Advances

Recognition technology could protect personal data
Engineering graduate student Tsu-Wang (David) Shen, professor Willis Tompkins and associate professor Yu Hen Hu are developing a system that can verify identity via a simple electrocardiogram reading.

PINs, passwords, bar codes and more guard personal and financial information, but Tompkins, of biomedical engineering, says these measures don’t offer enough security.

Tompkins is one of a growing group of researchers interested in using biometrics — measurable anatomical, physiological or behavioral traits — to verify identity. Already, devices scan fingerprints, hands, irises, retinas and faces, or analyze voices or signatures. Tompkins hopes to add electrocardiogram recognition to the mix.

ECG readers, which exercise enthusiasts already can find on a variety of equipment at the gym, have the potential both to hurdle the price barrier and assuage accuracy concerns, says Tompkins.

Tompkins says he could design a reader on which the subject places his or her hands or fingertips, or a wearable “belt” that captures the signal and transmits it to a reader via radio waves. Either the reader or the belt would cost about $150 and offer information security in a largely foolproof manner. “The advantage of the ECG is it’s dynamic — there clearly has to be a living person there,” says Tompkins.

Varmus to present first Temin lecture
Nobel Prize winner Harold M. Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health, and current president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, will give the first Howard M. Temin Lecture Wednesday, May 1, at 2 p.m. in 272 Bascom.

The lecture is the latest of several ways in which the university honors the life and work of Temin, who died in 1994. Each year thousands of people are reminded of him as they take the Lakeshore Path that bears his name. Temin himself bicycled or walked the trail almost every day on his way to work at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, now part of the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center.

At the lab, and perhaps along the path, he developed the radical ideas on how genetic information flows in cells that won him, with David Baltimore and Renato Dulbecco, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1975.

In addition to being UW–Madison’s most distinguished scientist, Temin was a dedicated mentor and teacher. Students, in fact, spearheaded the Temin lectureship. The McArdle graduate student organization, called the Data Club, chose Varmus and invited him to present the first lecture. Varmus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work on the genetic basis of cancer, was also a friend of Temin.

Bill Sugden, McArdle associate director, will provide an introduction to Temin’s research at noon Tuesday, April 30, 125 McArdle Laboratory.

Herbal extract to be tested in breast cancer patients
Women who have experienced arm swelling as a result of their treatment for breast cancer may be interested in participating in a new study by researchers at the UW Comprehensive Cancer Center.

As many as one in three breast cancer patients suffer this type of swelling, known as lymphedema. The study will seek to determine whether horse chestnut seed extract can reduce the arm swelling.

Paul Hutson, associate professor of pharmacology, is working with physicians on this study. They are looking for 76 breast cancer survivors experiencing lymphedema to participate.

Information: 262-5223.