Standing up together to fight Type I diabetes (Juvenile Diabetes)

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Sam Witwicky, you hold the key to earth's survive. - Transformers, 2008

He who saves a single life, saves the entire world. - Talmud, cited in Schindler's List

Give a lot smart people the funding to do their job. I am a professor. I know that people in research labs can do miraculous things if they are given the resources to do it. - Dr. Randy Pausch, in advocacy to Pancreatic Cancer Action network

I have a friend. She is very passionated to research and very happy everyday. Yesterday, she told me that she has Juvenile Diabetes. I said, "What!" I thought diabetes was only for elderlies. She is only 19.

So I did some Google search. The result shocked me. There are 3 million Americans suffered from Type I diabetes. 40 children per day are diagnosed with Type I diabetes. Sadly, there is no cure right now. They have to inject insulin in their whole life to control the blood sugar level. Otherwise, the high density sugar in the blood could damage their organs.

The number of diabetes patients is increasing world widely. Currently, there are 246 million patients around the world. According to World Health Organization, the number could be more than doubled by 2030. In America, totally 8% of the population has diabetes.

My brain turned blank when I read that the diabetes could cause many complications, such as blindness, heart attack, kidney failure, etc. I don't remember where I read a data that patients has a very high rate to get blind in 5 years. Oh, no, what's going on? She wants to be a PhD. You can't make her blind!

Of course, we spend a lot of money and resources to fight with this disease. In 2007, diabetes accounted for $174 billion in health-care costs in the U.S. 1/5 American health-care dollars were spent on diabetes patients in 2007. An estimated 22 percent of hospital inpatient days in the U.S. were incurred by people with diabetes in 2007.

Despite of the huge amount of money we spend, diabetes is still taking people's life away. Diabetes is the fifth (or sixth, from different sources) leading cause of death world widely. It kills one American every three minutes. Oh, no, shut up. Stop telling me bad news like that!

But, we have our heroes. Scientists around the world are developing the cure to this chronic disease. They have many smart ideas, such as islet transplantation or revoking the beta-cell to generate insulin again. Though they are not applicable yet, the clinical trials for some methods are going on. So please count on our heroes. One day, we can cure this disease.

But while scientists need funds to do research to save people's lives, stupid US congress and the idiot president are still burning money in Iraq. Now we are joking that NSF (National Science Foundation) stands for "Not sufficient funds". The congress likes putting money in Iraq rather than saving Americans' lives.

So what do we do? "We are the cure." Let's turn the hope to some non-profit organizations, raising funds to support the research.

Few weeks ago, I joined the IEEE Texas Tech chapter team in the "Race for the cure" event in Lubbock, TX. It is a non-profit organization devoted in providing research funds for scientists to fight with beast cancer. They have the races and walks all over the nation to prompt the public awareness of beast cancer and thus raise money for cancer research.

This July, Dr. Randy Pausch of Carnegie Mellon University died of pancreatic cancer. He is my hero. I wrote a blog to memorize him. Before he left the world, he testified in front of the US congress asking for more funds on pancreatic cancer research. He also made two non-profit organizations famous, Lustgarten foundation, and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN).

To Type I Diabetes, we also have such organization, the JDRF (Juvenile Diabets Research Foundation). We also have an American Diabetes Association. But they seemed focusing on Type II diabetes research more.

I have donated money to both PanCAN and Race for the Cure before. So today, when I found JDRF, I decided to donate some money to them. I know how important a seeding grant is. Without the generous $25, 000 research fellowship and $35, 000 grant, I can't make my first paper on epilepsy signal processing published. It will appear on a very good AI conference and we are having more impressing results coming out. So when our small donations (e.g., 20 dollars) sum up, we are giving the chance for scientists to cure the disease. If I wanna help my friend, maybe giving scientists some research funds is one of the best ideas.

Tomorrow is her birthday. Luckily, I can make a tribute donation. So, I donated 20 dollars and put her name as the honoree's name. I also pray to God to give wisdom to scientists and relief her from the disease ASAP.

The battle against diabetes is not over yet. We should continue moving on. Here is a list of things you can do to help JDRF funding Juvenile Diabetes research. Please help spreading the words to your friends and let more people be aware of this disease.

Remember, "United we stand". In 1977, after many years fight of medical personnels all over the world, there is no smallpox patient in the world anymore. When we stand up to fight together, we will win this time too. May God bless us and may He renew our strength.

LaTeX IDE on Windows

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I hope to die before I have to use Microsoft Word - Prof. Donald E. Knuth, Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University

LaTeX is an awesome stuff for scientific document typesetting. You don't need to worry about the layout. Just put whatever you wanna say, and LaTeX will place them as expected on the paper. If you use Word, you have to control the typesetting by yourself. And it can't do some intelligent stuff, like make the width of a table to be 1/3 of the page width, coz it can't compute. Besides, LaTeX is so awesome for embedding math formulas into the paper.

So, on Linux we have Kile and on Mac we have TeXshop. How about Windows? Don't worry. You download MikTeX as the LaTeX compiler and download WinEdt as the editor. Another easier way is to download this ftp://ftp.ctex.org/pub/tex/systems/ctex/2.4/CTeX-2.4.6-Full.exe Just follow the instructions and you are done.

The compiling is pretty easy. Just follow the numbers on the following picture, click 1-2-3. By default, the Adobe Reader will pop-up automatically to show you the generated PDF document. If not, click 4.

Stalking journals to submit my paper

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

I published a first-author paper on ICTAI 2008 about epileptic EEG recognition. http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.3361

After that, I did some improvements, such as using raw data with artifacts, and cleared assumptions in that papers. Currently, the accuracy of using data with artifacts is 89%. So, I decide to write a new paper and submitted to a journal.

Now, I have five candidates:

• AI in Medicine, IF: 1.825, http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/505627/description
• Medical Decision Making, IF: 2.196, http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc.nav?prodId=Journal201430
• International Journal of Medical Informatics, IF: 1.579, http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/506040/description
• IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, IF: 1.622, http://tbme.embs.org/
  
• IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine, IF: 1.436, http://bme.ee.cuhk.edu.hk/TITB
  

But I feel like that the two IEEE Trans. don't fit the topic of my current work. Maybe AI in Medicine matches the best.

I also feel like that the SCI is really nothing. For example, IEEE Spectrum, is just a club magazine, not a scientific journal. Every member of IEEE can get it every month - I even never read it. But, it's in SCI, with a 0.933 impact factor. Another example, I have read a paper on IEEE Trans. on Information Technology in Biomedicine. Its experiment has nothing to do with the hypothesis it proposes.

We can't judge a journal or a paper by the IF. For example, there are many papers discussing Communism in China. They cited Mao Tse Tong's articles thousands of thousands of times. But, does Mao's article make sense?

I plan to dig down more on my work and submit it to a journal with good reputation, such as AI in Medicine.

Table I: Top 20 (Impact factor) journal in ISI Medical

Rank	Abbreviated Journal Title (linked to journal information)	ISSN	Total Cites	Impact Factor	Immediacy Index	Articles	Cited Half-life
1	J AM MED INFORM ASSN	1067-5027	2394	3.094	0.699	93	5.2
2	J MED INTERNET RES	1438-8871	583	2.953	0.474	38	3.5
3	MED DECIS MAKING	0272-989X	2144	2.196	0.667	63	8.4
4	J BIOMED INFORM	1532-0464	626	2.000	0.720	75	3.5
5	ARTIF INTELL MED	0933-3657	932	1.825	0.500	52	5.0
6	INT J MED INFORM	1386-5056	1201	1.579	0.216	102	4.6
7	J EVAL CLIN PRACT	1356-1294	737	1.570	0.415	130	4.5
8	STAT MED	0277-6715	8930	1.547	0.379	348	8.5
9	STAT METHODS MED RES	0962-2802	1266	1.492	0.111	27	8.3
10	METHOD INFORM MED	0026-1270	1132	1.451	0.423	111	4.8
11	IEEE T INF TECHNOL B	1089-7771	748	1.436	0.493	73	4.2
12	INT J TECHNOL ASSESS	0266-4623	1046	1.406	0.238	63	6.4
13	IEEE ENG MED BIOL	0739-5175	1100	1.066	0.268	56	6.6
14	CIN-COMPUT INFORM NU	1538-2931	198	0.957	0.000	30	3.7
15	MED BIOL ENG COMPUT	0140-0118	2167	0.943	0.304	125	9.4
16	COMPUT METH PROG BIO	0169-2607	1234	0.887	0.132	121	7.9
17	BIOMED TECH	0013-5585	397	0.593	0.086	58	5.4
18	MED INFORM INTERNET	1463-9238	206	0.490	0.036	28	6.8
19	J MED SYST	0148-5598	386	0.450	0.159	69	5.5
20	J CANCER EDUC	0885-8195	446	0.342	0.073	55	7.5

Table II: Top 20 (Impact factor) journal in ISI Engineering: Biomedical category

Rank	Abbreviated Journal Title (linked to journal information)	ISSN	Total Cites	Impact Factor	Immediacy Index	Articles	Cited Half-life
1	ANNU REV BIOMED ENG	1523-9829	1629	11.567	0.684	19	5.2
2	BIOMATERIALS	0142-9612	32942	6.262	1.100	558	4.7
3	MED IMAGE ANAL	1361-8415	1681	3.505	0.280	50	5.8
4	IEEE T MED IMAGING	0278-0062	7725	3.275	0.368	144	7.0
5	BIOMED MICRODEVICES	1387-2176	911	3.073	0.291	103	3.9
6	J BIOMECH	0021-9290	13112	2.897	0.351	473	8.9
7	J BIOMED MATER RES A	1549-3296	4893	2.612	0.283	459	3.4
8	BIOMECH MODEL MECHAN	1617-7959	260	2.604	0.270	37	2.7
9	PHYS MED BIOL	0031-9155	11573	2.528	0.404	488	5.8
10	IEEE T NEUR SYS REH	1534-4320	934	2.489	0.118	68	3.9
11	ANN BIOMED ENG	0090-6964	3521	2.346	0.333	180	5.0
12	CLIN ORAL IMPLAN RES	0905-7161	3583	2.148	0.202	124	6.3
13	J BIOMED MATER RES B	1552-4973	1712	1.933	0.279	272	2.9
14	J BIOMAT SCI-POLYM E	0920-5063	2331	1.862	0.152	99	6.4
15	ARTIF ORGANS	0160-564X	2256	1.835	0.232	112	6.0
16	ARTIF INTELL MED	0933-3657	932	1.825	0.500	52	5.0
17	J BIOMATER APPL	0885-3282	370	1.651	0.179	28	6.7
18	CLIN BIOMECH	0268-0033	3197	1.642	0.176	142	6.6
19	IEEE T BIO-MED ENG	0018-9294	7470	1.622	0.252	270	8.5
20	J BIOMECH ENG-T ASME	0148-0731	4111	1.591	0.191	110	8.8

Let's make a Makefile

by Forrest Sheng Bao http://fsbao.net

Make is a great tool on Linux and Mac. I have never used it on Windows, coz I seldom use Windows, maybe once per two weeks. Windows sucks, flat suck, especially Windows Vista.

So, what is make? Generally, make is a program to control the compiling process, what you wanna compile, what you don't wanna compile, what you wanna compile to and what you wanna compile from. So, in order to let make know these, we should write a Makefile. Makefile generally can be used for two cases: 1) you have many files 2) your file has many preprocessors/switches. For example, let's take a look at the hello.cpp

#include 

#ifdef ONE
int main ()
{
      std::cout << "Hello world in ANSI-C++\n";
      return 0;
}
#endif

#ifdef TWO
int main ()
{
      std::cout << "preprocessor works\n";
      return 0;
}
#endif

If you add -D ONE as the option to g++ compiler, then only the first part will be compiled. Otherwise, only the second part will be compiled. You can type following two lines to generate different executable files:

g++ hello.cpp -D ONE -o one.out
g++ hello.cpp -D TWO -o two.out

Maybe sometimes you want the one.out and sometimes you want the two.out. So make can do this for you. You just need to save following lines as a file called Makefile

one:
       g++ hello.cpp -D ONE -o one.out
two:
       g++ hello.cpp -D TWO -o two.out

Then, when you type

make one

or omit the "one" you will get one.out. If you type

make two

, you will get two.out. So, actually, the syntax of Makefile is very easy

make parameter:
         compiling command

And you just need to append make parameter after the make when you compile it from a Unix shell, such as

make one

. But actually, this is a simple case, you can add dependencies after the make parameter: line.