Biomedical subjects

George R Thoma

Publications and source records attributed to George R Thoma.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2004

Image informatics at a national research center.

Image informatics at the Communications Engineering Branch of the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC), an R&D division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), includes document and biomedical images. In both domains, research into computer-assisted methods for information extraction, and the implementation of prototype systems incorporating such methods, is central to our mission. Current document image research focuses on extracting bibliographic data from scanned journal articles. Current biomedical imaging work focuses on content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and related problems in segmentation, indexing, and classifying collections of images of the spine and of the uterine cervix.

Diagnostic Imaging↗

PubMed2004

Organizing literature information for clinical decision support.

Answers to clinical questions occurring during healthcare practitioner/patient interaction can be often found in National Library of Medicine's (NLM) databases. The recent advances in wireless handheld computers promise to make them a widely used tool to deliver needed information to the practitioner at the point of service. This paper addresses challenges in organizing and presenting information obtained from NLM's MEDLINE database of indexed citations in a way that will help practitioners reduce literature search time on handheld computers. We study two clustering algorithms and two methods of labeling document clusters.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

Content-based image retrieval for large biomedical image archives.

Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) has been a topic of research interest for nearly a decade. Approaches to date use image features for describing content. A survey of the literature shows that progress has been limited to prototype systems that make gross assumptions and approximations. Additionally, research attention has been largely focused on stock image collections. Advances in medical imaging have led to growth in large image collections. At the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communication, an R&D division of the National Library of Medicine, we are conducting research on CBIR for biomedical images. We maintain an archive of over 17,000 digitized x-rays of the cervical and lumbar spine from the second National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES II). In addition, we are developing an archive of a large number of digitized 35 mm color slides of the uterine cervix. Our research focuses on developing techniques for hybrid text/image query-retrieval from the survey text and image data. In this paper we present the challenges in developing CBIR of biomedical images and results from our research efforts.

Archives↗

PubMed2004

PubMed on Tap: discovering design principles for online information delivery to handheld computers.

Online access to biomedical information from handheld computers will be a valuable adjunct to other popular medical applications if information delivery systems are designed with handheld computers in mind. The goal of this project is to discover design principles to facilitate practitioners' access to online medical information at the point-of-care. A prototype system was developed to serve as a testbed for this research. Using the testbed, an initial evaluation has yielded several user interface design principles. Continued research is expected to discover additional user interface design principles as well as guidelines for results organization and system performance

Computers, Handheld↗