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Integration of functional brain information into stereotactic irradiation treatment planning using magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance axonography.

PURPOSE: To minimize the risk of neurologic deficit after stereotactic irradiation, functional brain information was integrated into treatment planning. METHODS AND MATERIALS: Twenty-one magnetoencephalography and six magnetic resonance axonographic images were made in 20 patients to evaluate the sensorimotor cortex (n = 15 patients, including the corticospinal tract in 6), visual cortex (n = 4), and Wernicke's area (n = 2). One radiation oncologist was asked to formulate a treatment plan first without the functional images and then to modify the plan after seeing them. The pre- and postmodification values were compared for the volume of the functional area receiving > or =15 Gy and the volume of the planning target volume receiving > or =80% of the prescribed dose. RESULTS: Of the 21 plans, 15 (71%) were modified after seeing the functional images. After modification, the volume receiving > or =15 Gy was significantly reduced compared with the values before modification in those 15 sets of plans (p = 0.03). No statistically significant difference was found in the volume of the planning target volume receiving > or =80% of the prescribed dose (p = 0.99). During follow-up, radiation-induced necrosis at the corticospinal tract caused a minor motor deficit in 1 patient for whom magnetic resonance axonography was not available in the treatment planning. No radiation-induced functional deficit was observed in the other patients. CONCLUSION: Integration of magnetoencephalography and magnetic resonance axonography in treatment planning has the potential to reduce the risk of radiation-induced functional dysfunction without deterioration of the dose distribution in the target volume.

Adult↗

IMGT-ONTOLOGY and IMGT databases, tools and Web resources for immunogenetics and immunoinformatics.

The international ImMunoGeneTics information system (IMGT; http://imgt.cines.fr), is a high quality integrated information system specialized in immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR), major histocompatibility complex (MHC), and related proteins of the immune system (RPI) of human and other vertebrates, created in 1989, by the Laboratoire d'ImmunoGénétique Moléculaire (LIGM; Université Montpellier II and CNRS) at Montpellier, France. IMGT provides a common access to standardized data which include nucleotide and protein sequences, oligonucleotide primers, gene maps, genetic polymorphisms, specificities, 2D and 3D structures. IMGT consists of several sequence databases (IMGT/LIGM-DB, IMGT/MHC-DB, IMGT/PRIMER-DB), one genome database (IMGT/GENE-DB) and one 3D structure database (IMGT/3Dstructure-DB), interactive tools for sequence analysis (IMGT/V-QUEST, IMGT/JunctionAnalysis, IMGT/PhyloGene, IMGT/Allele-Align), for genome analysis (IMGT/GeneSearch, IMGT/GeneView, IMGT/LocusView) and for 3D structure analysis (IMGT/StructuralQuery), and Web resources ("IMGT Marie-Paule page") comprising 8000 HTML pages. IMGT other accesses include SRS, FTP, search by BLAST, etc. By its high quality and its easy data distribution, IMGT has important implications in medical research (repertoire in autoimmune diseases, AIDS, leukemias, lymphomas, myelomas), veterinary research, genome diversity and genome evolution studies of the adaptive immune responses, biotechnology related to antibody engineering (single chain Fragment variable (scFv), phage displays, combinatorial libraries) and therapeutical approaches (grafts, immunotherapy). IMGT is freely available at http://imgt.cines.fr.

Animals↗

The relationship of vertical and horizontal velocity gradients in the perception of shape, rotation, and rigidity.

Perceived shape, rotation, and rigidity were investigated in displays with linear velocity gradients in the vertical and horizontal directions. Different temporal relationships between these gradients simulated perspective projections of frontally oriented or rotated translating dihedral angles, orthographic projections of rotating dihedral angles, or nonrigid motion. Displays with nonzero horizontal gradients were judged to represent greater angle magnitudes (less relative depth) than displays with 0 horizontal gradients. The temporal relationship between the vertical and horizontal gradients did not influence judged shape but did affect rotation and rigidity judgments; rigid rotations were judged to rotate most, and nonrigid displays were rated as least rigid. These results indicate that the visual system integrates information from more than 1 velocity field. Possible integration methods based on first-order optic flow analysis are discussed.

Form Perception↗

The Winchester experience with the TDS hospital information system.

The Royal Hampshire County Hospital is a pilot site for the Resource Management Initiative. It is also the pilot site within the Wessex Region for the Hospital Information System (HIS). We have pursued an ambitious, integrated information system strategy within the hospital. This has been planned and most of it implemented within a short timescale. Although some of the remaining difficulties are technical, the greatest challenges relate to people, their reactions to the introduction of new technology and the need to acquire new skills. The training and development of staff become critical. The importance of an effective management structure with major medical and nursing involvement has been, and will remain, crucial to our continued progress.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Informatics in medical practice: billing systems survey by the Hawaii Medical Association.

The Information Age has arrived! Our offices are quickly integrating information machines for the business part of our profession, just as the stethoscope and scalpel are requisites for the practice of medicine and surgery. The mission of the HMA Computer Committee is to provide guidance in the direction of medical informatics for its members. We hope to assist the membership in the selection, evaluation and use of the products relating to the processing of information in the modern practice of medicine.

Accounting↗

Outcome-based quality improvement in home health care: the OASIS indicators.

The outcomes movement in home health care is expanding rapidly, with strong support from both the industry and Medicare. The Federal government has proposed requiring all Medicare-certified agencies to collect data items from the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) to form the basis for standardized risk-adjusted outcome reporting as part of a systematic outcome-based quality improvement (OBQI) approach. In addition to contributing to improving patient outcomes, OASIS data items, when combined with other assessment information, utilization data, and cost information, can provide home health care agencies with a powerful integrated information set for internal management and strategic planning.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, U.S.↗

On and off pathway contributions to apparent motion perception.

We studied the separability and/or interaction of the On and Off pathways in their role as inputs to visual motion perception. Using the long-range motion perception system, we asked if the motion system can use brightness polarity information, by testing whether correspondence is preferred between elements for which brightness polarity is preserved. We found such a preference, suggesting that brightness polarity information is indeed available to the motion system. However, under certain conditions motion is perceived even though the brightness polarity of apparent motion stimulus elements is reversed, indicating that the apparent motion system does integrate information from these two pathways. The source of the preference for maintaining polarity seems not to be the different brightnesses of the dark and bright stimulus elements, but the very fact that information must be integrated from different pathways. We relate the characteristics of the dependence of the motion perception on element contrast and contrast sign to those of previously reported visual evoked potential responses to brightness increments and decrements.

Contrast Sensitivity↗

START: an advanced radiation therapy information system.

START is an advanced radiation therapy information system (RTIS) which connects direct information technology present in the devices with indirect information technology for clinical, administrative, information management integrated with the hospital information system (HIS). The following objectives are pursued: to support decision making in treatment planning and functional and information integration with the rest of the hospital; to enhance organizational efficiency of a Radiation Therapy Department; to facilitate the statistical evaluation of clinical data and managerial performance assessment; to ensure the safety and confidentiality of used data. For its development a working method based on the involvement of all operators of the Radiation Therapy Department, was applied. Its introduction in the work activity was gradual, trying to reuse and integrate the existing information applications. The START information flow identifies four major phases: admission, visit of admission, planning, therapy. The system main functionalities available to the radiotherapist are: clinical history/medical report linking function; folder function; planning function; tracking function; electronic mail and banner function; statistical function; management function. Functions available to the radiotherapy technician are: the room daily list function; management function: to the nurse the following functions are available: patient directing function; management function. START is a departmental client (pc-windows)-server (unix) developed on an integrated database of all information of interest (clinical, organizational and administrative) coherent with the standard and with a modular architecture which can evolve with additional functionalities in subsequent times. For a more thorough evaluation of its impact on the daily activity of a radiation therapy facility, a prolonged clinical validation is in progress.

Medical Records Systems, Computerized↗

IMGT standardized criteria for statistical analysis of immunoglobulin V-REGION amino acid properties.

IMGT, the international ImMunoGeneTics information system(R) (http://imgt.cines.fr) is a high-quality integrated information system specializing in immunoglobulins (IG), T cell receptors (TR) and major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of human and other vertebrates. IMGT comprises IMGT/LIGM-DB, the comprehensive database of IG and TR sequences from human and other vertebrates (76 846 sequences in September 2003). In order to define the IMGT criteria necessary for standardized statistical analyses, the sequences of the IG variable regions (V-REGIONs) from productively rearranged human IG heavy (IGH) and IG light kappa (IGK) and lambda (IGL) chains were extracted from IMGT/LIGM-DB. The framework amino acid positions of 2474 V-REGIONs (1360 IGHV, 585 IGKV, 529 IGLV) were numbered according to the IMGT unique numbering. Two statistical methods (correspondence analysis and hierarchic classification) were used to analyze the 237 framework positions (80 for IGHV, 79 for IGKV, 78 for IGLV), for three properties (hydropathy, volume and chemical characteristics) of the 20 common amino acids. Results of the analyses are shown as standardized two-dimensional representations, designated as IMGT Colliers de Perles statistical profiles. They provide a characterization of the amino acid properties at each framework position of the expressed IG V-REGIONs, and a visualization of the resemblances and differences between heavy and light, and between kappa and lambda sequences. The standardized criteria defined in this paper, amino acid positions and property classes, will be useful to study the mutations and allele polymorphisms, to establish correlations between amino acids in the IG and TR protein three-dimensional structures and to extract new knowledge from V-like domains of chains, other than IG and TR, belonging to the immunoglobulin superfamily.

Amino Acid Sequence↗

"Living" under the challenge of information decay: the stochastic corrector model vs. hypercycles.

The combined problem of having a large genome size when the accuracy of replication was a limiting factor is probably the most difficult transition to explain at the late stages of RNA world. One solution has been to suggest the existence of a cyclically coupled system of autocatalytic and cross-catalytic molecular mutualists, where each member helps the following member and receives help from the preceding one (i.e., a "hypercycle"). However, such a system is evolutionarily unstable when mutations are taken into account because it lacks individuality. In time, the cooperating networks of genes should have been encapsulated in a cell-like structure. But once the cell was invented, it closely aligned genes' common interests and helped to reduce gene selfishness, so there was no need for hypercycles. A simple package of competing genes, described by the "stochastic corrector model" (SCM), could have provided the solution. Until now, there is no clear demonstration that the proposed mechanisms (compartmentalized hypercycles and the stochastic corrector model) do in fact solve the error threshold problem. Here, we present a Monte Carlo model to test the viability of protocell populations that enclose a hypercyclic (HPC) or a non-hypercyclic (SCM) system when faced with realistic mutation rates before the evolution of efficient enzymic machinery for replication. The numerical results indicate that both systems are efficient information integrators and are able to overcome the danger of information decay in the absence of accurate replication. However, a population of SCM protocells can tolerate higher deleterious mutation rates and reaches an equilibrium mutational load lower than that in a population of HPC protocells.

Animals↗

Reconstruction of a functional human gene network, with an application for prioritizing positional candidate genes.

Most common genetic disorders have a complex inheritance and may result from variants in many genes, each contributing only weak effects to the disease. Pinpointing these disease genes within the myriad of susceptibility loci identified in linkage studies is difficult because these loci may contain hundreds of genes. However, in any disorder, most of the disease genes will be involved in only a few different molecular pathways. If we know something about the relationships between the genes, we can assess whether some genes (which may reside in different loci) functionally interact with each other, indicating a joint basis for the disease etiology. There are various repositories of information on pathway relationships. To consolidate this information, we developed a functional human gene network that integrates information on genes and the functional relationships between genes, based on data from the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database, Reactome, the Human Protein Reference Database, the Gene Ontology database, predicted protein-protein interactions, human yeast two-hybrid interactions, and microarray co-expressions. We applied this network to interrelate positional candidate genes from different disease loci and then tested 96 heritable disorders for which the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man database reported at least three disease genes. Artificial susceptibility loci, each containing 100 genes, were constructed around each disease gene, and we used the network to rank these genes on the basis of their functional interactions. By following up the top five genes per artificial locus, we were able to detect at least one known disease gene in 54% of the loci studied, representing a 2.8-fold increase over random selection. This suggests that our method can significantly reduce the cost and effort of pinpointing true disease genes in analyses of disorders for which numerous loci have been reported but for which most of the genes are unknown.

Computational Biology↗

Clinical perspectives on the modern laboratory.

Clinicians depend daily on the clinical laboratory in the conduct of patient care. The modern clinical laboratory is a sophisticated network of people, machines, and processes tightly coupled with the clinicians it serves. The modern laboratory seeks to support a wide variety of encyclopedic information, collections, status information, and results effectively and efficiently. The modern laboratory integrates information management and quality improvement methods to retrieve and deliver needed information accurately and in a timely fashion. Ultimately, the modern laboratory achieves its information flow seamlessly, with the clinician improving overall cost-effectiveness of the health care system.

Clinical Laboratory Information Systems↗

Neural substrate for an integrated metabolic control of feeding behavior.

Evidence indicates that feeding behavior in rats is controlled by a mechanism that integrates information about different aspects of fuel metabolism. We investigated the neural substrate for this integrated control by measuring the effect of metabolic inhibitors given alone and in combination on food intake and neuronal activity as reflected by the expression of c-Fos protein. Combined administration of methyl palmoxirate (5 mg/kg po), an inhibitor of fatty acid oxidation, and 2,5-anhydro-D-mannitol (150 mg/kg ip), which decreases liver ATP content, increased feeding in rats more than expected on the basis of eating responses after treatment with either inhibitor given alone. Combined treatment also produced a synergistic increase in Fos-like immunoreactivity in several brain areas, including the nucleus of the solitary tract, area postrema, and parvocellular portion of the hypothalamic paraventricular nucleus. These findings provide strong evidence for the involvement of selected brain regions in the metabolic control of food intake and suggest that metabolic information used to control feeding behavior is integrated in the periphery or at the level of the brain stem.

Animals↗

Picture archiving and communication system-asynchronous transfer mode network in a midsized hospital.

This article describes the pathway to full implementation of a hospital information system-picture archiving and communication system-wide area network (HIS-PACS-WAN) in a 300-bed acute care hospital, and the linking of that system to two other off-site medical centers. The PACS included direct digital capture of computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, nuclear medicine, and ultrasonography images into an Olicon archive. Plain radiographs and fluoroscopy images were digitized manually and archived into an Olicon system. The active archive included current images on each Olicon workstation and the juke box. Long-term archiving of the images on removable optical discs, which would be loaded manually by an operator every time a request for one of these studies appeared on the operator's monitor, also was implemented. Ability to store, retrieve, and display simultaneously the physician's report of each procedure along with the images was an ultimate goal. The WAN is to be used for teleradiology and teleconferencing among the three medical centers involved in this study as well as other off-site locations. Phase I included the design and installation of the local area network (LAN) in the Department of Radiology at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center. This included the clinics and the inpatient and hospital-wide fiber-optic network and its linkage to the local telephone company. Phase II involved linkage of the Olicon workstations to imaging equipment. This implementation has been delayed significantly because of inadequate needs assessment, absence of planning for forward-compatibility to imaging equipment, and incompatibilities in DICOM conformance among vendors. Every PACS project must include an in-depth needs analysis, which should be updated yearly because of rapid turnover of technology. Although this analysis should have a heavy emphasis on clinical needs, it must incorporate the hospital-wide needs for an integrated information systems network. Integration of PACS, HIS, RIS, and a dictation/transcription system is a complex task that requires a full-time, clinically oriented project officer for successful completion.

Computer Communication Networks↗

MobileMed: a PDA-based mobile clinical information system.

Patient clinical data are distributed and often fragmented in heterogeneous systems, and therefore the need for information integration is a key to reliable patient care. Once the patient data are orderly integrated and readily available, the problems in accessing the distributed patient clinical data, the well-known difficulties of adopting a mobile health information system, are resolved. This paper proposes a mobile clinical information system (MobileMed), which integrates the distributed and fragmented patient data across heterogeneous sources and makes them accessible through mobile devices. The system consists of four main components: a smart interface, an HL7 message server (HMS), a central clinical database (CCDB), and a web server. The smart interface and the HMS work in concert to generate HL7 messages from the existing legacy systems, which essentially send the patient data in HL7 messages to the CCDB to be stored and maintained. The CCDB and the web server enable the physicians to access the integrated up-to-date patient data. By proposing the smart interface approach, we provide a means for effortless implementation and deployment of such systems. Through a performance study, we show that the HMS is reliable yet fast enough to be able to support efficient clinical data communication.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Spectral integration in primary auditory cortex: laminar processing of afferent input, in vivo and in vitro.

Auditory cortex neurons integrate information over a broad range of sound frequencies, yet it is not known how such integration is accomplished at the cellular or systems levels. Whereas information about frequencies near a neuron's characteristic frequency is likely to be relayed to the neuron by lemniscal thalamocortical inputs from the ventral division of the medial geniculate nucleus, we recently proposed that information about frequencies spectrally distant from characteristic frequency is mainly relayed to the neuron via "horizontal" intracortical projections from neurons with spectrally-distant characteristic frequencies [J Neurophysiol 91 (2004) 2551]. Here we test this hypothesis by using current source density analysis to determine if characteristic frequency and spectrally-distant non-characteristic frequency stimuli preferentially activate thalamocortical and horizontal pathways, respectively, in rat auditory cortex. Characteristic frequency stimuli produced current source density profiles with prominent initial current sinks in layers 3 and 4--the termination zone of lemniscal inputs from medial geniculate nucleus. In contrast, stimuli three octaves below characteristic frequency produced initial current sinks mainly in the infragranular layers. Differences between current source density profiles were only apparent for initial current sinks; profiles for longer-latency current sinks evoked by characteristic frequency and non-characteristic frequency stimuli overlapped to a greater degree, likely due to shared mechanisms of intracortical processing or to longer-latency thalamocortical contributions (lemniscal and nonlemniscal). To identify current source density profiles produced by activation of lemniscal thalamocortical inputs alone, we utilized the mouse auditory thalamocortical slice preparation. Electrical stimulation of the medial geniculate nucleus in vitro produced major current sinks in cortical layers 3/4, and excitation spread horizontally from this point throughout primary auditory cortex to produce current sinks in multiple cortical layers. These data support the hypothesis that relay of thalamocortical information throughout auditory cortex via horizontal intracortical projections may be the basis of broad spectral integration in vivo.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Modeling face identification processing in children and adults.

Two face identification experiments were carried out to study whether and how children (5-year-olds) and adults integrate single facial features to identify faces. Using the paradigm of the Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception each experiment used the same expanded factorial design, with three levels of eyes variations crossed with three levels of mouth variations as well as their corresponding half-face conditions. In Experiment 1, an integration of facial features was observed in adults only. But, in adjusting the salience of the features varied, the results of Experiment 2 indicate that children and adults evaluated and integrated information from both features to identify a face. A weighted Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception fit the judgments significantly better than a Single Channel Model and questions previous claims of holistic face processing. Although no developmental differences in the stage of the integration of facial information were observable, differences between children and adults appeared in the information used for face identification.

Adult↗