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Bioinformatics has developed as a key discipline to support science. Integrated access to the various new and established information resources is a key requirement for their future utility. A strategy for this integration has been developed and is being demonstrated to a core group of European users.
Since 1983, the Spencer S. Eccles Health Sciences Library has presented InfoFair, an annual event featuring presentations, exhibits, demonstrations, and workshops on computer and information topics of interest to health professionals and health information providers at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center and throughout Utah. The first InfoFair was held in response to an increasing number of inquiries from library users on how to search MEDLINE from their home or office computers. The focus of InfoFair has expanded and changed over the past nineteen years to reflect changes in library users' computer and information needs, concerns, and interests. While themes and programs have changed, a definite set of trends, guidelines, and procedures have developed based on the experience gained each year. The purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the changes in InfoFair from 1983 to 2001 and to present information for use by other libraries for planning and presenting similar events.
In 1990, the Republican Scientific-Medical Library (RSML) of the Ministry of Health of Armenia in collaboration with the Fund for Armenian Relief created a vision of a national library network supported by information technology. This vision incorporated four goals: (1) to develop a national resource collection of biomedical literature accessible to all health professionals, (2) to develop a national network for access to bibliographic information, (3) to develop a systematic mechanism for sharing resources, and (4) to develop a national network of health sciences libraries. During the last decade, the RSML has achieved significant progress toward all four goals and has realized its vision of becoming a fully functional national library. The RSML now provides access to the literature of the health sciences including access to the Armenian medical literature, provides education and training to health professionals and health sciences librarians, and manages a national network of libraries of the major health care institutions in Armenia. The RSML is now able to provide rapid access to the biomedical literature and train health professionals and health sciences librarians in Armenia in information system use. This paper describes the evolution of the RSML and how it was accomplished.
OBJECTIVES: Information systems are expensive to create, and consume resources in their operation. They are justified in order to achieve clearly defined objectives in health service quality and efficiency. To ensure that these objectives are being met, and in order to build up an evidence-base to support well focused policies, systems, and practice, evaluation would seem to be fully justified and indeed essential. However, there are major factors jeopardising good evaluation practice, ranging from reluctance to commit resources or expose decisions to scrutiny, through to lack of appreciation of the full range of dimensions which should be studied. This paper seeks to create fuller appreciation of the issues and their importance. METHODS: Experiential and literature reviews form the basis of an exposition of principles, methods, and key current activities. RESULTS: A summary has been produced of the key challenges to health ICT evaluation, and its adverse comparison with other sectors. An explanation of the viewpoints and levels of health information evaluation is followed by a short history of principal milestones, current scientific methodology activity, and key collaborative activities. CONCLUSION: The need for a stronger commitment to health ICT evaluation is demonstrated if the application of health informatics systems is to receive due recognition as scientifically and empirically justified. Commitment of resources and scientific endeavour are needed, and thus the recent Declaration of Innsbruck, arising out of an event sponsored by the European Science Foundation, is timely and fully justified.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) developed Science-in-the-Box (SIB; www.scienceinthebox.com) after discussions with their stakeholders as to how the consumer products company could better communicate key environmental performance and safety information to the public. A series of workshops enabled P&G to understand that consumers and other key business decision makers wanted meaningful information about the science behind P&G products. In addition, it was clear that making such information available would produce business benefits by encouraging long-term relationships with decision makers ranging from consumers and retailers to policy makers and nongovernmental organizations. These benefits were not necessarily quantifiable in the short term, but they still had to be balanced by the costs in terms of resource commitment and potential intellectual property issues. Since its inception in September 2002, SIB has successfully reached key target audiences and built improved credibility and confidence in P&G products and approaches. The website is now available in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian and is used by consumers, journalists, teachers, scientists, and policy makers. Several user surveys carried out during the initial developmental period, together with unsolicited e-mail feedback, have demonstrated that SIB has successfully created a platform for continuous dialogue with consumers and other interested parties.
For many years, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences has been a leader in studying the role of environmental factors in the causation of diseases that are particularly prevalent or unique to women. As we enter the next millennium, we face exciting new possibilities in broadening our understanding of how the environment impacts women's health. Sophisticated new technology and scientific information are now available to help us more precisely define environmental contributions to disease. Moreover, further development of our information base in environmental health sciences will usher in a new era of informed preventive care for women of all ages. The hallmark of this new era will be our ability to finally address the etiology and prevention of disease, rather than simply focusing on treatment and management of human illness.
Anatomy is a visual science. For centuries, anatomic information has been conveyed through drawings that have been presented to students through every available medium. The projection of animated images from a computer is a medium that offers great promise in effecting improved communication of anatomic information. Using Microsoft PowerPoint software, we have developed animated presentations for all of our lectures in Gross and Developmental Anatomy. As a starting point, we scan pen-and-ink drawings to create a digital image. The image may be edited and manipulated in an image processing program. Next, the image is imported into a PowerPoint slide where it is labeled and otherwise enhanced (arteries overlaid with red color, veins in blue, etc.) and the enhancements are animated, as we describe here step by step. For the lecture, the file is loaded on a server that is accessible through a network from a computer in the lecture hall. The output is directed to a video projector and the PowerPoint presentation is projected in the "Slide Show" mode. We use a wireless mouse that allows us to control the presentation from anywhere in the room. Before the lecture, students are provided with the same unlabeled drawings as handouts, and during the lecture the students are actively engaged in labeling the drawings and making related notes. After the lecture, the file is saved in HTML format and posted on our course web site where students can access the slides. Evaluation by the students at the end of the course demonstrated that this style of presentation was very favorably received.
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Science can provide more information about the nature of aggressive acts, and therefore the mens rea of criminal offenses, than is commonly assumed. For example, progress has been made in classifying aggression as impulsive or premeditated within the context of the role of conscious experience in controlling behavior. This review of the status of the scientific ability to distinguish conscious from unconscious acts and more specifically impulsive from premeditated aggressive acts is organized around four themes: (i) How is aggression defined and measured in general? (ii) How does the distinction between impulsive and premeditated aggression relate to the legal concept of mens rea? (iii) How do various scientific disciplines contribute to the mind/body discourse? (iv) What risk factors are associated with impulsive and premeditated aggression respectively? The authors conclude that the most promising approach to researching the nature of behavioral intention and motivation is to apply a discipline neutral model that integrates the data from multiple disciplines, collectively designated the cognitive neurosciences.
The objective of this paper is to support the following thesis: In health services research, a statistician can, and often should, contribute beyond what is generally defined as the 'classical' statistician project role. I use projects from RAND Health, the health services research division of the RAND Corporation, to demonstrate the issues that arise for the statistician in this expanded collaborative role. These projects are the 'HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study' (HCSUS) and the 'Ephedra: Clinical Efficacy and Side Effects Project'. HCSUS collected information on a nationally representative sample of people in care for HIV infection in order to determine what services were being delivered and their cost in order to guide policy decisions on the allocation of limited health care resources. The ephedra project was a systematic review conducted by the Southern California Evidence-Based Practice Centre to provide information on the existing science so that the National Institutes of Health could guide an expanded research effort to better understand the safety of ephedrine alkaloids. In order to collaborate on more than just the data analysis of a typical project, the statistician must proactively contribute to all project phases. These phases include problem formulation, study design, data collection, analysis, and the communication of results. The statistician needs to effectively and efficiently balance methodological, substantive, practical, and sometimes even ethical demands. As a result of contributing beyond standard statistical tasks, the statistician may directly impact health policy decisions.
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The objectives of teaching evidence-based surgery (EBS) are to inform and convince that EBS is a method of interrogation, reasoning, appraisal, and application of information to guide physicians in their decisions to best treat their patients. Asking the right, answerable questions, translating them into effective searches for the best evidence, critically appraising evidence for its validity and importance, and then integrating EBS with their patients' values and preferences are daily chores for all surgeons. Teaching and learning EBS should be patient-centered, learner-centered, and active and interactive. The teacher should be a model for students to become an expert clinician who is able to match and take advantage of the clinical setting and circumstances to ask and to answer appropriate questions. The process is multistaged. Teaching EBS in small groups is ideal. However, it is time-consuming for the faculty and must be clearly and formally structured. As well, evidence-based medicine (EBM) courses must cater to local institutional needs, must receive broad support from the instructors and the providers of information (librarians and computer science faculty), use proven methodologies, and avoid scheduling conflicts. In agreement with others, we believe that the ideal moment to introduce the concepts of EBM into the curriculum of the medical student is early, during the first years of medical school. Afterward, it should be continued every year. When this is not the case, as in many countries, it becomes the province of the surgeon in teaching hospitals, whether they are at the university, are university-affiliated, or not, to fulfill this role.
INTRODUCTION: The evolution of the field of neurological surgery has been marked by a progressive minimalism. This has been evident in the development of an entire arsenal of modern neurosurgical enterprises, including microneurosurgery, neuroendoscopy, stereotactic neurosurgery, endovascular techniques, radiosurgical systems, intraoperative and navigational devices, and in the last decade, cellular and molecular adjuvants. AIMS: In addition to reviewing the major developments and paradigm shifts in the cyclic reinvention of the field as it currently stands, this paper attempts to identify forces and developments that are likely to fuel the irresistible escalation of minimalism into the future. These forces include discoveries in computational science, imaging, molecular science, biomedical engineering, and information processing as they relate to the theme of minimalism. DISCUSSION: These areas are explained in the light of future possibilities offered by the emerging field of nanotechnology with molecular engineering.
The question whether a scientist can be responsible for an outcome of her work which she does not foresee, and so is ignorant of, is addressed. It is argued that ignorance can be a ground for the attribution of responsibility, on condition that there are general principles, rules or norms, that the subject should be aware of. It is maintained that there are such rules which inform the practice of science as a social institution.
Thirty years ago, the idea that culture and philosophy could provide a foundation for normative medical ethics was more easily entertained than it is today when the very notion of a norm, whether culturally, philosophically or ethically derived, is in itself a problem. In large measure this comes from our contemporary embrace of cultural and philosophical pluralism and an increasing tendency to exchange the difficult belief in abstract and universally applicable norms for the more accessible notion that ethical values are cultural and relative derivatives. Despite this, in the face of the unprecedented ethical dilemmas presented by modern medicine, we have attempted to apply traditional ethical norms and analysis to modern medicine to establish a consensus for its right practice. Unfortunately, the attempt has not been successful, so that wherever we turn we find that ethical problems in medicine remain intractable and unresolved. That, in turn, has prompted a certain scepticism about the efficacy of ethics in medicine. In order to understand why we have reached this impasse, it is essential to realize that we have seriously underestimated the way science and technology have informed and, as a consequence, transformed the practice of medicine. Contributing to this, our tendency to think of technology simply as a way of doing things has blinded us to the fact that it is more fundamentally a way of thinking, knowing and valuing.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
The cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) is often used in learning control. It can be viewed as a basis function network (BFN). The conventional CMAC uses local constant basis functions. A disadvantage is that its output is constant within each quantized state and the derivative information is not preserved. If the constant basis functions are replaced by non-constant differentiable basis functions, the derivative information will be able to be stored into the structure as well. In this paper, the generalized scheme that uses general basis functions is investigated. The conventional CMAC is a special case of the generalized technique. The mathematical foundation for the modified scheme is derived and the convergence of learning is proved. Simulations for the CMAC with Gaussian basis functions (GBFs) are performed to demonstrate the improvement of accuracy in modeling, and the capability in providing derivative information. Copyright 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd