User Interface Design for Searching Biomedical Literature

Biomedical bibliographic sources are crucial resources for the work of physicians, biologists, and bioinformatics. Many of the genetic-medical diagnoses depend on the findings in these bibliographic sources. Despite the importance and value of the information stored in these repositories, the user interface (UI) of these resources does not provide the adequate mechanisms to interact with the content, converting the query and interpretation of the information into complex and time-consuming tasks. In this sense, improving the usability of these UIs becomes a challenge since this means facilitating the interaction, analysis and comparison of biomedical information, and, consequently, improving the productivity of professionals in this domain. This paper presents a UI design for the search of biomedical bibliography that incorporates solutions to the usability problems documented and detected by a study of the literature. The proposed design becomes a usability heuristic for UI designers facing the development of UIs in this domain

Advancement in Dietary Assessment and Self-Monitoring Using Technology

Although methods to assess or self-monitor intake may be considered similar, the intended function of each is quite distinct. For the assessment of dietary intake, methods aim to measure food and nutrient intake and/or to derive dietary patterns for determining diet-disease relationships, population surveillance or the effectiveness of interventions. In comparison, dietary self-monitoring primarily aims to create awareness of and reinforce individual eating behaviours, in addition to tracking foods consumed. Advancements in the capabilities of technologies, such as smartphones and wearable devices, have enhanced the collection, analysis and interpretation of dietary intake data in both contexts. This Special Issue invites submissions on the use of novel technology-based approaches for the assessment of food and/or nutrient intake and for self-monitoring eating behaviours. Submissions may document any part of the development and evaluation of the technology-based approaches. Examples may include: web adaption of existing dietary assessment or self-monitoring tools (e.g., food frequency questionnaires, screeners) image-based or image-assisted methods mobile/smartphone applications for capturing intake for assessment or self-monitoring wearable cameras to record dietary intake or eating behaviours body sensors to measure eating behaviours and/or dietary intake use of technology-based methods to complement aspects of traditional dietary assessment or self-monitoring, such as portion size estimation

Performance evaluation of unified medical language system®'s synonyms expansion to query PubMed

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>PubMed is the main access to medical literature on the Internet. In order to enhance the performance of its information retrieval tools, primarily non-indexed citations, the authors propose a method: expanding users' queries using Unified Medical Language System' (UMLS) synonyms i.e. all the terms gathered under one unique Concept Unique Identifier.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This method was evaluated using queries constructed to emphasize the differences between this new method and the current PubMed automatic term mapping. Four experts assessed citation relevance.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Using UMLS, we were able to retrieve new citations in 45.5% of queries, which implies a small increase in recall. The new strategy led to a heterogeneous 23.7% mean increase in non-indexed citation retrieved. Of these, 82% have been published less than 4 months earlier. The overall mean precision was 48.4% but differed according to the evaluators, ranging from 36.7% to 88.1% (Inter rater agreement was poor: kappa = 0.34).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This study highlights the need for specific search tools for each type of user and use-cases. The proposed strategy may be useful to retrieve recent scientific advancement.</p

Developing User Personas to Aid in the Design of a User-Centered Natural Product-Drug Interaction Information Resource for Researchers

Pharmacokinetic interactions between natural products and conventional drugs can adversely impact patient outcomes. These complex interactions present unique challenges that require clear communication to researchers. We are creating a public information portal to facilitate researchers’ access to credible evidence about these interactions. As part of a user-centered design process, three types of intended researchers were surveyed: drug-drug interaction scientists, clinical pharmacists, and drug compendium editors. Of the 23 invited researchers, 17 completed the survey. The researchers suggested a number of specific requirements for a natural product-drug interaction information resource, including specific information about a given interaction, the potential to cause adverse effects, and the clinical importance. Results were used to develop user personas that provided the development team with a concise and memorable way to represent information needs of the three main researcher types and a common basis for communicating the design’s rationale

Literature search

The paper seeks to highlight the complexity of literature searching in online bibliographic databases and the importance of developing advanced search skills towards greater search efficiency. The lack of knowledge of the content, structure and operation of databases, poor search skills, and superficiality in assessing search results are discussed as the major obstacles to efficient literature searching. It is suggested that despite technical improvements towards adjusting search engines to natural language processing, the knowledge of traditional search strategies remains highly relevan

Patient Engagement: The Impact of Electronic Patient Portal Use on Missed Appointments in Patients with Diabetes, a Retrospective Study

Background: This retrospective observational chart review evaluated the use of the MyChart® patient portal as a viable tool for engaging patients. Engagement was measured as fewer missed appointments (no-shows and same-day cancellations). Objectives: To determine who uses the MyChart® patient portal in a chronically ill population of adult patients with diabetes and assess the association of portal use with missed appointments. Methods: The medical records of adult patients (18-80) with a diagnosis of Type 1 and/or Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (DM) were reviewed (N=7,795). The efficacy of the MyChart® patient portal at reducing missed appointments was assessed by comparing patients who use the portal (evidenced by two or more log-ins during the study period) to those who do not. Results: In this study, 43.7% of adult patients with diabetes used a portal account. Portal users were predominantly female, non-Black, married, non-smokers, and had at least one of the comorbidities often associated with diabetes (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and/or obesity). Portal users were on average 58.8 years old. Use of the MyChart® patient portal was independently associated with a reduced no-show rate (4.7% for portal users compared to 12.4% for nonusers). However, when patients who activated a portal account during the study period were subjected to a within-subjects analysis, the mean missed appointment percentage was not statistically significantly different when patients had an activated portal account compared to when they did not. Thus, the portal may be a useful tool for engaging chronically ill patients but it is only one component to appointment arrivals. Conclusion: Conclusions from this study are limited given the retrospective design. Nonetheless, the findings suggest that the patient portal is effective at engaging chronically ill patients and thus warrants greater merit. The portal may also be a useful tool for reducing missed appointments in patients with chronic illness who would greatly benefit from appointment adherence. Future research should focus on testing the hypotheses generated in a prospective manner

On Your MARC, Get Set, Code!

How are MARC records performing in our search environment? This presentation will look at the process and results of a research project that analyzed how users’ search terms matched up with MARC fields, as well as how and where MARC records were displayed in search results lists. Presenters will discuss the process, the results of the project, and outline how attendees can implement similar research projects at their institutions, including tools and techniques they can use to analyze how their own records are surfacing in a search environment

A Relevance Feedback-Based System For Quickly Narrowing Biomedical Literature Search Result

The online literature is an important source that helps people find the information. The quick increase of online literature makes the manual search process for the most relevant information a very time-consuming task and leads to sifting through many results to find the relevant ones. The existing search engines and online databases return a list of results that satisfy the user\u27s search criteria. The list is often too long for the user to go through every hit if he/she does not exactly know what he/she wants or/and does not have time to review them one by one. My focus is on how to find biomedical literature in a fastest way. In this dissertation, I developed a biomedical literature search system that uses relevance feedback mechanism, fuzzy logic, text mining techniques and Unified Medical Language System. The system extracts and decodes information from the online biomedical documents and uses the extracted information to first filter unwanted documents and then ranks the related ones based on the user preferences. I used text mining techniques to extract PDF document features and used these features to filter unwanted documents with the help of fuzzy logic. The system extracts meaning and semantic relations between texts and calculates the similarity between documents using these relations. Moreover, I developed a fuzzy literature ranking method that uses fuzzy logic, text mining techniques and Unified Medical Language System. The ranking process is utilized based on fuzzy logic and Unified Medical Language System knowledge resources. The fuzzy ranking method uses semantic type and meaning concepts to map the relations between texts in documents. The relevance feedback-based biomedical literature search system is evaluated using a real biomedical data that created using dobutamine (drug name). The data set contains 1,099 original documents. To obtain coherent and reliable evaluation results, two physicians are involved in the system evaluation. Using (30-day mortality) as specific query, the retrieved result precision improves by 87.7% in three rounds, which shows the effectiveness of using relevance feedback, fuzzy logic and UMLS in the search process. Moreover, the fuzzy-based ranking method is evaluated in term of ranking the biomedical search result. Experiments show that the fuzzy-based ranking method improves the average ranking order accuracy by 3.35% and 29.55% as compared with UMLS meaning and semantic type methods respectively