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Biomedical subjects

Alexa T McCray

Publications and source records attributed to Alexa T McCray.

12 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2004

Promoting health literacy.

This report reviews some of the extensive literature in health literacy, much of it focused on the intersection of low literacy and the understanding of basic health care information. Several articles describe methods for assessing health literacy as well as methods for assessing the readability of texts, although generally these latter have not been developed with health materials in mind. Other studies have looked more closely at the mismatch between patients' literacy levels and the readability of materials intended for use by those patients. A number of studies have investigated the phenomenon of literacy from the perspective of patients' interactions in the health care setting, the disenfranchisement of some patients because of their low literacy skills, the difficulty some patients have in navigating the health care system, the quality of the communication between doctors and their patients including the cultural overlay of such exchanges, and ultimately the effect of low literacy on health outcomes. Finally, the impact of new information technologies has been studied by a number of investigators. There remain many opportunities for conducting further research to gain a better understanding of the complex interactions between general literacy, health literacy, information technologies, and the existing health care infrastructure.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Design of Genetics Home Reference: a new NLM consumer health resource.

The authors have developed the Genetics Home Reference, a consumer resource that addresses the health implications of the Human Genome Project. The research results made possible by the Human Genome Project are being made available increasingly in scientific databases on the Internet, but, because of the often highly technical nature of these databases, they are not readily accessible to the lay public. The authors' goal is to provide a bridge between the clinical questions of the public and the richness of the data emanating from the Human Genome Project. The Genetics Home Reference currently focuses on single gene or polygenic conditions that are also topics on MEDLINEplus, the National Library of Medicine's primary consumer health site. As knowledge of genetics expands, the interrelationships between genes and diseases will continue to unfold, and the site will reflect these developments.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed2004

Strategies for supporting consumer health information seeking.

Despite a growing number of available Web-based health information resources, consumers continue to face a variety of barriers as they attempt to access these resources. Developing a system that appropriately responds to user queries poses several challenges. Guided by an earlier study that analyzed a large number of queries submitted to ClinicalTrials.gov, we developed a variety of techniques to assist user information seeking. We tested the efficacy of these techniques by submitting the original user queries to our new search engine to determine if these techniques would result in better system performance. Overall, the number of query failures was reduced, but the largest improvement was found in the system's query suggestion capability. For a subset of query failures, the current system was able to cut the earlier failure rate almost in half, in most cases providing a suggestion rather than directly finding records. The techniques described here provide a new approach for responding to user queries. The techniques are tolerant of certain types of errors and provide feedback to assist users in reformulating their queries.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2004

Design, implementation and management of a web-based data entry system for ClinicalTrials.gov.

We describe the development and deployment of a web-based authoring capability, the first implementation of which is used for data entry and management in support of the ClinicalTrials.gov web site. The system facilitates efficient collection of summary protocol information from multiple geographically-dispersed organizations. We explain the motivation for developing this capability, and cite critical design goals. We then describe system design, implementation and operation, focusing on essential aspects of each. We conclude with a summary of the extent to which we met our stated objectives.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed2003

Developing and evaluating criteria to help reviewers of biomedical informatics manuscripts.

Peer-reviewed publication of scientific research results represents the most important means of their communication. The authors have annually reviewed a large heterogeneous set of papers to produce the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Yearbook of Medical Informatics. To support an objective and high-quality review process, the authors attempted to provide reviewers with a set of refined quality criteria, comprised of 80 general criteria and an additional 60 criteria for specific types of manuscripts. Authors conducted a randomized controlled trial, with 18 reviewers, to evaluate application of the refined criteria on review outcomes. Whereas the trial found that reviewers applying the criteria graded papers more strictly (lower overall scores), and that junior reviewers appreciated the availability of the criteria, there was no overall change in the interrater variability in reviewing the manuscripts. The authors describe their experience as a "case report" and provide a reference to the refined quality review criteria without claiming that the criteria represent a validated instrument for quantitative quality measurement.

Humans↗
PubMed2003

Exploring semantic groups through visual approaches.

Objectives. We investigate several visual approaches for exploring semantic groups, a grouping of semantic types from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic network. We are particularly interested in the semantic coherence of the groups, and we use the semantic relationships as important indicators of that coherence. Methods. First, we create a radial representation of the number of relationships among the groups, generating a profile for each semantic group. Second, we show that, in our partition, the relationships are organized around a limited number of pivot groups and that partitions created at random do not exhibit this property. Finally, we use correspondence analysis to visualize groupings resulting from the association between semantic types and the relationships. Results. The three approaches provide different views on the semantic groups and help detect potential inconsistencies. They make outliers immediately apparent, and, thus, serve as a tool for auditing and validating both the semantic network and the semantic groups.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2003

Understanding search failures in consumer health information systems.

We examined queries that led to search failures on two National Library of Medicine Web-based consumer health sites, ClincialTrials.gov and MEDLINEplus. The purpose of the study was to analyze and categorize queries resulting that led to no results with the ultimate goal of developing interventions to assist users in recovering from those failures. We first analyzed over 2,700 queries, iteratively developing a coding scheme. We subsequently applied the codes to an additional set of 2,000 queries. We found that most of the queries were in scope, relevant to the system being searched, and did not exhibit so-called consumer language. As the final step, we developed a taxonomy based on whether the search failures were due primarily to content issues, to problems in query formulation, or to limitations of the search system. The results reported here have informed the further development of our own systems, and they may be helpful to others as they seek to improve consumer access to health information.

Clinical Trials as Topic↗
PubMed2003

UMLS language and vocabulary tools.

A variety of resources developed for use with the Unified Medical Language System are presented. These resources include the UMLS Knowledge Source Server, the SPECIALIST lexicon, a set of lexical tools that work with the SPECIALIST lexicon, and a variety of other NLP document processing tools. These tools manage lexical variation, tokenize and parse text strings, suggest spelling variants, and provide text-to-concept mapping capabilities. The UMLS Knowledge Source Server is available under a license agreement. The other tools are freely downloadable.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed2003

The Genetics Home Reference: a new NLM consumer health resource.

The Genetics Home Reference (GHR) is a new information resource developed to be part of the National Library of Medicine's (NLM's) consumer health initiatives. The GHR's guiding principle is to make the health implications of the Human Genome Project accessible to the public. The GHR accomplishes this by providing a bridge between the NLM's consumer health systems MEDLINEplus and ClinicalTrials.gov on the one hand and the multiple resources emanating from the Human Genome Project on the other. The initial focus is on single gene conditions that are main topics in MEDLINEplus.

Databases as Topic↗
PubMed2002

Evaluation of the UMLS as a terminology and knowledge resource for biomedical informatics.

OBJECTIVES: Terminology and knowledge resources are essential components of interoperability among disparate systems. This paper evaluates whether names and relationships needed in biomedical informatics are present in the UMLS. METHODS: Terms for five broad categories of concepts were extracted from LocusLink and mapped to the UMLS Metathesausus. Relationships between gene products and the other four categories (phenotype, molecular function, biological process, and cellular component) were searched for in the Metathesaurus. All gene products in the Gene Ontology database were also mapped to the UMLS in order to evaluate its global coverage of the domain. RESULTS: The coverage of concepts ranged from 2% (gene product symbols) to 44% (molecular functions). The coverage of relationships ranged from 60% for Gene product-Biological process to 83% for Gene product-Molecular function. DISCUSSION: Terminology and ontology issues are discussed, as well as the need for integrating additional resources to the UMLS.

Databases, Genetic↗
PubMed2002

The lexical properties of the gene ontology.

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a construct developed for the purpose of annotating molecular information about genes and their products. The ontology is a shared resource developed by the GO Consortium, a group of scientists who work on a variety of model organisms. In this paper we investigate the nature of the strings found in the Gene Ontology and evaluate them for their usefulness in natural language processing (NLP). We extend previous work that identified a set of properties that reliably identifies natural language phrases in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The results indicate that a large percentage (79%) of GO terms are potentially useful for NLP applications. Some 35% of the GO terms were found in a corpus derived from the MEDLINE bibliographic database, and 27% of the terms were found in the current edition of the UMLS.

Genes↗