The 3rd Keck Symposium on Computational Biology. Houston, Texas, November 1-3, 1992. Abstracts.
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Medical informatics has experienced dramatic growth, both as an applied and as a research discipline in recent years. In this paper, we argue that there is a need to expand the research base to characterize the cognitive dimension of informatics. Theories and methods from cognitive science can provide an effective counterpart to traditional medical informatics in addressing issues of usability of the systems, the processing of information, and the training of physicians. In the first part of the paper, we address the problems inherent in applying basic theories to practice and suggest some potential solutions. The second section deals with epistemological issues that are fundamental to cognitive science research and medical informatics. We then discuss two areas of application of cognitive scientific theories and methods to medical informatics: cognitive evaluation of human computer interface and intelligent medical decision support systems. The paper addresses the progress that has been made thus far and discusses how future cognitive research can facilitate further growth in the development of these applications.
The various theoretical models of disease, the nosology which is accepted by the medical community and the prevalent logic of diagnosis determine both the medical approach as well as the development of the relevant technology including the structure and function of the A.I. systems involved. A.I. systems in medicine, in addition to the specific parameters which enable them to reach a diagnostic and/or therapeutic proposal, entail implicitly theoretical assumptions and socio-cultural attitudes which prejudice the orientation and the final outcome of the procedure. The various models -causal, probabilistic, case-based etc. -are critically examined and their ethical and methodological limitations are brought to light. The lack of a self-consistent theoretical framework in medicine, the multi-faceted character of the human organism as well as the non-explicit nature of the theoretical assumptions involved in A.I. systems restrict them to the role of decision supporting "instruments" rather than regarding them as decision making "devices". This supporting role and, especially, the important function which A.I. systems should have in the structure, the methods and the content of medical education underscore the need of further research in the theoretical aspects and the actual development of such systems.
A telemedicine system model, based on a message-trigger service, is described. This model distributes system applications on multiple computers and establishes a communication platform to exchange messages among all applications. By broadcasting event messages, an application is able to trigger a set of local and remote services. At the same time, a protocol for message exchange is proposed to fulfill cooperation of applications. To validate the model, a teleconsultation system is designed. The results indicate that the model has good compatibility and that the characteristics are easy to implement.
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This paper presents a psychological perspective on key issues related to medical vocabularies. There have been rapid advances in the development of computer technology underlying medical information systems. However, in keeping with technological progress, we must also take into account advances in our understanding of human behaviour and learn from failures in human performance. A central issue examined in this paper is the extent to which we can develop generic vocabularies that are also flexible and adaptable to specific situations. Empirical research indicates that variability in human performance is much greater than what current medical classifications take into account. A related challenge is that of how to best develop vocabularies that meet the needs of users. Based on theoretical perspectives and research emerging from the domain of cognitive psychology, we suggest that an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the comprehension and application of terminology is required. It is argued that rather than beginning with highly specified terminologies, i.e. the normative approach, we might instead begin by examining the natural context of how health care workers acquire, understand and negotiate knowledge in practice.
The Internet, and in particular the World Wide Web (WWW), are growing at a tremendous rate. Information useful to researchers and practitioners in gerontology is scattered and hard to locate, even for experts in the use of the WWW. In order to locate and organize access to this material, a WWW server was developed for gerontologists, using state-of-the-art Internet search techniques. This report provides background on the WWW, reasons for its growth, its potential usefulness to gerontologists, and the results of an exhaustive search of over 300 potential sites. Relevant information was discovered in 5 general categories of gerontology-related information: academic institutions, government agencies, biomedical and health research institutions, general interest sites and data archives.
The Tempus CME project "Regional Network for Healthcare Management" was aiming to perform a feasibility study for a communication network dedicated to the healthcare field. The needs assessment survey as well as the debates during the working sessions and during the conference on how communication can support a better healthcare delivery, substantiated the approach for achieving the Romanian health information market. The proposed communication network can be considered as a national information infrastructure offering good links between health, education, research and industry and a unique frame for information providers and users, for the estate and private companies. The network should also provide support and guidance for the development of new educational fields as applied informatics in healthcare.
Concepts of documentation rely not only on the contents required and technical demands, but the procedures covered and in medical applications especially security aspects are also matters of critical concern. Even though the need for effective documentation (i.e., adequate in content, availability, feasibility and easy to retrieve analysis) is not a question, tasks and aims (for example, quality of patient care) deserve attention and establishing efforts have to be analyzed regarding their structural and personal prerequisites and implications before particular tools for documentation can be developed.
The situated action perspective, which embraces a diversity of views, challenges several of the fundamental assumptions of the symbolic information-processing framework underlying cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we consider the following issues; symbolic representations, plans and actions, distributed cognition, and the transfer of learning. We evaluate each of these issues in terms of research and theories in clinical cognition and examine the implications for education and training, and for the integration of intelligent systems in medical practice. We argue for a reconceptualization of the symbolic framework in terms of the way the role of internal representations and cognitive activities are perceived. However, symbolic representations are integral to medical cognition and should continue to be central in any theoretical framework. A re-examination of cognitive science in medicine in terms of the relationship among physicians, technology, and the workplace could prove to be constructive in bridging the gap between theory and practice.
The HELP hospital information system has been operational at LDS Hospital since 1967. The system initially supported a heart catheterization laboratory and a post open heart Intensive Care Unit. Since the initial installation the system has been expanded to become an integrated hospital information system providing services with sophisticated clinical decision-support capabilities to a wide variety of clinical areas such as laboratory, nurse charting, radiology, pharmacy, etc. The HELP system is currently operational in multiple hospitals of LDS Hospital's parent health care enterprise--Intermountain Health Care (IHC). The HELP system has also been integrated into the daily operations of several other hospitals in addition to those at IHC. Evaluations of the system have shown: (1) it to be widely accepted by clinical staff; (2) computerized clinical decision-support is feasible; (3) the system provides improvements in patient care; and (4) the system has aided in providing more cost-effective patient care. Plans for making the transition from the 'function rich' HELP system to more modern hardware and software platforms are also discussed.
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EDGAR (Extraction of Drugs, Genes and Relations) is a natural language processing system that extracts information about drugs and genes relevant to cancer from the biomedical literature. This automatically extracted information has remarkable potential to facilitate computational analysis in the molecular biology of cancer, and the technology is straightforwardly generalizable to many areas of biomedicine. This paper reports on the mechanisms for automatically generating such assertions and on a simple application, conceptual clustering of documents. The system uses a stochastic part of speech tagger, generates an underspecified syntactic parse and then uses semantic and pragmatic information to construct its assertions. The system builds on two important existing resources: the MEDLINE database of biomedical citations and abstracts and the Unified Medical Language System, which provides syntactic and semantic information about the terms found in biomedical abstracts.
This paper describes a clinical study that is being conducted in 15 countries world-wide via the internet. The study concerns the removal of Factor VIII inhibitors in haemophilic children. The suitability of the Internet for this type of study is explored together with the technology (Active Server Pages, Secure Sockets Layer) that is involved in the creation of such a system.