, in 1968 and 1973, respectively.

-         1968-1972 research assistant with the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Data Processing Systems, RWTH Aachen. Designing and testing programmable traffic control systems, application in the city of Aachen.

-         1972-1981 Chief Engineer in the above Institute. Coordinating research activities in signal processing, computer architectures and medical applicable computer systems (portable ECG-off line analysis system, computerised catheterisation system with longterm data archives).

-         1981-1985 with the company TELENORMA, Telefonbau und Normalzeit, Frankfurt, FRG, performing research in systems engineering of communication and data processing systems, introducing software-techniques

-         1984-1985 Lecturer at RWTH Aachen.

-         1985-1988 with the Institute of Electrical Engineering and Data Processing Systems supervising a research group in medical image processing. Main research interest: biomedically motivated computer science. This includes the complete systematic hardware and software design of data signal and image processing systems including heart, liver and fetus 3D representations based on ultrasound images.

-         Since 1988 full professor in informatics at the university of Oldenburg. Research in:

-         telemedicine,

-         integrated system design,

-         realtime-systems,

-         pattern recognition,

-         control systems.

-         Since 1990 active participation in standardisation; member of CEN/TC251/WG1 and WG4.

-         1992-1998 Member of the Board of Directors of OFFIS, an affiliated institute to the university.

Dr. Wilfried Thoben

-         received his diploma (MSc) in computer science from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, in 1993

-         received his Doctor degrees in computer science from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany, in 1999

-         1993-1997 research assistent with the department of computer science at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany.  Research in information systems for epidemiological cancer registration.

-         1997-1999 research assistent at OFFIS.  Research in

-         security of workflow based applications

-         epidemiological cancer registration

-         Since 1999 director of the R&D Division „Healthcare Information and Communication Systems“ at OFFIS.

-         Since 2001 CEO of the OFFIS CARE GmbH, a spin-off of OFFIS which is responsible for the cancer registry lower-saxony.

Dr. Marco Eichelberg

-         received his diploma (MSc) and doctoral degrees in computer science from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany, in 1994 and 2001, respectively.

-         1994-1995 research assistent with the department of computer science at Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany.  Research in teleradiology over broad-band networks.

-         Since 1995 researcher at OFFIS.  Research in

-         telemedicine,

-         medical imaging,

-         communications, interfaces and standards,

-         security.

-         Work for the European Committee for Standardization (TC 251 Health Informatics) and the DICOM Committee (WG 14 Security), both in the fields of security for healthcare communication.

-          

Dipl.-Inform. Jörg Riesmeier

-         received his diploma (MSc) in computer science from the Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Germany, in 1997.

-         Since 1998 researcher at OFFIS.  Research in

-         telemedicine,

-         medical imaging,

-         communications, interfaces and standards,

-          structured medical data.

Publications

1. Peter Jensch: Vereinheitlichung und Normung von Schnittstellen, in: Tagungsband VDE/DVMT Frankfurt, 20. Oktober 1998

2. Marcel Claus, Kay Kronberg, Gert-Hinrich Reil, Peter Jensch: Computer-aided quality control, documentation, result, and report generation and education in echocardiography, in: European Heart Journal Vol. 20, Abstr. Supplement August/September 1999, page 311, ISSN 0195-668X

3. Peter Jensch: Multimedia in Medicine and Data Security for Telemedicine, in: World Congress “Safety of Modern Technical Systems”, Sept. 2001, ISBN 3-8249-0659-7, pp 517-526

4. Marcel Claus, Kay Kronberg, Jörg Riesmeier, Gert-Hinrich Reil: Automatisierte Archivierung von angiografischen Filmen zur Workflow-Unterstützung im Herzkatheterlabor, in: Zeitschrift für Kardiologie Band 90, Supplement 5 2001, Seite V/57

5. Kay Kronberg, Marcel Claus, Jörg Riesmeier, Marco Eichelberg, Gert-Hinrich Reil: One year experience with a Cardiology PACS using MPEG-4 for video compression, in: Proceedings of the 20^th EuroPACS annual meeting, Oulu University Press, p. 219 (2002), ISBN 952-5325-06-7

6. Marcel S. Claus, Jörg Riesmeier, Thomas Wilkens: A generic approach for the integration of DICOM Worklist Management in cardiology, in: European Heart Journal Vol. 23, Abstr. Supplement September 2002, page 117, ISSN 0195-668X

7. Marco Eichelberg, Jörg Riesmeier, Andreas Thiel, Peter Jensch, Dirk Emmel, Alexander Haderer, Jens Ricke, Johannes Bernarding: Standards for a secure image and report distribution in teleradiology, in: Proceedings of the International Conference "Informatics for Health Care", Vol. 1, Kaunas University of Technology, Technologija, pp. 9-18 (2002),
ISBN 9955-09-260-2

8. Marcel Claus, Jörg Riesmeier, Thomas Wilkens, Kay Kronberg: Workflow-Unterstützung in der Kardiologie: Integration medizinischer Daten in heterogenen Umgebungen, in: TELEMED 2002: Tagungsband zur 7. Fortbildungsveranstaltung und Arbeitstagung, Günter Steyer, Klaus-Peter Löhr, Thomas Tolxdorff (Hrsg.); Berlin, Seite 51-59, ISBN 3-9808-6530-4

9. Jörg Riesmeier, Marco Eichelberg, Joachim Kieschke, Hans-Peter Hellemann, Birgit Gruschka-Hellemann, Roman Sokiranski, Axel Munte, Wilfried Thoben, Peter Jensch: The Bavarian mammography recertification programme: experiences with a workstation prototype for softcopy reading, in: Medical Imaging, SPIE 2003, San Diego, Feb. 2003

Activities in the project

We would see our main contribution in the following network activities:

-         T3: Transmission and interfaces, security of data transmission

-         T4: Signal processing, classification, recognition and evaluation