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PubMed1997

The development and implementation of an expert system for the analysis of umbilical cord blood.

An assessment of neonatal outcome may be obtained from analysis of blood in the umbilical cord of the infant immediately after delivery. This can provide information on the health of the newborn infant, guide requirements for neonatal care, and is recommended practice of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. However, there are problems with the technique. Samples frequently contain errors in one or more of the important parameters, preventing accurate interpretation and many clinical staff lack the expert knowledge required to interpret error-free results. In this paper the development and implementation of an expert system to overcome these difficulties is described. The expert system validates results, provides a textual interpretation and archives all results to database for audit, research and medico-legal purposes. The system has now been in routine clinical use for over 3 years in Plymouth, and has also been installed in several other hospitals in the UK. Results are presented in which the types and frequency of errors are established and the user acceptance of the system is determined.

Expert Systems↗
PubMed2004

SaRAD: a Simple and Robust Abbreviation Dictionary.

MOTIVATION: Due to recent interest in the use of textual material to augment traditional experiments it has become necessary to automatically cluster, classify and filter natural language information. RESULTS: The Simple and Robust Abbreviation Dictionary (SaRAD) provides an easy to implement, high performance tool for the construction of a biomedical symbol dictionary. The algorithms, applied to the MEDLINE document set, result in a high quality dictionary and toolset to disambiguate abbreviation symbols automatically.

Abbreviations as Topic↗
PubMed1992

The cultural logic of Indian medicine: prognosis and etiology in Rajasthani popular therapeutics.

This paper considers certain ways of describing and treating sickness in rural Rajasthan, and the representations of sickness and of the body on which they are based. Two indigenous medical or 'ethnomedical' perspectives on illness and its treatment emerge from the analysis of ethnographic material collected during field research in northern India. In the first part of the paper various characterizations of South Asian medicine are discussed, and I suggest that Western preconceptions about the nature and purpose of 'medicine' itself has led one of these perspectives to be highlighted in anthropological considerations at the expense of the other. A further dimension of ethnomedicine emerges through discussions of local therapeutic rituals and discourses about sickness and the body. This consideration of one domain of local therapeutics reveals its underlying cultural logic and highlights ethnomedical formulations that have heretofore been analytically neglected. It does not address the formal or textually based Indian medical traditions to any extent. It is concerned with the cultural construction of sickness and medicine among Hindu lay people and folk healers and employs folkloric material that, though rarely considered in anthropological writings on South Asia, may be fruitful guide to the meanings which sickness has for those experiencing and treating it.

Culture↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Knowledge-based interpretation of serologic tests for hepatitis on the World Wide Web.

HEPAXPERT is a knowledge-based system that interprets the results of routine serologic tests for infection with hepatitis A and B viruses. The following tests are included: hepatitis A virus antibodies, IgM antibodies to the hepatitis A virus, hepatitis A virus in stool, hepatitis B surface antigen and antibodies, antibodies to hepatitis B core antigen, and hepatitis B envelope antigen and antibodies. HEPAXPERT/WWW, an implementation of HEPAXPERT-III for the World Wide Web, can be reached by URL http://www.med-expert.co.at/hepax. After selecting HEPAXPERT/WWW, serologic test results can be entered and will be transferred as an E-mail message for subsequent interpretation, which is done off-line with HEPAXPERT-III. The textual interpretation is sent back via E-mail. Each qualitative test for hepatitis A and B antibodies and antigens may produce one of four possible results: positive, negative, borderline, and not tested. To cover the resulting 64 (A) and 57,344 (B) combinations of findings, the knowledge base of HEPAXPERT/WWW contains 16 rules of hepatitis A and 131 rules for hepatitis B serology interpretation. This basic knowledge is structured such that all possible combinations of findings can be interpreted, and there is no overlap in the premises underlying the rules. The reports that the system automatically generates include the transferred results of the tests; a detailed analysis of the results, including virus exposure, immunity, stage of illness, prognosis, infectiousness, and vaccination recommendation; and, as an option, an identification, to distinguish the origin of the interpretation requests.

Austria↗
PubMed1997

A WWW-accessible knowledge base for the interpretation of hepatitis serologic tests.

HEPAXPERT is a knowledge-based system that interprets the results of routine serologic tests for infection with hepatitis A and B viruses. The following tests are included: hepatitis A virus anti-bodies (anti-HAV), IgM antibodies to the hepatitis A virus (IgM anti-HAV), hepatitis A virus (HAV in stool, hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and antibodies (qualitative anti-HBs, quantitative anti-HBs titre), antibodies to hepatitis B core antigen (anti-HBc and IgM anti-HBc), and hepatitis B envelope antigen (HBeAg) and antibodies (anti-HBe). HEPAXPERT/WWW--an implementation of HEPAXPERT-III for WWW--can be reached by URL http://www.swun.com/hepax of the World Wide Web. After selecting HEPAXPERT/WWW, serologic test results can be entered and will be transferred as an e-mail message for subsequent interpretation which is done off-line with HEPAXPERT-III. The textual interpretation is sent back via e-mail. Each qualitative test for hepatitis A and B antibodies and antigens may produce one of four possible results: positive, negative, borderline, and not tested. To cover the resulting 64 (A) and 57344 (B) combinations of findings, the knowledge base of HEPAXPERT/WWW contains 16 rules for hepatitis A and 131 rules for hepatitis B serology interpretation. This basic knowledge is structured such that all possible combinations of findings can be interpreted and there is no overlap in the premises underlying the rules. The reports that the system automatically generates include: (a) the transferred results of the tests; (b) a detailed analysis of the results, including virus exposure, immunity, stage of illness, prognosis, infectiousness, and vaccination recommendation; and (c) optional: an ID to distinguish the origin of the interpretation requests.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed2003

Towards a decision support system for health promotion in nursing.

AIMS: This study was designed to investigate what type of models, techniques and data are necessary to support the development of a decision support system for health promotion practice in nursing. Specifically, the research explored how interview data can be interpreted in terms of Concept Networks and Bayesian Networks, both of which provide formal methods for describing the dependencies between factors or variables in the context of decision-making in health promotion. BACKGROUND: In nursing, the lack of generally accepted examples or guidelines by which to implement or evaluate health promotion practice is a challenge. Major gaps have been identified between health promotion rhetoric and practice and there is a need for health promotion to be presented in ways that make its attitudes and practices more easily understood. New tools, paradigms and techniques to encourage the practice of health promotion would appear to be beneficial. Concept Networks and Bayesian Networks are techniques that may assist the research team to understand and explicate health promotion more specifically and formally than has been the case, so that it may more readily be integrated into nursing practice. METHODS: As the ultimate goal of the study was to investigate ways to use the techniques described above, it was necessary to first generate data as text. Textual descriptions of health promotion in nursing were derived from in-depth qualitative interviews with nurses nominated by their peers as expert health promoting practitioners. FINDINGS: The nurses in this study gave only general and somewhat vague outlines of the concepts and ideas that guided their practice. These data were compared with descriptions from various sources that describe health promotion practices in nursing, then examples of a Conceptual Network and a representative Bayesian Network were derived from the data. CONCLUSIONS: The study highlighted the difficulty in describing health promotion practice, even among nurses recognized for their expertise in health promotion. Nevertheless, it indicated the data collection and analysis methods necessary to explicate the cognitive processes of health promotion and highlighted the benefits of using formal conceptualization techniques to improve health promotion practice.

Bayes Theorem↗
PubMed2006

Visual setup of logical models of signaling and regulatory networks with ProMoT.

BACKGROUND: The analysis of biochemical networks using a logical (Boolean) description is an important approach in Systems Biology. Recently, new methods have been proposed to analyze large signaling and regulatory networks using this formalism. Even though there is a large number of tools to set up models describing biological networks using a biochemical (kinetic) formalism, however, they do not support logical models. RESULTS: Herein we present a flexible framework for setting up large logical models in a visual manner with the software tool ProMoT. An easily extendible library, ProMoT's inherent modularity and object-oriented concept as well as adaptive visualization techniques provide a versatile environment. Both the graphical and the textual description of the logical model can be exported to different formats. CONCLUSION: New features of ProMoT facilitate an efficient set-up of large Boolean models of biochemical interaction networks. The modeling environment is flexible; it can easily be adapted to specific requirements, and new extensions can be introduced. ProMoT is freely available from http://www.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/projects/promot/.

Animals↗
PubMed1992

No aging in India: the uses of gerontology.

This paper develops a critique of international gerontology through an ethnography and analysis of gerontological practice in India. The central theme of Indian gerontology - that of an imminent demographic and social explosion of an aging population who will tax the country's slender resources - misrepresents available data and fails to signify the experience of most Indian old people. Narrative and deconstructive techniques are deployed to examine the language of crisis and the complex sources of this misrepresentation. Three sources are explored: local disjunctions of class and gender in India, neocolonial biases in the structure of knowledge on aging central to international discourse, and subaltern strategies within India for subverting Western and elite Indian imperatives of what it means to be old. A variety of textual, ethnographic, and historical materials are examined: Indian and American literature pertaining to the 1982 World Assembly on Aging, a series of sociological texts each entitled "Aging in India," and four contemporary Indian institutions designed to meet the needs of old people: a social service agency, a geriatric clinic, a retirement community, and an old age home.

Aged↗
PubMed2000

NLP techniques associated with the OpenGALEN ontology for semi-automatic textual extraction of medical knowledge: abstracting and mapping equivalent linguistic and logical constructs.

This research project presents methodological and theoretical issues related to the inter-relationship between linguistic and conceptual semantics, analysing the results obtained by the application of a NLP parser to a set of radiology reports. Our objective is to define a technique for associating linguistic methods with domain specific ontologies for semi-automatic extraction of intermediate representation (IR) information formats and medical ontological knowledge from clinical texts. We have applied the Edinburgh LTG natural language parser to 2810 clinical narratives describing radiology procedures. In a second step, we have used medical expertise and ontology formalism for identification of semantic structures and abstraction of IR schemas related to the processed texts. These IR schemas are an association of linguistic and conceptual knowledge, based on their semantic contents. This methodology aims to contribute to the elaboration of models relating linguistic and logical constructs based on empirical data analysis. Advance in this field might lead to the development of computational techniques for automatic enrichment of medical ontologies from real clinical environments, using descriptive knowledge implicit in large text corpora sources.

Electronic Data Processing↗
PubMed2002

[Primary antisera before and after the expiration date. Comparative immunohistochemical observations and analysis of data sheets and labels].

By means of positive and negative controls, the immunostaining properties of a series (B) of 78 primary antibodies (PAB) that had expired 7-77 months previously (mean, 26.3 months) were evaluated in comparison those of the same non expired (functioning) PAB. Qualitatively, no significative difference was observed in the specificity and sensitivity. Among all of the PAB (with the exception of one), no immunonegativity was observed. With special reference to immunohistochemical methods, dilution and retrieval procedures, as suggested on data sheets, were additionally considered. Moreover the residual availability of the reagents was checked. In fact 58 PAB were still available for further examination with probable prolongation of the duration of validity. Other observations are analytically reported as far as polyclonal, monoclonal, concentrated and predilluted expired PAB are concerned. In the same way, duration of available validity before the expiration date was examined for the expired PAB and for an additional series of 90 nonexpired PAB. Finally textual information (including intended use) reported on data sheets and labels has been scrutinized in detail. In conclusion, for the diagnostically applied immunohistochemistry on the basis of these findings and the recent American and European rules, the following propositions should be considered: (1) surveillance on methodological technical approach and diagnostic evaluation, with emphasis on accurate standardization and primary responsibility of the pathologist; (2) opportunity of a continuous feed-back between laboratories-customers and producers-traders, in order to render more uniform the information and establish more realistic parameters of utilization; and (3) possibility of cost reduction according to limited financial support from the health care administration.

Humans↗
PubMed2006

[A linguistic analysis of Norwegian medical discourse].

BACKGROUND: Recent studies show that the traditional conception of academic writing practices as neutral and deprived of personal elements needs to be revised. The KIAP project investigates whether there is such a thing as cultural identity in academic prose and to what extent it may be related to discipline or language. The genre "research article" is analysed with respect to specific linguistic devises which may indicate similarities and differences between articles written in different languages (English, French, Norwegian) and within different disciplines (economics, linguistics, medicine). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The material consists of an electronic corpus containing 450 refereed articles taken from recognised journals. The methods used are both quantitative and qualitative. RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION: The results confirm the main hypothesis that discipline is more important than language for the explanation of similarities and differences between the nine sub-corpora. Medical articles in all languages are characterised by relatively few occurrences of first person pronouns, indefinite pronouns, meta-textual elements, negations and concessive constructions; on the other hand, medical articles have the highest frequency as regards bibliographical references. These observations may to some extent be explained by different academic traditions, different objects of study and different methods. Norwegian medical articles contain relatively more occurrences of the studied linguistic phenomena than the English and French articles.

Communication↗
PubMed1999

[The general psychological concept in the later work of Eugen Bleulers. Comparison with a summarized description from a forgotten theory 60 years after the final publication (1939)].

Documents by Eugen Bleuler from 1921 to 1939 that go into general psychological topics of meaning of consciousness, formation of motive and will, are presented. An effort towards integration of seemingly incompatible, side by side standing, unrelated biological and psychological concepts that probably is most likely explainable by the contemporary background of ideas, is recognizable. In this context, Eugen Bleuler refers to an already (especially by Richard Semon) systematically developed theory called "Mnemism" that he interpreted and applied to the psychological circumstances mentioned above. That theory of "mnemism" that can be most adequately described as a biogenetic-vitalistic theory, is assuming, that all organic life--independent of the possibility of a self-reflecting consciousness--is able to learn experiences made by analysis of environment and to pass it on following generations. Pattern of stimulus reactions are in the sense of this theory memorized ("engraphiert") and reactivated under similar situational circumstances ("ekphoriert") by the psychological mode of association.--It can be shown that Bleuler pursued this theory for a period of more than ten years. It represents the benchmark for Bleuler's standpoints, for example for the question of determination of human acting, that as itselves are already known from his earlier documents, but here have found a more theoretically based explanation. The assumption of the efficacy of specific, not necessary consciously remembered "engramms" of memory, suggests the hypothesis of the existence of unconsciousness; in this context textual points of contact to the psychological concepts of S. Freud and C. G. Jung--mnemic memory and collective unconscious--are shown.

Consciousness↗
PubMed1993

Building large knowledge bases in molecular biology.

Large scale genome sequencing projects are now producing hugh amounts of data which can be readily stored and managed within data base management systems, and analyzed using dedicated software packages. The results of these analyzes should also be stored with the input DNA sequences. The increasing complexity and size of the objects to be described and managed have led biologists to rely on advanced data models such as the object-oriented model. As a joint effort between our computer science and molecular biology research projects, the knowledge bases we have developed in molecular genetics have shown however that the basic object-oriented model is not fully adapted to the complexity of some biological situations encountered. Advanced descriptive capabilities, provided only by knowledge models originated from the AI field, are required. Composite or evolving objects, multiple viewpoints, constraints, tasks and methods, textual annotations are some examples of such capabilities. They are illustrated by biological situations for which they appeared to be necessary. Supporting powerful reasoning mechanisms (e.g. object classification, constraint propagation or qualitative simulators), they allow the development of large knowledge bases in molecular biology. These knowledge bases are expected to become the adequate support for co-operative distributed research efforts.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1998

A multimedia database for dermatology.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) Radiation Emergency Medical Preparedness (REMPAN) centres have built up the International Computer Database for Radiation Accident Case Histories (ICDREC) to document the treatment of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) patients. Radiation induced skin lesions may cause severe late effects in radiation accident patients. Dermatological multimedia documentation is included into the ICDREC. In particular, retrieval and display of digitised skin photographs and medical reports serves to improve patient care, medical education, and scientific analysis concerning the cutaneous radiation syndrome (CRS). The database has been built up as a client/server system. A particular focus has been set on using commercial off-the-shelf software components. The medical data including the multimedia data are stored in a relational database system. The database can be accessed by inexpensive personal computers in the dermatologist's workplace. Authorised institutions can access the database via the Internet. Retrieval of one skin photograph via local area network (LAN) requires approximately 3 seconds. The current state of the application is illustrated with the skin lesion treatment of a Chernobyl patient. An example is given on how to access the ICDREC from a dermatologist's desktop personal computer. The discussion focuses on the advantages of storing the textual and pictorial data in one central database to be accessed from different care centres and how the results can be generalised for medical multimedia information systems.

Dermatology↗
PubMedDate not supplied

On the quality of ART1 text clustering.

There is a large and continually growing quantity of electronic text available, which contain essential human and organization knowledge. An important research endeavor is to study and develop better ways to access this knowledge. Text clustering is a popular approach to automatically organize textual document collections by topics to help users find the information they need. Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural networks possess several interesting properties that make them appealing in the area of text clustering. Although ART has been used in several research works as a text clustering tool, the level of quality of the resulting document clusters has not been clearly established yet. In this paper, we present experimental results with binary ART that address this issue by determining how close clustering quality is to an upper bound on clustering quality.

Cluster Analysis↗
PubMed1990

Design and operation of a nuclear medicine picture archiving and communication system.

Construction of a new Veterans Administration Medical Center provided a unique opportunity to design and implement a state-of-the-art nuclear medicine department in a large teaching and research hospital. The new medical center allowed the acquisition of all new gamma cameras and computer systems without any historical need to patch together a system of old and new equipment. The picture archiving and communication system (PACS) was designed to link five gamma cameras to four image viewing areas, followed by digital archive on an optical disc. The gamma cameras' computers and viewing areas' computers are linked to a central networking computer in a manner that provides nine independent but digitally communicating image computers. Each nuclear medicine computer is capable of acquiring gamma camera data while possibly also performing up to three other simultaneous tasks: analysis of image data, transfer of image data from node to node, and patient database manipulation. The nine image computers each appear to the user as a digital file cabinet, containing various folders, which in turn contain patient studies. To transfer a patient study from one location to another, the user simply queues a transfer request by selecting a file drawer-folder combination for the source and destination locations. It takes only a few seconds to queue a transfer request, and the transfer is complete about a minute later without any further user intervention. A computer genie awakens during the early morning off-hours and performs housekeeping tasks, including movement of patient studies (based on date of acquisition) from active viewing folders to inactive archive folders. All scheduling, workload data, patient image reports, etc, are handled by a patient textual information database system. Patient reports and scheduling information are transmitted to the medical center's central computer where they are made readily available throughout the medical center. The PACS, in clinical use since the spring of 1988, is practical and well-received by technologists, nuclear medicine physicians, and more importantly, our consumer, the referring physicians.

Hospital Information Systems↗
PubMed2006

Development of bioinformatics resources for display and analysis of copy number and other structural variants in the human genome.

The discovery of an abundance of copy number variants (CNVs; gains and losses of DNA sequences >1 kb) and other structural variants in the human genome is influencing the way research and diagnostic analyses are being designed and interpreted. As such, comprehensive databases with the most relevant information will be critical to fully understand the results and have impact in a diverse range of disciplines ranging from molecular biology to clinical genetics. Here, we describe the development of bioinformatics resources to facilitate these studies. The Database of Genomic Variants (http://projects.tcag.ca/variation/) is a comprehensive catalogue of structural variation in the human genome. The database currently contains 1,267 regions reported to contain copy number variation or inversions in apparently healthy human cases. We describe the current contents of the database and how it can serve as a resource for interpretation of array comparative genomic hybridization (array CGH) and other DNA copy imbalance data. We also present the structure of the database, which was built using a new data modeling methodology termed Cross-Referenced Tables (XRT). This is a generic and easy-to-use platform, which is strong in handling textual data and complex relationships. Web-based presentation tools have been built allowing publication of XRT data to the web immediately along with rapid sharing of files with other databases and genome browsers. We also describe a novel tool named eFISH (electronic fluorescence in situ hybridization) (http://projects.tcag.ca/efish/), a BLAST-based program that was developed to facilitate the choice of appropriate clones for FISH and CGH experiments, as well as interpretation of results in which genomic DNA probes are used in hybridization-based experiments.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2001

A preliminary report of the virtual craniofacial center: development of Internet-/Intranet-based care coordination of pediatric craniofacial patients.

The authors present preliminary information regarding the development of an Internet-based Virtual Craniofacial Center that provides access to a patient database with visual and textual data. Patients are photographed by digital camera with standardized images. Through a Web site linked to a remote database, patient demographics, management data, reports, and acquired digital photographic images are stored and retrieved. The database can be used to sort and to present data as desired by multiple specialists. Confidentiality is maintained by unique identification numbers and password access to the server for craniofacial team members. The current system uses economical equipment (i.e., digital camera, personal computer with modem, and access to a remote Windows NT-based server), using data that can be entered in a variety of cross-platform personal computer systems and transmitted on a wide range of bandwidths-from a relatively low-bandwidth (28.8 KB per second) modem to a high-speed T-3 line connection. Long-term goals include archival data storage and analysis, as well as the development of multicenter telemedicine links for active craniofacial centers.

Child↗