Recognition: 2 of SSBTR : 80G Certified

SSBTR 80G Certificate

Eligibility of Faculty in International Standard : SAU

South Asian University, only university in India that follow International Standard : Have a look for required qualification in faculty recruitment

Nature Index: over 50% of China’s high-quality research involves international co-authors

Nature Index: over 50% of China’s high-quality research involves international co-authors, 2017-May-26

The Nature Index 2017 China supplement, published today, reveals that as China’s total number of articles included in the Nature Index increased since 2012, the percentage of articles with international co-authors has continued to rise year-on-year. By 2016, papers with international co-authors comprised more than 50% of the country’s articles in the index.

In 2016, the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Italy formed the strongest bilateral collaboration between a Chinese institution and an international institution, followed by Peking University and Harvard University. Out of the top 10 international bilateral collaborations in China, the Germany-based Max Planck Society participated in five.
However, the depth of collaborations between institutions domestically remains far greater than internationally. There are 56 such partnerships between Chinese institutions that are stronger than the leading global pairing.
In terms of China’s inter-city collaborations, as well as institutions in Beijing having the highest contribution to the index overall, last year they formed the largest number of partnerships across China. Beijing was followed by Shanghai and Nanjing in this respect. But beyond these metropolises, institutions in smaller cities have expertise that makes them strong collaborators in their own right.
For instance, Kunming, well-known for its unique biodiversity, is a boon for scientists interested in studying plants and ecology. Whereas Changchun in China’s northeast has a long history specialising in chemistry research. Last year institutions in Kunming formed 190 domestic research partnerships with other Chinese institutions to co-author papers included in the index, ranking 16th of the 184 Chinese cities examined by the index. More than two-thirds of Kunming’s output on the Nature Index is the field of chemistry, with many articles investigating the chemical structures and processes of plants. Changchun’s strongest partnership last year was between Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry (CIAC) and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in Beijing, both part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
For the first time, the Nature Index China supplement took a look at China’s performance beyond the 68 journals tracked by the index and expanded into the larger Web of Science database, from Clarivate Analytics. “This helps our readers and index users gain a broad picture of China’s research output overall and in some specific fields. By making comparisons, they can find some interesting facts to better understand the trend,” said David Swinbanks, Founder of the Nature Index.
As indicated by the Nature Index, international papers make up a significant portion of China’s high-quality research, but this level of international co-authorship does not extend to all papers published in China. The country’s share of articles with international co-authors indexed in the Web of Science remains below 25%. “The slower growth rate in papers from international collaborations was because China’s overall research output had grown so dramatically,” said Dr. Yue Weiping, Chief Scientist of China for Clarivate Analytics. “This slower rate may be attributed to language barriers and allocation of institutional resources. Researchers in top universities have more opportunities or resources to collaborate with peers worldwide.” Yet there are signs that this overall rate of international collaboration will rise over the next decade, due to government policies – such as the national World-Class 2.0 project – aimed at making Chinese research more global, including generous funding schemes to promote collaboration.

 

Some opinion of Rolf M. Zinkernagel for those who want to venture into newer fields of biomedical branch

Some notable facts are very important as reflected in the comments by Rolf. M. Zinkernagel

Here some opinion of him is important for those who want to venture into new fields of biomedical branch.

We are given to understand that you had difficulty in getting a postdoctoral position despite applying to as many as 50 institutions. A disappointment of this magnitude could possibly annihilate even the most spirited aspirants.
That's just normal! You must realize that nobody is waiting for you. Why do we go to an institution? We do that to learn, to gain more experience and knowledge. Sure it was busy with all of the rejections because I had to keep applying without a stable position, but it was normal. Just set your goals; keep a
straight mind; and address the principal question that you are trying to answer.

How about disagreements from the scientific community about your work?
Disagreement is normal. It takes some time for hypotheses and even results to be accepted. However, getting published in journals, such as Nature, does provide reassurance. There is an entire article on comments counter arguing the opinions that I had published in an issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology. However, I am never worried about the hypotheses that I publish because many of these are testable.

Do you believe that being in big institutions ( such as the Ivy League institutes) enhances the prospects of one winning the Nobel Prize as against, say, being the head of a smaller laboratory early in your life?
There is no such standard rule, provided that you have the facilities needed to carry out your research. At the end of the day, you simply need to be lucky. You can get lucky in a small institution or a big one. When Peter and I were working on solving the problems of MHC-restricted immune T-cell recognition, the Eureka moment came in Canberra, Australia. It was so unexpected, so serendipitous, that the most important thing we did was not to miss it! Had we not discovered it, somebody else would have surely done so sooner or later. Discoveries can occur anywhere.

===> Note: It was the 3rd volume of the Journal [Characteristics of the interaction in vitro between cytotoxic thymus-derived lymphocytes and target monolayers infected with lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus, Scan J Immunol, 1974, 3:287-94] and in the following year another publication in the 1st volume of Lancet, [A biological role for the major histocompatibility antigens, Lancet 1975, 1:1406-9]. Possibly at that that time, corporate culture had not pervade into the academy of science. In present scenario the journal could not have indexing status and as par UGC journal criteria that pioneering scientist would not able to pursue his further research and hence, such fundamental discoveries would not be possible in India due to existing academic policy of Indian science. Let's see what are big difference with respect to the development of bio-medical scenario in Indian context.
 
Does medical education equip one better to deal with the challenges of research?
You need both. Laboratory work teaches you to be more analytic in your approach. By studying medicine, you realize the importance of quality control, and can better apply it. If I were to advise a student, it would be better to get a basic medical background and then acquire molecular skills, for that's much easier. Also when you start off with medicine, the road ahead is wide open: There is a variety of paths that you can pursue.
===> Note: In Indian context diseases are addressed by scientists who do not have any exposure to clinical scenario. Ironically, they holds different policy making bodies. Let's see how it affect the paradigm change.

What advice would you give to students who are at the start of their scientific careers?
You have to make a choice to take big risks, or to safeguard yourself by earning good money. However, you can only make a significant discovery by taking risks, because you will have to go somewhere where no one has gone before. Everybody will give you advice, but I personally believe that once you reach the
age of 16, you don't change. You just pick the suggestions that fit your character. You learn from experience. Pick out the advice that has worked for you early on, and leave out what hasn't.
===> Note: Due to bad policy and poor economic structure Indian students avoid minimal level of risks as risks may impose them to get hand-to-mouth, good money is far away. In most of the academic jobs, there is very stringent bar and reservation system

 

that actually do not nurture for the development of a mind-set to learn from failures.

Ref. Science and Sensibility: An Interview with Rolf M. Zinkernagel published in MedGenMed 2007, 9:24
---
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Secretary, SSBTR

Ageism "as bad as racism"

Though different persons have different physical and mental and cognitive ability irrespective of biological age. Moreover different works need different maturation time frame to grow specially in scientific research. However in Indian context there is a blunt age bar that actually deny suitable person to get into the academic and scientific research. As a result nation may suffer. Interestingly, the issue is now being discussed in Nature Jobs Blog by Jack Leeming dated 27 Oct 2016.
SSBTR thinks the age bar issue has detrimental effect towards the propagation of multi-/interdisciplinary research. For details please visit Ageism "as bad as racism".
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Secretary, SSBTR

Natural Language Processing Use in Radiology: A Systematic Review

Following document is important with respect to Electronic Health Record -

"Natural Language Processing Use in Radiology: A Systematic Review" by Dorothy A. Sippo, MD, MPH, CIIP, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Daniel Rubin, MD, MS; Paul G. Nagy, PhD, FSIIM; Brandyn Lau, MPH presented in the Annual Meeting of Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine, SiiM2015

Hypothesis: The performance of natural language processing used in radiology has improved over time. The types of applications of this technology in radiology have expanded over time.

Introduction: The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 has spurred greater adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), with their use nearly doubling from 2010-2011 (1). With more clinical data available in an electronic format, the goal is to be able to leverage this data to assess the quality of care and guide future decision making. A significant proportion of EHR data is stored in a narrative, unstructured format. Natural language processing (NLP) employs a computer to extract meaningful information from human language. In the setting of the EHR, it is typically used to extract information from unstructured report text. A 2008 review of research on the extraction of information from text documents in EHRs revealed that performance of these systems has improved since a prior systematic review in 1995 (2).
Radiology is a medical subspecialty with a rich collection of text documents reporting the results of imaging examinations. Frequently, these documents have been stored in an electronic format over significant periods of time. They represent an archive that is ripe for information extraction to identify imaging findings and disease diagnoses. There are numerous descriptions in the literature to NLP being applied within radiology (3). A systematic review of the literature to investigate the use of NLP in radiology would be helpful to summarize the progress in the field and to identify gaps. The goal of this work is to evaluate the performance of NLP over time in radiology. We will identify the types of information being extracted from radiology reports and the clinical applications of this informatics tool. We will also address the computer science methods being used for NLP in radiology. From our review, we will identify gaps in functionality and opportunities for future work.

Methods: We will use a systematic approach to searching the literature to minimize the risk of bias in selecting articles for inclusion in this review. Searching the literature will involve identifying reference sources, formulating a search strategy for each source, and executing and documenting each search. For our searches of electronic databases, we will identify relevant medical subject heading terms. 

Sources Our comprehensive search will include electronic searching of peer-reviewed literature databases and grey-literature databases as well as hand-searching. We will run searches of the MEDLINE®, EMBASE®, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Web of Science, INSPEC, and Compendex databases through September 15, 2014. We will design search strategies specific to each database to enable the team to focus the available resources on articles that are most likely to be relevant to the key questions about the performance and application of NLP over time within radiology. We will develop a core strategy for MEDLINE®, accessed via PubMed, on the basis of an analysis of the relevant medical subject heading terms and text words of key articles identified a priori. The PubMed strategy will form the basis for the strategies developed for the other electronic databases.

Management of Literature Search With the assistance of the Johns Hopkins University Welch Medical Library, all references will be downloaded into ProCite® version 5.0.3 (ISI ResearchSoft, Carlsbad, CA) and de-duplicated prior to initiating the review. We will use this database to store full articles in portable document format (PDF) and to track the search results at the title review, abstract review, article inclusion/exclusion levels.
Title Review Two team members will independently reviewed all titles. For a title to be eliminated at this level, both reviewers must indicate that it is ineligible. If the first reviewer marks a title as eligible, it will be promoted to the next level, or if the two reviewers do not agree on the eligibility of an article, it will automatically promoted to the next level.
Abstract Review We will exclude an abstract at this level if the abstract does not apply to one of the key questions or for any of the following reasons: does not address NLP used in radiology, has no original data (e.g., letter to the editor, comment, systematic review), or is not in English. Abstracts will be promoted to the article review level if two reviewers agreed that the abstract could be applicable. Differences of opinion will be resolved by discussion between the two reviewers.
Article Review Full articles that were selected for review during the abstract review phase will undergo independent review by two members of the study team to determine whether they should be included in the full data abstraction. If both reviewers determine the articles have applicable information, the articles will be included in the data abstraction.
Data Abstraction We will sequentially review each article to abstract data from the final list of articles. For all articles, reviewers will extract information on general study characteristics, including: study design, location, clinical topic of interest, inclusion and exclusion criteria, description of the population under study, and description of the NLP applications. In this process, the primary reviewer will complete all relevant data abstraction forms. A second reviewer will check the first reviewer’s data abstraction forms for completeness and accuracy. We will form reviewer pairs to include personnel with both clinical and methodological expertise. We will resolve differences of opinion through consensus adjudication between the reviewers.

Results: We will summarize the different types of NLP approaches used on radiology reports and their reported performance. We will describe how NLP is being applied to radiology and assess if applications have expanded over time. We will present the types of computer science methods used for NLP in radiology and, where possible, categorize these methodologies. We will also identify gaps in functionality and applications of NLP as it relates to modern challenges of quality assurance, business intelligence, decision support, and scientific discovery.

Discussion: We will discuss types of applications of NLP in radiology and how this has the potential to enable knowledge discovery to inform future healthcare decision making. We will highlight NLP applications with superior performance and factors that may have contributed to their success. We will discuss how an understanding of NLP methods can inform future development of NLP applications within radiology.

Conclusion: A systematic review of the literature of the use of NLP in radiology demonstrates how its performance and scope of applications have evolved over time and suggests new opportunities for research.

References:

1. DesRoches CM, Charles D, Furukawa MF, Joshi MS, Kralovec P, Mostashari F, Worzala C, Jha AK. Adoption Of Electronic Health Records Grows Rapidly, But Fewer Than Half Of US Hospitals Had At Least A Basic System In 2012. Health Aff (Millwood). 2013 Aug;32(8):1478-85.
2. Meystre SM, Savova GK, Kipper-Schuler KC, Hurdle JF. Extracting information from textual documents in the electronic health record: a review of recent research. Yearb Med Inform. 2008:128-44.
3. Friedman C. A broad-coverage natural language processing system. Proc AMIA Symp. 2000:270-4.

---
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D
Secretary, SSBTR

Design the Implementation Strategy For Development of Systems Biology/Medicine for Developing Countries

SSBTR members are thinking about the importance, bottleneck of implementation strategies of Translating Systems Biology or Systems Medicine for developing countries. They have proposed some strategic planning to overcome the hurdles and to implement it. Their thinking are shared in recent two articles:
1. Bottleneck towards the Practice of Multi-/Interdisciplinary Nature of Systems Pharmacology and Systems Medicine: Experience from India, Advances in Pharmacology and Clinical Trials, 1(1): APCT-MS-ID-00010, Pages 1-7.
Abstract. Presently medicine and clinical practices are viewed with systems approach. This makes a paradigm shift in the academic pursuits of the subject pharmacology, hence pharmacology with systems based approach is known as Systems Pharmacology. If Systems Pharmacology can be practised in a proper manner it would modify the future medicine and health care system. Since towards its accomplishment, it requires multidisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary framework and however, several policy related problems may hamper its development. Some of the problems exist globally while some others are mainly India specific. Currently, India is considered to be the superpower among the south Asian countries and therefore, it may be the representative of the developing countries. Hence, development of the subject in Indian perspective is vital in the management of different diseases in the global context as well. Here we discuss the problems that confront the development and growth of the subject in India and propose some methods that may come out as solutions. Apparently it seems that the major bottlenecks are mistrust, issue of nepotism and bias in the academic pursuit, but the inner reasons are the fund crunch, problem in recruitment policy, ignorance regarding the global trend of science and its implementation in policy.


2. Importance and Implementation Strategies of Systems Medicine Education in India, Annals of Systems Biology, 1(1): 1-12
Abstract. Though the inevitable outcome of Systems Biology (SB) may be directed to seek answers to the medical problems; however, due to its expanding horizon and flexibility, different academic institutions across the globe focus on different aspects of SB in their educational curriculum. Hence, some European educationists propose for streamlining of different course curriculum. Here such issues are discussed with respect to their translation towards medicine and health care system i.e., Systems Medicine (SM) under the perspectives of developing countries. Conventional molecule centric high-throughput technology driven practices of SB that are being carried out in Western world may not fit under the perspective of developing countries due to associated high cost. Streamlining approach for SB course curriculum would shift the multi-/interdisciplinary (MDID) framework of SB towards more rigidity and narrow down the scope for the development of the subject in developing countries. Since independence of India, policy was adopted so that field dependent (FD) cognition has got priority. Present educational policy makers are trained with that direction; hence, they remain ignorant about the importance of other facets of education. Still there is some unawareness regarding the long-term effect about the implemented policy for country’s development. Practice of SM is the need of time to address the regional and local problems. Development of domain knowledge and analytical methods should be prioritized for developing countries. This would invariably take an initiative towards further development of computational methods, information and web technology and automation; thereby its vastness and expanding horizons would be appreciated. Such activities may also shift the existing health care paradigm in near future. Learning process and education on SM through research could be the ideal path for the development of the subject. This, in turn, may blur the demarcating lines across and between the far disciplines and make a paradigm shift in the educational system across the globe.

Changing Paradigm in Higher Education

This discussion looks at the role and potential of a growing class of professionals at U.S. colleges and universities today: scholar-practitioners or alternative-academics. Scholar-practitioners are products of a changing higher education landscape where core faculty lines are declining while contract and adjunct positions are growing in tandem with the proliferation of specialized campus services.  For hybrid scholar-practitioners of international higher education, opportunities exist to leverage their exposure to data and experiential knowledge in order to broaden and deepen the discussion in an enterprise increasingly attracting significant research attention. For details see ---> Bernhard Streitwieser and Anthony C. Ogden, "The Scholar-Practitioner Debate in International Higher Education", International Higher Education, 86: Summer 2016.

This article examines whether domestic or international mobility of scientists have positive effect on the productivity or impact of their work. We analyzed 100 top producing authors from 7 disciplines and found that mobility between at least two affiliations increases both output (number of publications) and impact (number of citations). However, mobility between countries does not seem to have a positive impact as domestic affiliation mobility. For detail see ---> Gali Halevi, Henk F. Moed, Judit Bar-Ilan "Does Research Mobility Have an Effect on Productivity and Impact?" International Higher Education, 86: Summer 2016.
----
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.

Microwave & Psychotronic weapons

http://www.globalresearch.ca/psychotronic-and-electromagnetic-weapons-remote-control-of-the-human-nervous-system
--
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.

GM Food

http://www.globalresearch.ca/over-40-rodent-feeding-studies-show-genetically-modified-food-is-disastrous-to-health/5481036
--
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.

A Workshop Report: Systems Biology Approach to Toxicity Testing

Computational systems biology is an important tool for prediction and better understanding of toxicity through dose-response modeling. Click here to see

--

BISHWAJIT DAS
Member & Web Admin
Society for Systems Biology & Translational Research

Email: bishwajit@ssbtr.net

Almost All Psych Drug Use Is Unnecessary: Study

More than half a million people age 65 years or older die every year in the West from psychiatric drug use, and the worst part is that these death pills aren’t even effective at treating either mental illness or depression. 
Click here to see ...  
--
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
West Bengal State University

Vaccination: Have a look to the consequences in the world

A huge amount is still being invested in vaccination research. Have
a look what are consequences in the world.

• Casualities in war
• glaxosmithkline paid 63 million to vaccine victims 
• HPV vaccine 
• vaccine & autism

--
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Physiology
West Bengal State University

American Physiological Society

American Physiological Society makes call for paper on GI Systems Biology.
--
Durjoy Majumder, Ph.D
Assistant Professor, Department of Physiology, West Bengal State University

N-of-1 Project for Personalized Medicine

Recent time US President Barack Obama has announced a US$ 215 million project N-of-1 targeted to deliver Personalized Medicine (Nature 29 April 2015). Please see N-of-1 Project for Personalized Medicine & Precision Medicine Plan
The major suggestions of practicing methodologies actually coincides with the MORA (Middle-out Rationalist Approach) view.Please see Cross-roads, MORA and Multi-scaling

--

Durjoy Majumder, PhD
Secretary, SSBTR