42,843 research outputs found
Barry Smith an sich
Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf LĆ¼the, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Å»eÅaniec, and Jan WoleÅski
Towards new information resources for public health: From WordNet to MedicalWordNet
In the last two decades, WORDNET has evolved as the most comprehensive computational lexicon of general English. In this article, we discuss its potential for supporting the creation of an entirely new kind of information resource for public health, viz. MEDICAL WORDNET. This resource is not to be conceived merely as a lexical extension of the original WORDNET to medical terminology; indeed, there is already a considerable degree of overlap between WORDNET and the vocabulary of medicine. Instead, we propose a new type of repository, consisting of three large collections of (1) medically relevant word forms, structured along the lines of the existing Princeton WORDNET; (2) medically validated propositions, referred to here as medical facts, which will constitute what we shall call MEDICAL FACTNET; and (3) propositions reflecting laypersonsā medical beliefs, which will constitute what we shall call the MEDICAL BELIEFNET. We introduce a methodology for setting up the MEDICAL WORDNET. We then turn to the discussion of research challenges that have to be met in order to build this new type of information resource
What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?
Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of
international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response
and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a
signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where
traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue
of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting
using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using
BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration
detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance
against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings. Results: We report sensitivity,
specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV),
mean alerts/100 days and F1, at 95% confidence interval (CI) for 287
ProMED-mail postings on 18 outbreaks across 14 countries over a 366 day period.
Results indicate that W2 had the best F1 with a slight benefit for day of week
effect over C2. In drill down analysis we indicate issues arising from the
granular choice of country-level modeling, sudden drops in reporting due to day
of week effects and reporting bias. Automatic alerting has been implemented in
BioCaster available from http://born.nii.ac.jp. Conclusions: Online health news
alerts have the potential to enhance manual analytical methods by increasing
throughput, timeliness and detection rates. Systematic evaluation of health
news aberrations is necessary to push forward our understanding of the complex
relationship between news report volumes and case numbers and to select the
best performing features and algorithms
User-centered visual analysis using a hybrid reasoning architecture for intensive care units
One problem pertaining to Intensive Care Unit information systems is that, in some cases, a very dense display of data can result. To ensure the overview and readability of the increasing volumes of data, some special features are required (e.g., data prioritization, clustering, and selection mechanisms) with the application of analytical methods (e.g., temporal data abstraction, principal component analysis, and detection of events). This paper addresses the problem of improving the integration of the visual and analytical methods applied to medical monitoring systems. We present a knowledge- and machine learning-based approach to support the knowledge discovery process with appropriate analytical and visual methods. Its potential benefit to the development of user interfaces for intelligent monitors that can assist with the detection and explanation of new, potentially threatening medical events. The proposed hybrid reasoning architecture provides an interactive graphical user interface to adjust the parameters of the analytical methods based on the users' task at hand. The action sequences performed on the graphical user interface by the user are consolidated in a dynamic knowledge base with specific hybrid reasoning that integrates symbolic and connectionist approaches. These sequences of expert knowledge acquisition can be very efficient for making easier knowledge emergence during a similar experience and positively impact the monitoring of critical situations. The provided graphical user interface incorporating a user-centered visual analysis is exploited to facilitate the natural and effective representation of clinical information for patient care
The journals of importance to UK clinicians: A questionnaire survey of surgeons
Background: Peer-reviewed journals are seen as a major vehicle in the transmission of research
findings to clinicians. Perspectives on the importance of individual journals vary and the use of
impact factors to assess research is criticised. Other surveys of clinicians suggest a few key journals
within a specialty, and sub-specialties, are widely read. Journals with high impact factors are not
always widely read or perceived as important. In order to determine whether UK surgeons
consider peer-reviewed journals to be important information sources and which journals they read
and consider important to inform their clinical practice, we conducted a postal questionnaire
survey and then compared the findings with those from a survey of US surgeons.
Methods: A questionnaire survey sent to 2,660 UK surgeons asked which information sources
they considered to be important and which peer-reviewed journals they read, and perceived as
important, to inform their clinical practice. Comparisons were made with numbers of UK NHSfunded
surgery publications, journal impact factors and other similar surveys.
Results: Peer-reviewed journals were considered to be the second most important information
source for UK surgeons. A mode of four journals read was found with academics reading more
than non-academics. Two journals, the BMJ and the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England,
are prominent across all sub-specialties and others within sub-specialties. The British Journal of
Surgery plays a key role within three sub-specialties. UK journals are generally preferred and
readership patterns are influenced by membership journals. Some of the journals viewed by
surgeons as being most important, for example the Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England,
do not have high impact factors.
Conclusion: Combining the findings from this study with comparable studies highlights the
importance of national journals and of membership journals. Our study also illustrates the
complexity of the link between the impact factors of journals and the importance of the journals
to clinicians. This analysis potentially provides an additional basis on which to assess the role of
different journals, and the published output from research
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