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Biomedical subjects

R K Taira

Publications and source records attributed to R K Taira.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Requirements of a Web-based experiment management system.

Recent advances in tools for scientific data acquisition, visualization, and analysis have lead to growing information management problems for medical research laboratories. An exponential increase in the volume of data, combined with a proliferation of heterogeneous formats and autonomous systems, has driven the need for flexible and powerful Experiment Management Systems (EMS). This paper provides a detailed analysis of the informatics requirements of an EMS, and proposes a new type of middleware called an EMS-Building Environment (EMSBE), which enables the rapid development of web-based systems for managing laboratory data and workflow. We describe the Web-Interfacing Respository Manager (WIRM), an open-source application server for building customizable experiment management systems. WIRM is being used to manage several ongoing experiments, including a natural language processor of radiological findings, and an interdisciplinary project for studying brain function.

Clinical Laboratory Information Systems↗
PubMed2000

Evaluation of SNOMED3.5 in representing concepts in chest radiology reports: integration of a SNOMED mapper with a radiology reporting workstation.

Standardized medical terminologies are gaining importance in the representation of medical data. In this paper, we present the evaluation of the SNOMED3.5 medical terminology to code concepts routinely used in chest radiology reports. Integration of this terminology mapper into a radiology reporting workstation that incorporates a speech recognition system and a natural language processor is also discussed. A total of 700 anatomical location terms (including synonyms) were tested and 72% of the terms had corresponding SNOMED terms. Of the 28% that did not result in a match, 16% were either morphological variants of SNOMED terms or could be found from a combination of terms from two or more SNOMED axes. Only 12% of the terms (primarily specialized radiology terms) were concepts not actually included in the SNOMED terminology.

Humans↗
PubMed1999

Initial experiences with building a health care infrastructure based on Java and object-oriented database technology.

A multi-tiered telemedicine system based on Java and object-oriented database technology has yielded a number of practical insights and experiences on their effectiveness and suitability as implementation bases for a health care infrastructure. The advantages and drawbacks to their use, as seen within the context of the telemedicine system's development, are discussed. Overall, these technologies deliver on their early promise, with a few remaining issues that are due primarily to their relative newness.

Database Management Systems↗
PubMed1999

Process models for telehealth: an industrial approach to quality management of distant medical practice.

Process modeling is explored as an approach for prospectively managing the quality of a telemedicine/telehealth service. This kind of prospective quality management is more appropriate for dynamic health care environments compared to traditional quality assurance programs. A vector model approach has also been developed to match a process model to the needs of a particular site.

Humans↗
PubMed1999

Creating and indexing teaching files from free-text patient reports.

Teaching files based on real patient data can enhance the education of students, staff and other colleagues. Although information retrieval system can index free-text documents using keywords, these systems do not work well where content bearing terms (e.g., anatomy descriptions) frequently appears. This paper describes a system that uses multi-word indexing terms to provide access to free-text patient reports. The utilization of multi-word indexing allows better modeling of the content of medical reports, thus improving retrieval performance. The method used to select indexing terms as well as early evaluation of retrieval performance is discussed.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1999

A statistical natural language processor for medical reports.

Statistical natural language processors have been the focus of much research during the past decade. The main advantage of such an approach over grammatical rule-based approaches is its scalability to new domains. We present a statistical NLP for the domain of radiology and report on methods of knowledge acquisition, parsing, semantic interpretation, and evaluation. Preliminary performance data are given. A discussion of the perceived benefit, limitations and future work is presented.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1997

A multimedia database system for thermal ablation therapy of brain tumors.

A prototype multimedia medical database is described for supporting thermal ablation therapy of brain tumors. Its design is motivated by the major need to manage and access multimedia information on the progress and reaction of tumors to various therapy protocols. The database links images to patient data in a way that permits the use to view and query medical information using alphanumeric, temporal, and feature-based predicates. Visualization programs permit the user to view or annotate the query results in various ways. These results support the wide variety of data types and presentation methods required by neuroradiologists to manage thermal ablation therapy data. The database satisfactorily meets the requirements defined by thermal ablation therapy. A similar approach is being undertaken for supporting different therapies of other types of tumors, thus showing the generality of our approach.

Brain Neoplasms↗
PubMed1996

Architectural design and tools to support the transparent access to hospital information systems, radiology information systems, and picture archiving and communication systems.

The fragmentation of the electronic patient record among hospital information systems (HIS), radiology information systems (RIS), and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) makes the viewing of the complete medical patient record inconvenient. The purpose of this report is to describe the system architecture, development tools, and implementation issues related to providing transparent access to HIS, RIS, and PACS information. A client-mediator-server architecture was implemented to facilitate the gathering and visualization of electronic medical records from these independent heterogeneous information systems. The architecture features intelligent data access agents, run-time determination of data access strategies, and an active patient cache. The development and management of the agents were facilitated by data integration CASE (computer-assisted software engineering) tools. HIS, RIS, and PACS data access and translation agents were successfully developed. All pathology, radiology, medical, laboratory, admissions, and radiology reports for a patient are available for review from a single integrated workstation interface. A data caching system provides fast access to active patient data. New network architectures are evolving that support the integration of heterogeneous software subsystems. Commercial tools are available to assist in the integration procedure.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed1996

A concept-based retrieval system for thoracic radiology.

Current digital information systems in radiology are insufficient to accommodate the retrieval needs of academicians. Significant efforts are required in retrieving clinical cases for teaching and research. We describe a prototype system that supports intelligent case retrieval based on a combined specification of patient demographics, radiologic findings, and pathologic diagnoses. The documents for these cases can be distributed among multiple heterogeneous data bases. The system features automatic indexing of radiology and pathology reports, a comprehensive lexicon for thoracic radiology, an interface to a hospital information system, radiology information system, and picture archiving and communication systems, and a graphical user interface for query formulation and results visualization. The prototype system was developed within the domain of thoracic radiology involving patients with lung cancer.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMed1996

Integrated multimedia timeline of medical images and data for thoracic oncology patients.

A prototype multimedia medical database has been developed to provide image and textual data for thoracic oncology patients undergoing treatment of advanced malignancies. The database integrates image data from the hospital picture archiving and communication system with textual reports from the radiology information system, alphanumeric data contained in the hospital information system, and other electronic medical data. The database presents information in a timeline format and also contains visualization programs that permit the user to view and annotate radiographic measurements in tabular or graphic form. The database provides an efficient and intuitive display of the changing status of oncology patients. The ability to integrate, manage, and access relevant multimedia information may substantially enhance communication among distributed multidisciplinary health care providers and may ensure greater consistency and completeness of patient-related data.

Databases, Factual↗
PubMed1995

Technical considerations in planning a distributed teleradiology system.

A large-scale teleradiology project is under way to link a Florida imaging center to the UCLA Department of Radiology. The initial goal is to provide Florida patients in a routine clinical practice environment with subspecialty consultation by academic radiologists. The plan then calls for the addition of other domestic and international sites. Technical issues in planning to establish the necessary teleradiology infrastructure include wide area network design, image compression, distributed archiving, and special viewing station features. Special emphasis is placed on archive design that makes intelligent use of information, such as triggering events from the radiological information system (RIS) for image prefetching and visual cues from photo-icons for full-size image retrieval. Concepts such as teleconsultation and remote procedure monitoring are aimed at providing the same level of services at distant sites that would be available in-house. This article highlights the system design parameters that must be considered to engineer a scalable distributed teleradiology system.

California↗
PubMed1993

Interfacing aspects between the picture archiving communications systems, radiology information systems, and hospital information systems.

Information relevant to radiological applications is commonly managed by several autonomous medical information systems including hospital information systems (HIS), radiological information systems (RIS), and picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). In this report, we explain the need to coordinate these systems and to provide some framework in which they can exchange information. In the first half of this report, we describe the integration of a PACS system into a hospital operation. Next, we present the interfacing methods between the HIS and the RIS, and between the RIS and the PACS. Two methods are further detailed for the communication between the RIS and the PACS (1) the triggered database to database transfer, and (2) the query protocol. The implementation of the first method successfully allows RIS reports, procedure and patient demographic information to be displayed at the request of the user along with the associated images at a PACS workstation. The query protocol allows a PACS to dynamically query RIS information. It will be eventually integrated into the design of a scientific multimedia distributed medical database system built on top of the HIS, the RIS, and the PACS.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed1993

An automatic method for enhancing the display of different tissue densities in digital chest radiographs.

Digital chest radiographs are often too bright and/or lack contrast when viewed on a video display. This often occurs in radiographs taken of patients with dense lungs, or when incorrect x-ray exposure techniques or inappropriate image preprocessing operations are performed (eg, by the computed radiography system or laser scanner). This article describes a method to automatically provide brightness and contrast adjustments to selectively enhance either soft or dense tissues. This method reduces viewer interaction and improves displayed image quality. The algorithm analyzes the gray-level histogram of a chest radiograph and determines the breakpoints that separate the region outside the patient (background), the radiographically soft tissues, and the radiographically dense tissues. From these breakpoints, a series of piecewise linear look-up tables (LUTs) is generated to selectively enhance either the soft tissues or the dense tissues. This is performed by: (1) varying the contrast in the patient background to achieve the desired overall brightness, (2) selectively increasing the contrast of the tissue region of interest, and (3) reducing or maintaining the contrast of the remaining region. The resulting LUTs are applied to the original image via video display.

Algorithms↗
PubMed1992

Receiver-operating-characteristic study of chest radiographs in children: digital hard-copy film vs 2K x 2K soft-copy images.

Two methods are commonly used to visualize digital radiologic imaging data: (1) hard-copy viewing, in which the digital data are used to modulate the intensity of a laser beam that exposes an analog film and (2) soft-copy viewing, in which the digital data are converted to an analog video signal and presented on a CRT monitor. The film method allows new digital imaging systems to be easily integrated into conventional radiologic management and viewing methods. The second method, soft-copy viewing, allows digital imaging data to be managed and viewed electronically in a picture archiving and communication system (PACS). These PACS systems are hypothesized to have improved operational efficiency and enhanced image-analysis capabilities. The quality of soft-copy images is still not widely accepted. This article reports on the results of a large-scale receiver-operating-characteristic study comparing observers' performance in detecting various pediatric chest abnormalities on soft-copy 2048 x 2048K byte displays with their performance with digital laser-printed film from computed radiography. The disease categories studied were pneumothorax, linear atelectasis, air bronchogram, and interstitial disease. The selected data set included 239 images; 77 contained no proved abnormality and 162 contained one or more of the abnormalities mentioned. Seven pediatric radiologists participated in the study, two as judges and five as observers. Our results show no significant difference between viewing images on digital hard copy and soft copy for the detection of pneumothoraces and air bronchograms. A slight performance edge for soft copy was seen for interstitial disease and linear atelectasis. This result indicates that computed chest radiographs in children viewed in a soft-copy PACS environment should result in diagnoses similar to or slightly more accurate than those obtained in a laser-printed film-based environment.

Child↗
PubMed1992

Infrastructure design of a picture archiving and communication system.

A picture archiving and communication system (PACS) infrastructure is the necessary framework to integrate distributed and heterogeneous imaging systems, provide intelligent data-base management of all radiology-related information, arrange an efficient means of viewing, analyzing, and documenting study results, and furnish a mechanism for effectively communicating study results to the referring physician. The PACS infrastructure consists of a basic skeleton of hardware components integrated by standardized, flexible software subsystems. This review describes these concepts and basic building blocks drawn from our original investigation, past experience, and the current clinical system in our radiology department.

Computer Systems↗
PubMed1992

Digital archive center: implementation for a radiology department.

OBJECTIVE: In this article, we describe the implementation of a digital archive center for a radiology department in a 700-bed teaching hospital. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The archive center consists of two identical archive systems, each comprising five components: an archive server, a data-base server, an optical disk library, a stand-alone optical disk drive, and a communication network. An image management system controls the image traffic from acquisition devices to display stations. A fault-tolerant mechanism was built into the archive center to achieve a 100% uptime. RESULTS: The center has been in operation for over 6 months. We have not experienced a single total system failure during this period. It currently archives all digital images from three MR units and four CT scanners and selected images from three computed radiographic systems and two laser film digitizers. The center archives between 1.5 and 2.0 gigabytes of images per workday. CONCLUSION: With its built-in fault-tolerant mechanism, we believe that the implemented archive center is very reliable and is suitable for a radiology department to archive its digital images.

Hospital Bed Capacity, 500 and over↗