An overview of the design and methods for retrieving high-quality studies for clinical care

BACKGROUND: With the information explosion, the retrieval of the best clinical evidence from large, general purpose, bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE can be difficult. Both researchers conducting systematic reviews and clinicians faced with a patient care question are confronted with the daunting task of searching for the best medical literature in electronic databases. Many have advocated the use of search filters or "hedges" to assist with the searching process. The purpose of this report is to describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronics databases. OBJECTIVE: To describe the design and methods of a study that set out to develop optimal search strategies for retrieving sound clinical studies of health disorders in large electronic databases. DESIGN: An analytic survey comparing hand searches of 170 journals in the year 2000 with retrievals from MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and PsycINFO for candidate search terms and combinations. The sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy of unique search terms and combinations of search terms were calculated. CONCLUSION: A study design modeled after a diagnostic testing procedure with a gold standard (the hand search of the literature) and a test (the search terms) is an effective way of developing, testing, and validating search strategies for use in large electronic databases

Choosing and using methodological search filters : searchers' views

© 2014 The authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal © 2014 Health Libraries Group.Peer reviewedPostprin

Building Pathology and COVID-19: A Literature Review and Commentary on Field Hospital Setting

In 2019, there was an emerging disease, namely Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). This disease firstly emerged in Asia before there was a worldwide spreading. COVID-19 is highly contagious. The pandemic results in more than 100 million infections worldwide (by the end of January 2021). Each country has to have a good public health plan to correspond with the increasing number of the patient. To correspond with the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, finding for sufficient space for patient care is needed. The presently available number of hospitals might be limited and it usually requires an urgent setting of the new building for management of the situation. The field hospital is usually set. In this work, the authors performed a retrospective literature review to summarize the available data on building pathology and COVID-19. The aim of the study is about the quality of the field hospital buildings and the defects in the buildings. The standard databases, SCOPUS and PubMED are used for literature searching. The derived publications are summarized and extracted for a conclusion. According to the literature analysis, there are very few publications on the topic of building pathology of a field hospital for COVID-19 containment. The role of field hospital in outbreak management is confirmed in thee literature. However, the specific report regarding building pathology of field hospital is limited. The newly constructed field hospital is usually in the rapid emergency mode. Based on the present analysis, it can show that there is a lack of concern on building pathology of the field hospital. Due to the rapid construction of field hospitals for COVID-19 outbreak management, the quality control and standardization are important. Further researches on the building pathology and quality management of field hospital are recommended

Building Pathology and COVID-19: A Literature Review and Commentary on Field Hospital Setting

In 2019, there was an emerging disease, namely Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). This disease firstly emerged in Asia before there was a worldwide spreading. COVID-19 is highly contagious. The pandemic results in more than 100 million infections worldwide (by the end of January 2021). Each country has to have a good public health plan to correspond with the increasing number of the patient. To correspond with the rapid increase in the number of COVID-19 patients, finding for sufficient space for patient care is needed. The presently available number of hospitals might be limited and it usually requires an urgent setting of the new building for management of the situation. The field hospital is usually set. In this work, the authors performed a retrospective literature review to summarize the available data on building pathology and COVID-19. The aim of the study is about the quality of the field hospital buildings and the defects in the buildings. The standard databases, SCOPUS and PubMED are used for literature searching. The derived publications are summarized and extracted for a conclusion. According to the literature analysis, there are very few publications on the topic of building pathology of a field hospital for COVID-19 containment. The role of field hospital in outbreak management is confirmed in thee literature. However, the specific report regarding building pathology of field hospital is limited. The newly constructed field hospital is usually in the rapid emergency mode. Based on the present analysis, it can show that there is a lack of concern on building pathology of the field hospital. Due to the rapid construction of field hospitals for COVID-19 outbreak management, the quality control and standardization are important. Further researches on the building pathology and quality management of field hospital are recommended

Sample size determination for bibliographic retrieval studies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Research for developing search strategies to retrieve high-quality clinical journal articles from MEDLINE is expensive and time-consuming. The objective of this study was to determine the minimal number of high-quality articles in a journal subset that would need to be hand-searched to update or create new MEDLINE search strategies for treatment, diagnosis, and prognosis studies.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The desired width of the 95% confidence intervals (W) for the lowest sensitivity among existing search strategies was used to calculate the number of high-quality articles needed to reliably update search strategies. New search strategies were derived in journal subsets formed by 2 approaches: random sampling of journals and top journals (having the most high-quality articles). The new strategies were tested in both the original large journal database and in a low-yielding journal (having few high-quality articles) subset.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For treatment studies, if W was 10% or less for the lowest sensitivity among our existing search strategies, a subset of 15 randomly selected journals or 2 top journals were adequate for updating search strategies, based on each approach having at least 99 high-quality articles. The new strategies derived in 15 randomly selected journals or 2 top journals performed well in the original large journal database. Nevertheless, the new search strategies developed using the random sampling approach performed better than those developed using the top journal approach in a low-yielding journal subset. For studies of diagnosis and prognosis, no journal subset had enough high-quality articles to achieve the expected W (10%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The approach of randomly sampling a small subset of journals that includes sufficient high-quality articles is an efficient way to update or create search strategies for high-quality articles on therapy in MEDLINE. The concentrations of diagnosis and prognosis articles are too low for this approach.</p

Using Large Language Models to Automate Category and Trend Analysis of Scientific Articles: An Application in Ophthalmology

Purpose: In this paper, we present an automated method for article classification, leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLM). The primary focus is on the field of ophthalmology, but the model is extendable to other fields. Methods: We have developed a model based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including advanced LLMs, to process and analyze the textual content of scientific papers. Specifically, we have employed zero-shot learning (ZSL) LLM models and compared against Bidirectional and Auto-Regressive Transformers (BART) and its variants, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and its variant such as distilBERT, SciBERT, PubmedBERT, BioBERT. Results: The classification results demonstrate the effectiveness of LLMs in categorizing large number of ophthalmology papers without human intervention. Results: To evalute the LLMs, we compiled a dataset (RenD) of 1000 ocular disease-related articles, which were expertly annotated by a panel of six specialists into 15 distinct categories. The model achieved mean accuracy of 0.86 and mean F1 of 0.85 based on the RenD dataset. Conclusion: The proposed framework achieves notable improvements in both accuracy and efficiency. Its application in the domain of ophthalmology showcases its potential for knowledge organization and retrieval in other domains too. We performed trend analysis that enables the researchers and clinicians to easily categorize and retrieve relevant papers, saving time and effort in literature review and information gathering as well as identification of emerging scientific trends within different disciplines. Moreover, the extendibility of the model to other scientific fields broadens its impact in facilitating research and trend analysis across diverse disciplines

Procedimentos normalizados para pesquisa de informação clínica sobre reacções adversas no âmbito da infecção VIH/SIDA

Dissertação de mestrado em Medicina (Síndrome da Imunodeficiência Adquirida), apresentado à Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de CoimbraA terapêutica anti-retrovírica constitui a verdadeira revolução na epidemiologia da infecção VIH / SIDA. A adopção de regimes terapêuticos combinados permite um controlo mais rigoroso da evolução da doença e um aumento da qualidade de vida do doente, embora as reacções adversas associadas possam condicionar a adesão à terapêutica, o desenvolvimento de resistências e a perda de futuras opções de tratamento. A procura de informação relativa a resultados clínicos negativos da terapêutica anti-retrovírica na literatura científica, com base no conceito de Medicina Baseada na Evidência, motivou o desenvolvimento deste trabalho em duas partes, na base de dados bibliográfica de acesso gratuito MEDLINE, através do operador PubMed. O objectivo geral proposto consiste na optimização de uma metodologia sistematizada de pesquisa de Informação Clínica, avaliada com base na relação entre os parâmetros sensibilidade e especificidade e tendo como referência uma estratégia de pesquisa genérica desenvolvida para a busca de informação relativa a iatrogenia medicamentosa. Na primeira parte do trabalho, construímos equações de pesquisa que incluíram termos MeSH referentes à classe farmacológica, “subheadings” relativos a reacções adversas e o filtro qualitativo relativo ao tipo de estudo, para identificação e análise da prevalência dos resultados negativos da terapêutica anti-retrovírica descritos em casos clínicos. Os resultados obtidos coincidiram com as reacções adversas características dos fármacos anti-retrovíricos, apesar do número de artigos recuperado ser pouco significativo. Na segunda parte do trabalho, procedemos à construção de equações de pesquisa em três fases, num nível crescente de complexidade, com a introdução e combinação de termos MeSH correspondentes às classes de fármacos anti-retrovíricos, “subheadings” relativos a reacções adversas, filtros qualitativos relativos ao tipo de estudo (estudo de casos, revisões sistemáticas e ensaios clínicos aleatorizados), palavras-chave relativas à situação clínica indexadas em MeSH e “subheadings” relativos à situação clínica, com vista à optimização da metodologia de pesquisa. A respectiva apreciação, baseada nos valores da sensibilidade e especificidade calculados, mostra a importância do filtro qualitativo relativo ao tipo de estudo, uma vez que a informação relativa a resultados clínicos negativos da terapêutica anti-retrovírica é encontrada, fundamentalmente, em casos clínicos referenciados na literatura. A originalidade do trabalho nesta área comprova e reforça a real necessidade de uma gestão do risco dos resultados clínicos negativos da terapêutica, para obtenção de melhores resultados, e a importância crescente do conhecimento e aprendizagem da procura da evidência em fontes credíveis que, conjugada com o sentido crítico individual e com as características do doente, serve de suporte à decisão clínica.Development of antiretroviral therapy is the true turning-point in the treatment of HIV infection, allowing a best rigorous control of infection’s progress and a better quality of patient’s life. Related adverse drug effects can determine non-compliance, leading to resistance development and loss of future treatment options. Finding published adverse drug effects of antiretroviral agents, using an evidence-based approach, and optimizing a systematic methodology of that kind of clinical information search in MEDLINE, through PubMed, assessed by the parameters sensibility and specificity, is the main purpose of this work divided in two sections. A generic search strategy developed to find information related to drug iatrogenic was considered as a reference to the development of search studied strategies. In first section, we combined MeSH terms related to the different antiretroviral agents, subheadings linked to adverse effects and a qualitative filter related to study design. With that search strategies, we identified and analyzed the prevalence of adverse effects of antiretroviral agents described in case reports. The results presented are similar to characteristic adverse effects of antiretroviral agents, despite the fact that the number of articles retrieved was less significant. The second section was divided in three phases with a growing complexity level. We introduced and combined MeSH terms related to the different antiretroviral agents, subheadings linked to adverse effects and a qualitative filter related to study design (case reports, systematic reviews and randomized controlled trials), indexed MeSH keywords related to the clinical situation and subheadings related to the clinical situation, to create different search strategies to optimize the proposed methodology. Their assessment by means of sensibility and specificity shows the importance of the qualitative filter used, because adverse effects of antiretroviral agents are mainly found in case reports. As the first work that approaches two different concepts simultaneously, adverse effects of antiretroviral agents and an evidence based medicine approach to search literature, it demonstrates and reinforces the real need for information, as way for risk management of adverse effects, to obtain better results, and the importance of knowing and learning evidence based practice in credible sources to support clinical decisions, integrated with clinical expertise and patient’s values