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Biomedical subjects

P Srinivasan

Publications and source records attributed to P Srinivasan.

10 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1996

Ocular malaria. A clinical and histopathologic study.

PURPOSE: Clinical and histopathologic findings of ocular lesions in malaria rarely have been described. This study reports lesions in three patients with malaria, with a histopathologic study of eyes obtained at autopsy of one of these patients. METHODS: Various ocular lesions were documented in three patients with malarial infection, with histopathologic study of one patient. In all three patients, the diagnosis of malaria was confirmed by the demonstration of malarial parasites in peripheral smears and by fluorescent microscopy of acridine orange-stained buffy coat preparations of venous blood. RESULTS: Multiple superficial blotchy retinal hemorrhages over the posterior pole were seen in the first patient, whereas acute bilateral panuveitis and secondary glaucoma were seen in the second, which on resolution showed multiple blotchy superficial retinal hemorrhages with perivasculitis. The third patient had cerebral malaria and was found to have subconjunctival and retinal hemorrhages. This patient died of pulmonary thromboembolism, and the eyes were obtained at autopsy. On gross examination, there were multiple retinal hemorrhages in the posterior pole. Histopathologic study showed cytoadherence of parasitized erythrocytes as well as schizonts and gametocytes of Plasmodium vivax within the retinal and choroidal blood vessels. CONCLUSION: The authors' findings suggest that patients with unexplained blotchy retinal hemorrhages should be investigated for malarial infection, especially if they reside or have travelled in endemic areas.

Acridine Orange↗
PubMed1996

Retrieval feedback for query design in MEDLINE. A comparison with expert network and LLSF approaches.

Query design is a vibrant research focus in information retrieval. The objective is to modify a user's original query into one that is more effective for retrieval. Researchers have proposed and investigated a variety of strategies to support query design in MEDLINE. This paper examines a query design method built within the framework of retrieval feedback. In particular, the effectiveness of this method is compared with the effectiveness of competing methods that utilize query mapping functions constructed in an expert network or built using the Linear Least Squares Fit approach. The comparison indicates that retrieval feedback offers an approach that is just as effective as these alternative approaches. Moreover, it has the advantage of being simpler to implement.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1995

National health policy for traditional medicine in India.

External pressures have combined to erode the practice of India's traditional medical systems to such an extent that they are in danger of becoming extinct. A better balanced national health policy could go a long way towards reversing this trend.

Education, Medical↗
PubMed1994

From chart tracking to workflow management.

The current interest in system-wide integration appears to be based on the assumption that an organization, by digitizing information and accepting a common standard for the exchange of such information, will improve the accessibility of this information and automatically experience benefits resulting from its more productive use. We do not dispute this reasoning, but assert that an organization's capacity for effective change is proportional to the understanding of the current structure among its personnel. Our workflow manager is based on the use of a Parameterized Petri Net (PPN) model which can be configured to represent an arbitrarily detailed picture of an organization. The PPN model can be animated to observe the model organization in action, and the results of the animation analyzed. This simulation is a dynamic ongoing process which changes with the system and allows members of the organization to pose "what if" questions as a means of exploring opportunities for change. We present, the "workflow management system" as the natural successor to the tracking program, incorporating modeling, scheduling, reactive planning, performance evaluation, and simulation. This workflow management system is more than adequate for meeting the needs of a paper chart tracking system, and, as the patient record is computerized, will serve as a planning and evaluation tool in converting the paper-based health information system into a computer-based system.

Computer Simulation↗
PubMed1994

Structured text representations and relevance judgments: an exploratory study.

This paper presents results of an exploratory study on using a structured text and query model for analyzing relevance judgments made by users on retrieved texts The structured model moves beyond keyword based text representation and retrieval. In particular it allows texts and queries to be represented by concepts embedded within the structural framework of complex objects. These objects preserves important text-based links between the selected concepts. The current study reveals a tendency for user judged relevance potential to decrease as the structure-based similarity between query and text decreases. This indicates that the structure-based retrieval model has the potential to conduct more precise retrieval than keyword based models. This supports our overall research goal of developing and investigating the structured retrieval model.

Information Storage and Retrieval↗
PubMed1993

Quality retrieval of the empirical literature: a structured approach.

The extent and growth of medical knowledge is tremendous. As of December 1990, the MEDLINE database had 6.5 million records in its collection, with approximately a third added during the last five years. Despite numerous innovations, retrieval technology has not kept pace with the exploding numbers of authors, articles, journals, books and conferences. A major limiting factor is that the basic mechanisms of retrieval systems almost uniformly rely on keyword representation and searching. These keywords are either assigned to texts perhaps with the assistance of special vocabularies, or appear naturally in these texts. In particular no structural or role information is preserved to connect these keywords to each other. This paper presents an alternative approach wherein role preserving, structured representations are used. This approach has the potential to increase retrieval quality.

Information Storage and Retrieval↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Retrieval feedback in MEDLINE.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate a new approach for query expansion based on retrieval feedback. The first objective in this study was to examine alternative query-expansion methods within the same retrieval-feedback framework. The three alternatives proposed are: expansion on the MeSH query field alone, expansion on the free-text field alone, and expansion on both the MeSH and the free-text fields. The second objective was to gain further understanding of retrieval feedback by examining possible dependencies on relevant documents during the feedback cycle. DESIGN: Comparative study of retrieval effectiveness using the original unexpanded and the alternative expanded user queries on a MEDLINE test collection of 75 queries and 2,334 MEDLINE citations. MEASUREMENTS: Retrieval effectivenesses of the original unexpanded and the alternative expanded queries were compared using 11-point-average precision scores (11-AvgP). These are averages of precision scores obtained at 11 standard recall points. RESULTS: All three expansion strategies significantly improved the original queries in terms of retrieval effectiveness. Expansion on MeSH alone was equivalent to expansion on both MeSH and the free-text fields. Expansion on the free-text field alone improved the queries significantly less than did the other two strategies. The second part of the study indicated that retrieval-feedback-based expansion yields significant performance improvements independent of the availability of relevant documents for feedback information. CONCLUSIONS: Retrieval feedback offers a robust procedure for query expansion that is most effective for MEDLINE when applied to the MeSH field.

Feedback↗