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Alterations to the figure of pictures committed to visual memory are more easily detected than alterations to the ground, both in single and paired stimulus tests. Data for 40 scenes from 54 undergraduates suggest that perceptual processes interact with information storage and/or retrieval.
The management and storage of pure tone audiometry data creates a major problem for otolaryngological clinics. We have devised a new computerized database system to overcome this problem. The hardware involved includes multiple audiometers and computers interfaced with a glassfiber local area network (Pi-Net). The software used is database 3 plus, a popular database language and utility software package. Programs were written for data entry, data transfer, reference, entry of patient ID, and evaluation of tympanoplasty. The following benefits of the system are noted. 1) Data entry is possible at every terminal (audiometer and computer). 2) Storage capacity is sufficient for more than 10 years of operation. 3) All data can be retrieved rapidly at any terminal. Evaluations of pre- and post-tympanoplasty hearing loss are facilitated by this system. This system is very effective for follow up of hearing disorders.
Data is king. Data is power. Data is the path to quality. Quality is what our patients want and deserve. Do you use your hospital data to its fullest potential? Do you compare your data to others? Are you improving? If not, you need to investigate ways to fully utilize your data.
Forty elderly patients (13 men and 27 women, aged 56 to 80 years) were enrolled in a single-blind, randomized, parallel study to assess the efficacy and safety of selegiline (10 mg, once daily) and that of L-acetylcarnitine (500 mg, twice daily) in the treatment of patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer-type disorders. The treatments lasted 90 days, after a run-in period of 15 days. An extensive psychometric examination, carried out at baseline and subsequently at every 30 days of treatment, was used for evaluation of efficacy. Drug safety was assessed by noting any adverse effects that occurred during treatment and by performing laboratory tests at the beginning and end of treatment. According to the resulting data, selegiline therapy led to a global improvement in the capacity for the processing, storage, and retrieval of given information. Improvements in verbal fluency and visuospatial abilities were also noted. The marked between-group differences demonstrate that, at the dosage used, selegiline was far more effective than L-acetylcarnitine with respect to the degree of improvement. Finally, tolerability of both drugs was excellent, inasmuch as neither the monitoring for adverse drug reactions nor laboratory tests revealed any abnormalities resulting from therapy.
Successful research in clinical trauma requires the researcher to be exposed to many injured patients, have a personal commitment to research conducted at inconvenient hours and be inquisitive so as to identify clinical problems that need scientific answers. Once initiated, a research project necessitates the collection and storage of clinical data on a weekly basis before patient discharge. A computer data program facilitates later retrieval and statistical analysis. Departmental support of the clinical investigator is mandatory. Although the personal commitments for producing first-rate clinical research may seem excessive, the rewards are commensurate.
OBJECTIVES: The UMLS constitutes the largest existing collection of medical terms. However, little has been published about the users and uses of the UMLS. This study sheds light on these issues. DESIGN: We designed a questionnaire consisting of 26 questions and distributed it to the UMLS user mailing list. Participants were assured complete confidentiality of their replies. To further encourage list members to respond, we promised to provide them with early results prior to publication. Sector analysis of the responses, according to employment organizations is used to obtain insights into some responses. RESULTS: We received 70 responses. The study confirms two intended uses of the UMLS: access to source terminologies (75%), and mapping among them (44%). However, most access is just to a few sources, led by SNOMED, MeSH, and ICD. Out of 119 reported purposes of use, terminology research (37), information retrieval (19), and terminology translation (14) lead. Four important observations are that the UMLS is widely used as a terminology (77%), even though it was not designed as one; many users (73%) want the NLM to mark concepts with multiple parents in an indented hierarchy and to derive a terminology from the UMLS (73%). Finally, auditing the UMLS is a top budget priority (35%) for users. CONCLUSIONS: The study reports many uses of the UMLS in a variety of subjects from terminology research to decision support and phenotyping. The study confirms that the UMLS is used to access its source terminologies and to map among them. Two primary concerns of the existing user base are auditing the UMLS and the design of a UMLS-based derived terminology.
Freezing is often used to retard bacterial enzymatic activity in fecal specimens collected to quantify specific carbohydrates. The effectiveness of freezer storage on preservation of lactose and glucose polymers was assessed. The data showed that more than 50% of lactose that was added to fecal supernatants that were stored without treatment for more than 50 days at -20 degrees C was lost. Adjustment of pH with HCl (pH 4.9), with HgCl2 (pH 6.3 or 5.85), or with NaOH (pH 10) improved carbohydrate preservation (P less than 0.0004). Storage of the supernatants of fecal homogenates lessened the loss of carbohydrate compared with the total homogenates (P less than 0.001). In supernatants, degradation occurred via simple hydrolysis; in homogenates, degradation occurred by hydrolysis and fermentation to a variety of end-products. Unprocessed fecal specimens that were frozen for months, then retrieved and incubated with lactose or glucose polymers showed extensive fermentative capacity. Cumulatively, the data indicate that enzymatic activity in feces is not halted by storage in the freezer, even if bacteria have been filtered from the stool.
In response to rapidly expanding data collection and retrieval needs, a modest perinatal database was initiated. This database combines the ease of entry and retrieval and the continuous accessibility of a microsystem with the storage and back-up advantages of a minicomputer with programming and troubleshooting support. The described system requires no change in medical record keeping, permits data entry by nursing personnel, requires little editing and is reasonably priced.
Data mining in genome sequences can identify distant homologues of known protein families, and is most powerful if solved structures are available to reveal the three-dimensional implications of very dissimilar sequences. Here we describe putative serpin sequences identified with very high statistical significance in the Caenorhabditis elegans genome. When mapped onto vertebrate serpins such as alpha1-antitrypsin, they suggest novel structural features. Some appear complete, some show extensive deletions, and others appear to contain only the C-terminal part of the known serpin fold, probably in partnership with N-terminal regions that have conformations unlike those of known serpins. The observation of such striking sequence similarity, in proteins that must have significantly different overall structures, substantially extends the structural characteristics of the serpin family of proteins.
An associative memory is modeled in networks of cells that are assumed to have the short-term plasticity of the neuromuscular junction of the frog. The data relating synaptic transmission efficiency and stimulation frequency for post-tetanic potentiation of the neuromuscular junction are represented by polynomial expansions. Simulation of storage and retrieval demonstrates that functional associative memory is feasible based on this particular synaptic plasticity. Retrieval reaches a maximum efficiency at a delay of three minutes after storage and is lost after about 9 min. The signal to noise ratio of the retrieved pattern drops steadily as additional associations are stored in memory but retrieval appears to be possible with up to four stored associations. Although the data are derived from synapses not normally proposed as a basis for memory functions, the results here will generalize to other synaptic junctions located more centrally that have similar characteristics. This simulation technique allows the efficiency of associative memory based on various types of synaptic plasticity to be evaluated.
The aims of the study reported here were to describe the information-related behavior of general medical practitioners, to study information communication in general practices, and to establish guidelines for good practice. General practitioners (GPs) were interviewed, and information and communication audits also involving other staff at the practices were undertaken. The main reasons why GPs needed information were for patient care, managing the practice, legal and ethical matters, and teaching trainee GPs. Most practices had problems with internal and external communication and the storage and retrieval of information. The main conclusion is that practices need to have an information strategy that considers human, manual, and computer aspects of information handling.
The Thames Cancer Registry (TCR) has registered a high proportion of tumours from death certificate information only (DCO) registrations. This paper describes the results of a study set up to establish whether this proportion could be reduced by linking cancer registrations with routine hospital data from the Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES) data set using computerized matching. A total of 67752 registrations were identified from the TCR. Matches were found in the HES data set for 66%. The proportion of cases retrieved for each tumour site was: 72% for colorectal cancer; 62% for cancer of the lung, trachea or bronchus; and 65% for female breast cancer. For all three tumour sites the proportion of matches found for patients registered from hospital case notes was higher than the proportion found for patients registered as DCOs (P < 0.0001 for all three tumour sites). Among matched DCO cases, 58% had at least one procedure recorded. DCO rates might be reduced by as much as 43% (from 17% of total registrations to less than 10%) for the three most common cancers if the method of electronic matching outlined here was used. Younger age groups, prognosis of tumour site and residence in North Thames region were all positively associated with successful matching (P < 0.0001 in all three cases). Many matched DCO cases were found to have had more than one admission for cancer. Among ordinary in-patient admissions, admissions to patients ratios of 1.5, 1.4 and 1.9 were found for colorectal, lung and breast cancers respectively. Of 5190 matched DCOs a procedure was recorded for 3013 (58%). HES data offer a useful aid to follow-up of case notes on patients identified to the registry by death certificates. Doubts about the completeness and accuracy of HES data mean case notes must remain the 'gold standard'.
MOTIVATION: A large, high-quality database of homologous sequence alignments with good estimates of their corresponding phylogenetic trees will be a valuable resource to those studying phylogenetics. It will allow researchers to compare current and new models of sequence evolution across a large variety of sequences. The large quantity of data may provide inspiration for new models and methodology to study sequence evolution and may allow general statements about the relative effect of different molecular processes on evolution. RESULTS: The Pandit 7.6 database contains 4341 families of sequences derived from the seed alignments of the Pfam database of amino acid alignments of families of homologous protein domains (Bateman et al., 2002). Each family in Pandit includes an alignment of amino acid sequences that matches the corresponding Pfam family seed alignment, an alignment of DNA sequences that contain the coding sequence of the Pfam alignment when they can be recovered (overall, 82.9% of sequences taken from Pfam) and the alignment of amino acid sequences restricted to only those sequences for which a DNA sequence could be recovered. Each of the alignments has an estimate of the phylogenetic tree associated with it. The tree topologies were obtained using the neighbor joining method based on maximum likelihood estimates of the evolutionary distances, with branch lengths then calculated using a standard maximum likelihood approach.
The Internet consists of a vast inhomogeneous reservoir of data. Developing software that can integrate a wide variety of different data sources is a major challenge that must be addressed for the realisation of the full potential of the Internet as a scientific research tool. This article presents a semi-automated object-oriented programming system for integrating web-based resources. We demonstrate that the current Internet standards (HTML, CGI [common gateway interface], Java, etc.) can be exploited to develop a data retrieval system that scans existing web interfaces and then uses a set of rules to generate new Java code that can automatically retrieve data from the Web. The validity of the software has been demonstrated by testing it on several biological databases. We also examine the current limitations of the Internet and discuss the need for the development of universal standards for web-based data.
Studies have shown that monitoring HIV-infected patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy is best represented by combined measurement of plasma HIV-1 RNA and CD4+ T-lymphocytes [1]. This pilot study at the University of Missouri-Columbia integrates molecular diagnostic and flow cytometric data reporting to provide current and historical HIV-1 RNA levels and CD4+ T-cell counts. The development of a single database for storage and retrieval of these values facilitates composite report generation that includes longitudinal HIV-1 RNA levels and CD4+ T-cell counts for all patients. Results are displayed in tables and plotted graphically within a web browser. This method of data presentation converts individual data points to more useful medical information and could provide clinicians with decision support for improved monitoring of HIV patients undergoing antiretroviral therapy.
Advanced medical imaging requires storage of large quantities of digitized clinical data. These data must be stored in such a way that their retrieval does not impair the clinician's ability to make a diagnosis. In this paper, we propose the theory and algorithm for near (or diagnostically) lossless dynamic image data compression. Taking advantage of domain-specific knowledge related to medical imaging, the medical practice and the dynamic imaging modality, a compression ratio greater than 80:1 is achieved. The high compression ratios are achieved by the proposed compression algorithm through three stages: 1) addressing temporal redundancies in the data through application of image optimal sampling, 2) addressing spatial redundancies in the data through cluster analysis, and 3) efficient coding of image data using standard still-image compression techniques. To illustrate the practicality of the proposed compression algorithm, a simulated positron emission tomography (PET) study using the fluoro-deoxy-glucose (FDG) tracer is presented. Realistic dynamic image data are generated by "virtual scanning" of a simulated brain phantom as a real PET scanner. These data are processed using the conventional [8] and proposed algorithms as well as the techniques for storage and analysis. The resulting parametric images obtained from the conventional and proposed approaches are subsequently compared to evaluate the proposed compression algorithm. As a result of this study, storage space for dynamic image data is able to be reduced by more than 95%, without loss in diagnostic quality. Therefore, the proposed theory and algorithm are expected to be very useful in medical image database management and telecommunication.
We review our experience with a picture archiving and communication system to replace film in the ultrasound section of a clinical radiology department. The system includes three ultrasound units connected by a fiberoptic network via acquisition nodes to a central data management system, workstation, and optical jukebox. The system handles 80% of sonographic studies in the department. Image production, interpretation, storage, and retrieval are evaluated. Despite limitations, a picture archiving and communication system can be integrated into a functioning ultrasound section of an active radiology department with minimal disruption and promising results.
Lack of space and organization have become significant problems in the contemporary business world. Modern industries must eliminate mountains of paper and better organize themselves. With the incorporation of a fully automated equipment management system and image storage system, the Jacobi Medical Center has succeeded in correcting these problems. This technical note shows how the use of computer software and hardware components can be integrated to manage electronic patient care equipment. The adoption of this new technology was applied to equipment maintenance, tracking and record-keeping, thereby accomplishing the aims of space conservation and organization. As the components became more advanced, the technology included computer software products that could store more information and electronically effect a more rapid document retrieval. This will eventually allow for a paperless operation. The latest available equipment management software is supported by an image storage system that may contain important signature documents and outside vendor information. The applicability of these systems to the biomedical engineering field is obvious: (a) space efficiency eliminates folders and files; (b) simultaneous technician access to equipment history; and (c) rapid archive retrieval of data as well as vendor information and safety alerts.