Imaging Informatics and the Human Brain Project: the Role of Structure, Review

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A Case for an Online Educational Administrator Practicum Experience

The principal and superintendent practicum experiences have traditionally been entirely face-to-face (f2f) between university professors, interns and site mentors – typically a campus or district administrator (Figure 1). Advancements in technology combined with the exponential growth of online graduate programs give rise to additional incorporation of technology into the practicum experience

General Practitioners' perceptions of the route to evidence-based medicine: a questionnaire survey

Objectives: To determine the attitude of general practitioners towards evidence based medicine and their related educational needs. Design: A questionnaire study of general practitioners. Setting: General practice in the former Wessex region, England. Subjects: Randomly selected sample of 25% of all general practitioners (452), of whom 302 replied. Main outcome measures: Respondents' attitude towards evidence based medicine, ability to access and interpret evidence, perceived barriers to practising evidence based medicine, and best method of moving from opinion based to evidence based medicine. Results: Respondents mainly welcomed evidence based medicine and agreed that its practice improves patient care. They had a low level of awareness of extracting journals, review publications, and databases (only 40% knew of the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews), and, even if aware, many did not use them. In their surgeries 20% had access to bibliographic databases and 17% to the world wide web. Most had some understanding of the technical terms used. The major perceived barrier to practising evidence based medicine was lack of personal time. Respondents thought the most appropriate way to move towards evidence based general practice was by using evidence based guidelines or proposals developed by colleagues. Conclusion: Promoting and improving access to summaries of evidence, rather than teaching all general practitioners literature searching and critical appraisal, would be the more appropriate method of encouraging evidence based general practice. General practitioners who are skilled in accessing and interpreting evidence should be encouraged to develop local evidence based guidelines and advice

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

NEOREG : design and implementation of an online neonatal registration system to access, follow and analyse data of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus infection

Today's registration of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection is still performed on paper-based forms in Flanders, Belgium. This process has a large administrative impact. It is imortant that all screening tests are registered to have a complete idea of the impact of cCMV. Although these registrations are usable in computerised data analysis, these data are not available in a format to perform electronic processing. An online Neonatal Registry (NEOREG) System was designed and developed to access, follow and analyse the data of newborns remotely. It allows patients' diagnostic registration and treatment follow-up through a web interface and uses document forms in Portable Document Format (PDF), which incorporate all the elements from the existing forms. Forms are automatically processed to structured EHRs. Modules are included to perform statistical analysis. The design was driven by extendibility, security and usability requirements. The website load time, throughput and execution time of data analysis were evaluated in detail. The NEOREG system is able to replace the existing paper-based CMV records

A Query Integrator and Manager for the Query Web

We introduce two concepts: the Query Web as a layer of interconnected queries over the document web and the semantic web, and a Query Web Integrator and Manager (QI) that enables the Query Web to evolve. QI permits users to write, save and reuse queries over any web accessible source, including other queries saved in other installations of QI. The saved queries may be in any language (e.g. SPARQL, XQuery); the only condition for interconnection is that the queries return their results in some form of XML. This condition allows queries to chain off each other, and to be written in whatever language is appropriate for the task. We illustrate the potential use of QI for several biomedical use cases, including ontology view generation using a combination of graph-based and logical approaches, value set generation for clinical data management, image annotation using terminology obtained from an ontology web service, ontology-driven brain imaging data integration, small-scale clinical data integration, and wider-scale clinical data integration. Such use cases illustrate the current range of applications of QI and lead us to speculate about the potential evolution from smaller groups of interconnected queries into a larger query network that layers over the document and semantic web. The resulting Query Web could greatly aid researchers and others who now have to manually navigate through multiple information sources in order to answer specific questions

Recording of time-varying back-pain data: A wireless solution

Chronic back pain is a debilitating experience for a considerable proportion of the adult population, with a significant impact on countries’ economies and health systems. While there has been increasing anecdotal evidence to support the fact that for certain categories of patients (such as wheelchair users), the back pain experienced is dynamically varying with time, there is a relative scarcity of data to support and document this observation, with consequential impact upon such patients’ treatment and care. Part of the reason behind this state of affairs is the relative difficulty in gathering pain measurements at precisely defined moments in time. In this paper,we describe a wireless-enabled solution that collects both questionnaire and diagrammatic, visual-based data, via a pain drawing, which overcomes such limitations, enabling seamless data collection and its upload to a hospital server using existing wireless fidelity technology. Results show that it is generally perceived to be an easy-to-use and convenient solution to the challenges of anywhere/anytime data collection