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The VA advantage: the gold standard in clinical informatics.

How does a healthcare organization undergo such transformation as described in the lead paper in eight short years? Just imagine being part of an organization that achieved the following transformations: (1) reduction in hospital and long-term-care beds from 92,000 to 53,000 and an increase in outpatient clinics from 200 to 850 (2) a 75% increase in the number of patients treated on an annual basis (from 2.8 million to 4.9 million) with only a 32% cumulative increase in budget (from $19 billion to $25 billion) (3) clinicians who have access to complete medical records for almost all patient visits and all care settings (4) clinicians who willingly enter medication orders 94% of the time (5) patients who are increasingly satisfied with their care, ranking the service consistently higher than the competition (6) improved patient outcomes, achieved at costs 25% less than the competition. Such transformation is impossible to achieve without vision, leadership, talent, teamwork and tools. I will restrict my comments to a discussion of the tools, specifically the VA's clinical information system (VistA, HealtheVet, My HealtheVet. However, it is important to note that the results described in this paper would not be possible without the VA's transformational leadership and dedicated teams of professionals capable of executing the vision.

Decision Support Systems, Clinical↗

[The informatics of human genome and traditional Chinese medicine].

Guided by the theory and methodology of yin-yang set derived from Changing Book and Medicine Canon, and using genetics as a bridge, we have tried to bring together the ancient functional systematology and modern structural one as well as Eastern and Western medicine, thereby promoting the modernization of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in theory and in clinical practice. Herein, we used virtual technology to transform the genetic information in OMIM of NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information of USA, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ) into a secondary database in the form of webpages. There are sixteen kinds of the database named gene morbidity ones as followings as: the nature of gene, the profile of common phenotype, a interaction of endogenous, the disease of a organ or a viscera pathogenesis phenomenon, TCM, the sign of diagnosis of western medicine, the gene response to environment, syndrome, disease, nerve and -endocrine, tumor and cancer, psychology and behavior, morbidity, endo-factor of molecular information, expression, the interaction between endogenous and exogenous in which there is 4 711 words, files. The advantages of the database are its aptness for using human fuzzy intelligence to recognize things, suitability to uncovering the noumenon (yinyang) nature of an object and applicability to clinical use.

Computational Biology↗

Informatics center for mouse genomics: the dissection of complex traits of the nervous system.

In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of tools and techniques available to researchers interested in exploring the genetic basis of all aspects of central nervous system (CNS) development and function. Here, we exploit a powerful new reductionist approach to explore the genetic basis of the very significant structural and molecular differences between the brains of different strains of mice, called either complex trait or quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis. Our specific focus has been to provide universal access over the web to tools for the genetic dissection of complex traits of the CNS--tools that allow researchers to map genes that modulate phenotypes at a variety of levels ranging from the molecular all the way to the anatomy of the entire brain. Our website, The Mouse Brain Library (MBL; http://mbl.org) is comprised of four interrelated components that are designed to support this goal: The Brain Library, iScope, Neurocartographer, and WebQTL. The centerpiece of the MBL is an image database of histologically prepared museum-quality slides representing nearly 2000 mice from over 120 strains--a library suitable for stereologic analysis of regional volume. The iScope provides fast access to the entire slide collection using streaming video technology, enabling neuroscientists to acquire high-magnification images of any CNS region for any of the mice in the MBL. Neurocartographer provides automatic segmentation of images from the MBL by warping precisely delineated boundaries from a 3D atlas of the mouse brain. Finally, WebQTL provides statistical and graphical analysis of linkage between phenotypes and genotypes.

Analysis of Variance↗

American Academy of Pediatrics: Task Force on Medical Informatics. Special requirements for electronic medical record systems in pediatrics.

Electronic medical record (EMR) systems, which are usually designed for adult care, must perform certain functions to be useful in pediatric care. This statement outlines these functions (eg, immunization tracking and pediatric dosing calculations) to assist vendors and standards organizations with software design for pediatric systems. The description of these functions should also provide pediatricians with a set of requirements or desirable features to use when evaluating EMR systems. Particular attention is paid to special aspects of pediatric clinical care and privacy issues unique to pediatrics.

Child↗

[Experience of nursing education in collective health: informatics used to teach epidemiologic surveillance].

This article discusses the application of information technology (IT) in education, its benefits and the ethical and ideological implications in using this tool in nursing education and work. It relates the experience of developing contents on epidemiological surveillance. Some pedagogical experiences were given to the students handling an Aids database, with the purpose of motivating them to express their understanding and to reflect on the health problems of the population, associating the occurrence and the profiles of this epidemic in different areas of the city of São Paulo, with the forms of work and life of population groups in certain places. The understanding of the health-disease process was enlarged. IT is a potent instrument in epidemiological surveillance for the teacher who act as mediator between the information and the knowledge that one wants to build.

Computer-Assisted Instruction↗

Prediction of global distribution of insect pest species in relation to climate by using an ecological informatics method.

The aim of this work was to predict the worldwide distribution of two pest species-Ceratitis capitata (Wiedemann), the Mediterranean fruit fly, and Lymantria dispar (L.), the gypsy moth-based on climatic factors. The distribution patterns of insect pests have most often been investigated using classical statistical models or ecoclimatic assessment models such as CLIMEX. In this study, we used an artificial neural network, the multilayer perceptron, trained using the backpropagation algorithm, to model the distribution of each species. The data matrix used to model the distribution of each species was divided into three data sets to (1) develop and train the model, (2) validate the model and prevent over-fitting, and (3) test each model on novel data. The percentage of correct predictions of the global distribution of each species was high for Mediterranean fruit fly for the three data sets giving 95.8, 81.5, and 80.6% correct predictions, respectively, and 96.8, 84.3, and 81.5 for the gypsy moth. Kappa statistics used to test the level of significance of the results were highly significant (in all cases P < 0.0001). A sensitivity analysis applied to each model based on the calculation of the derivatives of each of a large number of input variables showed that the variables that contributed most to explaining the distribution of C. capitata were annual average temperature and annual potential evapotranspiration. For L. dispar, the average minimum temperature and minimum daylength range were the main explanatory variables. The ANN models and methods developed in this study offer powerful additional predictive approaches in invasive species research.

Animals↗

Genetic testing of the general population: ethical and informatic concerns.

Whether we like it or not, genetic testing will almost certainly become routine medical practice within the next 25 years. Integrated circuit chips already exist that can perform 400 genetic tests simultaneously, thus greatly reducing the costs. At least one company is already working on a prototype for a handheld genetic tester that would allow primary care physicians to perform hundreds or thousands of genetic tests on a simple blood smear in just a few minutes. "Genetic report cards" for children are not very far off at all. The use of such widespread testing poses a variety of ethical dilemmas. One problem that has not been appreciated sufficiently, however, is the question of how to interpret the test results. Because of the ways the genes implicated in diseases are discovered and marketed, quantitative analysis of the tests can be extremely misleading. The difficulty is that we simply do not have sufficient information about variance in genetic and other factors in the general population to make accurate projections of a patient's risk, given the presence of a gene. This uncertainty is obscured, however, when we provide the patient with a numerical analysis of risk because it is well established that people tend to overestimate the information content of numerical projections. This situation is made far worse by the fact that we do not have enough adequately trained genetic counselors to handle the load that will soon be placed on them (and studies have shown that physicians are generally very poorly prepared to act as accurate sources of information on complex genetic issues). For these reasons, I argue that access to genetic testing should be treated the same way as access to new medical procedures and medications--namely, withheld from the general public until proven safe and effective in large-scale trials. This is certain to be an unpopular policy, but it seems the only way to prevent a great deal of abuse of genetic tests.

Ethics, Medical↗

Open microscopy environment and findspots: integrating image informatics with quantitative multidimensional image analysis.

Biomedical research and drug development increasingly involve the extraction of quantitative data from digital microscope images, such as those obtained using fluorescence microscopy. Here, we describe a novel approach for both managing and analyzing such images. The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) is a sophisticated open-source scientific image management database that coordinates the organization, storage, and analysis of the large volumes of image data typically generated by modern imaging methods. We describe FindSpots, a powerful image-analysis package integrated in OME that will be of use to those who wish to identify and measure objects within microscope images or time-lapse movies. The algorithm used in FindSpots is in fact only one of many possible segmentation (object detection) algorithms, and the underlying data model used by OME to capture and store its results can also be used to store results from other segmentation algorithms. In this report, we illustrate how image segmentation can be achieved in OME using one such implementation of a segmentation algorithm, and how this output subsequently can be displayed graphically or processed numerically using a spreadsheet.

Algorithms↗

Retriever and CompareTable, two informatics tools for data analysis of high-density oligonucleotide arrays.

High-density oligonucleotide arrays are widely employed for detecting global changes in gene expression profiles of cells or tissues exposed to specific stimuli. Presented with large amounts of data, investigators can spend significant amounts of time analyzing and interpreting this array data. In our application of GeneChip arrays to analyze changes in gene expression in viral-infected epithelium, we have needed to develop additional computational tools that may be of utility to other investigators using this methodology. Here, I describe two executable programs to facilitate data extraction and multiple data point analysis. These programs run in a virtual DOS environment on Microsoft Windows 95/98/2K operating systems on a desktop PC. Both programs can be freely downloaded from the BioTechniques Software Library (www.BioTechniques.com). The first program, Retriever, extracts primary data from an array experiment contained in an Affymetrix textfile using user-inputted individual identification strings (e.g., the probe set identification numbers). With specific data retrieved for individual genes, hybridization profiles can be examined and data normalized. The second program, CompareTable, is used to facilitate comparison analysis of two experimental replicates. CompareTable compares two lists of genes, identifies common entries, extracts their data, and writes an output text file containing only those genes present in both of the experiments. The output files generated by these two programs can be opened and manipulated by any software application recognizing tab-delimited text files (e.g., Microsoft NotePad or Excel).

Computational Biology↗

The role of informatics in the coordinated management of biological resources collections.

The term 'biological resources' is applied to the living biological material collected, held and catalogued in culture collections: bacterial and fungal cultures; animal, human and plant cells; viruses; and isolated genetic material. A wealth of information on these materials has been accumulated in culture collections, and most of this information is accessible. Digitalisation of data has reached a high level; however, information is still dispersed. Individual and coordinated approaches have been initiated to improve accessibility of biological resource centres, their holdings and related information through the Internet. These approaches cover subjects such as standardisation of data handling and data accessibility, and standardisation and quality control of laboratory procedures. This article reviews some of the most important initiatives implemented so far, as well as the most recent achievements. It also discusses the possible improvements that could be achieved by adopting new communication standards and technologies, such as web services, in view of a deeper and more fruitful integration of biological resources information in the bioinformatics network environment.

Animals↗