Protégé: A Tool for Managing and Using Terminology in Radiology Applications

The development of standard terminologies such as RadLex is becoming important in radiology applications, such as structured reporting, teaching file authoring, report indexing, and text mining. The development and maintenance of these terminologies are challenging, however, because there are few specialized tools to help developers to browse, visualize, and edit large taxonomies. Protégé (http://protege.stanford.edu) is an open-source tool that allows developers to create and to manage terminologies and ontologies. It is more than a terminology-editing tool, as it also provides a platform for developers to use the terminologies in end-user applications. There are more than 70,000 registered users of Protégé who are using the system to manage terminologies and ontologies in many different domains. The RadLex project has recently adopted Protégé for managing its radiology terminology. Protégé provides several features particularly useful to managing radiology terminologies: an intuitive graphical user interface for navigating large taxonomies, visualization components for viewing complex term relationships, and a programming interface so developers can create terminology-driven radiology applications. In addition, Protégé has an extensible plug-in architecture, and its large user community has contributed a rich library of components and extensions that provide much additional useful functionalities. In this report, we describe Protégé’s features and its particular advantages in the radiology domain in the creation, maintenance, and use of radiology terminology

Gene expression profiling reveals differential effects of sodium selenite, selenomethionine, and yeast-derived selenium in the mouse

The essential trace mineral selenium is an important determinant of oxidative stress susceptibility, with several studies showing an inverse relationship between selenium intake and cancer. Because different chemical forms of selenium have been reported to have varying bioactivity, there is a need for nutrigenomic studies that can comprehensively assess whether there are divergent effects at the molecular level. We examined the gene expression profiles associated with selenomethionine (SM), sodium selenite (SS), and yeast-derived selenium (YS) in the intestine, gastrocnemius, cerebral cortex, and liver of mice. Weanling mice were fed either a selenium-deficient (SD) diet (<0.01 mg/kg diet) or a diet supplemented with one of three selenium sources (1 mg/kg diet, as either SM, SS or YS) for 100 days. All forms of selenium were equally effective in activating standard measures of selenium status, including tissue selenium levels, expression of genes encoding selenoproteins (Gpx1 and Txnrd2), and increasing GPX1 enzyme activity. However, gene expression profiling revealed that SS and YS were similar (and distinct from SM) in both the expression pattern of individual genes and gene functional categories. Furthermore, only YS significantly reduced the expression of Gadd45b in all four tissues and also reduced GADD45B protein levels in liver. Taken together, these results show that gene expression profiling is a powerful technique capable of elucidating differences in the bioactivity of different forms of selenium

To: The Epimed Monitor ICU Database®: a cloud-based national registry for adult intensive care unit patients in Brazil

We congratulate the Epimed collaborators(1) on their impressive results from a privately owned registry in Brazil, an upper-middle income country. In addition to the examples from high income countries cited by the authors, Sri Lanka - a lower-middle-income country in South Asia - has implemented a national cloud-based intensive care unit (ICU) registry,(2) directly overseen by the Ministry of Health and Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA), in partnership with other national and overseas collaborators, including the Dutch National Intensive Care Evaluation (NICE) foundation. Founded in 2012, the cloud-based critical care unit registry, as part of a codesigned agile mobile data platform, the so called Network for Improving Critical Care Systems and Training (NICST; www.nicst.com), encompasses almost the entire network of state ICUs island-wide and includes pediatric, neonatal and specialized units

To: The Epimed Monitor ICU Database®: a cloud-based national registry for adult intensive care unit patients in Brazil

We congratulate the Epimed collaborators(1) on their impressive results from a privately owned registry in Brazil, an upper-middle income country. In addition to the examples from high income countries cited by the authors, Sri Lanka - a lower-middle-income country in South Asia - has implemented a national cloud-based intensive care unit (ICU) registry,(2) directly overseen by the Ministry of Health and Information and Communications Technology Agency (ICTA), in partnership with other national and overseas collaborators, including the Dutch National Intensive Care Evaluation (NICE) foundation. Founded in 2012, the cloud-based critical care unit registry, as part of a codesigned agile mobile data platform, the so called Network for Improving Critical Care Systems and Training (NICST; www.nicst.com), encompasses almost the entire network of state ICUs island-wide and includes pediatric, neonatal and specialized units