Developing population information systems.
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Gerontology is a new field including various disciplines such as medicine, engineering science, social science etc, and is sometimes called as "longevity science". Because of the wide area of the field, it is important to show the scope of the science and the development of its thesaurus contributes to this end. We developed a relevant thesaurus based on the research funded by Longevity Science Promotion Organization, and using the thesaurus, we also developed a database and retrieval system of the gerontology research. This system can be accessed on the Internet.
A knowledge based system (KBS) which helps health service managers to interpret immunization coverage rates was installed in two provinces of Papua New Guinea. It was assessed over a period of 4 months to determine whether it was a potentially useful management tool. One province used the system but did not adjust its activities significantly because it was meeting its targets for immunization. In the other province the KBS helped provincial managers to detect problems and respond to them. Consequently, improvements in performance indicators were detected. It is difficult to attribute the improvements entirely to the KBS but several actions were taken to strengthen immunization services and the KBS appeared to support these. It appears that interventions which make routinely collected data more understandable and readily usable by health service managers can lead to improvements in the delivery of health services.
BACKGROUND: Text-mining can assist biomedical researchers in reducing information overload by extracting useful knowledge from large collections of text. We developed a novel text-mining method based on analyzing the network structure created by symbol co-occurrences as a way to extend the capabilities of knowledge extraction. The method was applied to the task of automatic gene and protein name synonym extraction. RESULTS: Performance was measured on a test set consisting of about 50,000 abstracts from one year of MEDLINE. Synonyms retrieved from curated genomics databases were used as a gold standard. The system obtained a maximum F-score of 22.21% (23.18% precision and 21.36% recall), with high efficiency in the use of seed pairs. CONCLUSION: The method performs comparably with other studied methods, does not rely on sophisticated named-entity recognition, and requires little initial seed knowledge.
OBJECTIVE: To develop a classification system for the retrieval of stored material on various vulvar conditions. STUDY DESIGN: The major subject areas of vulvar conditions and management were identified. They were further classified into categories and subcategories. A numbering system was chosen for coding. The information was formatted to allow retrieval from the Internet in a framework ready for label printing. RESULTS: The classification system developed provides guidelines that are useful in making retrieval of stored material on various vulvar conditions more efficient. It can be expanded and personalized to fit the practitioner's needs and can be obtained from the Internet in the following manner by opening Netscape and entering the location: http:/(/)www.med.umich.edu/obgyn/vulva/ vulvalit.html. The filing system was formatted to allow standard, 5266, file-folder-sized label sheets to be inserted into the printer, allowing access to pretyped labels. A total of 464 labels will be printed. CONCLUSION: This system for retrieving vulvar information will be useful to many people, including clinicians, educators and researchers. The information is easily obtained from the Internet and printed in label form. It aids in the development of a system for life-long learning.
The authors describe their experience designing a controlled medical vocabulary server created to support the exchange of patient data and medical decision logic. The first section introduces practical and theoretical premises that guided the design of the vocabulary server. The second section describes a series of structures needed to implement the proposed server, emphasizing their conformance to the design premises. The third section introduces potential applications that provide services to end users and also a group of tools necessary for maintaining the server corpus. In the fourth section, the authors propose an implementation strategy based on a common framework and on the participation of groups from different health-related domains.
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Health care information systems must reflect at least two basic characteristics of the health care community: the increasing mobility of patients and the personal liability of everyone giving medical treatment. Open distributed information systems bear the potential to reflect these requirements. But the market for open information systems and operating systems hardly provides secure products today. This 'missing link' is approached by the prototype SECURE Talk that provides secure transmission and archiving of files on top of an existing operating system. Its services may be utilized by existing medical applications. SECURE Talk demonstrates secure communication utilizing only standard hardware. Its message is that cryptography (and in particular asymmetric cryptography) is practical for many medical applications even if implemented in software. All mechanisms are software implemented in order to be executable on standard-hardware. One can investigate more or less decentralized forms of public key management and the performance of many different cryptographic mechanisms. That of, e.g. hybrid encryption and decryption (RSA+DES-PCBC) is about 300 kbit/s. That of signing and verifying is approximately the same using RSA with a DES hash function. The internal speed, without disk accesses etc., is about 1.1 Mbit/s. (Apple Quadra 950 (MC 68040, 33 MHz, RAM: 20 MB, 80 ns. Length of RSA modulus is 512 bit).
This paper aims to explore the challenges of applying data protection laws that were drawn up with traditional computer systems in mind to new forms of technology. The development of Document Image Processing systems is used as an example.
Nursing knowledge and nursing data are the foundation for nursing practice. Domain knowledge that is stored in the literature of nursing and related disciplines, if not in memory, needs to be available to nurses during the process of clinical decision making. Although the electromechanical technology for delivering knowledge is available, conceptual technology lags far behind. An informatics solution to the conceptual problem is provided by knowledge engineering, the branch of informatics that addresses such problems by developing methods for restructuring knowledge from one form into a form that is more useful. The purpose of this article is to describe a research program for engineering nursing knowledge that has resulted in the development of such a tool, a prototype computer system for storing, managing, and modeling research-knowledge. The system is called ARKS, acronym for A Research-Knowledge System.
The objective of this study was to compare how well medical professionals are able to retrieve relevant literature references using two computerized literature searching systems that provide automated (non-human) indexing of content. The first program was SAPHIRE, which features concept-based indexing, free-text input of queries, and ranking of retrieved references for relevance. The second program was SWORD, which provides single-word searching using Boolean operators (AND, OR). Sixteen fourth-year medical students participated in the study. The database for searching was six volumes from the 1989 Yearbook series. The queries were ten questions generated on teaching rounds. All subjects searched half the queries with each program. After the searching, each subject was given a questionnaire about prior experience and preferences about the two programs. Recall (proportion of relevant articles retrieved from the database) and precision (proportion of relevant articles in the retrieved set) were measured for each search done by each participant. Mean recall was 57.6% with SAPHIRE; it was 58.6% with SWORD. Precision was 48.1% with SAPHIRE vs 57.6% with SWORD. Each program was rated easier to use than the other by half of the searchers, and preferences were associated with better searching performance for that program. Both systems achieved recall and precision comparable to existing systems and may represent effective alternatives to MEDLINE and other retrieval systems based on human indexing for searching medical literature.
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The progress in information and communication technology, together with the search for the most effective and efficient ways to use the limited resources for health care, are opening new areas for research and development in perinatal care. Information systems and practice oriented by evidence-based medicine are modifying the operation of health services, and the quality of their management is being monitored by the success of their outcomes. As a study case, a Perinatal Information System widely used in Latin America and the Caribbean is discussed in some detail. Future challenges in the compatibility of information systems and databanks, the need for longer follow-up periods and measurement of health-related quality of life as outcomes for perinatal care, and the strategies to integrate all these concepts for the improvement of daily practice are discussed.
A research project funded by the Welsh Office and undertaken by the Department of Information and Library Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth examined the information systems in place in a sample of general medical practices in Wales. Shortcomings were identified in patient records, the supply of medical information for patients, staff training and staff communications. Practices lacked coherent information management strategies to relate information to practice goals and to define responsibility and protocols for information tasks. Unless rectified, these deficiencies will inhibit the viability of primary care data as a basis for medical research, audit and for identifying the health needs of communities.
MOTIVATION: In addition to existing bioinformatics software, a lot of new tools are being developed world wide to supply services for an ever growing, widely dispersed and heterogeneous collection of biological data. The integration of these resources under a common platform is a challenging task. To this end, several groups are developing integration technologies, in which services are usually registered in some sort of catalogue to allow novel discovering and accessing mechanisms to be implemented. However, each service demands specific interfaces to accommodate their parameters and it is a complicated task linking the different service inputs and outputs to solve a biological problem. RESULTS: In this work we address the design and implementation of a versatile web client to access BioMOBY compatible services (a system by which a client can interact with multiple sources of biological data regardless of the underlying format or schema) using the service description stored in the BioMOBY catalogue. The automatic interface generator significantly reduces developing time and produces uniform service access mechanisms. The design and proof of concept (for such a client) including the generic interface generator have been developed and implemented in the National Institute for Bioinformatics in Spain. AVAILABILITY: The INB (National Institute for Bioinformatics, Spain) platform is available at www.inab.org/MOWServ
BACKGROUND: Biological resources are essential tools for biomedical research. Their availability is promoted through on-line catalogues. Common Access to Biological Resources and Information (CABRI) is a service for distribution of biological resources and related data collected by 28 European culture collections. Linking this information to bioinformatics databanks can make the collections' holdings more visible after a search in molecular biology databanks and vice-versa. Identification of links to sequence databases can be useful, but annotation and indexing problems, together with compilation errors, immediately arise. In this paper, we present our efforts for the identification of cross-references between CABRI catalogues and the EMBL Data Library and related results. RESULTS: An SRS site with both EMBL and CABRI catalogues has been set up. Ad-hoc changes in indexing scripts allowed to achieve homogeneous index keys and SRS link features have been used to identify links between databases. After manual checking and comparison with an alternative procedure, about 67,500 valid cross-references were identified, added to the EMBL Data Library and are now distributed with it. HTML links can be established from EMBL to CABRI network service. Procedures can be executed whenever needed. CONCLUSION: Links between EMBL and CABRI catalogues constitute an improved access to micro-organisms of certified quality and can produce positive effects on biomedical research. Further links between CABRI catalogues and other bioinformatics databases can now easily be defined by using these cross-references. Linking genetic information onto natural resources information may stand model for the integration of other databases containing empirical data on these materials.
The general perception that the use of information technology (IT) in health care is ten to fifteen years behind IT in other industrial sectors such as banking, manufacturing, and airline is rapidly changing. Health care providers, faced with an unprecedented era of competition and managed care, are now exploring the opportunities for using IT to improve the quality while simultaneously reducing the cost of health care. A revolution is taking place in the health care industry, with IT playing an increasingly important role in its delivery. In recent years, for example, the industry spent approximately $12 billion to $14 billion a year on IT. Further exponential growth is expected as the health care industry implements electronic medical records, upgrades hospital information systems, sets up intranets for sharing information among key stakeholders, and uses public networks, such as the Internet, for distributing health-related information and for providing remote diagnostics. Along with these drastic changes and the new approach to health care, the field of health/medical informatics and telematics has also experienced significant growth in the last few years. This article identifies and surveys the critical information technologies that are being adopted to provide strategic benefits to the various health care constituencies including hospitals and health maintenance organizations (HMOs).