Poster Session

The EC Tempus ePBLnet project funded an extraordinary collaboration in three post-soviet countries, transforming traditional didactic curricula into student-centred PBL. This study reviews the challenges faced by trainee tutors during this transition, while surrounded by institutions in more than 15 countries running traditional curricula. Within the Tempus program, by the method of problem-based learning, 9 teachers of the Astana Medical University (AMU) have gone a cycle of seminars and trainings. Trainings were conducted by the supervisor of e-Learning of St. George’s University (London) Terry Poulton and consultant on PBL of the same university Ella Iskrenko. At the present time there has been conducted an analysis of the PBL existing cases of educational program of Saint George University and accomplishing their integration into the educational program AMU for 1, 2 and 3 years of education. Classes with students on the PBL program are conducted in the special rooms equipped with all necessary technical means. Since February 2014 by this method there have been taught 32 students. Both students and tutors were pleasantly surprised with the extensive information volume about structure and functioning of an organism, diagnostic methods and treatment, patient’s rights which can be derived while studying a simple clinical case. The implementation of PBL in educational process of AMU, providing tutors and students with necessary conditions for the development of their creative potential. Training in small groups and personal oriented environment contribute to the improvement of medical personnel training quality, competences perfection of undergraduates, increase of competitiveness of the Kazakhstan experts in the world market of medical services.

Aim and objectives: The aim of this survey is to evaluate the quality of education of the trainees in Hippokrateio General Hospital of Thessaloniki as well as to examine the correlation between the undergraduate medical education and the demands during the postgraduate specialization. Method: In the survey participated 96 trainees, who in December 2014 were working in Hippokrateio General Hospital of Thessaloniki. They completed anonymously und voluntarily questionnaires based on the Postgraduate Hospital Educational Environment Measure (PHEEM). PHEEM consists of 40 questions.The possible answers are formed based on a Likert-type scale (Strongly disagree, Disagree, Almost disagree, Almost agree, Agree, Strongly agree). The questions can be classified in three sub-scales: Perceptions of of role autonomy, perceptions of teaching and perceptions of social support. The answers are presented on a 0-100 scale. The PHEEM questionnaire is followed by the request of positive and negative comments with regards to the hospital environment as well as questions, that refer to their satisfaction, the fulfillment of their undergraduate expectations and the undergraduate preparation for the demands of their postgraduate training. Results: From the 96 participants 61,5 % are men and 38,5 % are women. Their average age is 32,57 years old and the average total training period is 36,35 months. 36,5 % attend a surgical specialization, 43,8 % an internal medicine specialization and 19,8 % a laboratory specialization. 80,2 % have studied in a greek university (58,3 % in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and 19,8 % have studied abroad. The total score of PHEEM is 54 %, the score of the sub-scale perception of autonomy is 53 %, the score of perception of education is 56 % and the score of the perception of social support is 51 %. The lowest scoring statements are: “There is an informative junior doctors handbook”, “I have suitable access to career guidance”, “There are good counseling opportunities for junior doctors who fail to complete their training satisfactorily” and the highest scoring statements are: “I have a contract of employment that provides information about hours of work”, “I have good collaboration with the other doctors in my grade ”, “I feel part of the team working here” and “My seniors and consultants are accessible”. According to the results only 52 % of the participants are satisfied with their job and only 45 % believe that the expectations they had in the first year of Medicine School are fulfilled. Lastly, almost positive judge the trainees their undergraduate preparation for the demands during their postgraduate training, the better communication with their patients and their everyday clinical practice. Conclusion: The educational environment provided by the Hippokrateio General Hospital of Thessaloniki is evaluated by the trainees as almost positive. However, many improvements must be made. The level of job satisfaction of the young doctors is low and even lower is their sense of fulfillment of their undergraduate expectations. Lastly, improvements must be made towards a better preparation in medicine schools for the postgraduate training of young doctors.

The etiopathology of IBD still remains unknown. The combined use of lifestyle surveys associated with blood samples and relevant clinical registers seems the best methodology to identify possible links between genetic predisposition, disease occurrence and natural course of the disease. Such a system will help understand the natural course of the disease, study the predisposing factors and related genes and determine early clinical, genetic and immunological predictors of outcome and response to treatment. We build an efficient personalized web-based platform, in order to manage medical data, using efficient data mining and knowledge extraction techniques. Various variables already defined, determined for which associations are searched within the recorded datasets, discover interesting interrelations and extract new knowledge from multiple and heterogeneous archived data that reflect everyday lifestyle and medical information, examine the results of previous therapeutic regimens and obtain quantitative explanations of the observations and generate efficient reports with intelligent data visualization. Our proposed clinical DSS platform incorporates a Data Repository and a Knowledge Discovery module. The platform will provide tracking, data query, report generation, process management functions, data handling as well as statistics, data mining and knowledge extraction capabilities. Medical data from 652 old patients have already been digitized, while blood sampling (plus genetic and serological study) has already been achieved in 295 new patients and 243 healthy volunteers. Several knowledge discovery techniques have been applied already, giving more than satisfactory results. Building such a system, for the first time in Greece, will contribute even more to IBD knowledge and research, as the proposed system will create a unique multidisciplinary combined database with combination of clinical, environmental and laboratory data in IBD. In addition, as IBD is regarded to be a multifactorial disease, we hope to better define some factors that clearly predispose to certain IBD phenotypes and IBD disease course.

Cochlear implants are devices aiming to help the ones suffering from a complete hearing loss. They do not restore normal hearing however. They merely provide an increasingly accurate representation of sound, since modern devices have some 24 electrodes that form synapses with some 16,000 cells approximately inside the cochlea. After the surgeon’s infusion the patient’s brain is able to adapt to the new representation of sounds, to a certain degree typically after a year. For post-lingually deaf subjects, the initial sounds are described to be robotic, fuzzy, cartoonish, or similar to a noisy street. After training and calibration, performed by the doctor, most users are able to recognize voices, and enhance lip reading. Interestingly, too many subjects, after recent advances, are able to retain and comprehend speech and language. The surgeon’s role is not merely confined to linking nerves with a stimulating mechanism or by properly parameterizing the implantable nerve simulator. The doctor is the one that directs the motor mechanism for producing speech. In this point a “interdisciplinary” group of scientists is involved, trying to visualize the “big picture” that comes out of thousand of synapses linked with bioelectronics. The subject bearing a cochlear implant does not react on the basis of what he hears; in reality he reconstructs sounds based on what his mind thinks sounds should be morphed in for speech production. Moreover, he will be prompted one way or the other to try his skills in music reproduction, and more specifically in singing. Therefore, the critical question is: what is the image of sounds; how many “dimensions” do sounds have; What data should the patient reproduce so to makeshift his analysis - resynthesis brain systems to take advantage of his working memory as a Brain Computer Interface? After all, as doctors say, we do not hear with our ears, but with our brain!

In the actual stage of development of Life Sciences and IT&C technology, simulations, statistics and predictive software systems are tools that should not be missing from Health Education. The usage of simulation techniques in Life Sciences and Health Education provide the possibility to study and to predict the behavior of living systems in different environment conditions. Open Source programming languages, like Python, R, Octave, PHP and other, offer the possibility to create dedicated software systems, at minimal costs, for simulation and statistics in Life Sciences. In the same time, a large number of Open Access Databases in different fields of Life Sciences (genomics, proteoemics, epidemiology, biomedical research and others) around the world, provides adequate and accurate data for simulation and analysis. GenoComp - Genomic Computing is an open source dedicated software system for genomic analysis and statistics. GenoComp - Genomic Computing is the result of the interdisciplinary research activity in the areas of software development and life sciences at IBMC International SRL. The software system GenoComp - Genomic Computing is developed in Python, a high level open source programming language specific for the scientific field. Python, as a high level programming language, provides a number of advantages in complex software systems development: flexibility, object oriented programming, the possibility to write well structured and easy to read source code, it is a programming language specific for the scientific field, it is free. The GenoComp - Genomic Computing software system is designed for DNA and RNA sequence analysis and comparisons between different structures of genomic sequences. The main features of the system GenoComp are: RNA and DNA sequence analysis (nucleotide statistics, amino-acids content analysis, pattern analysis), RNA and DNA sequences structure comparison and statistics, multiple tests. The application allows a variety of statistical output data in multiple formats and comparative tests on structures of DNA and RNA sequences. The integration of statistical results of genomic analysis with the role that RNA and DNA have in the behavior of biological systems, provides important information in the fields of Health Sciences and Health Education.