Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Information Science”

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

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

At least 1,279 records · Page 71Linked to original sources

Sharing science: characteristics of effective scientist-teacher interactions.

Despite national guidelines to reform K-12 science education, our students are not learning science any better. Conducted under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a symposium examined several programs where professional scientists interact with classroom teachers to improve science education. Symposium participants described their projects and discussed the factors that contribute or detract from each project's success. The events of this symposium are critically analyzed. Four themes emerged as issues that affect the successful implementation and continuation of science education reform projects: scientific literacy as a primary goal, personal characteristics and commitment of project partners, curricular change built on social and developmental goals, and the incentive/reward structures in universities and school systems. This review of the emergent themes places the opinions of the symposium participants into the larger context of a growing science education research literature to inform others about synergy between professional scientists and classroom teachers. Our aim is to help others learn about the characteristics of effective partnerships to improve science education.

Cooperative Behavior↗

Utilizing Geographic Information Systems in community assessment and nursing research.

Application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in health sciences is relatively new, but it appears to be expanding faster than any other areas of GIS application. Although health scientists have long been using geographic information conceptually, the current availability of user-friendly GIS tools has caused a rapid endorsement of GIS in community health research. Locations of disease incidence, surrounding environments, health care facilities, geographic boundaries of the communities, and other essential community infrastructures have always been essential components of epidemiological and health care studies. This article provides an example of the effective use of GIS in a community assessment project. The purpose of this project was to survey the households in Hinds County, Mississippi, to assess community health status and the under-utilization of health care services. Ultimately, the assessment will be used to positively influence health outcomes within defined geographic communities. Community assessment was accomplished using extensive face-to-face surveys coupled with GIS technology to optimize the process and to evaluate the results.

Community Health Nursing↗

What might echography learn from image science?

We review the current state of knowledge of the processes by which the information content of ultrasonic pulse-echo images is transferred to an observer, to the point of contributing to diagnostic judgments. As systematic knowledge in this specific field is rather sparse, we present relevant information and techniques derived from other areas of image science, both medical and otherwise. Quantitative measures both of the information content of ultrasonic and other images and of their characteristic noise content are first considered. An account is then given of the relevant aspects of human visual psychophysics, with particular reference to perception of contrast and detail, image texture, movement and colour, again with emphasis on documenting quantitative aspects of such behaviour. Against this background, we consider the efficiency, in current practice, of image information transfer to a human observer, how and to what extent this could be improved by changes in practice and, in particular, in what situations substantial innovations in machine processing of image data would be expected to improve human performance. It is suggested that several problems in the field may provide a worthwhile and challenging scope for future research.

Humans↗

Occlusal registration: science or art?

Most of the information available to guide the clinician in making occlusal records focuses on the clinical techniques and methods involved. There is little objective information regarding the use of the more recently introduced elastomeric materials which are growing in popularity in the clinic. Much of the published work relies on the clinical experience of the authors rather than the properties of the material to be used to make the occlusal records. This paper aims to review the materials currently available to clinicians for use in occlusal registrations. The materials are discussed with regard to their suitability for the task and suggestions given regarding their use. Setting aside considerations of technique, it is suggested that there would be value in basing the selection of materials for occlusal registration on objective research. However, it may well be that the technique, as with many other things in dentistry, is as important as the specific properties of the materials used.

Dental Impression Materials↗

Contributions of epidemiology to exercise science and cardiovascular health.

Much important information about the cardiovascular benefits and hazards of exercise requires the methods of epidemiology, i.e., the study in human populations of frequencies and distributions of disease in terms of time, place, and personal characteristics. The key techniques are comparison and contrast, but epidemiological analyses of physical activity and cardiovascular health often must rely on circumstantial evidence to assess cause-and-effect relationships. The study procedures must be designed to meet rigorous epidemiological principles: statistical association, temporal sequence, consistency, persistence, independence, dose-response relationship, specificity, alterability, repeatability, and confirmation of findings. Through measurement and contrast, study procedures aim to determine whether physically active persons experience a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease than do persons more sedentary. Based on these principles, current evidence indicates that exercise induces protective benefits against coronary heart disease that enable most persons to approach their potential longevity.

Actuarial Analysis↗

The art and science of allergy skin testing.

Demographic information, symptoms, and allergy skin test data from 809 patients from four allergy practices (A, B, C, and D) were statistically evaluated. A panel of 42 allergens were used for a total of 24,293 tests. Allergen positivity ranged from 51% for house dust to 9% for cat/dog. The patient population had primarily respiratory tract spring symptoms. Significant differences between the practices were found for (1) the number of skin tests done per patient, (2) the number of positive tests per patient, and (3) the grading of a positive test. A patient had a 3-fold to 6-fold greater chance of being found atopic by practice C or D than by practice A with practice B being intermediate. These differences highlight the need for less variation and better diagnostic standardization in the practice of allergy.

Allergens↗

Radioactive contamination: state of the science and its application to predictive models.

Information on environmental levels and transport processes of natural and anthropogenic radioactivity, although plentiful, is widely scattered, and relatively few attempts have been made to summarize and synthesize this information. Furthermore, most experimental observations and experiments on environmental radioactivity have been designed for documentation or testing of specific hypotheses, rather than for providing key information for transport simulation models or on fundamental processes which such models seek to represent. This paper examines three basic questions, namely (1) what is the current state of the science of radioecology?; (2) how well is this science being incorporated into predictive models?; and (3) how well are the models being used to guide and improve the science? These discussions will be preceded by a brief description of the field of radioecology, and comments on its relevance to other sciences as well as to major societal problems stemming from environmental releases of radioactivity. In addition to assessing the current state of the science and its use in predictive models, specific ideas for improving both the science and its associated models will be advanced. These ideas fall under the categories of (1) environmental transport processes and model parameters, (2) estimating exposure and dose to human and ecological receptors, and (3) dose-effect relationships for plants and animals.

Journal Article↗

Information for health and human development.

Information is one of the most powerful instruments of change known to man. It can be used to relieve much pain and suffering, because the basic infrastructure of any successful enterprise is based not only on the management of the physical, financial, and human resources but also on information resources. This paper describes the relationship between health and human development and outlines the roles health sciences librarians might consider in managing information to ensure health, to assist not only medical scientists but also the powerful members of the community. No persons should be hampered in their ability to make decisions about health matters because they did not have access to information librarians have at their disposal.

Developing Countries↗

Knowledge management prerequisites for building an information society in healthcare.

The European Research Area requires either technological development or information literacy of health professionals. This information literacy shall be understood much deeper and broader than a basic preparation to use ICT tools in everyday life only. The author's first aim is to present the literature review and analysis of different definition of the "information" concept in Polish and foreign sources for health sciences, to emphasize a problem fundamental for an information society development, i.e. lack of adequate "information" understanding. Health professionals' information literacy shall also build an awareness of conceptual differences among numerous classifications, thesauruses, and information-retrieval languages, which result in different information received in a retrieval process. This problem can be of crucial effect for either health research or practice. Understanding the problem shall mobilize the researchers, classifiers, and indexers to co-ordinate efforts aimed in organizing "a translator" covering the most popular classifications' and thesauruses' concepts, to make an international research co-operation easier, relevant, and safe for the patients.

Artificial Intelligence↗

Toxicological information series, I. Toxicological information.

This paper presents a brief history of the evolution of toxicological information in the United States since 1966 when concern over the hazards of the ubiquitous chemicals in the environment was translated into recommendations for action by The Panel on the Handling of Toxicological Information of the President's Science Advisory Committee. It describes some of the data bases that were developed as a result of these recommendations and introduces a series of papers that discuss toxicology information resources, their content, and their accessibility. The series is a project of the Information Handling Committee of the Society of Toxicology. Papers II-V of this series will be published in subsequent issues of Fundamental and Applied Toxicology.

Information Services↗

CPMCnet: an integrated information and internet resource.

The Network and Computer Systems department of the Health Sciences Library developed CPMCnet, an UNIX-based information and Internet server at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. The project linked Gopher and World-Wide Web protocols as well as clients into an integrated application, providing the advantages of both. Development and use of CPMCnet has opened new channels of communication among information providers and end-users.

Academic Medical Centers↗

Fraud and hoaxes in science.

The recent spate of moral condemnation of fraud in science reflects the conservative nature of scientists; fraud, like error, is a normal part of science and cannot be legislated away.

Humans↗

DataFoundry: information management for scientific data.

Data warehouses and data marts have been successfully applied to a multitude of commercial business applications. They have proven to be invaluable tools by integrating information from distributed, heterogeneous sources and summarizing this data for use throughout the enterprise. Although the need for information dissemination is as vital in science as in business, working warehouses in this community are scarce because traditional warehousing techniques do not transfer to scientific environments. There are two primary reasons for this difficulty. First, schema integration is more difficult for scientific databases than for business sources, because of the complexity of the concepts and the associated relationships. While this difference has not yet been fully explored, it is an important consideration when determining how to integrate autonomous sources. Second, scientific data sources have highly dynamic data representations (schemata). When a data source participating in a warehouse changes its schema, both the mediator transferring data to the warehouse and the warehouse itself need to be updated to reflect these modifications. The cost of repeatedly performing these updates in a traditional warehouse, as is required in a dynamic environment, is prohibitive. This paper discusses these issues within the context of the DataFoundry project, an ongoing research effort at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. DataFoundry utilizes a unique integration strategy to identify corresponding instances while maintaining differences between data from different sources, and a novel architecture and an extensive meta-data infrastructure, which reduce the cost of maintaining a warehouse.

Computer Systems↗

Concepts for developing a collaborative in silico model of the acute inflammatory response using agent-based modeling.

The complexity of the acute inflammatory response (AIR) is, by now, generally recognized. The primary manifestation of this property has been the difficulty in translating the information derived from reductionist, basic science research into effective clinical treatment regimens for sepsis. However, the recognition of the "complexity" of the AIR is not without its pitfalls. Despite its limitations, reductionism remains the primary means of obtaining scientific information. Furthermore, a functional shortcoming of use of the term complex has been to make it equivalent to "essentially unsolvable." Therefore, a mechanism is needed to integrate the apparatus of reductionist analysis into a complex synthetic methodology that overcomes the current limitations of both. Toward this end, I propose a structure for a class of collaborative, community-wide in silico models that use the framework of agent-based modeling. Agent-based modeling is a type of mathematical modeling that focuses on the behaviors of the components of complex systems and is well suited for translating the results of basic science experiments. I will also introduce a preliminary version of a syntactical "grammar" that can potentially be used to facilitate the transfer of basic science data into computer code. It is hoped that when a mature version of this framework is implemented, the resulting models will provide a functional, synthetic data base on the AIR that could be used for directing research, testing hypotheses, teaching and training, and drug discovery/testing.

Acute Disease↗

[Laureates of the Palladin Premium of the National Academy of Science of Ukraine].

The article presents a short information about the Resolution of Ukr.SSR Soviet of Ministers on establishing the nominal premium of Presidium the Academy of Sciences of Ukr.SSR (of NAS of Ukraine, now) in the field of biochemistry and molecular biology dedicated to the famous scientists, founder of the Ukrainian biochemical school and the Institute of Biochemistry named after him--academician O. V. Palladin. There is a chronologically sequential list presenting all Laureates (with photo pictures) awarded by this honourable bonus with displaying their scientific works for which they received this reward.

Academies and Institutes↗

Selective use of online literature searching by a drug information service.

The use of online searching in a drug information center on a regular but selective basis is described. Of 90-100 information requests received monthly in a university-affiliated drug information center located within the health sciences library, five to eight computer searches are performed. All other questions are answered using a manual search. The computer searches are conducted by a medical librarian who works closely with the pharmacist. For each search, the library charges the drug information center for at least 12 minutes of connect time; charges cover the library's direct costs only. The drug information center is staffed by a director and assistant director; in addition, Pharm.D. students and clinical pharmacy residents work there. Factors influencing the decision to do an online rather than a manual search include budgetary constraints, how quickly an answer is needed, the success of a preliminary manual search, and the complexity of the request. Considerations for conducting online searches through a library rather than by the staff of the drug information center include requisite search skills, costs, and accessibility to computer search services. The selective use of online searches through a health sciences library is a viable means of accessing online information in a drug information center that cannot support its own online literature-retrieval system.

Budgets↗

'At the point at which you can do something about it, then it becomes more relevant': informed consent in the pharmacogenetic clinic.

Sociological investigation of informed consent has generated rich and complex descriptions of the clinical encounter, often challenging the straightforward picture painted by medical ethicists. This paper builds on this work, drawing on ideas from the Sociology of Science and Technology, to explore informed consent issues surrounding the use of the drug Herceptin, widely cited as an example of a novel approach to drug development called pharmacogenetics. Drawing on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 25 UK-based breast cancer specialists, this paper explores Herceptin's disputed epistemological status, as an example of pharmacogenetics or as something out of the ordinary in terms of clinical practice. It considers how, in turn, this impacts on the way in which informed consent is sought and influenced by clinicians' desire to protect patients from possibly distressing test results. It highlights the flexible, contingent and context dependent nature of informed consent in the clinical setting.

Antibodies, Monoclonal↗