Articles

A decision-analytic approach to define poor prognosis patients: a case study for non-seminomatous germ cell cancer patients

Classification systems may be useful to direct more aggressive treatment to cancer patients with a relatively poor prognosis. The definition of 'poor prognosis' often lacks a formal basis. We propose a decisio...

Authors: Merel R van Dijk, Ewout W Steyerberg and J Dik F Habbema

Using machine learning algorithms to guide rehabilitation planning for home care clients

Targeting older clients for rehabilitation is a clinical challenge and a research priority. We investigate the potential of machine learning algorithms – Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)...

Authors: Mu Zhu, Zhanyang Zhang, John P Hirdes and Paul Stolee

Models predicting the growth response to growth hormone treatment in short children independent of GH status, birth size and gestational age

Mathematical models can be used to predict individual growth responses to growth hormone (GH) therapy. The aim of this study was to construct and validate high-precision models to predict the growth response t...

Authors: Jovanna Dahlgren, Berit Kriström, Aimon Niklasson, Andreas FM Nierop, Sten Rosberg and Kerstin Albertsson-Wikland

The effect of attitude to risk on decisions made by nurses using computerised decision support software in telephone clinical assessment: an observational study

There is variation in the decisions made by telephone assessment nurses using computerised decision support software (CDSS). Variation in nurses' attitudes to risk has been identified as a possible explanatory...

Authors: Alicia O'Cathain, James Munro, Iain Armstrong, Catherine O'Donnell and David Heaney

Effect of electronic patient record use on mortality in End Stage Renal Disease, a model chronic disease: retrospective analysis of 9 years of prospectively collected data

In chronic disease, health information technology promises but has yet to demonstrate improved outcomes and decreased costs. The main aim of the study was to determine the effects on mortality and cost of an e...

Authors: Victor E Pollak and Jonathan A Lorch

Creating a medical dictionary using word alignment: The influence of sources and resources

Automatic word alignment of parallel texts with the same content in different languages is among other things used to generate dictionaries for new translations. The quality of the generated word alignment dep...

Authors: Mikael Nyström, Magnus Merkel, Håkan Petersson and Hans Åhlfeldt

A comparative analysis of predictive models of morbidity in intensive care unit after cardiac surgery – Part II: an illustrative example

Popular predictive models for estimating morbidity probability after heart surgery are compared critically in a unitary framework. The study is divided into two parts. In the first part modelling techniques an...

Authors: Gabriele Cevenini, Emanuela Barbini, Sabino Scolletta, Bonizella Biagioli, Pierpaolo Giomarelli and Paolo Barbini

A comparative analysis of predictive models of morbidity in intensive care unit after cardiac surgery – Part I: model planning

Different methods have recently been proposed for predicting morbidity in intensive care units (ICU). The aim of the present study was to critically review a number of approaches for developing models capable ...

Authors: Emanuela Barbini, Gabriele Cevenini, Sabino Scolletta, Bonizella Biagioli, Pierpaolo Giomarelli and Paolo Barbini

Estimation of progression of multi-state chronic disease using the Markov model and prevalence pool concept

We propose a simple new method for estimating progression of a chronic disease with multi-state properties by unifying the prevalence pool concept with the Markov process model.

Authors: Hui-Chuan Shih, Pesus Chou, Chi-Ming Liu and Tao-Hsin Tung

A web-based laboratory information system to improve quality of care of tuberculosis patients in Peru: functional requirements, implementation and usage statistics

Multi-drug resistant tuberculosis patients in resource-poor settings experience large delays in starting appropriate treatment and may not be monitored appropriately due to an overburdened laboratory system, d...

Authors: Joaquin A Blaya, Sonya S Shin, Martin JA Yagui, Gloria Yale, Carmen Z Suarez, Luis L Asencios, J Peter Cegielski and Hamish SF Fraser

Deafness mutation mining using regular expression based pattern matching

While keyword based queries of databases such as Pubmed are frequently of great utility, the ability to use regular expressions in place of a keyword can often improve the results output by such databases. Reg...

Authors: Christopher M Frenz

Is OpenSDE an alternative for dedicated medical research databases? An example in coronary surgery

When using a conventional relational database approach to collect and query data in the context of specific clinical studies, a study with a new data set usually requires the design of a new database and entry...

Authors: Angeliek C Venema, Astrid M van Ginneken, Marcel de Wilde and Ad JJC Bogers

Instruments to assess the perception of physicians in the decision-making process of specific clinical encounters: a systematic review

The measurement of processes and outcomes that reflect the complexity of the decision-making process within specific clinical encounters is an important area of research to pursue. A systematic review was cond...

Authors: France Légaré, David Moher, Glyn Elwyn, Annie LeBlanc and Karine Gravel

Online detection and quantification of epidemics

Time series data are increasingly available in health care, especially for the purpose of disease surveillance. The analysis of such data has long used periodic regression models to detect outbreaks and estima...

Authors: Camille Pelat, Pierre-Yves Boëlle, Benjamin J Cowling, Fabrice Carrat, Antoine Flahault, Séverine Ansart and Alain-Jacques Valleron

Modeling and detection of respiratory-related outbreak signatures

Time series methods are commonly used to detect disease outbreak signatures (e.g., signals due to influenza outbreaks and anthrax attacks) from varying respiratory-related diagnostic or syndromic data sources....

Authors: Peter F Craigmile, Namhee Kim, Soledad A Fernandez and Bema K Bonsu

Generating prior probabilities for classifiers of brain tumours using belief networks

Numerous methods for classifying brain tumours based on magnetic resonance spectra and imaging have been presented in the last 15 years. Generally, these methods use supervised machine learning to develop a cl...

Authors: Greg M Reynolds, Andrew C Peet and Theodoros N Arvanitis

Developing a web-based information resource for palliative care: an action-research inspired approach

General Practitioners and community nurses rely on easily accessible, evidence-based online information to guide practice. To date, the methods that underpin the scoping of user-identified online information n...

Authors: Annette F Street, Kathleen Swift, Merilyn Annells, Roger Woodruff, Terry Gliddon, Anne Oakley and Goetz Ottman

Indivo: a personally controlled health record for health information exchange and communication

Personally controlled health records (PCHRs), a subset of personal health records (PHRs), enable a patient to assemble, maintain and manage a secure copy of his or her medical data. Indivo (formerly PING) is a...

Authors: Kenneth D Mandl, William W Simons, William CR Crawford and Jonathan M Abbett

Access, use and perceptions regarding Internet, cell phones and PDAs as a means for health promotion for people living with HIV in Peru

Internet tools, cell phones, and other information and communication technologies are being used by HIV-positive people on their own initiative. Little is known about the perceptions of HIV-positive people tow...

Authors: Walter H Curioso and Ann E Kurth

Clinical decision modeling system

Decision analysis techniques can be applied in complex situations involving uncertainty and the consideration of multiple objectives. Classical decision modeling techniques require elicitation of too many para...

Authors: Haiwen Shi and James Lyons-Weiler

Group differences in physician responses to handheld presentation of clinical evidence: a verbal protocol analysis

To identify individual differences in physicians' needs for the presentation of evidence resources and preferences for mobile devices.

Authors: Danielle M Lottridge, Mark Chignell, Romana Danicic-Mizdrak, Nada J Pavlovic, Andre Kushniruk and Sharon E Straus

Erratum to: Manuscript Architect: a web application for scientific writing in virtual interdisciplinary groups

Authors: Ricardo Pietrobon, Karen C Nielsen, Susan M Steele, Andreia P Menezes, Henrique Martins and Danny O Jacobs

Physicians' intentions and use of three patient decision aids

Decision aids are evidence based tools that assist patients in making informed values-based choices and supplement the patient-clinician interaction. While there is evidence to show that decision aids improve ...

Authors: Ian D Graham, Jo Logan, Carol L Bennett, Justin Presseau, Annette M O'Connor, Susan L Mitchell, Jacqueline M Tetroe, Ann Cranney, Paul Hebert and Shawn D Aaron

Design of a Two-level Adaptive Multi-Agent System for Malaria Vectors driven by an ontology

The understanding of heterogeneities in disease transmission dynamics as far as malaria vectors are concerned is a big challenge. Many studies while tackling this problem don't find exact models to explain the...

Authors: Guillaume Koum, Augustin Yekel, Bengyella Ndifon, Josiane Etang and Frédéric Simard

Improving search filter development: a study of palliative care literature

It is difficult to systematically search for literature relevant to palliative care in general medical journals. A previously developed search filter for use on OVID Medline validated using a gold standard set...

Authors: Ruth M Sladek, Jennifer Tieman and David C Currow

An automatic method to generate domain-specific investigator networks using PubMed abstracts

Collaboration among investigators has become critical to scientific research. This includes ad hoc collaboration established through personal contacts as well as formal consortia established by funding agencie...

Authors: Wei Yu, Ajay Yesupriya, Anja Wulf, Junfeng Qu, Marta Gwinn and Muin J Khoury

Utilization of the PICO framework to improve searching PubMed for clinical questions

Supporting 21^st century health care and the practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires ubiquitous access to clinical information and to knowledge-based resources to answer clinical questions. Many questio...

Authors: Connie Schardt, Martha B Adams, Thomas Owens, Sheri Keitz and Paul Fontelo

Automated real time constant-specificity surveillance for disease outbreaks

For real time surveillance, detection of abnormal disease patterns is based on a difference between patterns observed, and those predicted by models of historical data. The usefulness of outbreak detection str...

Authors: Shannon C Wieland, John S Brownstein, Bonnie Berger and Kenneth D Mandl

Reviewing the integration of patient data: how systems are evolving in practice to meet patient needs

The integration of Information Systems (IS) is essential to support shared care and to provide consistent care to individuals – patient-centred care. This paper identifies, appraises and summarises studies exa...

Authors: Ricardo J Cruz-Correia, Pedro M Vieira-Marques, Ana M Ferreira, Filipa C Almeida, Jeremy C Wyatt and Altamiro M Costa-Pereira

Medicine in words and numbers: a cross-sectional survey comparing probability assessment scales

In the complex domain of medical decision making, reasoning under uncertainty can benefit from supporting tools. Automated decision support tools often build upon mathematical models, such as Bayesian networks...

Authors: Cilia LM Witteman, Silja Renooij and Pieter Koele

A Decision Aid for COPD patients considering inhaled steroid therapy: development and before and after pilot testing

Decision aids (DA) are tools designed to help patients make specific and deliberative choices among disease management options. DAs can improve the quality of decision-making and reduce decisional conflict. An...

Authors: Elie A Akl, Brydon JB Grant, Gordon H Guyatt, Victor M Montori and Holger J Schünemann

Prognosis of the individual course of disease - steps in developing a decision support tool for Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic disease of uncertain aetiology. Variations in its disease course make it difficult to impossible to accurately determine the prognosis of individual patients. The Sylvia Lawry C...

Authors: M Daumer, A Neuhaus, C Lederer, M Scholz, JS Wolinsky and M Heiderhoff

Julius – a template based supplementary electronic health record system

EHR systems are widely used in hospitals and primary care centres but it is usually difficult to share information and to collect patient data for clinical research. This is partly due to the different proprie...

Authors: Rong Chen, Gösta Enberg and Gunnar O Klein

Mapping the categories of the Swedish primary health care version of ICD-10 to SNOMED CT concepts: Rule development and intercoder reliability in a mapping trial

Terminologies and classifications are used for different purposes and have different structures and content. Linking or mapping terminologies and classifications has been pointed out as a possible way to achie...

Authors: Anna Vikström, Ylva Skånér, Lars-Erik Strender and Gunnar H Nilsson

Can postponement of an adverse outcome be used to present risk reductions to a lay audience? A population survey

For shared decision making doctors need to communicate the effectiveness of therapies such that patients can understand it and discriminate between small and large effects. Previous research indicates that pat...

Authors: Rasmus Dahl, Dorte Gyrd-Hansen, Ivar Sønbø Kristiansen, Jørgen Nexøe and Jesper Bo Nielsen

Clinical decision support tools: analysis of online drug information databases

Online drug information databases are used to assist in enhancing clinical decision support. However, the choice of which online database to consult, purchase or subscribe to is likely made based on subjective...

Authors: Kevin A Clauson, Wallace A Marsh, Hyla H Polen, Matthew J Seamon and Blanca I Ortiz

A simulation study comparing aberration detection algorithms for syndromic surveillance

The usefulness of syndromic surveillance for early outbreak detection depends in part on effective statistical aberration detection. However, few published studies have compared different detection algorithms ...

Authors: Michael L Jackson, Atar Baer, Ian Painter and Jeff Duchin

Evidence-based medicine among internal medicine residents in a community hospital program using smart phones

This study implemented and evaluated a point-of-care, wireless Internet access using smart phones for information retrieval during daily clinical rounds and academic activities of internal medicine residents i...

Authors: Sergio A León, Paul Fontelo, Linda Green, Michael Ackerman and Fang Liu

Using GIS to create synthetic disease outbreaks

The ability to detect disease outbreaks in their early stages is a key component of efficient disease control and prevention. With the increased availability of electronic health-care data and spatio-temporal ...

Authors: Rochelle E Watkins, Serryn Eagleson, Sam Beckett, Graeme Garner, Bert Veenendaal, Graeme Wright and Aileen J Plant

A UMLS-based spell checker for natural language processing in vaccine safety

The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient s...

Authors: Herman D Tolentino, Michael D Matters, Wikke Walop, Barbara Law, Wesley Tong, Fang Liu, Paul Fontelo, Katrin Kohl and Daniel C Payne

Medical communication and technology: a video-based process study of the use of decision aids in primary care consultations

Much of the research on decision-making in health care has focused on consultation outcomes. Less is known about the process by which clinicians and patients come to a treatment decision. This study aimed to q...

Authors: Eileen Kaner, Ben Heaven, Tim Rapley, Madeleine Murtagh, Ruth Graham, Richard Thomson and Carl May

Relemed: sentence-level search engine with relevance score for the MEDLINE database of biomedical articles

Receiving extraneous articles in response to a query submitted to MEDLINE/PubMed is common. When submitting a multi-word query (which is the majority of queries submitted), the presence of all query words with...

Authors: Mir S Siadaty, Jianfen Shu and William A Knaus

Usability of a barcode scanning system as a means of data entry on a PDA for self-report health outcome questionnaires: a pilot study in individuals over 60 years of age

Throughout the medical and paramedical professions, self-report health status questionnaires are used to gather patient-reported outcome measures. The objective of this pilot study was to evaluate in individua...

Authors: Patrick Boissy, Karen Jacobs and Serge H Roy

Polychotomization of continuous variables in regression models based on the overall C index

When developing multivariable regression models for diagnosis or prognosis, continuous independent variables can be categorized to make a prediction table instead of a prediction formula. Although many methods...

Authors: Harukazu Tsuruta and Leon Bax

Accounting for seasonal patterns in syndromic surveillance data for outbreak detection

Syndromic surveillance (SS) can potentially contribute to outbreak detection capability by providing timely, novel data sources. One SS challenge is that some syndrome counts vary with season in a manner that ...

Authors: Tom Burr, Todd Graves, Richard Klamann, Sarah Michalak, Richard Picard and Nicolas Hengartner

Context-sensitive autoassociative memories as expert systems in medical diagnosis

The complexity of our contemporary medical practice has impelled the development of different decision-support aids based on artificial intelligence and neural networks. Distributed associative memories are ne...

Authors: Andrés Pomi and Fernando Olivera

Systematic review of prognostic models in traumatic brain injury

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a leading cause of death and disability world-wide. The ability to accurately predict patient outcome after TBI has an important role in clinical practice and research. Prognost...

Authors: Pablo Perel, Phil Edwards, Reinhard Wentz and Ian Roberts

Diagnostic omission errors in acute paediatric practice: impact of a reminder system on decision-making

Diagnostic error is a significant problem in specialities characterised by diagnostic uncertainty such as primary care, emergency medicine and paediatrics. Despite wide-spread availability, computerised aids h...

Authors: Padmanabhan Ramnarayan, Andrew Winrow, Michael Coren, Vasanta Nanduri, Roger Buchdahl, Benjamin Jacobs, Helen Fisher, Paul M Taylor, Jeremy C Wyatt and Joseph Britto

Technical development of PubMed Interact: an improved interface for MEDLINE/PubMed searches

The project aims to create an alternative search interface for MEDLINE/PubMed that may provide assistance to the novice user and added convenience to the advanced user. An earlier version of the project was th...

Authors: Michael Muin and Paul Fontelo

Creating a medical English-Swedish dictionary using interactive word alignment

This paper reports on a parallel collection of rubrics from the medical terminology systems ICD-10, ICF, MeSH, NCSP and KSH97-P and its use for semi-automatic creation of an English-Swedish dictionary of medic...

Authors: Mikael Nyström, Magnus Merkel, Lars Ahrenberg, Pierre Zweigenbaum, Håkan Petersson and Hans Åhlfeldt