Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Datasets as Topic”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 487 records · Page 27Linked to original sources
PubMed2004

Disease management programs for depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

BACKGROUND: Substantial deficits in the care of depression make the provision of new evidence-based care models a matter of increasing importance. So far, disease management programs (DMPs) have not been systematically assessed. OBJECTIVE: This study was a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials investigating the effectiveness of DMP for depression as compared with usual primary care. METHODS: Criteria for study selection were depression as main diagnosis in adults, the intervention DMP (evidence-based guidelines, patient/provider education, collaborative care, reminder systems, and monitoring), and trial quality A/B (Cochrane Collaboration guidelines) rated by 2 observers. Measurement instruments had to be published in peer-reviewed journals and filled out by the participants, their relations, or independent raters. Meta-analyses were conducted by using dichotomous outcomes within forest plots. Tests of heterogeneity, sensitivity analyses, and funnel plots were performed. Economic evaluations were descriptively summarized. RESULTS: DMP had a significant effect on depression severity, with a relative risk of 0.75 (95% confidence interval 0.70-0.81) in a homogeneous dataset of 10 high-quality trials. It was robust in all sensitivity analyses (evidence level 1A). Funnel plot symmetry indicated a low probability of publication bias. Patient satisfaction and adherence to the treatment regimen improved significantly, but only in heterogeneous models. The costs per quality adjusted life year ranged between US 9,051 dollars and US 49,500 dollars. CONCLUSION: DMP significantly enhance the quality of care for depression. Costs are within the range of other widely accepted public health improvements. Future research should focus on the effect of long-term interventions, and the compatibility with health care systems other than managed-care driven ones.

Antidepressive Agents↗
PubMed2001

Maps of the brain.

We review recent developments in brain mapping and computational anatomy that have greatly expanded our ability to analyze brain structure and function. The enormous diversity of brain maps and imaging methods has spurred the development of population-based digital brain atlases. These atlases store information on how the brain varies across age and gender, across time, in health and disease, and in large human populations. We describe how brain atlases, and the computational tools that align new datasets with them, facilitate comparison of brain data across experiments, laboratories, and from different imaging devices. The major methods are presented for the construction of probabilistic atlases, which store information on anatomic and functional variability in a population. Algorithms are reviewed that create composite brain maps and atlases based on multiple subjects. We show that group patterns of cortical organization, asymmetry, and disease-specific trends can be resolved that may not be apparent in individual brain maps. Finally, we describe the creation of four-dimensional (4D) maps that store information on the dynamics of brain change in development and disease. Digital atlases that correlate these maps show considerable promise in identifying general patterns of structural and functional variation in human populations, and how these features depend on demographic, genetic, cognitive, and clinical parameters.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2005

Comparative analyses of genetic diversities within tomato and pepper collections detected by retrotransposon-based SSAP, AFLP and SSR.

The retrotransposon-based sequence-specific amplification polymorphism (SSAP) marker system was used to assess the genetic diversities of collections of tomato and pepper industrial lines. The utility of SSAP markers was compared to that of amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) and simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. On the basis of our results, SSAP is most informative of the three systems for studying genetic diversity in tomato and pepper, with a significant correlation of genetic relationships between different SSAP datasets and between SSAP, AFLP and SSR markers. SSAP showed about four- to ninefold more diversity than AFLP and had the highest number of polymorphic bands per assay ratio and the highest marker index. For tomato, SSAP is more suitable for inferring overall genetic variation and relationships, while SSR has the ability to detect specific genetic relationships. All three marker results for pepper showed general agreement with pepper types. Additionally, retrotransposon sequences isolated from one species can be used in related Solanaceae genera. These results suggest that different marker systems are suited for studying genetic diversity in different contexts depending on the group studied, where discordance between different marker systems can be very informative for understanding genetic relationships within the study group.

Capsicum↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Highly accurate and consistent method for prediction of helix and strand content from primary protein sequences.

OBJECTIVE: One of interesting computational topics in bioinformatics is prediction of secondary structure of proteins. Over 30 years of research has been devoted to the topic but we are still far away from having reliable prediction methods. A critical piece of information for accurate prediction of secondary structure is the helix and strand content of a given protein sequence. Ability to accurately predict content of those two secondary structures has a good potential to improve accuracy of prediction of the secondary structure. Most of the existing methods use composition vector to predict the content. Their underlying assumption is that the vector can be used to provide functional mapping between primary sequence and helix/strand content. While this is true for small sets of proteins we show that for larger protein sets such mapping are inconsistent, i.e. the same composition vectors correspond to different contents. To this end, we propose a method for prediction of helix/strand content from primary protein sequences that is fundamentally different from currently available methods. METHODS AND MATERIAL: Our method is accurate and uses a novel approach to obtain information from primary sequence based on a composition moment vector, which is a measure that includes information about both composition of a given primary sequence and the position of amino acids in the sequence. In contrast to the composition vector, we show that it provides functional mapping between primary sequence and the helix/strand content. RESULTS: A set of benchmarks involving a large protein dataset consisting of over 11,000 protein sequences from Protein Data Bank was performed to validate the method. Prediction done by a neural network had average accuracy of 91.5% for the helix and 94.5% for the strand contents. We also show that using the new measure results in about 40% reduction of error rates when compared with the composition vector results. CONCLUSIONS: The developed method has much better accuracy when compared with other existing methods, as shown on a large body of proteins, in contrast to other reported results that often target small sets of specific protein types, such as globular proteins.

Amino Acid Sequence↗
PubMed2006

Comparison of spectral counting and metabolic stable isotope labeling for use with quantitative microbial proteomics.

Spectral counting, a promising method for quantifying relative changes in protein abundance in mass spectrometry-based proteomic analysis, was compared to metabolic stable isotope labeling using (15)N/(14)N "heavy/light" peptide pairs. The data were drawn primarily from a Methanococcus maripaludis experiment comparing a wild-type strain with a mutant deficient in a key enzyme relevant to energy metabolism. The dataset contained both proteome and transcriptome measurements. The normalization technique used previously for the isotopic measurements was inappropriate for spectral counting, but a simple adjustment for sampling frequency was sufficient for normalization. This adjustment was satisfactory both for M. maripaludis, an organism that showed relatively little expression change between the wild-type and mutant strains, and Porphyromonas gingivalis, an intracellular pathogen that has demonstrated widespread changes between intracellular and extracellular conditions. Spectral counting showed lower overall sensitivity defined in terms of detecting a two-fold change in protein expression, and in order to achieve the same level of quantitative proteome coverage as the stable isotope method, it would have required approximately doubling the number of mass spectra collected.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

The European Congenital Heart Defects Surgery Database experience: Pediatric European Cardiothoracic Surgical Registry of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery.

The initial purpose of collecting data on the outcome of congenital heart surgery procedures across Europe was to make possible comparison of results and definition of mortality and morbidity risk factors as well as targeting research activities. The European Congenital Heart Surgeons Foundation, established in 1992, created the European Congenital Heart Defects Database, precursor to today's Pediatric European Cardiothoracic Surgical Registry. In 1999, initiatives of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons and the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery resulted in a series of conferences aimed at arriving at a standardized nomenclature and reporting strategies as a foundation for an international database. In April 2000 the International Congenital Heart Surgery Nomenclature and Database Project published a minimum dataset of 21 items and lists of 150 diagnoses, 200 procedures, and 32 complications, as well as 28 extracardiac anomalies and 17 preoperative risk factors. Since January 2000 the Pediatric European Cardiothoracic Surgical Registry has officially operated from the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at the Children's Memorial Health Institute in Warsaw, Poland, under the auspices of the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery and the responsibility of Bohdan Maruszewski. As of March 2001, 84 cardiothoracic units from 33 countries had registered in the database and data on almost 4,000 procedures have been collected. Participation in the database is free of charge through the internet for all participants. Development of data validation protocols is a work in progress.

Child↗
PubMed2005

The denominator in general practice, a new approach from the Intego database.

BACKGROUND: To determine the denominator or the 'population at risk' is a problem which has long been encountered in general practice-based epidemiological research. It is important for calculating epidemiological figures. OBJECTIVES: The aim of this article is to demonstrate how in the absence of a patient list, a reliable denominator can be calculated, starting from the number of patients who contacted their GP in the period of one year. Therefore a brief overview will be given from known approaches, then the new approach will be illustrated on a database named Intego, with data from 43 general practices in Belgium. METHODS: The Intego database contains information about patient contacts, diagnoses, laboratory results and drug prescriptions, extracted from the participants' structured electronic medical record system. The number of patients who contacted the practice in a year can be calculated from the Intego data. On the other hand, the percentage of the population that consults a GP during a particular period was obtained from the reimbursement claims data available from the sickness funds. By combining these two datasets, stratified by age, gender and district, a correction factor was calculated. An estimate of the real size of the Intego practice populations was obtained by extrapolating the yearly contact group by this factor. RESULTS: In 2003 according the Intego-register, 64,161 patients contacted their family practice and this correlated with an estimated practice population of 80,094 patients. The absence of the socio-economic status in the estimation is irrelevant in our model of estimating the practice population. CONCLUSION: The availability of a denominator in general practice-based research is essential to calculate epidemiological figures. This method using a correction factor makes it possible to calculate a reliable practice population. A similar approach will probably also be applicable in other European countries.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Short Form 36 (SF-36) Health Survey questionnaire: which normative data should be used? Comparisons between the norms provided by the Omnibus Survey in Britain, the Health Survey for England and the Oxford Healthy Life Survey.

BACKGROUND: Population norms for the attributes included in measurement scales are required to provide a standard with which scores from other study populations can be compared. This study aimed to obtain population norms for the Short Form 36 (SF-36) Health Survey Questionnaire, derived from a random sample of the population in Britain who were interviewed at home, and to make comparisons with other commonly used norms. METHODS: The method was a face-to-face interview survey of a random sample of 2056 adults living at home in Britain (response rate 78 per cent). Comparisons of the SF-36 scores derived from this sample were made with the Health Survey for England and the Oxford Healthy Life Survey. RESULTS: Controlling for age and sex, many of mean scores on the SF-36 dimensions differed between the three datasets. The British interview sample had better total means for Physical Functioning, Social Functioning, Mental Health, Energy/Vitality, and General Health Perceptions. The Health (interview) Survey for England had the lowest (worst) total mean scores for Physical Functioning, Social Functioning, Role Limitations (physical), Bodily Pain, and Health Perceptions. The postal sample in central England had the lowest (worst) total mean scores for Role Limitations (emotional), Mental Health and Energy/Vitality. CONCLUSION: Responses obtained from interview methods may suffer more from social desirability bias (resulting in inflated SF-36 scores) than postal surveys. Differences in SF-36 means between surveys are also likely to reflect question order and contextual effects of the questionnaires. This indicates the importance of providing mode-specific population norms for the various methods of questionnaire administration.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Evaluation of the impact of the Canadian CT head rule on British practice.

BACKGROUND: The Canadian CT head rule has been developed to identify which adults with minor head injuries require computed tomography (CT). This is hoped will reduce the number of CT scans performed for minor head injury in North America. It was unclear whether applying the rule would reduce or even increase the number of CT scans requested in UK emergency departments. METHODS: A retrospective evaluation was conducted of all adults who presented after minor head injuries to Addenbrooke's emergency department. Clinical information about patients with head injuries is collected on standardised forms. A dataset was constructed to predict how many patients would require head CT scans if the Canadian CT rule was applied. RESULTS: 1489 adults presented after minor head injury over a seven month period. Seventy four of these had CT scans for head injury, applying the Canadian CT head rule would have resulted in 132 CT scans being requested. This is significantly more (p>0.001). This would have resulted in a 68% increase in costs. INTERPRETATION: The Canadian CT head rule would result in an increase in the number of CT scans requested for minor head injuries. This increased cost must be considered against the 488 skull radiographs that were requested during the study period.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Personalised risk communication for informed decision making about taking screening tests.

BACKGROUND: There is a trend towards greater patient involvement in healthcare decisions. Adequate discussion of the risks and benefits associated with different choices is often required if involvement is to be genuine and effective. Achieving both the adequate involvement of consumers and informed decision making are now seen as important goals for any screening programme. Personalised risk estimates have been shown to be effective methods of risk communication in general, but the effectiveness of different strategies has not previously been examined. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of different types of personalised risk communication for consumers making decisions about taking screening tests. SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) (The Cochrane Library Issue 4, 2004), MEDLINE (1985 to December 2005), EMBASE (1985 to December 2005), CINAHL (1985 to December 2005), and PsycINFO (1989 to December 2005). Follow-up searches involved hand searching Preventive Medicine, citation searches on seven authors, and searching reference lists of articles. For the original version of this review (Edwards 2003c) we also searched CancerLit (1985 to 2001) and Science Citation Index Expanded (searched March 2002). SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised controlled trials addressing the decision by consumers of whether or not to undergo screening, incorporating an intervention with a 'personalised risk communication element' and reporting cognitive, affective, or behavioural outcomes. A 'personalised risk communication element' is based on the individual's own risk factors for a condition (such as age or family history). It may be calculated from an individual's risk factors using formulae derived from epidemiological data, and presented as an absolute or relative risk or as a risk score, or it may be categorised into, for example, high, medium or low risk groups. It may be less detailed still, involving a listing, for example, of a consumer's risk factors as a focus for discussion and intervention. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two authors independently assessed each trial for quality and extracted data. We extracted data about the nature and setting of the intervention, and relevant outcome data, along with items relating to methodological quality. We then used standard statistical methods of the Consumers and Communication Review Group to combine data using MetaView, including analysis according to different levels of detail of personalised risk communication, different condition for screening, and studies based only on high risk participants rather than people at 'average' risk. MAIN RESULTS: Twenty-two studies were included, nine of which were added in the 2006 update of this review. There was weak evidence, consistent with a small effect, that personalised risk communication (whether written, spoken or visually presented) increases uptake of screening tests (odds ratio (OR) 1.31 (random effects, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.98 to 1.77). In three studies the interventions showed a trend towards more accurate risk perception (OR 1.65 (95% CI 0.96 to 2.81), and three other trials with heterogenous outcome measures showed improvements in knowledge with personalised risk interventions. There was little other evidence from these studies that the interventions promoted or achieved informed decision making by consumers about participation in screening. More detailed personalised risk communication may be associated with a smaller increase in uptake of tests. That is, for personalised risk communication which used and presented numerical calculations of risk, the OR for test uptake was 0.82 (95% CI 0.65 to 1.03). For risk estimates or calculations which were categorised into high, medium or low strata of risk, the OR was 1.42 (95% CI 1.07 to 1.89). For risk communication that simply listed personal risk factors the OR was 1.42 (95% CI 0.95 to 2.12). Over half of the included studies assessed interventions in the context of mammography. These studies showed similar effects to the overall dataset. The five studies examining risk communication in high risk individuals (individuals at higher risk due to, for example, a family history of breast cancer or other conditions) showed larger odds ratios for uptake of tests than the other studies (random effects OR 1.74; 95% CI 1.05 to 2.88). There were insufficient data from the included studies to report odds ratios on other key outcomes such as: intention to take tests, anxiety, satisfaction with decisions, decisional conflict, knowledge and resource use. AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Personalised risk communication (as currently implemented in the included studies) may have a small effect on increasing uptake of screening tests, and there is only limited evidence that the interventions have promoted or achieved informed decision making by consumers.

Communication↗
PubMed2004

Integrative analysis of multiple gene expression profiles applied to liver cancer study.

A statistical method for combining multiple microarray studies has been previously developed by the authors. Here, we present the application of the method to our hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) data and report new findings on gene expression changes accompanying HCC. From the cross-verification result of our studies and that of published studies, we found that single microarray analysis might lead to false findings. To avoid those pitfalls of single-set analyses, we employed our effect size method to integrate multiple datasets. Of 9982 genes analyzed, 477 significant genes were identified with a false discovery rate of 10%. Gene ontology (GO) terms associated with these genes were explored to validate our method in the biological context with respect to HCC. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the data integration process increases the sensitivity of analysis and allows small but consistent expression changes to be detected. These integration-driven discoveries contained meaningful and interesting genes not reported in previous expression profiling studies, such as growth hormone receptor, erythropoietin receptor, tissue factor pathway inhibitor-2, etc. Our findings support the use of meta-analysis for a variety of microarray data beyond the scope of this specific application.

Carcinoma, Hepatocellular↗
PubMed2000

Methodological issues in the use of guidelines and audit to improve clinical effectiveness in breast cancer in one United Kingdom health region.

AIMS: To develop a system to improve and monitor clinical performance in the management of breast cancer patients in one United Kingdom health region. DESIGN: An observational study of the changes brought about by the introduction of new structures to influence clinical practice and monitor change. SETTING: North Thames (East) Health region, comprising seven purchasing health authorities and 21 acute hospitals treating breast cancer. SUBJECTS: The multi-disciplinary breast teams in 21 hospitals and an audit sample of 419 (28%) of the breast cancer patients diagnosed in 1992 in the region. INTERVENTIONS: Evidence-based interventions for changing clinical practice: regional guidelines, senior clinicians acting as < >, audit of quality rather than cost of services, ownership of data by clinicians, confidential feed-back to participants and education. OUTCOME MEASURES: Qualitative measures of organizational and behavioural change. Quantitative measures of clinical outcomes compared to guideline targets and to results from previous studies within this population. RESULTS: Organizational changes included the involvement, participation of and feedback to 16 specialist surgeons and their multidisciplinary teams in 21 hospitals. Regional clinical guidelines were developed in 6 months and the dataset piloted within 9 months. The audit cycle was completed within 2 years. The pilot study led to prospective audit at the end of 2 years for all breast cancers in the region and a 15-fold increase in high quality clinical information for these patients. Changes in clinical practice between 1990 and 1992 were observed in the use of chemotherapy (up from 17-23%) and axillary surgery (up from 46-76%). CONCLUSIONS: The approach used facilitated rapid change and found a balance between local involvement (essential for sustainability within a hospital setting) and regional standardization (essential for comparability across hospitals). The principles of the approach are generalized to other cancers and to other parts of the UK and abroad.

Breast Neoplasms↗
PubMed2005

CMfinder--a covariance model based RNA motif finding algorithm.

MOTIVATION: The recent discoveries of large numbers of non-coding RNAs and computational advances in genome-scale RNA search create a need for tools for automatic, high quality identification and characterization of conserved RNA motifs that can be readily used for database search. Previous tools fall short of this goal. RESULTS: CMfinder is a new tool to predict RNA motifs in unaligned sequences. It is an expectation maximization algorithm using covariance models for motif description, featuring novel integration of multiple techniques for effective search of motif space, and a Bayesian framework that blends mutual information-based and folding energy-based approaches to predict structure in a principled way. Extensive tests show that our method works well on datasets with either low or high sequence similarity, is robust to inclusion of lengthy extraneous flanking sequence and/or completely unrelated sequences, and is reasonably fast and scalable. In testing on 19 known ncRNA families, including some difficult cases with poor sequence conservation and large indels, our method demonstrates excellent average per-base-pair accuracy--79% compared with at most 60% for alternative methods. More importantly, the resulting probabilistic model can be directly used for homology search, allowing iterative refinement of structural models based on additional homologs. We have used this approach to obtain highly accurate covariance models of known RNA motifs based on small numbers of related sequences, which identified homologs in deeply-diverged species.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2004

Model-based fitting of single-channel dwell-time distributions.

Single-channel recordings provide unprecedented resolutions on kinetics of conformational changes of ion channels. Several approaches exist for analysis of the data, including the dwell-time histogram fittings and the full maximal-likelihood approaches that fit either the idealized dwell-time sequence or more ambitiously the noisy data directly using hidden Markov modeling. Although the full maximum likelihood approaches are statistically advantageous, they can be time-consuming especially for large datasets and/or complex models. We present here an alternative approach for model-based fitting of one-dimensional and two-dimensional dwell-time histograms. To improve performance, we derived analytical expressions for the derivatives of one-dimensional and two-dimensional dwell-time distribution functions and employed the gradient-based variable metric method for fast search of optimal rate constants in a model. The algorithm also has the ability to allow for a first-order correction for the effects of missed events, global fitting across different experimental conditions, and imposition of typical constraints on rate constants including microscopic reversibility. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the algorithm, and comparisons with the full maximum likelihood fitting are discussed.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1998

The distribution of health care costs and their statistical analysis for economic evaluation.

OBJECTIVE: Where patient level data are available on health care costs, it is natural to use statistical analysis to describe the differences in cost between alternative treatments. Health care costs are, however, commonly considered to be skewed, which could present problems for standard statistical tests. This review examines how authors report the distributional form of health care cost data and how they have analysed their results. METHOD: A review of cost-effectiveness studies that collected patient-level data on health care costs. To supplement the review, five datasets on health care costs are examined. Consideration is given to the use of parametric methods on the transformed scale and to non-parametric methods of analysing skewed cost data. RESULTS: Since economic analysis requires estimation in monetary units, the usefulness of transformation-based methods is limited by the inability to retransform cost differences to the original scale. Non-parametric rank sum methods were also found to be of limited use for economic analysis, partly due to the focus on hypothesis testing rather than estimation. Overall, the non-parametric approach of bootstrapping was found to offer a useful test of the appropriateness of parametric assumptions and an alternative method of estimation where those assumptions were found not to hold. CONCLUSIONS: Guidelines for the analysis of skewed health care cost data are offered.

Cost-Benefit Analysis↗
PubMed1997

Brainvox: an interactive, multimodal visualization and analysis system for neuroanatomical imaging.

A study of cognition emerging from a neurobiological perspective, as opposed to one emerging from a purely computational or psychological perspective, begins with observations of the human brain in normal and pathological states and is furthered by the investigation of hypotheses which are articulated using neuroanatomical nomenclature. Brainvox is an interactive three-dimensional brain imaging software package designed to permit such research through the support of the description and quantification of brain pathology in magnetic resonance images and of the experimental investigation of human cognition in lesion and functional imaging studies. Important general features of Brainvox, for these purposes, are: (1) adaptation of volume rendering for brain lesions and for corendered datasets; (2) shared memory architecture, which enables the user to identify and label anatomical structures, while inspecting the brain in multiple views simultaneously; (3) modular program design, including interlocking command-line utilities, which make Brainvox extensible and empower users without programming expertise to implement new analysis techniques through Unix shell scripting; and (4) full integration of three-dimensional tools for visualization with tools for analysis. Specific features include a new object templating technique (MAP-3) for studies of groups of brain-lesioned subjects, a complete and extensible suite of command-line processing utilities, a three-dimensional optimal graph-searching tool, and a method for planning PET slices and matching MR and PET slices (MP_FIT).

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1999

Impact on quality of life during an allergen challenge research trial.

BACKGROUND: Quality of life (QOL) issues resulting from participation in an allergy research trial, or indeed any clinical trial, is not documented in the medical literature. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether participating in a trial where allergic symptoms are induced has a significant impact on subjects' QOL, and to quantify extent and duration. METHODS: Subjects were recruited from a trial utilizing a controlled allergen environment to assess anti-allergic medications. A QOL survey (consisting of the Rhinoconjunctivitis Quality of Life Questionnaire [RQLQ] & the SF-36) was completed at screening, on study day, and approximately 2 weeks post-study. Follow-up was sought from subjects' whose QOL was significantly worse than baseline. RESULTS: Of 219 trial participants, 206 completed both screening and study surveys; 141 returned at least one follow-up survey; and 136 constructed the final dataset. Mean overall scores at follow-up via RQLQ were significantly better than screening (P < .001). Significant decreases in QOL from baseline on study day occurred in social function on the SF-36 (P = .026) and in domains of sleep (P = .019), non-nasal symptoms (P = .05), ocular symptoms (P < .001), and nasal symptoms (P < .001) on the RQLQ. Average post-study follow-up was 17.1 days (range = 5 to 55 days). CONCLUSION: Subjects participating in a trial involving allergic symptom induction experienced a decrease of QOL in parameters specific to rhinoconjunctivitis and social function. Subjects' QOL returned to or improved over baseline within 2 1/2 weeks. Positive QOL findings are important to studies where symptoms are induced and also have relevance to standard Phase 3 drug trials.

Allergens↗
PubMed2001

What is bioinformatics? A proposed definition and overview of the field.

BACKGROUND: The recent flood of data from genome sequences and functional genomics has given rise to new field, bioinformatics, which combines elements of biology and computer science. OBJECTIVES: Here we propose a definition for this new field and review some of the research that is being pursued, particularly in relation to transcriptional regulatory systems. METHODS: Our definition is as follows: Bioinformatics is conceptualizing biology in terms of macromolecules (in the sense of physical-chemistry) and then applying "informatics" techniques (derived from disciplines such as applied maths, computer science, and statistics) to understand and organize the information associated with these molecules, on a large-scale. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Analyses in bioinformatics predominantly focus on three types of large datasets available in molecular biology: macromolecular structures, genome sequences, and the results of functional genomics experiments (e.g. expression data). Additional information includes the text of scientific papers and "relationship data" from metabolic pathways, taxonomy trees, and protein-protein interaction networks. Bioinformatics employs a wide range of computational techniques including sequence and structural alignment, database design and data mining, macromolecular geometry, phylogenetic tree construction, prediction of protein structure and function, gene finding, and expression data clustering. The emphasis is on approaches integrating a variety of computational methods and heterogeneous data sources. Finally, bioinformatics is a practical discipline. We survey some representative applications, such as finding homologues, designing drugs, and performing large-scale censuses. Additional information pertinent to the review is available over the web at http://bioinfo.mbb.yale.edu/what-is-it.

Computational Biology↗