An Object-Oriented Approach to Knowledge Representation in a Biomedical Domain

An object-oriented approach has been applied to the different stages involved in developing a knowledge base about insulin metabolism. At an early stage the separation of terminological and assertional knowledge was made. The terminological component was developed by medical experts and represented in CORE. An object-oriented knowledge acquisition process was applied to the assertional knowledge. A frame description is proposed which includes features like states and events, inheritance and collaboration. States and events are formalized with qualitative calculus. The terminological knowledge was very useful in the development of the assertional component. It assisteed in understanding the problem domain, and in the implementation stage, it assisted in building good inheritance hierarchies

The design of systems for learning and working in librarianship.

The paper presents a philosophy and theory for the design of a system that would mediate between the librarian as a knowledge worker and the library as a learning organization. It does this by combining Activity Theory and Ecological Interface Design. The task to be supported is that of classification. The hypothesis is that the task of library classification can be supported by using the surrounding organization as an interactive learning environment, as the process of organizational learning depends on an appreciation of the cognitive process of classification

Ontology-Based MEDLINE Document Classification

An increasing and overwhelming amount of biomedical information is available in the research literature mainly in the form of free-text. Biologists need tools that automate their information search and deal with the high volume and ambiguity of free-text. Ontologies can help automatic information processing by providing standard concepts and information about the relationships between concepts. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) ontology is already available and used by MEDLINE indexers to annotate the conceptual content of biomedical articles. This paper presents a domain-independent method that uses the MeSH ontology inter-concept relationships to extend the existing MeSH-based representation of MEDLINE documents. The extension method is evaluated within a document triage task organized by the Genomics track of the 2005 Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). Our method for extending the representation of documents leads to an improvement of 17% over a non-extended baseline in terms of normalized utility, the metric defined for the task. The SVMlight software is used to classify documents

Proteins and Peptide Drugs: Different Routes of Administration for Their Delivery

Proteins and peptides have the wide range of therapeutic agents emerged within and the administration is through needle and syringe i.e., parenteral delivery is the choice of route of administration, but it has drawn some drawback related to patient incompliance such as causing pain during administration, sterility and cost of the product though the bioavailability is 100%. The route of administration plays an important role as it have an impact on the therapeutic outcome of the drug, with the advancement in the branch of pharmaceutical biotechnology. Based on the biophysical and biochemical properties a delivery system was designed for protein and peptide based therapeutic and clinical application have come into existence through non-invasive delivery and in addition, this dosage form can be significantly self-administered by patients, manufacturing cost would be less compared to the injections. The main aim is to focus in this review article is the recent advances in the delivery of therapeutic proteins and peptides via different non-invasive routes and the barriers affecting the drug transportation, approaches, advantages, challenges. Keywords: Non-invasive drug delivery, therapeutic proteins and peptides, non-invasive routes

Tradisi Perawatan Ibu Hamil dalam Masyarakat di Kecamatan Kemuning Kabupaten Indragiri Hilir

This research was conducted in Kemuning Sub-district of Indragiri Hilir Regency with title of research of Tradition of Pregnant Mother Care in Society. This study aims to determine the stages of women's care in the community of Kemuning Sub-district Indragiri Hilir and to know if the tradition value in pregnant women treatment already conform with the medic treatment in the clinic. This research is descriptive qualitative research. Subjects in this study consist of 9 people, midwives and customs leaders who can help researchers. The purpose of purposive sampling is to adjust to research objectives. The data collection of reports using guidelines. The results show that currently rituals are still performed pregnant women in the Malay community. Pregnancy care pregnant women are not free from the help of a shaman and many taboos that should not be done by a pregnant woman. The food that do not allowed to consume by the pregnant women consist of some animal and begetable. Pregnant women apply some things that should not be done during pregnancy. The role of a husband in pregnancy is to lead the wife to studying pregnancy, while the role of in-laws or parents during pregnancy is to help with homework such as cooking and other homework. In the family of pregnancy care is the routine exams and the implementation of midwife messages, continue pregnancy abstinence, consultation to the midwife when it is sick, regards the message of the family, often eat cashew for the confidence of the child's skin Is born white later (it is Believed By the Malay community) and to the dentist there are sick. Family and midwife are sources of information. Safe information in pregnancy care is information that comes from a midwife.Keywords; Tradition, pregnant women's care, Malay ssociet

Community Dynamics of Phytoplankton in a Typical Navigation Pool in the Upper Mississippi River

In 1986 we studied phytoplankton in the mid-reaches of Pool 8, which is a typical navigation pool of the Upper Mississippi River. During years of normal discharge, the areas studied usually become distinctly different from each other (ranging from free-flowing river to stagnant marsh) as the ice-free season progresses. These differences among sites did not occur during our study because the discharge into Pool 8 during 1986 was about 85% greater than the 10-yr mean discharge (1972-1982). Moreover, differences among areas were not observed with respect to physical and chemical characteristics such as photic zone depth, temperature, dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus, and silica. Accordingly, the phytoplankton assemblages and standing crops, which were characteristic of eutrophic waters, remained similar for all study areas. The phytoplankton was dominated by centric diatoms (Melosira granulata, M. italica, Stephanodiscus astrea, and Cyclotella meneghiniana), which comprised about 70% of the total cell volume. Aphanizomenon flos-aquae, Cryptomonas ovata, and U lothrix subconstricta were the most abundant non-diatoms; however, dense blooms of Aphanizomenon that normally occur in the Upper Mississippi River did not occur during the summer of 1986. Of the physical and chemical characteristics studied, discharge and temperature were most highly correlated with phytoplankton cell volume and chlorophyll a. In contrast, phosphorus and nitrogen were not correlated with phytoplankton standing crop

Growth of bifidobacteria in mammalian milk

Microbial colonization of the mammalian intestine begins at birth, when from a sterile state a newborn infant is exposed to an external environment rich in various bacterial species. An important group of intestinal bacteria comprises bifidobacteria. Bifidobacteria represent major intestinal microbiota during the breast-feeding period. Animal milk contains all crucial nutrients for babies’ intestinal microflora. The aim of our work was to test the influence of different mammalian milk on the growth of bifidobacteria. The growth of seven strains of bifidobacteria in human milk, the colostrum of swine, cow’s milk, sheep’s milk, and rabbit’s milk was tested. Good growth accompanied by the production of lactic acid was observed not only in human milk, but also in the other kinds of milk in all three strains of Bifidobacterium bifidum of different origin. Human milk selectively supported the production of lactic acid of human bifidobacterial isolates, especially the Bifidobacterium bifidum species. The promotion of bifidobacteria by milk is species-specific. Human milk contains a key factor for the growth of specific species or strains of human-origin bifidobacteria compared to other kinds of milk. In contrast, some components (maybe lysozyme) of human milk inhibited the growth of Bifidobacterium animalis. Animal-origin strains of bifidobacteria were not able to significantly grow even in milk of animal origin, with the exception of B. animalis subsp. lactis 1,2, which slightly grew in sheep’s milk

On benzenoid systems with a minimal number of inlets

Inlets are features on the perimeter of a benzenoid system that determine numerous of its electronic and topological properties. A class of large benzenoid systems is constructed, having a small number of inlets. It is shown that the minimal number of inlets in a benzenoid system with h hexagons is less than or equal to 3(h 1) . Copyright ©2013 SCS

Technology for large-scale translation of clinical practice guidelines : a pilot study of the performance of a hybrid human and computer-assisted approach

Background: The construction of EBMPracticeNet, a national electronic point-of-care information platform in Belgium, was initiated in 2011 to optimize quality of care by promoting evidence-based decision-making. The project involved, among other tasks, the translation of 940 EBM Guidelines of Duodecim Medical Publications from English into Dutch and French. Considering the scale of the translation process, it was decided to make use of computer-aided translation performed by certificated translators with limited expertise in medical translation. Our consortium used a hybrid approach, involving a human translator supported by a translation memory (using SDL Trados Studio), terminology recognition (using SDL Multiterm termbases) from medical termbases and support from online machine translation. This has resulted in a validated translation memory which is now in use for the translation of new and updated guidelines. Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of the hybrid human and computer-assisted approach in comparison with translation unsupported by translation memory and terminology recognition. A comparison was also made with the translation efficiency of an expert medical translator. Methods: We conducted a pilot trial in which two sets of 30 new and 30 updated guidelines were randomized to one of three groups. Comparable guidelines were translated (a) by certificated junior translators without medical specialization using the hybrid method (b) by an experienced medical translator without this support and (c) by the same junior translators without the support of the validated translation memory. A medical proofreader who was blinded for the translation procedure, evaluated the translated guidelines for acceptability and adequacy. Translation speed was measured by recording translation and post-editing time. The Human Translation Edit Rate was calculated as a metric to evaluate the quality of the translation. A further evaluation was made of translation acceptability and adequacy. Results: The average number of words per guideline was 1,195 and the mean total translation time was 100.2 min/1,000 words. No meaningful differences were found in the translation speed for new guidelines. The translation of updated guidelines was 59 min/1,000 words faster (95% CI 2-115; P=.044) in the computer-aided group. Revisions due to terminology accounted for one third of the overall revisions by the medical proofreader. Conclusions: Use of the hybrid human and computer-aided translation by a non-expert translator makes the translation of updates of clinical practice guidelines faster and cheaper because of the benefits of translation memory. For the translation of new guidelines there was no apparent benefit in comparison with the efficiency of translation unsupported by translation memory (whether by an expert or non-expert translator