A virtual computer lab for distance biomedical technology education

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MED15/382: Co-operative Interface in Medical Education on the WWW

Hospitals deal with a huge volume of medical information shared by multidisciplinary staff. The management and circulation of this information require massive computerization. This medical computerization, associated with the Internet technological progress, has given birth to many software applications in the educational field. In the context of medical virtual university, the World Wide Web intrinsic interactive and asynchronous functionality has to be extended to become co-operative and in real-time. In the context of our virtual medical university in Rennes, we have worked on a system, called CSCWeb, allowing implementation of synchronous co-operative functionality through multi-platform graphical interfaces on the Web. This project is motivated by the use of existing computer-based equipment in most of medical schools. The CSCWeb system is designed to be easily upgraded by Java programmers. It allows to re-use generic co-operative graphical tools, such as textual chat, and to develop specific graphical tools well-suited to application fields. In the CSCWeb system, the participants of a co-operative session give automatic individual access to the multimedia medical information. This distributed access avoids the bottleneck generally caused by multimedia data volume in centralized systems. The system handles only internal and external data. The former are commands which allow to play remotely the same sequence of graphical events of the local user's interface. The latter are additional medical information, such as comments, definition of region of interest on a X-ray, etc. These internal and external data are textual (comments, co-ordinates, etc.), and represent a small volume of data to transfer between participants. Furthermore, these commands are only dependent on graphical objects (button, frame, etc) whatever their use is (color selector, etc). Therefore, the use of commands allows easy extension of co-operative functionality to any kind of data, such as video, without increasing the charge of the CSCWeb mechanism. Only individual access to the new type of data will be affected by its volume according to the network bandwidth. Our first purpose was to check the feasibility of our strategic choices. To date, we have implemented an educational prototype including a group management interface which is a built-in co-operative graphical tool, and a whiteboard which is a generic one. The resulting system has been evaluated, on intranet in the Laboratory of Medical Computing in Rennes (France), in terms of implementation and working performance. This evaluation is encouraging to extend the CSCWeb system for co-diagnosis in medical practice. As it is platform independent, the CSCWeb system is well-adapted to almost all medical units' computer-based equipment. Furthermore, the great flexibility of the Java programming language in user interface design contributes to fit final users' requirements

Principle of codification for quick comparisons with the entire biomolecule databanks and associated programs in FORTRAN 77.

We propose a new method for homology search of nucleic acids or proteins in databanks. All the possible subsequences of a specific length in a sequence are converted into a code and stored in an indexed file (hash-coding). This preliminary work of codifying an entire bank is rather long but it enables an immediate access to all the sequence fragments of a given type. With our method a strict homology pattern of twenty nucleotides can be found for example in the Los Alamos bank (GENBANK) in less than 2 seconds. We can also use this data storage to considerably speed up the non-strict homology search programs and to write a program to help in the selection of nucleic acid hybridization probes

CARI'96 : actes du 3ème colloque africain sur la recherche en informatique = CARI'96 : proceedings of the 3rd African conference on research in computer science

L'ADM-INDEX est un système utilisant les méthodes linguistiques (morphologie, syntaxe et sémantique) pour l'indexation et l'interrogation de comptes-rendus médicaux. Sa base de connaissances est une restructuration du système A.D.M. qui est une vaste base de connaissances médicales développée au Centre Hospitalier Régional de Rennes depuis 1972 et qui a été le premier videotex professionnel d'aide au diagnostic médical en France. Dans cet article, nous présentons d'une part la base de connaissances de l'ADM-INDEX qui est constituée d'un dictionnaire, d'un ensemble de règles et d'un thesaurus, et d'autre part, le processus d'indexation et de recherche d'informations. Un prototype du système est consultable sur World Wide Web, qui est le système multimédia le plus utilisé sur Internet. (Résumé d'auteur

An objective method for bed capacity planning in a hospital department - a comparison with target ratio methods.

Objectives To propose an objective approach in order to determine the number of beds required for a hospital department by considering how recruitment fluctuates over time. To compare this approach with classical bed capacity planning techniques. Methods A simulated data-based evaluation of the impact that the variability in hospital department activity produces upon the performance of methods used for determining the number of beds required. The evaluation criteria included productive efficiency measured by the bed occupancy rate, accessibility measured by the transfer rate of patients due to lack of available beds and a proxy of clinical effectiveness, by the proportion of days during which there is no possibility for unscheduled admission. Results When the variability of the number of daily patients increases, the Target Occupancy Rate favors productive efficiency at the expense of accessibility and proxy clinical effectiveness. On the contrary, when the variability of the department activity is marginal, the Target Activity Rate penalizes the proxy of clinical effectiveness, and the Target Occupancy Rate underoptimizes productive efficiency. The method we propose led to a superior performance in terms of accessibility and proxy of clinical effectiveness at the expense of productive efficiency. Such a situation is suitable for intensive care units. In the case of other departments, a weighting procedure should be used to improve productive efficiency. Conclusions This approach could be considered as the first step of a family of methods for quantitative healthcare planning

: an Interactive and Multimedia Environment for Remote Clinical Reasoning Learning in Cardiology

The medical curriculum has changed with the adoption of the student-centered and case-based learning paradigm. Information and Communication Technologies can be useful tools to complement Clinical Reasoning Learning (CRL) sessions. Our objective was to use computers in order to coordinate remote CRL sessions, integrating electronic resources at every step of the reasoning process. CRL sessions will be enriched by multimedia medical data. We create