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I2C: a system for the indexing, storage, and retrieval of medical images by content.

Image indexing, storage, and retrieval based on pictorial content is a feature of image database systems which is becoming of increasing importance in many application domains. Medical image database systems, which support the retrieval of images generated by different modalities based on their pictorial content, will provide added value to future generation picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), and can be used as a diagnostic decision support tools and as a tool for medical research and training. We present the architecture and features of I2C, a system for the indexing, storage, and retrieval of medical images by content. A unique design feature of this architecture is that it also serves as a platform for the implementation and performance evaluation of image description methods and retrieval strategies. I2C is a modular and extensible system, which has been developed based on object-oriented principles. It consists of a set of cooperating modules which facilitate the addition of new graphical tools, image description and matching algorithms. These can be incorporated into the system at the application level. The core concept of I2C is an image class hierarchy. Image classes encapsulate different segmentation and image content description algorithms. Medical images are assigned to image classes based on a set of user-defined attributes such as imaging modality, type of study, anatomical characteristics, etc. This class-based treatment of images in the I2C system achieves increased accuracy and efficiency of content-based retrievals, by limiting the search space and allowing specific algorithms to be fine-tuned for images acquired by different modalities or representing different parts of the anatomy.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

The poor quality of information about laparoscopy on the World Wide Web as indexed by popular search engines.

BACKGROUND: This study was undertaken to determine the quality of information on the Internet regarding laparoscopy. METHODS: Four popular World Wide Web search engines were used with the key word "laparoscopy." Advertisements, patient- or physician-directed information, and controversial material were noted. RESULTS: A total of 14,030 Web pages were found, but only 104 were unique Web sites. The majority of the sites were duplicate pages, subpages within a main Web page, or dead links. Twenty-eight of the 104 pages had a medical product for sale, 26 were patient-directed, 23 were written by a physician or group of physicians, and six represented corporations. The remaining 21 were "miscellaneous." The 46 pages containing educational material were critically reviewed. At least one of the senior authors found that 32 of the pages contained controversial or misleading statements. All of the three senior authors (LKN, NAO, GAF) independently agreed that 17 of the 46 pages contained controversial information. CONCLUSION: The World Wide Web is not a reliable source for patient or physician information about laparoscopy. Authenticating medical information on the World Wide Web is a difficult task, and no government or surgical society has taken the lead in regulating what is presented as fact on the World Wide Web.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Problems faced by editors of peer reviewed medical journals.

Forty-six medical and dental journals are published from Pakistan of which only 29 are currently recognized by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council. Only a few are peer reviewed. Six are indexed in Medline while EMBASE Excerpta Medica and World Health Organization Index Medicus for Eastern Mediterranean Region cover others. Editors of the peer reviewed medical journals are faced with numerous problems, which relate to the authors. Some of these are: shortage of quality of manuscripts, poor quality of reviewers, problems with indexation in international indexing services particularly Medline, duplicate submission and authorship and lastly, financial problems. Patronage from the Pharma industry is the major source of revenue which itself has serious implications. Editing a medical journal is a very stressful job and the editors have to work under too many pressures. A lot of useful data is presented at medical conferences, but a vast majority of it remains unpublished for various reasons, which adversely affects the citation rate from scientists from the developing third world countries in the world of medical literature. A few lectures on medical writing and research methodology to final year medical students will expose them to the art of medical writing. Specialty organizations can be persuaded to have a session on medical writing at their conferences, which will be extremely helpful not only to the potential new authors but also others, thereby improving the quality of their manuscripts. In addition to regular seminars, workshops for authors, reviewers and training courses for editors, subscribing to local medical journals by healthcare professionals and libraries are some of the measures that will help improve the situation to a great extent.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

[Documentation in developing countries and related technological issues].

While bibliographical referencing and indexing services have risen to a high level of efficiency-thanks to computers and other technical innovations-the same cannot be said for documentation in the form of texts and charts. However early an order is placed, it can take weeks for the final stage of the process to be completed. If even in developed countries the process can be slow and costly, in developing countries it is affected by the same socioeconomic conditions that impede the provision of health services. In the latter countries wide variations are apparent in the numbers of libraries, collections and lending library systems, and in the accessibility of books and journals on health. For physicians and nurses at some remote locations the only source of information on discoveries and new ideas may be the advertising supplied to them by traveling medical salesmen. There are grounds for optimism, however. In these countries more and more important books and journals are being published in the health field. In Latin America a number of areas of national interaction have come into view which promise to grow into a true network of biomedical and health information.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

MYCIN II: design and implementation of a therapy reference with complex content-based indexing.

We describe the construction of MYCIN II, a prototype system that provides for content-based markup and search of a forthcoming clinical therapeutics textbook, Antimicrobial Therapy and Vaccines. Existing commercial search technology for digital references utilizes generic tools such as textword-based searches with geographical or statistical refinements. We suggest that the drawbacks of such systems significantly restrict their use in everyday clinical practice. This is in spite of the fact that there is a great need for the information contained within these same references. The system we describe is intended to supplement keyword searching so that certain important questions can be asked easily and can be answered reliably (in terms of precision and recall). Our method attacks this problem in a restricted domain of knowledge-clinical infectious disease. For example, we would like to be able to answer the class of questions exemplified by the following query: "What antimicrobial agents can be used to treat endocarditis caused by Eikenella corrodens?" We have compiled and analyzed a list of such questions to develop a concept-based markup scheme. This scheme was then applied within an HTML markup to electronically "highlight" passages from three textbook chapters. We constructed a functioning web-based search interface. Our system also provides semi-automated querying of PubMed using our concept markup and the user's actions as a guide.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

How fast are hospital prices really rising?

The hospital services component of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measures the cost of hospital services to private patients paying list prices. It is, however, widely used as an estimate of the overall rate of inflation in hospital prices in spite of the fact that there are strong reasons to believe that it is inappropriate to use the CPI for this purpose. This is because: 1) A growing number of patients are enrolled in health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which negotiate discounts from list prices; and 2) the size of the discounts may have been increasing. The potential result is a gap between the rate of inflation of list prices and the rate of inflation of actual prices paid in transactions. This study explores whether such a gap exists and determines its possible magnitude. In addition, parallel indices for list and actual prices are computed on the basis of data from California hospitals for fiscal years 1983-1988. The analysis suggests that list price inflation has greatly exceeded actual inflation--by a factor of two for recent years. These findings have broad implications for evaluating not only inflation but also the impact of cost containment strategies.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

Development of the WAIS-III general ability index estimate (GAI-E).

The WAIS-III General Ability Index (GAI; Tulsky, Saklofske, Wilkins, & Weiss, 2001) is a recently developed, 6-subtest measure of global intellectual functioning. However, clinical use of the GAI is currently limited by the absence of a method to estimate premorbid functioning as measured by this index. The purpose of this study was to develop regression equations to estimate GAI scores from demographic variables and WAIS-III subtest performance. Participants consisted of those subjects in the WAIS-III standardization sample that has complete demographic data (N=2,401) and were randomly divided into two groups. The first group (n=1,200) was used to develop the formulas (i.e., Development group) and the second (n=1,201) group was used to validate the prediction algorithms (i.e., Validation group). Demographic variables included age, education, ethnicity, gender and region of country. Subtest variables included vocabulary, information, picture completion, and matrix reasoning raw scores. Ten regression algorithms were generated designed to estimate GAI. The GAI-Estimate (GAI-E) algorithms accounted for 58% to 82% of the variance. The standard error of estimate ranged from 6.44 to 9.57. The correlations between actual and estimated GAI ranged from r=.76 to r=.90. These algorithms provided accurate estimates of GAI in the WAIS-III standardization sample. Implications for estimating GAI in patients with known or suspected neurological dysfunction is discussed and future research is proposed.

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AIM-TWX service at the University of Virginia: a review and evaluation.

The paper reviews the highlights of a four-week trial period (November 19-December 18, 1970) during which the Medical Library of the University of Virginia experimented with a new remote-access bibliographical control and retrieval system via its TWX machine. The system, called AIM-TWX, was sponsored by the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications and utilizes a timeshared IBM 360/67 computer in Santa Monica, California. Citations from 109 clinically-oriented journals from 1966 to date, including those currently included in the Abridged Index Medicus, may be retrieved either on- or off-line. Various aspects of this service are described, including problems of staffing, training, and record keeping, as well as the role of the MeSH vocabulary which is the principle "language" of the man-computer dialog. The statistical results indicated that the system was used for approximately 200 minutes on nineteen days and that an average of sixteen searches were run on any given day, or about 4.6 searches per hour of use. In spite of an inexperienced staff who had little knowledge of the MeSH vocabulary and whose training schedule was limited to one four-hour session, the experiment was highly successful in terms of searches and citations. At the end of the period, 298 searches had been run for 114 requestors, and 5,343 citations had been produced. Only fifty-five searches yielded no citations. The experiment generated a great deal of excitement and interest among the staff of the Library and of the Medical Center. Moreover, a large number of medical practitioners in large and small communities of Virginia participated in this experiment, indicating that there exists a great demand for this type of literature searching which AIM-TWX is able to provide with great rapidity.

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Gender and race: an interaction affecting the replicability of well-being across groups.

The Life Satisfaction Index (LSI) continues to be one of the most frequently used measures of well-being in social gerontology. Discrepancies in the operational use of the LSI, however, have made comparisons across studies difficult. Few studies have incorporated examination of the effect of gender/race interactions on the performance of the LSI. The purpose of this study was to examine differences in the hierarchical factor structure of life satisfaction among four gender/race groups using previously reported item pools and coding schemes. Three second-order, three-factor life satisfaction models were examined using confirmatory factor analysis techniques with four groups of older adults: White men (n = 846), White women (n = 1341), Black men (n = 177), and Black women (n = 287). In general, results showed differences in LSI factor structure across gender/race groups. With regard to coding scheme, models using Neugarten et al.'s original coding scheme (1961) and those using Wood et al.'s alternative scoring (1969) were similar. Examination of models using different LSI item pools showed that the factor structure of life satisfaction was affected by the gender/race interaction, underscoring the problem of misspecification resulting from the sum of LSI items and use of the summated score as a unidimensional measure of well-being. Implications for future research are discussed.

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A comprehensive measure of pharmaceutical services: the pharmaceutical-care index.

The construction, validation, and use of a numerical index for measuring the provision of pharmaceutical care are described. The 681 respondents to the 1987 Great Lakes Pharmacy Services Survey were randomly divided into two equal groups of hospitals. Data for the first group (n = 341) were used to construct and validate the pharmaceutical-care index (PCI); data for the second group were used for index analysis. Bivariate analysis of 14 major inpatient pharmaceutical services resulted in one service, admission medication histories, being dropped from the index. Multivariate analysis showed that the remaining services contributed equally to the PCI; they were therefore retained. The possible range of PCI scores was -11.166 to 26.518, with a high score indicating greater provision of service. Analysis of data for the second randomly selected group of hospitals (n = 340) showed that PCI scores differed significantly on the basis of hospital size, hospital teaching affiliation, and pharmacy director's education. The correlation between average daily census and PCI score was fair. Higher scores were associated with the presence of a clinical coordinator or a clinical pharmacist. There were weak associations between PCI score and numbers of pharmacists, pharmacy managers, drug distribution pharmacists, and clinical pharmacists. However, the number of decentralized pharmacists and the number of technicians both showed a fair association with PCI score. Hospitals that had pharmacist participation in ambulatory-care clinics or a staff development program had higher PCI scores than hospitals that did not. The provision of inpatient pharmaceutical services, as assessed by the PCI, may be influenced by hospital size, teaching affiliation, the education of the pharmacy director, and other factors. Further research is needed to extend these findings to other hospitals, expose interactions among the factors that affect pharmaceutical care, and refine the PCI.

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Electronic surveillance of the pharmacology-toxicology literature: the need for controlled vocabularies and registry systems.

Controlled vocabularies of "preferred names" and registry systems are essential in electronic indexing, storing, searching, and retrieving the world's published literature. The most efficient and comprehensive search is accomplished by using the preferred name. Without a controlled vocabulary or a registry system, it would be necessary to remember every name that might have been used by authors since January 1966, in order to retrieve all the citations on a chemical from over 7.8 million citations currently in the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE and its backfiles. The task of creating the list of subject descriptors that make possible the surveillance of published literature via electronic databases requires the participation of the scientific community in developing domain-specific nomenclature, drug classification, controlled vocabularies, and registry systems as well. The biological unions of the International Council of Scientific Unions and its Committee on Data for Science and Technology are major contributors to the establishment and dissemination of standards for biological terminology and nomenclature. The objectives of the IUPHAR Nomenclature Committee include the development of a rational framework for the nomenclature of receptor classes or families and a classification for therapeutic agents. This will help define rules for the characterization and classification of receptors that are stable and easy to comprehend. The International Union of Pharmacology publishes guidelines for the classification of drugs and the nomenclature of receptors and ion channels.

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Can electronic search engines optimize screening of search results in systematic reviews: an empirical study.

BACKGROUND: Most electronic search efforts directed at identifying primary studies for inclusion in systematic reviews rely on the optimal Boolean search features of search interfaces such as DIALOG and Ovid. Our objective is to test the ability of an Ultraseek search engine to rank MEDLINE records of the included studies of Cochrane reviews within the top half of all the records retrieved by the Boolean MEDLINE search used by the reviewers. METHODS: Collections were created using the MEDLINE bibliographic records of included and excluded studies listed in the review and all records retrieved by the MEDLINE search. Records were converted to individual HTML files. Collections of records were indexed and searched through a statistical search engine, Ultraseek, using review-specific search terms. Our data sources, systematic reviews published in the Cochrane library, were included if they reported using at least one phase of the Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy (HSSS), provided citations for both included and excluded studies and conducted a meta-analysis using a binary outcome measure. Reviews were selected if they yielded between 1000-6000 records when the MEDLINE search strategy was replicated. RESULTS: Nine Cochrane reviews were included. Included studies within the Cochrane reviews were found within the first 500 retrieved studies more often than would be expected by chance. Across all reviews, recall of included studies into the top 500 was 0.70. There was no statistically significant difference in ranking when comparing included studies with just the subset of excluded studies listed as excluded in the published review. CONCLUSION: The relevance ranking provided by the search engine was better than expected by chance and shows promise for the preliminary evaluation of large results from Boolean searches. A statistical search engine does not appear to be able to make fine discriminations concerning the relevance of bibliographic records that have been pre-screened by systematic reviewers.

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Indexing of Internet resources in order to improve the provision of problem-relevant medical information.

Due to the information overload and the unstructured access to (medical) information of the internet, it isn't hardly possible to find problem-relevant medical information in an appropriate time (e.g. during a consultation). The web offers a mixture of web pages, forums, newsgroups and databases. The search for problem-relevant information for a certain knowledge area encounters on two basic problems. On the one hand, you have to find in the jungle of the information, relevant resources for your individual clinical case (treatment, diagnosis, therapeutic option etc..). The second problem consists of being able to judge the quality of individual contents of inteernet pages. On the basis of the different informational needs of health care professionals and patients a catalog with inteernet resources was created to tumor diseases such as lung cancer (small cell and non-small cell carcinoma), colorectal cancer and thyroid cancer. Explicit and implicit metainformation, if available, such as the title of the document, language, date or keywords are stored in the database. The database entries are editorially revised, so that further specific metainformation is available for the information retrieval. Our pragmatic approach of searching, editing, and archiving of internet content is still necessary since most of the web documents are based on HTML, which doesn't allow for structuring (medical) information and assigning metainformation sufficiently. The use of specific metainformation is crucial in order to improve the recall and precision of internet searches. In the future, XML and related technologies (RDF) will meet these requirements.

Abstracting and Indexing↗

A controlled vocabulary for nursing and allied health in Norway.

Nursing and allied health libraries at educational institutions in Norway have generally indexed their book collections with uncontrolled terms. With the reorganization of higher education in 1994, the majority of these libraries joined BIBSYS, which is a joint library system for higher education and research in Norway. This has led to chaos when searching the joint catalogue for literature on nursing and related fields. A term such as 'behaviour problems' may have up to five synonyms. In an attempt to improve the quality of searching the health literature, BIBSYS appointed a working group in the Spring of 1999 to find a suitable controlled vocabulary for this subject area, and to see how this vocabulary could be integrated into BIBSYS. The group presented its recommendations in October 1999. The report has been well received by the BIBSYS Board and by user groups. There are no Norwegian vocabularies that are suitable for use in nursing and allied health, therefore it will be necessary to translate and combine existing thesauri. The group has looked at the Nordic Multilingual Thesaurus on Health Promotion, the Swedish Spriline Thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and CINAHL Subject Heading List. Other relevant thesauri are AMED/CATS Thesaurus, Bioethics Thesaurus (Bioethicsline) and the RCN thesaurus. The group recommends the development of a Norwegian thesaurus based on a translation of parts of MeSH and CINAHL Subject Heading List.

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Three decades of the Ceylon Medical Journal--analysis using MEDLINE (PubMed).

INTRODUCTION: The Ceylon Medical Journal (CMJ) is the only Sri Lankan medical journal that is indexed in MEDLINE (PubMed). Publications in the CMJ from 1965 March to 2001 December were analysed using the PubMed interface of MEDLINE. METHOD: Using PubMed we downloaded the CMJ bibliography in MEDLINE format. Important tagged fields were written to a Microsoft-Access database using a PubMed Grabber/Analyser program. The analysis was done using Access-SQL and PubMed queries. RESULTS: There were 1472 citations by 1373 authors. 944 authors had only one and 176 had two articles. The top 10 authors contributed 8% and the top 25, 15.4% of the articles. Publications types were: 68.5% 'journal articles', 10.4% letters, 4.2% historical articles and 4.1% reviews. Controlled clinical trials, randomised controlled trials and clinical trials together totalled only 39 (2.1%). Articles were classified using 2 to 44 medical subject headings (MeSH; average 11.4, mode 9) from the MeSH vocabulary. CMJ articles classified using broad MeSH categories were (top five): infections 370(15 %), pathological conditions signs and symptoms 266( 10.8%), haemic, lymphatic and immunologic 199 (7.7%), endocrine, nutritional and metabolic 189 (7.7%), neoplasms 179(7.3%). DISCUSSION: For 938 (68%) authors, publishing in the CMJ was a one time affair. The top 50 authors contributed nearly a quarter (23.2%). A product of this research is an off-line CMJ searching system from 1965 to 2001 with menu driven search facilities which will be a useful tool for researchers.

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[Two or three things about the PMSI in stomatology and maxillofacial surgery].

The Information Systems Medicalization Program (PMSI in French) was created in 1985 for Public Health Service Hospitalisation Structures. It appeared to be directly derived from the North-American Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) system. Since them, the PMSI has been progressively developed in private structures as well. The authors have had the opportunity to use the latest version of the computer program which was elaborated in order to share the patients into more than 500 different groups of pathology. These groups were called "Homogeneous Patients Groups" (GHM in French). To each group corresponds a "Synthetic Activity Index" number (ISA in French). It is supposed to be representative of the average cost of the management of each kind of patients, based on the diagnosis and the surgery possibly done. Several astonishing findings have been made. Some of them can be summarized as mentioned below: In maxillofacial Surgery, each group (GHM) seems in fact to be extremely inhomogeneous: for example, total parotidectomy with preservation of the facial nerve belongs to the same group as accessory salivary gland exeresis. Total skin graft is in the same group as free composite osseous flap with vascular anastomosis. Coding a surgical procedure leads often to reduce the ISA number in comparison with the same patient without surgery: "impacted third molar" gives 754 points without surgery but only 658 if surgery is performed. Carcinologic surgery is wholly grouped in the same category, even for rather short procedures as isolated partial glossectomy. This group corresponds to a great number of ISA points (6486) while bimaxillary surgery or free flap transfer gives less than 2500 points. In conclusion, the use of the PMSI to allocate financial means can be extremely dangerous for maxillofacial surgery units and consequently for the quality of the medical care in our Specialty. Further studies are obviously necessary to complete a critical analysis of the current system and to improve it.

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Meta-analysis of the sensitivity and specificity of platform posturography.

OBJECTIVE: To compare the sensitivity and specificity of platform posturography with other vestibular tests for patients with peripheral vestibular deficits (PVD), Meniere's disease, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), and central nervous system-vestibular impairment (CNS). DATA SOURCES: A computed search was conducted using the Index Medicus database (1966-1994) and Current Contents Science Editions. STUDY SELECTION: Studies were selected for analysis if the article addressed the sensitivity and/or specificity of platform posturography, compared posturography with another objective test of vestibular function, identified the basis for abnormal test results, and reported the data with sufficient detail to calculate an effect size from a 2 x 2 contingency table. DATA EXTRACTION: A count of the normal and abnormal test results for posturography and the criterion standard were retrieved from each article, analyzed using a chi 2 statistic, and converted to an effect size. A positive effect size indicated that posturography identified abnormalities in patients who had normal tests on the criterion standard. DATA SYNTHESIS: Sensitivity and specificity of posturography were about 50%. The overall effect size was small (0.13) but positive. The diagnostic category had a significant influence on the predictive value of abnormal results (73% for Meniere's disease and BPPV, compared with 41% for PVD, and 44% for mixed CNS and PVD (F2,12 = 5.26, P = .02) and on the magnitude of the effect size (0.41 for mixed CNS and PVD compared with 0.22 for Meniere's disease and BPPV, and -0.10 for PVD (F2,12 = 13.95, P = .001). CONCLUSIONS: Platform posturography provides a measurable supplement to the standard vestibular examination. The enhancement was most notable when the target population included patients with CNS deficits.

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[Revista de Saúde Pública: forty years of Brazilian scientific production].

OBJECTIVE: To recognize the characteristics and path taken by the through analysis of the scientific production it has published over the period from 1967 to 2005. METHODS: Scientometric methods were used to analyze reference data on the articles published in the Revista, retrieved from the databases ISI/Thomson Scientific (Web of Science), National Library of Medicine (PubMed) and Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO). RESULTS: The Revista is the only Brazilian publication in the field of public health that is indexed by ISI/Thomson Scientific. It is prominent as a medium for publishing Brazilian scientific production in public health and is displaying a geometric increase in publication and citation, with annual rates of 4.4% and 12.7%, respectively. The mean number of authors per paper has risen from 2 to 3.5 over recent years. Although original research articles predominate, the numbers of reviews, multicenter studies, clinical trials and validation studies have been increasing. The number of articles published in foreign languages has also increased, accounting for 13% of the total, and the leading countries originating these are the UK, USA, Argentina and Mexico. The number and diversity of journals citing the Journal has been increasing, many of which are non-Brazilian. Authorship per author shows good fit to Lotka's Law, but the parameters suggest greater concentration and less dispersion than would be expected. Among the fields of interest of published papers, the following topics account for more than 50% of the total volume: infectious-parasitic diseases and vectors; health promotion, policies and administration; and epidemiology, surveillance and disease control. CONCLUSIONS: The Revista shows great dynamism, without signs of abating or reaching a plateau any time soon. There are signs of progressively increasing complexity in the studies published, and more multidisciplinary work. The Revista seems to be widening its outreach and recognition, while remaining faithful to the field of public health in Brazil.

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