Biomedical subjects

A C Browne

Publications and source records attributed to A C Browne.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1999

The diabetic neuropathic ulcer: an overview.

The leading cause of amputation in patients with diabetes is the nonhealing foot wound and its complications. The effects of peripheral neuropathy, peripheral vascular disease, and infection often combine to facilitate ulcer development that can lead to gangrene and amputation. In many instances, foot ulcers and amputation can be prevented. The literature over the past 5 years has included information on the infrared thermometry in the diagnosis of infection and acute Charcot change. Pressure downloading has been facilitated by computerized foot scanning systems and the use of prefabricated pneumatic walkers as an alternative to the contact cast. Local wound care is enforced by repeated sharp debridement. Nonhealing ulcers can benefit from biologicals: platelet-derived growth factors and a human dermal replacement containing viable fibroblasts. The most successful outcomes are achieved when interdisciplinary teams are formed to provide coordinated care. The goal of this article is to provide healthcare professionals with an overview of the risks of neuropathic foot injury and to offer strategies for prevention, protection, and reduction of recurrences of the diabetic foot ulcer.

Algorithms↗

PubMed1998

Evaluating lexical variant generation to improve information retrieval.

Techniques for managing lexical variation constitute an integral part of information retrieval systems. We report on a series of experiments aimed at evaluating LVG, a lexical variant management tool which addresses the particular problems involved in matching health related vocabularies to concepts in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Experiments conducted on data from the Large Scale Vocabulary Test indicate the effectiveness of this approach to managing biomedical information.

Evaluation Studies as Topic↗

PubMed1998

Discovering the modifiers in a terminology data set.

We recently conducted a study of a subset of the data collected in the NLM/AHCPR Large Scale Vocabulary Test (LSVT). We studied those 11,387 terms in the LSVT data that were narrower in meaning than the UMLS concepts mapped to. We hypothesized that when one term is narrower in meaning than another, the first and second terms are likely to differ primarily by modification. We compared three lexical processing methods of increasing sophistication and measured the ability of each of these methods to correctly identify the modifiers in the data set. The results indicate that when using the most powerful of the methods, 63% of the term pairs were found to differ only by premodification, by postmodification or by both, 31% share some lexical material, and the remaining 6% have no lexical items in common. The implications of the study are discussed.

Methods↗

PubMed1996

The UMLS Knowledge Source Server: a versatile Internet-based research tool.

The National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project regularly distributes a set of Knowledge Sources to the research community. In 1995 the UMLS data were made available for the first time through the Internet-based UMLS Knowledge Source Server. The server can be accessed through three different client interfaces. The World Wide Web interface allows users to browse and explore the data and to see how those data are organized in the UMLS. The command-line interface is best suited for batch processing, and the application programming interface allows developers at remote sites to embed calls in their application programs to the Knowledge Source Server.

Computer Communication Networks↗

PubMed1994

Lexical methods for managing variation in biomedical terminologies.

Access to biomedical terminologies is hampered by the high degree of variability inherent in natural language terms and in the terminologies themselves. The lexicon, lexical programs, databases, and indexes included with the 1994 release of the UMLS Knowledge Sources are designed to help users manage this variability. We describe these resources and illustrate their flexibility and usefulness in providing enhanced access to data in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

Biology↗

PubMed1993

UMLS knowledge for biomedical language processing.

This paper describes efforts to provide access to the free text in biomedical databases. The focus of the effort is the development of SPECIALIST, an experimental natural language processing system for the biomedical domain. The system includes a broad coverage parser supported by a large lexicon, modules that provide access to the extensive Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Knowledge Sources, and a retrieval module that permits experiments in information retrieval. The UMLS Metathesaurus and Semantic Network provide a rich source of biomedical concepts and their interrelationships. Investigations have been conducted to determine the type of information required to effect a map between the language of queries and the language of relevant documents. Mappings are never straightforward and often involve multiple inferences.

Humans↗