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The Internet is a worldwide network of computers with powerful communication capabilities. Electronic mail, World Wide Web, search engines, Usenet, listservs, and databases are tools to send, receive, and search for information via the Internet. This article defines common Internet terminology and describes the basic Internet tools that can enhance the practice of gastroenterology nurses and associates.
As part of a larger cross-country survey of dental students, students from the School of Dentistry, The University of Valparaiso, were invited to participate in a study to describe their use of information and communication technology (ICT). Information was derived from a 124-item questionnaire which included 14 socio-demographic items and 29 items asking about ICT use. ICT items were derived from a University of Birmingham, UK, battery. Data was collected in July and August 2004. A total of 162 of the 249 dental students participated in the study. The average age of students was 21.0 years (SD 2.4 years). The majority of participants (62.1%) were female. All participants had access to a computer, and 96.4% used the Internet. Most students had home Internet connections (73.4%). The most commonly used Internet sites on at least a weekly basis were: email (92.2%); and search engines (88.3%). However, a very few (21.1%) used the Internet to search for dental information for their studies on at least a weekly basis. Furthermore, although the majority (70.4%) found Internet use easy/very easy, 56.2% indicated that any search for information was easy/very easy. The majority (72.2%) indicated that the use of virtual education would not affect their class attendance. The final multivariate model explained 26% of the variance in ICT use, significant predictors for ICT use were gender, year of study, level of difficulty in using Internet, and place of Internet use. However, Internet use was mostly for non-dental purposes.
To explore the health benefits of tennis participation in veteran players and to identify future research needs, an electronic literature search using the Ovid (Cinhal, Medline, Sport Discus) library databases from 1966-2005 was undertaken. Specific search words were employed related to tennis, aging, exercise, health, and the psychophysiological systems. Public access internet search engines were also used (Google, PubMed), along with non-electronic searches of library holdings. There is ample research documenting the health benefits of regular participation in moderately intense aerobic activity. There have been research studies targeting veteran tennis players but most were cross sectional. No tennis related study successfully eliminated all confounding cross training effects. The health of veteran tennis players is improved by enhanced aerobic capacity, greater bone densities in specific regions, lower body fat, greater strength, and maintained reaction time performance in comparison with age matched but less active controls. However, it is not certain whether tennis alone can be a sole contributor to these physiological variables. Well controlled longitudinal research among elite veteran and novice older adult players is needed.
The internet has experienced tremendous growth over the past few years and has currently many resources in the field of medicine. However, many physicians remain unaware of how to gain access to this powerful tool. This article briefly describes the World Wide Web and its potential applications for physicians. The basics of web search engines and medical directories, as well as the use of advanced search with boolean operators are explained.
BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE STUDY: The quadricuspid aortic valve (QAV) is a rare congenital heart defect. All published cases of this rare malformation were reviewed. The study aim was to enlarge the evidence base for the condition, thus enabling conclusions to be drawn about its clinical course. METHODS: A literature search was conducted using the databases PubMed, Web of Science and the search engine Google. The reference sections of all relevant articles were also searched to identify additional cases of QAV. Cases with a truncal valve were excluded. RESULTS: A total of 186 cases was found. The mean age of patients was 50.7 years, and there was a slight male predominance (male:female ratio 1.61:1). Echocardiography was the leading mode of detection, followed by surgery, autopsy and aortography. Pure aortic regurgitation was found in almost 75% of cases, while only ca. 16% of the valves functioned normally. CONCLUSION: The QAV is a rare congenital heart defect with a high potential for serious complications. Patients with this condition should be carefully evaluated, and require close follow up.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the quality of internet information, readily accessible by the public, relating to rheumatoid arthritis and to investigate the relationship between financial interests of websites and the quality of information provided. METHODS: Five well-known search engines on the internet were investigated in an attempt to replicate a search undertaken by a typical patient. The phrase 'rheumatoid arthritis' was used for each search and the first 20 results were evaluated. Each site was evaluated in terms of 'general website criteria' and 'specific criteria' in relation to rheumatoid arthritis. The websites were scored out of 30. RESULTS: Fifty-five websites were evaluated. The mean total quality score was 12.15 (SD = 6.53) and 40 sites (72.7%) scored < 50% of the total marks available. Information about authorship, ownership and currency were missing in more than 75% (n = 42) of cases; only 20% (n = 11) of sites gave clear references to scientific literature; 64% (n = 35) of sites were judged to have a financial interest and these scored significantly lower total quality scores compared to the informative sites (p = <0.01). Information about the role of physiotherapy in the management of rheumatoid arthritis was absent in 70.9% (n = 39). CONCLUSION: The internet is a poor source of information for rheumatoid arthritis patients. Quality information is scarce and finding it is time-consuming. Guidelines are needed to regulate information that is published on the internet and define who is eligible to publish it. Until then the internet should not be recommended as a single source of patient information unless professionally endorsed websites are recommended.
Molecules, as defined by connectivity specified via the International Chemical Identifier (InChI), are precisely indexed by major web search engines so that Internet tools can be transparently used for unique structure searches.
MOTIVATION: Tandem mass spectrometry combined with sequence database searching is one of the most powerful tools for protein identification. As thousands of spectra are generated by a mass spectrometer in one hour, the speed of database searching is critical, especially when searching against a large sequence database, or when the peptide is generated by some unknown or non-specific enzyme, even or when the target peptides have post-translational modifications (PTM). In practice, about 70-90% of the spectra have no match in the database. Many believe that a significant portion of them are due to peptides of non-specific digestions by unknown enzymes or amino acid modifications. In another case, scientists may choose to use some non-specific enzymes such as pepsin or thermolysin for proteolysis in proteomic study, in that not all proteins are amenable to be digested by some site-specific enzymes, and furthermore many digested peptides may not fall within the rang of molecular weight suitable for mass spectrometry analysis. Interpreting mass spectra of these kinds will cost a lot of computational time of database search engines. OVERVIEW: The present study was designed to speed up the database searching process for both cases. More specifically speaking, we employed an approach combining suffix tree data structure and spectrum graph. The suffix tree is used to preprocess the protein sequence database, while the spectrum graph is used to preprocess the tandem mass spectrum. We then search the suffix tree against the spectrum graph for candidate peptides. We design an efficient algorithm to compute a matching threshold with some statistical significance level, e.g. p = 0.01, for each spectrum, and use it to select candidate peptides. Then we rank these peptides using a SEQUEST-like scoring function. The algorithms were implemented and tested on experimental data. For post-translational modifications, we allow arbitrary number of any modification to a protein. AVAILABILITY: The executable program and other supplementary materials are available online at: http://hto-c.usc.edu:8000/msms/suffix/.
Information about bacterial subcellular localization (SCL) is important for protein function prediction and identification of suitable drug/vaccine/diagnostic targets. PSORTdb (http://db.psort.org/) is a web-accessible database of SCL for bacteria that contains both information determined through laboratory experimentation and computational predictions. The dataset of experimentally verified information (approximately 2000 proteins) was manually curated by us and represents the largest dataset of its kind. Earlier versions have been used for training SCL predictors, and its incorporation now into this new PSORTdb resource, with its associated additional annotation information and dataset version control, should aid researchers in future development of improved SCL predictors. The second component of this database contains computational analyses of proteins deduced from the most recent NCBI dataset of completely sequenced genomes. Analyses are currently calculated using PSORTb, the most precise automated SCL predictor for bacterial proteins. Both datasets can be accessed through the web using a very flexible text search engine, a data browser, or using BLAST, and the entire database or search results may be downloaded in various formats. Features such as GO ontologies and multiple accession numbers are incorporated to facilitate integration with other bioinformatics resources. PSORTdb is freely available under GNU General Public License.
The explosive growth of the World Wide Web has produced frustration for researchers seeking quality content and pinpoint results among the noise and spam. Now, a handful of companies and academic researchers are working on a new breed of search engines to undo this second curse of Babel. These next-generation search tools will let scientists drill deeper into the billion-page Web.
Through the internet the public in South Korea has access to a growing supply of information on health and disease. In South Korea an estimated 13.93 million people used the internet in 2000. The number has increased rapidly compared to 1.63 million in 1997. Health information is often said to be one of the most retrieved types of information on the internet. However, a concern has emerged for the quality of health information documents contained on the World Wide Web. Lack of evaluation and oversight, and ease of publication, have led to inaccurate and misleading health-related publications on the Internet. For those seeking easy ways to identify high-quality and reliable information, rating systems to evaluate the quality of health information on the internet should be provided and developed. Given this background, the purpose of this research was to evaluate health information web sites on the internet. In this study we aimed to survey websites providing health information. 440 websites were selected using four search engines, YahooKorea (http://www.yahoo.co.kr), LycosKorea (http://www.lycos.co.kr), Empas (http://www.empas.co.kr), and Naver (http://www.naver.com), to conduct searches in December 2000. General quality criteria were used for the evaluation. These included ownership, currency, authorship, source, feedback mechanism, links, and functionality. More than 50% of web sites did not provide the date of publication or update of information, author and author credentials, references to source, etc. Websites of universities and universities' hospitals were more likely to provide name and type of provider (p < .01), author's name (p < .001), and references to source (p < .01) than other service providers. There is a need for better evidence-based health information as well as a need to develop simple criteria that ordinary people can understand and use. In addition, gateway services that operate a selective process and provide links to other organizations that provide high-quality health information should be offered and developed.
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use is growing rapidly. As CAM is relatively unregulated, it is important to evaluate the type and availability of CAM information. The goal of this study is to deter-mine the prevalence, content and readability of online CAM information based on searches for arthritis, diabetes and fibromyalgia using four common search engines. Fifty-eight of 599 web pages retrieved by a "condition search" (9.6%) were CAM-oriented. Of 216 CAM pages found by the "condition" and "condition + herbs" searches, 78% were authored by commercial organizations, whose pur-pose involved commerce 69% of the time and 52.3% had no references. Although 98% of the CAM information was intended for consumers, the mean read-ability was at grade level 11. We conclude that consumers searching the web for health information are likely to encounter consumer-oriented CAM advertising, which is difficult to read and is not supported by the conventional literature.
To adequately visualize and interpret the data fields of DICOM 3 datasets the data structure defined in the DICOM 3 standard has to be applied. The DICOM 3 data structure is very extensive and therefore costly to implement. We are working on an open source system which provides the data structure via a Java-programming interface. The data is held in a freely available XML-database. As a spin-off we are providing the web-based Dicom Search Engine (DicoSE) which will be available via internet soon. DicoSE allows for searching the DICOM standard data dictionary for defined data fields and visualizes the topology of the data which is present in DICOM datasets acquired by various types of modalities. Thus, the interpretation of the meaning of data fields is supported. For maintaining the data stored in the database a web-based administration interface is provided.
BACKGROUND: While women are far more likely to develop and die from cardiovascular disease (CVD) than breast cancer, research has shown that they markedly overestimate their personal risks of breast cancer and underestimate their CVD risks. The source of this disparity is not yet known, although increased media attention to breast cancer relative to CVD has been suggested to play a role. The purpose of the present study was to provide a first critical test of this possibility. Two hypotheses were tested: (a) the number of breast cancer articles would be greater than the number of CVD articles; and (b) this disparity in coverage would increase over the years. METHODS: A web-based search engine was used to quantify all breast cancer and cardiovascular disease articles (keyword search) in 73 popular magazines on a annual basis for a 10-year interval (1990-1999). RESULTS: Consistent with study hypotheses, breast cancer articles outnumbered CVD articles, and this disparity widened over the years (P < 0.0001). This disparity was not limited to specific magazine categories (e.g., women's interest). CONCLUSIONS: Over-representation of breast cancer vis-a-vis CVD is pervasive in popular magazines. Future research should investigate how such disparities in the media may influence risk perceptions, adoption of preventive health behaviors, and compliance with screening guidelines.
This article discusses the development of international guidelines for the diagnosis, treatment, follow-up, and prevention of low-grade Ta urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. The authors, who are experts in this field from 3 continents and 7 countries, reviewed the English language literature through September 2004. The results of the authors' deliberations are presented here as a consensus document. The objective of this study was to determine the optimal diagnostic workup, treatment, follow-up, and prevention of low-grade, Ta urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. A consensus conference convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Société Internationale d'Urologie (SIU) met to critically review the literature on the diagnosis and treatment of low-grade Ta urothelial carcinoma of the bladder. Research was conducted using Medline; this search engine also was used to identify additional works not detected at the initial search. Evidence-based recommendations for diagnosis and management of the disease were made with reference to a 4-point scale. Low-grade Ta urothelial carcinoma of the bladder is a well-studied subject with many level 1 and 2 evidence references that support clinical practice. Findings from 135 reviewed citations are summarized. Many grade A and B recommendations on the diagnostic workup and management of this disease can be given with level 1 and 2 evidence based on prospective randomized clinical trials of sufficient statistical power. This should improve the quality of the treatment of this disease.
EBM is the use of the best current evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. Practicing EBM requires five steps: (1) formulating well-built clinical questions, (2) finding the best evidence to answer the questions, (3) critically appraising the evidence, (4) applying the evidence to specific patients, and (5) saving the critically appraised evidence. The Cochrane Library is the best source for finding the best evidence about treatment. The second best method for finding evidence about treatment and the best source for finding most other types of best evidence in dermatology is by searching the MEDLINE database using the PubMed Clinical search engine of the National Library of Medicine (http://++www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/clin ica l.html). MEDLINE searches have inherent software and operator limitations that make their reliability quite variable. The quality (strength) of evidence is based on a hierarchy of evidence: results of systematic reviews of well-designed clinical studies, results of one or more well-designed clinical studies, results of large case series, and expert opinion. Once the best evidence has been found, the EBM approach involves critically appraising the quality of the evidence, determining its magnitude and precision, and applying it to the specific patient. Guidelines to appraise critically and apply evidence are available. The clinical question, best evidence, and its critical appraisal should be saved in a format that can be easily retrieved for future use.
BACKGROUND: The Web has become an important and influential source of health information. With the vast number of Web sites on the Internet, users often resort to popular search sites when searching for information. However, little is known about the characteristics of Web sites returned by simple Web searches for information about smoking cessation for teenagers. OBJECTIVE: To determine the characteristics of Web sites retrieved by search engines about smoking cessation for teenagers and how information quality correlates with the search ranking. METHODS: The top 30 sites returned by 4 popular search sites in response to the search terms "teen quit smoking" were examined. The information relevance and quality characteristics of these sites were evaluated by 2 raters. Objective site characteristics were obtained using a page-analysis Web site. RESULTS: Only 14 of the 30 Web sites are of direct relevance to smoking cessation for teenagers. The readability of about two-thirds of the 14 sites is below an eighth-grade school level and they ranked significantly higher (Kendall rank correlation, tau = -0.39, P =.05) in search-site results than sites with readability above or equal to that grade level. Sites that ranked higher were significantly associated with the presence of e-mail address for contact (tau = -0.46, P =.01), annotated hyperlinks to external sites (tau = -0.39, P =.04), and the presence of meta description tag (tau = -0.48, P =.002). The median link density (number of external sites that have a link to that site) of the Web pages was 6 and the maximum was 735. A higher link density was significantly associated with a higher rank (tau = -0.58, P =.02). CONCLUSIONS: Using simple search terms on popular search sites to look for information on smoking cessation for teenagers resulted in less than half of the sites being of direct relevance. To improve search efficiency, users could supplement results obtained from simple Web searches with human-maintained Web directories and learn to refine their searches with more advanced search syntax.
Medixx (www.medixx.ch) is a website devoted to the medical Internet. Its intention is to guide health care professionals in their discovery of the World Wide Web by presenting them the best medical sites available on the Internet. Thus, physicians will be able to acquire knowledge enabling them to find on the Web useful and worthwhile clinical information. Divided into twelve chapters, Medixx shows the usefulness of the Internet in medicine, the search for medical information on the Web, medical and general search engines, Medline, medical journals, sites of evidence-based medicine and finally various search strategies.