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Health R&D

We contribute to projects of national importance, drawing upon our extensive knowledge of the health industry. We approach each project from a solid grounding in the health domain.

Caring for Returning Soldiers and Their Families

As our nation's warriors return from battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're often faced with a new kind of battle — plodding through the morass of health benefits rules and policies to determine what coverage is available to help pay for health care and services for themselves and their families. Recognizing this problem, the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors recommended that the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs jointly develop a Web-based portal to provide patients with health care and benefits information from the two departments. SAIC took this challenge a step further by developing a single eBenefits portal that uses semantic-Web technology to locate, evaluate, and integrate DOD and VA benefits information, as well as CMS and private insurance coverage, relevant to an individual soldier and his or her family.

For active duty military, veterans and their beneficiaries, finding accurate, reliable benefits information on the Web can be quite frustrating. Many spend countless hours sifting through web pages trying to find the information that pertains to their specific situation. Part of the issue is that there are numerous benefit portals, each with a different look and feel. As a result, these users must review and compare data from a variety of different web sites to be sure they get the "right" information; each time re-entering their personal information.

This very issue was called out by the 2007 Dole/Shalala report. It identified the need for a "My eBenefits" site to provide active duty military and veterans customized information on their healthcare and benefits. As a result of this call to action, SAIC started development of a eBenefits portal, using internal research and development funds.

The Syntactic Web Problem

The Syntactic Web provides information that can be easily interpreted by humans but is very difficult for machines to process. This makes it hard to develop web browsers that can intelligently search the Web based on word meaning and context. For example, the search for "dental healthcare benefits" could result in a correct link to the dental benefit webpage on the Military Health System's Tricare Online portal or to an Army website describing an available position for Army Dental Corps Officers. The web browser has trouble distinguishing the two because neither site provides context to the meaning for the word 'Dental' in their web pages.

The Semantic Web Solution

The Semantic Web is a standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that enables Web content providers to offer rules which provide a collection of reusable terms and relationships to describe content. To further facilitate more succinct searching, web browsers are outfitted with smarter software called "reasoners" that process the rules and make the required calculations.

As an example, by applying the Semantic Web standard to a website such as Tricare Online the search for "dental healthcare benefits" gets a much different result. Adding the descriptors 'healthcare' for 'active duty' soldiers who require 'dental' benefits to the Tricare Online dental website allows a reasoningenabled web browser to find the correct site, and ignore the Army site that uses the discriminators 'dental', 'vocational jobs' web page for 'civilians'.

Benefits of Investment

Our investment in applying cutting-edge Semantic Web technology has resulted in a prototype application that responds to the need for improved access to benefits data for active duty military, veterans and their beneficiaries.

The eBenefits application enables:

  • A single point of entry to locate benefit information
  • Personalized, reusable searches based on an individuals' profile
  • Faster access to accurate benefit information

Another potential use for this technology is in the assessment of disability ratings. By combining an individual's health profile with rules that define levels of disability and the hierarchy of benefits associated with those disabilities, we can create a reusable disability calculator available on the Internet. This will help to speed the disability rating process and will result in unbiased, more accurate disability ratings.

Market Relevance

Applying Semantic Web technology to benefits portals managed by the Service Medical Departments, Tricare, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others optimizes the search capabilities of web browsers and results in more accurate, reliable benefits information. Ultimately this results in a higher-level of service and support for our active military and veterans when they need it most.

Maximizing the Power and Productivity of the Human Brain

Our heritage is in the creation of novel applications from basic scientific research. SAIC has invented key enabling technology that makes us a leader in the emerging field of Neurotechnology, and we are uniquely positioned to translate neuroscience to the marketplace. SAIC has developed methods for interpreting the brain signals associated with thought, intent, perception, and knowledge.

Our research combines the brain's cognitive abilities with the computational power of a computer. The goal is to create systems that solve today's intractable problems by harnessing both the brain and the computer, including tools that enhance military and intelligence workstations for data exploitation.

Recent advances in neuroscience have greatly increased our understanding of the perceptual and cognitive processes of the human brain. Improvements in brain imaging give unprecedented visibility into the workings of the brain. SAIC is translating these new scientific insights into valuable and practical solutions.

Advancements in direct brain-computer connections promise to revolutionize how humans and machines interact. Leveraging extensive experience in signal processing, SAIC has developed a new method for interpreting the human brain signals associated with thought, intent, perception, and knowledge.

This invention is a key enabler for many applications:

Neural signal processing

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the brain's response to information. State-of-theart EEG systems detect electrical activity inside the brain from sensors placed on the head. The brain responds differently to information, depending on the context or situation. For example, an intelligence analyst's brain reacts to the presence of a target, while a soldier's brain reacts to a potential threat. SAIC's neural signal processing can detect these reactions as they are happening by interpreting the patterns in the EEG signals.

Application to intelligence gathering

SAIC has demonstrated a working system that allows intelligence analysts to rapidly prioritize large volumes of satellite imagery by measuring and discriminating the analyst's brain signals. The brain's visual pattern recognition system spots relevant objects more quickly than the mind registers them cognitively. The SAIC system captures the analyst's subconscious recognition of relevant objects and efficiently prioritizes images for subsequent review, which significantly increases the amount of imagery the analyst can process.

Research for new applications

SAIC has established a center for research in neurotechnology to develop and test new applications of direct brain-computer interaction. As the scientific results are validated in the academic world, SAIC is uniquely positioned to translate neuroscience to the marketplace.

Capabilities

  • Augmented cognition:
    Efficient processing of large amounts of visual data to quickly and reliably recognize key factors or events
  • Neuromarketing:
    Interpreting brain waves to understand customer focus and preference in marketing research (e.g., product development, advertising testing)
  • Brain-computer interface:
    Assisting the handicapped with computer interfaces that interpret and act upon mental commands

Protecting Public Health through Surveillance

Our public health infrastructure relies on knowledge of diseases, both current outbreaks and future threats, at home and abroad. By providing over-the-horizon disease surveillance, we can assist our public health agencies with indications of emerging/re-emerging and epidemic diseases worldwide.

SAIC supports a number of disease and biological surveillance programs, including both automated syndromic surveillance from structured and unstructured data, and field surveillance of diseases in wildlife and migratory bird populations. We provide real-time detection systems to field biologists studying migratory wildlife to rapidly identify pathogens responsible for some of the most virulent diseases (anthrax, avian influenza, and plague); this information can assist decision-makers in planning, preparedness and response to potential outbreaks, and prevent epidemics or spread of disease from animals to humans. The goal of the next phase of this project is to increase information-sharing with reporting networks, such as the Public Health Information Network (PHIN).

Emerging Infectious Diseases (EIDs) are caused by pathogens such as HIV that jump the species barrier to infect humans, posing signifi cant threats to human and livestock/poultry health worldwide. SARS and Avian influenza are examples of EIDs, the spread of which pose risks to both national security and health. Public health, wildlife and veterinary public health surveillance systems provide the early warning infrastructure that alerts officials to EID outbreaks.

SAIC provides expertise to support syndromic, laboratory and mass surveillance for pathogens and toxins of public health significance for military, agriculture and public health customers domestically and internationally. In addition to SAIC's Pandemic Flu Surveillance, CDC Biosense, Public Health Information Network (PHIN) and DoD projects, SAIC has a series of early warning surveillance projects that provide the front line early warnings. Our team has leveraged existing infectious disease monitoring programs to provide identification of pathogens in wildlife in the most remote areas, where diseases can gain a foothold. By determining the locations of potential disease outbreaks and wildlife migration patterns, we can predict the cross-section of human exposure and work to avert pandemic disease outbreaks.

Disease surveillance can also provide an indirect indication of environmental and climate change. Many insect and arthropod pathogen vector species (flies, mosquitoes, ticks) are sensitive to small changes in temperature and other conditions related to climate change; as the Earth's temperature rises, species of mosquitoes responsible for diseases such as malaria, Dengue and Chikungunya are able to live at higher latitudes than before. Utilizing climate change models, in conjunction with trends in EID migration to new regions, have been used in the prediction of future outbreaks.

Beyond the formal public health surveillance, we are developing enhanced means of communicating and sharing disease awareness with larger, integrated efforts such as the Global Public Health Information Network (GPHIN), National Biosurveillance Integration System (NBIS), Global Avian Influenza Network for Surveillance (GAINS), ARGUS, and others. The use of handheld field data recorders (such as SAIC's ike 504 system) could expedite data submission to disease reporting networks, and further speed response and containment.

With the increasing awareness of not only health, but economic and social consequences of EIDs, many customers in the Federal civilian, military, and commercial markets are seeking useful disease information. In anticipation, several of these organizations (including pharmaceutical, financial services, and energy providers) have developed, or would like to develop, Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP) for operation under conditions of mass casualty events, such as biological warfare or disease outbreak. Our approach to advance knowledge and our familiarity with existing programs that can be rapidly leveraged to provide focused or broad coverage as needed, give us an edge in the market for products that enhance surveillance of diseases worldwide.

For the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, we operate NCI-Frederick, one of the world's premier cancer and AIDS research facilities. There we support a wide range of research areas, including development of nanotechnology applications for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer.

Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research

We work with the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research researchers to develop nanoscale devices (less than 100 nanometers in size) that can deliver cancer therapeutic agents and anticancer vaccines at the cellular level. Smaller than a living cell, these tiny drug delivery devices will likely be able to target only malignant cells, sparing healthy cells and reducing the side effects of today's cancer treatments.

To help expedite development of a next-generation anthrax vaccine, we are working with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, and the U.S. Army to produce and test a promising recombinant protective antigen vaccine. We also help develop vaccines to combat other devastating diseases such as malaria and HIV.