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Prism Home Page | |
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About Prism |
Documentation |
Download |
License |
What's New |
Acknowledgements |
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Prism Home Page | |
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About Prism |
Documentation |
Download |
License |
What's New |
Acknowledgements |
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Donnal Walter, M.D., Ph.D. |
Just as a prism reveals the spectrum of colors belonging to a beam of white light, Prism software is intended to make accessible a broad range of information in the neonatal intensive care setting. It also seeks to emphasize the hierarchical and fractal nature of clinical data, as well as the evolutionary process of computer software development. The goal of this project is to develop an extensive suite of interrelated clinical applications for newborn intensive care.
Another fitting metaphor comes from the field of molecular genetics. Microarray technology has been defined as: "a tool used to sift through and analyze the information contained within a genome that is expressed by cells or tissues at a particular point in time." We view Prism as "microarray technology" for clinical neonatology, that is, a tool for sifting through and analyzing the body of clinical information that has been collected about a patient (or group of patients) up through any given point in time.
The most important feature of Prism is its licensing as peer-reviewed, independent software (approved by the University of Arkansas, May 3, 2002 [I02-24]). The source code can be freely downloaded, reviewed, modified, used, and redistributed, as long as the simple license requirements are met.
The objective is not to compete with proprietary clinical information systems currently available for newborn intensive care. Rather, we simply believe that peer-reviewed software is philosophically a good fit for academic neonatology (whether or not our particular experiment succeeds). We want to see the Prism code propagate and evolve as quickly and as far and as long as possible.
Prism is an idea, therefore, must evolve in order to be successful. The first priority has been to establish a development framework that supports and encourages a cooperative, evolutionary strategy. The work on this framework is called the Mindwrapper project. Mindwrapper, the "kernal" of Prism, is built on top of the open-source language Python and GUI toolset wxPython. These are cross-platform software tools which operate on Linux, Apple Mac, and Microsoft Windows (among other platforms).
Source code will be released through the Prism Project at SourceForge when it is ready.
Prism and Mindwrapper are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For rationale and further discussion see the separate licensing page.
Current development:
(2004-10-25) Prism: version 0.1.1.0.
(2004-11-06) Mindwrapper: version 0.3.4.2.
The Prism graphic at the top of the page is courtesy of Carmen Kay Anslow (carmylita). The original, from her "Prism Fractals" collection, is entitled "Evolution" (modified and used with permission). The rainbow colors reflect the Prism idea, and the vertical and horizontal symmetries hint at Mindwrapper's abstraction-presentation architecture.
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This page is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
