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Curtis P Langlotz

Publications and source records attributed to Curtis P Langlotz.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Development and validation of queries using structured query language (SQL) to determine the utilization of comparison imaging in radiology reports stored on PACS.

The purpose of this research was to develop queries that quantify the utilization of comparison imaging in free-text radiology reports. The queries searched for common phrases that indicate whether comparison imaging was utilized, not available, or not mentioned. The queries were iteratively refined and tested on random samples of 100 reports with human review as a reference standard until the precision and recall of the queries did not improve significantly between iterations. Then, query accuracy was assessed on a new random sample of 200 reports. Overall accuracy of the queries was 95.6%. The queries were then applied to a database of 1.8 million reports. Comparisons were made to prior images in 38.69% of the reports (693,955/1,793,754), were unavailable in 18.79% (337,028/1,793,754), and were not mentioned in 42.52% (762,771/1,793,754). The results show that queries of text reports can achieve greater than 95% accuracy in determining the utilization of prior images.

Database Management Systems↗

Mentoring the mentors: Aligning mentor and mentee expectations.

The Radiology Alliance for Health Services Research sponsored a symposium at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Association of University Radiologists, which focused on the issue of aligning mentor and mentee expectations to foster successful mentoring relationships. This article presents a summary of the informal discussion of the panelists' individual experiences, common themes, and insights gained from the panel participants.

Academic Medical Centers↗

Fundamental measures of diagnostic examination performance: usefulness for clinical decision making and research.

Measures of diagnostic accuracy, such as sensitivity, specificity, predictive values, and receiver operating characteristic curves, can often seem like abstract mathematic concepts that have a minimal relationship with clinical decision making or clinical research. The purpose of this article is to provide definitions and examples of these concepts that illustrate their usefulness in specific clinical decision-making tasks. In particular, nine principles are provided to guide the use of these concepts in daily radiology practice, in interpreting clinical literature, and in designing clinical research studies. An understanding of these principles and of the measures of diagnostic accuracy to which they apply is vital to the appropriate evaluation and use of diagnostic imaging examinations.

Decision Making↗

The completeness of existing lexicons for representing radiology report information.

Although most medical lexicons contain up to 80% of clinical terms used in an ambulatory patient medical records archive, preliminary research suggests that they may be far less complete for radiology terms. We therefore compared the likelihood that several existing medical lexicons would contain terms found in a radiology report to the likelihood they would contain terms found in an ambulatory care medical record. We used three samples of imaging terms to assess the completeness of existing lexicons for medical imaging: (1) a random sample of imaging terms from the Unified Medical Language System Large Scale Vocabulary Test (UMLS-LSVT; n = 218), (2) terms actually used in the first 80 clinical knee magnetic resonance imaging reports generated by the routine clinical use of a structured reporting system (eDictation, Marlton, NJ; n = 76), and (3) terms listed in a glossary of thoracic imaging prepared by the Fleischner Society (n = 173). Using the UMLS Web-based Knowledge Source Server (http://umlsks.nlm.nih. gov/), we measured the rate at which terms in each of the above three sources were found in the UMLS and two of its major constituent terminologies: ICD-9-CM and SNOMED International. ICD-9-CM contained matches for 3%, 8%, and 11% of terms from the Fleischner Society Glossary, eDictation, and NLM-LSVT, respectively. SNOMED International contained matches for 32%, 46%, and 36% of terms from the Fleischner Society Glossary, eDictation, and NLM-LSVT, respectively. The UMLS contained matches for 36%, 50%, and 45% of terms from the Fleischner Society Glossary, eDictation, and NLM-LSVT, respectively. The assessed vocabularies were least likely to contain a term from the Fleischner Society Glossary and most likely to contain a term from the eDictation lexicon. The UMLS was the most complete, and ICD-9 was the least complete of the three systems evaluated. No lexicon achieved greater than 50% completeness for any test set of imaging terms. Our results show that no single lexicon is sufficiently complete to allow comprehensive indexing, search, and retrieval of radiology report information. These results confirm the few results available from the medical literature indicating that existing controlled vocabularies are insufficiently complete to represent the contents of radiology reports. A subjective analysis of these results may identify particular imaging sub-areas for which new terms should be developed.

Humans↗