CiteULike: Gaetan's library [269 articles]

Internet et santé : les enseignements de l'enquête permanente sur les conditions de vie des ménages, France, 2005

E Renahy — 2008-05-13T13:51:48-00:00

Revue d'Épidémiologie et de Santé Publique, Vol. In Press, Corrected Proof

Background The Internet is a major source of information for the general public in the field of health. However despite ever-increasing connection rates, a digital divide persists in the industrialised countries. The objective of this study was to assess the determinants involved in Internet access and then in Internet use for health information seeking.Methods This study is based on a cross-sectional survey of a representative random sample of French inhabitants: the Enquête permanente sur les conditions de vie des ménages conducted by Insee in 2005, which included a specific investigation on information and communication technology.Results Fifty-two percent of the French adult population had Internet access, and 28.5% of the Internet users had previously searched for medical information during the month before the survey. A first level of socioeconomic divide has been shown in Internet access: poor socioeconomic status, health problems. In terms of health information seeking among Internet users, the divide was not socioeconomic but more related to gender, the health care system utilization, and the diversified use of the Internet.Conclusion In a public health perspective, this study suggests that promoting Internet access and utilization is still necessary in order to make it a widely used tool for prevention and health promotion.RésuméPosition du problème Internet est devenu une source d'informations majeure pour le grand public dans le domaine de la santé. Cependant, malgré l'augmentation constante des taux d'accès à Internet, une fracture numérique persiste dans les pays industrialisés. L'objectif de cette étude était de mieux comprendre les déterminants impliqués dans les inégalités d'accès à Internet, d'une part, et les facteurs liés à son utilisation pour rechercher des informations en santé, d'autre part.Méthodes Les analyses ont été conduites à partir des données de l'« Enquête permanente sur les conditions de vie des ménages » de l'Insee en 2005 ; le questionnaire complémentaire portait cette année-là spécifiquement sur les technologies de l'information et de la communication.Résultats Plus de la moitié des Français (52 %) avaient un accès à Internet et 28,5 % des internautes avaient utilisé Internet au cours du mois précédant l'enquête pour rechercher des informations concernant un sujet de santé. Un premier niveau de fracture socioéconomique a été mis en évidence dans l'accès à Internet : situation socioéconomique difficile, problèmes de santé. En revanche, le second niveau de fracture (concernant, chez les internautes, l'utilisation d'Internet pour la recherche d'informations en santé) n'était plus socioéconomique : les facteurs les plus discriminants étaient le genre, la proximité au système de soin et l'usage diversifié d'Internet.Conclusion Dans une perspective de santé publique, cette étude suggère qu'une promotion active de la diffusion et de l'usage d'Internet reste nécessaire pour qu'il puisse constituer un media de prévention et de promotion de la santé utilisé par tous.

Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?

Mitchell Waldrop — 2008-05-13T10:11:00-00:00

Scientific American (April 2008)

What medical educators need to know about "Web 2.0".

JB McGee — 2008-05-13T08:18:45-00:00

Medical teacher, Vol. 30, No. 2. (March 2008), pp. 164-169.

"Web 2.0" describes a collection of web-based technologies which share a user-focused approach to design and functionality, where users actively participate in content creation and editing through open collaboration between members of communities of practice. The current generation of students in medical school made Web 2.0 websites such as Facebook and MySpace some of the most popular on the Internet. Medical educators and designers of educational software applications can benefit from understanding and applying Web 2.0 concepts to the curriculum and related websites. Health science schools have begun experimenting with wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 applications and have identified both advantages and potential problems with these relatively open, student-focused communication tools. This paper reviews the unique features of Web 2.0 technologies, addresses questions regarding potential pitfalls and suggests valuable applications in health science education.

You wrote it; you own it!

Emma Hill — 2008-05-05T10:09:50-00:00

J. Cell Biol. (30 April 2008), jcb.200804037.

Authors of papers published in Rockefeller University Press journals (The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology) now retain copyright to their published work. This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creative Commons license, six months after publication. 10.1083/jcb.200804037

Google Scholar revisited

Péter Jacsó — 2008-04-28T07:28:11-00:00

Online Information Review, Vol. 32, No. 1. (2008), pp. 102-114.

Is relevance relevant? User relevance ratings may not predict the impact of Internet search on decision outcomes.

Enrico W Coiera — 2008-04-28T07:26:13-00:00

Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA (24 April 2008)

OBJECTIVE A common measure of Internet search engine effectiveness is its ability to find documents that a user perceives as 'relevant'. This study sought to test whether user provided relevance ratings for documents retrieved by an Internet search engine correlate with the decision outcome after use of a search engine. DESIGN 227 university students were asked to answer four randomly assigned consumer health questions, then to conduct an Internet search on one of two randomly assigned search engines of different performance, and to again answer the question. MEASUREMENTS PARTICIPANTS were asked to provide a relevance score for each document retrieved as well as a pre and post search answer to each question. RESULTS User relevance rankings had little or no predictive power. Relevance rankings were unable to predict whether the user of a search engine could correctly answer a question after search and could not differentiate between two search engines with statistically different performance in the hands of users. Only when users had strong prior knowledge of the questions, and the decision task was of low complexity, did relevance appear to have modest predictive power. CONCLUSION User provided relevance rankings taken in isolation seem to be of limited to no value when designing a search engine that will be used in a general-purpose setting. Relevance rankings may have a place in situations in which experts provide rankings, and decision tasks are of complexity commensurate with the abilities of the raters. A more natural metric of search engine performance may be a user's ability to accurately complete a task, as this removes the inherent subjectivity of relevance rankings, and provides a direct and repeatable outcome measure which directly correlates with the performance of the search technology in the hands of users.

A web site to follow-up literature in occupational health for healthcare workers

JF Gehanno — 2008-04-25T14:12:49-00:00

(2008)

Electronic Health Records, Medical Research, and the Tower of Babel

Rebecca Kush — 2008-04-25T08:06:13-00:00

N Engl J Med, Vol. 358, No. 16. (17 April 2008), pp. 1738-1740.

10.1056/NEJMsb0800209

Off the Record -- Avoiding the Pitfalls of Going Electronic

Pamela Hartzband — 2008-04-25T08:05:53-00:00

N Engl J Med, Vol. 358, No. 16. (17 April 2008), pp. 1656-1658.

10.1056/NEJMp0802221

Personally Controlled Online Health Data -- The Next Big Thing in Medical Care?

Robert Steinbrook — 2008-04-25T08:05:32-00:00

N Engl J Med, Vol. 358, No. 16. (17 April 2008), pp. 1653-1656.

10.1056/NEJMp0801736

Open access: taking full advantage of the content.

PE Bourne — 2008-03-31T11:02:06-00:00

PLoS Comput Biol, Vol. 4, No. 3. (March 2008)

Developing a Sensitive Search Strategy in MEDLINE to Retrieve Studies on Assessment of the Diagnostic Performance of Imaging Techniques

Margaret Astin — 2008-04-25T07:32:38-00:00

Radiology, Vol. 247, No. 2. (1 May 2008), pp. 365-373.

Purpose: To prospectively develop a search strategy in MEDLINE for identifying studies on the diagnostic performance of any imaging modality, with maximized and minimized retrieval of relevant and irrelevant studies, respectively. Materials and Methods: Predefined inclusion criteria were used to conduct a hand search of two sets of radiologic journal articles for studies on assessment of the diagnostic performance of imaging techniques. These two sets of articles formed independent derivation and validation record sets for developing and evaluating the search strategy. The sensitivity and positive predictive values (PPVs) of search terms from the derivation reference-standard set of records were used to select terms and develop two components of the search strategy. The first component was used to identify any study (from the imaging literature) in which diagnostic test performance was assessed. The second component was used to identify studies of any imaging modality. The two components were combined in the final search strategy. The sensitivity, specificity, and PPV of the search strategy in the derivation and validation record sets were calculated. Results: The final search strategy had a sensitivity of 92.8%, a specificity of 58.5%, and a PPV of 25.1% for retrieval of the derivation set of records. Validation with an independent set of records gave a sensitivity of 91.9% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 87.1%, 95.1%), a specificity of 52.2% (95% CI: 49.2%, 55.2%), and a PPV of 25.1% (95% CI: 22.0%, 28.5%). Removal of irrelevant publication types further improved specificity and PPV in the validation set: to 77.6% (95% CI: 75.0%, 80.0%) and 40.9% (95% CI: 36.2%, 45.7%), respectively. The volume of imaging literature retrieved from MEDLINE by using the described search strategy has tripled since 1975. Conclusion: A sensitive search strategy to identify studies of the diagnostic performance of any imaging test was developed and validated. The retrieval estimates of this strategy in MEDLINE are adequate to develop a register of studies. Supplemental material: http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/2472070101/DC1 http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/2472070101/DC2 (C) RSNA, 2008 10.1148/radiol.2472070101

Tectonic shifts in the health information economy.

KD Mandl — 2008-04-21T07:26:53-00:00

The New England journal of medicine, Vol. 358, No. 16. (17 April 2008), pp. 1732-1737.

URL decay in MEDLINE - a 4-year follow-up study

Jonathan Wren — 2008-04-16T08:15:26-00:00

Bioinformatics (15 April 2008), btn127.

Motivation: Internet-based electronic resources, as given by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), are being increasingly used in scientific publications but are also becoming inaccessible in a time-dependant manner, a phenomenon documented across disciplines. Initial reports brought attention to the problem, spawning methods of effectively preserving URL content while some journals adopted policies regarding URL publication and begun storing supplementary information on journal websites. Thus, a re-examination of URL growth and decay in the literature is merited to see if the problem has grown or been mitigated by any of these changes Results: After the 2003 study, three follow-up studies were conducted in 2004, 2005 and 2007. Unfortunately, no significant change was found in the rate of URL decay among any of the studies. However, only 5% of URLs cited more than twice have decayed versus 20% of URLs cited once or twice. The most common types of lost content were computer programs (43%), followed by scholarly content (38%) and databases (19%). Compared to URLs still available, no lost content type was significantly over or under-represented. Searching for 30 of these websites using Google, 11 (37%) were found relocated to different URLs. Conclusions: URL decay continues unabated, but URLs published by organizations tend to be more stable. Repeated citation of URLs suggests calculation of an electronic impact factor (eIF) would be an objective, quantitative way to measure the impact of Internet-based resources on scientific research. Contact: Jonathan-Wren@OMRF.org 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn127

MedEvi: Retrieving textual evidence of relations between biomedical concepts from Medline.

Jung-Jae Kim — 2008-04-11T13:37:51-00:00

Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) (9 April 2008)

SUMMARY: Search engines running on MEDLINE abstracts have been widely used by biologists to find publications that are related to their research. The existing search engines such as PubMed, however, have limitations when applied for the task of seeking textual evidence of relations between given concepts. The limitations are mainly due to the problem that the search engines do not effectively deal with multi-term queries which may imply semantic relations between the terms. To address this problem, we present MedEvi, a novel search engine that imposes positional restriction on occurrences matching multi-term queries, based on the observation that terms with semantic relations which are explicitly stated in text are not found too far from each other. MedEvi further identifies additional keywords of biological and statistical significance from local context of matching occurrences in order to help users reformulate their queries for better results. AVAILABILITY: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/tc-test/textmining/medevi/ CONTACT: kim@ebi.ac.uk, pezik@ebi.ac.uk.

Joining the podcast revolution.

BC Jham — 2008-04-16T07:28:10-00:00

Journal of dental education, Vol. 72, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 278-281.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the latest generation of web-based tools such as podcasts. Podcasts are media files that can be distributed via the Internet and played on computers and handheld devices, including iPods or other digital audio players. The essence of podcasting is the creation of audio and/or video content for an audience that wants to listen to what they want, when they want, where they want, and how they want. With students now more mobile than ever, the idea of being able to access information without being linked to a certain physical location is very attractive. In the specific context of dental education, lectures and clinical procedures can be recorded by academic staff and distributed over the Internet to students as an audio or video podcast. The objective of this article is to review the most important concepts in podcasting, using simple and nontechnical terminology. In addition, this review aims to stimulate and encourage dental educators to employ this technology as a tool to enhance the learning experience of undergraduate and postgraduate dental students.

A bibliometric analysis of pharmacology and pharmacy journals: Scopus versus Web of Science

Juan Gorraiz — 2008-04-03T15:01:21-00:00

Journal of Information Science (3 April 2008), 0165551507086991.

Our study examines the suitability of Scopus for bibliometric analyses in comparison with the Web of Science (WOS). In particular we want to explore if the outcome of bibliometric analyses differs between Scopus and WOS and, if yes, in which aspects. Since journal indicators vary among disciplines, we analysed only journals from the subject pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences. Nonetheless, our study has also broader implications. Its major findings are: (a) Each top-100 JCR pharmacy journal was covered by Scopus. (b) The impact factor was higher for 82 and the immediacy index greater for 78 journals in Scopus in 2005. Pharmacy journals with a high impact factor in the JCR usually have a high impact factor in Scopus. (c) Several medium impact journals could be identified in Scopus which were not reported in JCR. (d) The two databases differed in the number of articles within a tolerable margin of deviation for most journals. 10.1177/0165551507086991

Evidence-based Medicine Search: a customizable federated search engine.

PJ Bracke — 2008-04-03T07:43:34-00:00

Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, Vol. 96, No. 2. (April 2008), pp. 108-113.

PURPOSE: This paper reports on the development of a tool by the Arizona Health Sciences Library (AHSL) for searching clinical evidence that can be customized for different user groups. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The AHSL provides services to the University of Arizona's (UA's) health sciences programs and to the University Medical Center. Librarians at AHSL collaborated with UA College of Medicine faculty to create an innovative search engine, Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) Search, that provides users with a simple search interface to EBM resources and presents results organized according to an evidence pyramid. EBM Search was developed with a web-based configuration component that allows the tool to be customized for different specialties. OUTCOMES/CONCLUSION: Informal and anecdotal feedback from physicians indicates that EBM Search is a useful tool with potential in teaching evidence-based decision making. While formal evaluation is still being planned, a tool such as EBM Search, which can be configured for specific user populations, may help lower barriers to information resources in an academic health sciences center.

Increasing state public health professionals' proficiency in using PubMed.

TS Harwell — 2008-04-03T07:36:54-00:00

Journal of the Medical Library Association : JMLA, Vol. 96, No. 2. (April 2008), pp. 134-137.

OBJECTIVE: The paper provides an overview of a strategy to increase utilization of online bibliographic databases by public health workers. METHODS: A web-based survey of professional staff in the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services was conducted to assess their use of and interest in training in online bibliographic databases. Based on the findings from the assessment, the department, in collaboration with the state university, provided brief ninety-minute training sessions for interested staff on the use of PubMed. RESULTS: Seventy of 115 (61%) of staff completed the survey. Only 39% of staff reported using an online bibliographic database to conduct a literature search in the past year, and only 10% (n=7) reported having ever received any training in their use. Perceived proficiency with the use of PubMed was higher upon completion of the brief training. The majority of training participants (n=27) indicated that they were very likely to use PubMed in the next year to search the literature. CONCLUSIONS: A collaboratively designed training can increase public health workers' proficiency in and intentions of using online bibliographic databases.

The risk of using the Internet as reference resource: A comparative study

Matthew Falagas — 2008-03-11T13:57:32-00:00

International Journal of Medical Informatics, Vol. 77, No. 4. (April 2008), pp. 280-286.

Objective We sought to examine the frequency and the specific problems encountered in accessing Internet references in two leading medical journals during the last 3 years.Methods Two investigators independently reviewed all publications in the issues of the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet during October 2005 to March 2006, November 2004 to January 2005, and November 2003 to January 2004. We calculated the total number of references and the subset referred to an Internet source of each article. Then, we visited the electronic sources to identify the Internet references and noted the problems of accessibility, if any. When we failed to directly access the reference in the electronic address provided by the authors, we visited the referred website; if this was also inadequate, we performed Google searches to retrieve the missing reference(s).Results 465/18,850 (2.5%) and 952/24,630 (3.9%) of the reviewed references in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, respectively, referred to Internet sources; from these we could not access 68/465 (14.6%) and 170/952 (17.9%) in the two journals, respectively. There were increasing proportions of lost Internet references as they age. Searching into the website referred by the authors of the reviewed articles could not provide the missing information in a considerable proportion (62.2%). However, the use of an Internet search engine (Google) helped us to identify references in other websites, reducing the proportion of missing Internet references to 17/465 (3.7%) and 17/952 (1.8%) for the two journals, respectively.Conclusions The response "page not found" was commonly encountered when we tried to access Internet references in publications of leading medical journals during the last 3 years. A considerable proportion of missing references was identified with the use of Google search engine. Authors of scientific articles should be aware of the problem of missing Internet references and until well-established Internet archiving solutions are in use, they should choose carefully their Internet references from reliable websites whenever it is impossible to avoid using them.

For what purpose and reasons do doctors use the Internet: A systematic review

Ken Masters — 2007-12-10T13:46:53-00:00

International Journal of Medical Informatics, Vol. 77, No. 1. (January 2008), pp. 4-16.

Objectives To determine doctors' reasons for using the Internet, and the factors that influence their usage.Data sources A systematic review of 38 studies, from 1994 to 2004, describing surveys of doctors' Internet usage.Results All of the studies were in the developed world, primarily in North America. Approximately 60-70% of doctors have access to the Internet, but in several studies access is more than 90%. Access is steadily increasing. Most Internet activity focuses on email and searching in journals and databases, but there is a very wide range of activities. Professional email with colleagues and patients is low, but increasing. The major factors discouraging usage are time, workload and cost, while too much information, liability issues and lack of skills also feature as discouraging factors. Factors encouraging use are unclear, but overall patient satisfaction and belief in improved service delivery, time saving and demand from patients are factors. There is a trend that males use the Internet more than females, young more than old, and specialists more than generalists, but these differences are not across the board, and show variations between studies.Conclusion In spite of the limitations, it is clear that doctors are highly connected to the Internet, and their professional usage is increasing. Factors encouraging and discouraging usage are more complex than simple connectivity. Usage differences between demographic groups do exist, but are equalising. More and consistent research is required in this area.

Medical information on YouTube.

AJ Hayanga — 2008-03-31T08:21:33-00:00

JAMA, Vol. 299, No. 12. (26 March 2008)

YouTube as a source of information on immunization: a content analysis.

J Keelan — 2008-03-31T08:21:20-00:00

JAMA, Vol. 298, No. 21. (5 December 2007), pp. 2482-2484.

Internet et médecine - D'inévitables rapports de proximité ?

Dominique Dupagne — 2008-03-28T14:58:00-00:00

Médecine, Vol. 3, No. 8., pp. 374-377.

Le réseau Internet révolutionne-t-il la médecine ? Oui et non. Oui car cette révolution a déjà eu lieu chez les patients. Non car il est parfaitement possible d'exercer et de prodiguer des soins de qualité sans posséder d'ordinateur. Comme chaque fois qu'un pas technologique important est franchi, les bouleversements ne sont pas ceux que l'on pouvait pressentir. Internet n'est pas le nouvel eldorado pour les entrepreneurs de la santé, ni le nouvel outil pour la formation médicale continue. Il constitue bien sûr une intéressante source documentaire instantanée, mais la « solitude interactive » qui le définit si bien s'oppose aux aspirations sociales du praticien.

Online social networking issues within academia and pharmacy education.

J Cain — 2008-03-28T13:50:02-00:00

Am J Pharm Educ, Vol. 72, No. 1. (15 February 2008)

Online social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular as indicated by the numbers of members and visits to the sites. They allow students to connect with users with similar interests, build and maintain relationships with friends, and feel more connected with their campus. The foremost criticisms of online social networking are that students may open themselves to public scrutiny of their online personas and risk physical safety by revealing excessive personal information. This review outlines issues of online social networking in higher education by drawing upon articles in both the lay press and academic publications. New points for pharmacy educators to consider include the possible emergence of an "e-professionalism" concept; legal and ethical implications of using online postings in admission, discipline, and student safety decisions; how online personas may blend into professional life; and the responsibility for educating students about the risks of online social networking.

Userscripts for the Life Sciences

Egon Willighagen — 2007-12-21T15:56:01-00:00

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 8, No. 1. (2007)

BACKGROUND:The web has seen an explosion of chemistry and biology related resources in the last 15 years: thousands of scientific journals, databases, wikis, blogs and resources are available with a wide variety of types of information. There is a huge need to aggregate and organise this information. However, the sheer number of resources makes it unrealistic to link them all in a centralised manner. Instead, search engines to find information in those resources flourish, and formal languages like Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language are increasingly used to allow linking of resources. A recent development is the use of userscripts to change the appearance of web pages, by on-the-fly modification of the web content. This pens possibilities to aggregate information and computational results from different web resources into the web page of one of those resources.RESULTS:Several userscripts are presented that enrich biology and chemistry related web resources by incorporating or linking to other computational or data sources on the web. The scripts make use of Greasemonkey-like plugins for web browsers and are written in JavaScript. Information from third-party resources are extracted using open Application Programming Interfaces, while common Universal Resource Locator schemes are used to make deep links to related information in that external resource. The userscripts presented here use a variety of techniques and resources, and show the potential of such scripts.CONCLUSIONS:This paper discusses a number of userscripts that aggregate information from two or more web resources. Examples are shown that enrich web pages with information from other resources, and show how information from web pages can be used to link to, search, and process information in other resources. Due to the nature of userscripts, scientists are able to select those scripts they find useful on a daily basis, as the scripts run directly in their own web browser rather than on the web server. This flexibility allows the scientists to tune the features of web resources to optimise their productivity.

CONQUER: A Methodology for Context-Aware Query Processing on the World Wide Web

Veda Storey — 2008-03-27T08:22:17-00:00

INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH, Vol. 19, No. 1. (1 March 2008), pp. 3-25.

A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and ontologies. The methodology constructs a semantic net using the original query as a seed, and refines the net with terms from the two knowledge sources. The enhanced query, represented by the refined semantic net, can be executed by search engines. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in a prototype. An empirical evaluation shows that queries suggested by the prototype produce more relevant results than those obtained by the original queries. The research, thus, provides a successful demonstration of the use of existing knowledge sources to enhance the semantic content of Web queries. The paper concludes by identifying potential uses of such enhancements of search technology in organizational contexts. 10.1287/isre.1070.0140

DOORS to the Semantic Web and Grid With a PORTAL for Biomedical Computing.

C Taswell — 2008-03-20T13:11:29-00:00

IEEE Trans Inf Technol Biomed, Vol. 12, No. 2. (March 2008), pp. 191-204.

The semantic web remains in the early stages of development. It has not yet achieved the goals envisioned by its founders as a pervasive web of distributed knowledge and intelligence. Success will be attained when a dynamic synergism can be created between people and a sufficient number of infrastructure systems and tools for the semantic web in analogy with those for the original web. The domain name system (DNS), web browsers, and the benefits of publishing web pages motivated many people to register domain names and publish web sites on the original web. An analogous resource label system, semantic search applications, and the benefits of collaborative semantic networks will motivate people to register resource labels and publish resource descriptions on the semantic web. The Domain Ontology Oriented Resource System (DOORS) and Problem Oriented Registry of Tags and Labels (PORTAL) are proposed as infrastructure systems for resource metadata within a paradigm that can serve as a bridge between the original web and the semantic web. Registers domain names while DNS publishes domain addresses with mapping of names to addresses for the original web. Analogously, PORTAL registers resource labels and tags while DOORS publishes resource locations and descriptions with mapping of labels to locations for the semantic web. BioPORT is proposed as a prototype PORTAL registry specific for the problem domain of biomedical computing.

Web 3.0 and health librarians: an introduction

2008-03-20T08:35:55-00:00

Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association, Vol. 29, No. 1. (January 2008)

Using the Internet to search for cancer clinical trials: A comparative audit of clinical trial search tools.

Nancy L Atkinson — 2008-03-20T08:29:12-00:00

Contemp Clin Trials (7 February 2008)

Advancing the clinical trial research process to improve cancer treatment necessitates helping people with cancer identify and enroll in studies, and researchers are using the power of the Internet to facilitate this process. This study used a content analysis of online cancer clinical trial search tools to understand what people with cancer might encounter. The content analysis revealed that clinical trial search tools were easy to identify using a popular search engine, but their functionality and content varied greatly. Most required that users be fairly knowledgeable about their medical condition and sophisticated in their web navigation skills. The ability to search by a specific health condition or type of cancer was the most common search strategy. The more complex tools required that users input detailed information about their personal medical history and have knowledge of specific clinical trial terminology. Search tools, however, only occasionally advised users to consult their doctors regarding clinical trial decision-making. This, along with the complexity of the tools suggests that online search tools may not adequately facilitate the clinical trial recruitment process. Findings from this analysis can be used as a framework from which to systematically examine actual consumer experience with online clinical trial search tools.

Long-Term Patterns of Online Evidence Retrieval Use in General Practice: A 12-Month Study

Farah Magrabi — 2008-03-20T08:27:13-00:00

J Med Internet Res, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Mar 2008)

Background: Provision of online evidence at the point of care is one strategy that could provide clinicians with easy access to up-to-date evidence in clinical settings in order to support evidence-based decision making. Objective: The aim was to determine long-term use of an online evidence system in routine clinical practice. Methods: This was a prospective cohort study. 59 clinicians who had a computer with Internet access in their consulting room participated in a 12-month trial of Quick Clinical, an online evidence system specifically designed around the needs of general practitioners (GPs). Patterns of use were determined by examination of computer logs and survey analysis. Results: On average, 9.9 searches were conducted by each GP in the first 2 months of the study. After this, usage dropped to 4.4 searches per GP in the third month and then levelled off to between 0.4 and 2.6 searches per GP per month. The majority of searches (79.2%, 2013/2543) were conducted during practice hours (between 9 am and 5 pm) and on weekdays (90.7%, 2315/2543). The most frequent searches related to diagnosis (33.6%, 821/2291) and treatment (34.5%, 844/2291). Conclusion: GPs will use an online evidence retrieval system in routine practice; however, usage rates drop significantly after initial introduction of the system. Long-term studies are required to determine the extent to which GPs will integrate the use of such technologies into their everyday clinical practice and how this will affect the satisfaction and health outcomes of their patients.

Google Generation

Andrew Mcgregor — 2008-03-20T08:12:46-00:00

A new age for cancer information seeking: are we better off now?

PR Helft — 2008-03-14T14:54:49-00:00

J Gen Intern Med, Vol. 23, No. 3. (March 2008), pp. 350-352.

A decade after the dawn of the Internet Age, are people who seek health information better off than they used to be? The current study by Arora and colleagues examines a small slice of the massive Health Information National Trends Survey dataset and attempts to understand the experiences of those US adults who have sought cancer information at any point in their lives from any source. One third reported that the information they encountered was hard to understand, and one half questioned the quality of the information they found. Several research questions regarding how individuals successfully find information on the Internet remain to be answered.

Medical students and their blogs.

M Bains — 2008-03-14T14:52:08-00:00

Med Teach, Vol. 29, No. 5. (June 2007)

Searching MEDLINE via PubMed.

FA Delwiche — 2008-03-14T14:19:26-00:00

Clin Lab Sci, Vol. 21, No. 1. (2008), pp. 35-41.

As the volume of biomedical literature has increased, so have the number and complexity of databases that index it. Learning to conduct an efficient literature search in an online database is an essential skill for today's clinical laboratory scientist. This article describes basic and advanced strategies for searching PubMed and the use of specialized features including MyNCBI.

An internet database for the classification and dissemination of information about hazardous chemicals and occupational diseases.

J A Brown — 2008-03-13T14:09:15-00:00

Am J Ind Med (11 March 2008)

BACKGROUND: The amount of information about hazardous agents in the workplace exceeds the capacity of human memory. There is a need to accurately represent or map this scientific knowledge for digital storage and retrieval. METHODS: A relational database of hazardous chemicals and occupational diseases was constructed by first collecting and sifting through the large volume of information. The information was indexed with a controlled vocabulary and documented with references to the scientific literature. RESULTS: The evolving database is available on the website of the National Library of Medicine. It enables users to browse categories and query by pick lists. Users can drill down to find specific information that may be useful for intervention and prevention. CONCLUSIONS: The large amount of information needed to support decisions concerning occupational exposures and diseases can be distilled, classified, and summarized in a relational database and disseminated by means of the World Wide Web to assist in the prevention of work-related diseases. Am. J. Ind. Med. 2008. (c) 2008 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

An open source infrastructure for managing knowledge and finding potential collaborators in a domain-specific subset of PubMed, with an example from human genome epidemiology

Wei Yu — 2007-11-10T21:48:55-00:00

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 8 (09 November 2007), 436.

MiSearch Adaptive PubMed Search Tool.

David J States — 2008-03-11T13:47:44-00:00

Bioinformatics (6 March 2008)

SUMMARY: MiSearch is an adaptive biomedical literature search tool that ranks citations based on a statistical model for the likelihood that a user will choose to view them. Citation selections are automatically acquired during browsing and used to dynamically update a likelihood model that includes authorship, journal and PubMed indexing information. The user can optionally elect to include or exclude specific features and vary the importance of timeliness in the ranking. AVAILABILITY: http://misearch.ncibi.org CONTACT: David J. States (dstates@umich.edu).

Web 2.0 and chronic illness: new horizons, new opportunities.

N Seeman — 2008-03-11T13:40:30-00:00

Healthc Q, Vol. 11, No. 1. (2008)

"Web 2.0" heralds a breakthrough opportunity for empowering healthcare consumers of all types, and especially for those suffering from different forms of chronic illness. As the author shows using some data gathered from a popular social networking website--MySpace.com--this opportunity may be greatest for heavily stigmatized chronic health issues, such as obesity and mental illness.

e-meducation.org: an open access medical education web portal

Vangelis Alexiou — 2008-01-31T12:39:08-00:00

BMC Medical Education, Vol. 8 (24 January 2008), 6.

[Keeping up to date with the relevant literature: 'really simple syndication'-(RSS)-feeds within PubMed]

E Leclercq — 2008-03-07T15:01:11-00:00

Ned Tijdschr Geneeskd, Vol. 152, No. 4. (26 January 2008), pp. 221-224.

For clinicians, researchers and policy makers in healthcare, it is important to keep up to date with the newest medical-scientific information. The large amount of new information makes this a difficult task. There are various techniques for keeping up to date, for instance reading systematic reviews, searching the literature at regular intervals oneself, and using the e-mail alerting services of, for example, PubMed. A new possibility is to be alerted to new scientific publications, for example, via a 'really simple syndication' (RSS)-feed. This option is now also made available by PubMed. In addition to PubMed, many other websites can now be searched systematically for new information by a RSS reader. With RSS feeds the user can be alerted to new information much faster than by an e-mail alerting service, so that one can anticipate new developments more rapidly.

Mayo Clinic office visit. Finding reliable health information on the Internet.

2008-03-07T07:40:58-00:00

Mayo Clin Womens Healthsource, Vol. 12, No. 4. (April 2008)

[Internet use in patients attending a hospital urology clinic]

D Santos Arrontes — 2008-03-06T09:30:00-00:00

Actas Urol Esp, Vol. 31, No. 10. (c 2007), pp. 1161-1165.

HYPOTHESIS: The increase in the awareness of computers in the general population and the spread of Internet as a tool for communication and knowledge, allows patients to have greater understanding of their conditions. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the use of Internet by the population from a health area and the knowledge extracted about their urological conditions. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This prospective study included all patients of age who attended a hospital urology clinic between 1st September and 31st December 2006, in a health area of 200,000 inhabitants. All patients were given a self-administered questionnaire to complete; medical staff did not intervene in filling it out in any case. The study variables were age (under 30, between 30 and 60 and over 60), sex, patient's pathology (only those with at least 5 cases were assessed), educational level (none, primary school qualification, intermediate studies and university studies), presence of a computer at home (yes/no), knowledge of the existence of internet (yes/no), searches performed on urological conditions and influence of these consultations in their relationship with their doctor. The relationship between the use of internet and the different variables was evaluated using the Kruskall-Wallis test. A probability of the null hypothesis less than 0.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: A total of 1,111 questionnaires were received, of which 1,062 were useful for processing. The mean age was 60.98 with a standard error of 15.08. 18.4% were women. The population distribution by level of studies was: 22.2% uneducated, 43.5% with primary education qualification, 27.5% with intermediate educational level and 6.8% university graduates. 58.4% of patients denied having a computer at home, 37.7% do not know what internet is, 76.7% do not have an e-mail address and just 6.7% visit medical pages, although only 1.5% admit having asked their doctor about information received on internet. According to classification by age, patients under 30 have significantly greater knowledge of computers and internet (p<0.001). However, there were no significant differences shown between the age and the fact of asking about information received through internet (p=0.1). The most visited web pages were, in order of the most to least visited: tuotromedico.com, varicocele.com, aecc.es, wikipedia.com, prostatitis.org, ondasalud.com and mapfrecajasalud.com. The most searched for conditions were: chronic prostatitis (25% of patients affected), testicular cancer (20% of patients), varicocele (18.7%), Peyronie's disease or congenital penile curvature (18.1%) and stenosis of the pyeloureteral junction (16.6%). CONCLUSIONS: --The exploitation of the internet as an information tool on the part of patients is very low, due to the characteristics inherent to our population, such as the low level of studies. --Urological web pages should dedicate an extensive part to the most common conditions in the younger population groups, such as varicocele or prostatitis. However, it is logical to expect that these epidemiological patterns will modify with time. --The use of internet and computers in general should be promoted among the different population groups in the health area under study.

e-LiSe - an online tool for finding needles in the "(Medline) haystack"

Arek Gladki — 2008-03-06T07:47:04-00:00

Bioinformatics (5 March 2008), btn086.

Summary: Using literature databases one can find not only known and true relations between processes but also less studied, non-obvious associations. The main problem with discovering such type of relevant biological information is "selection". The ability to distinguish between a true correlation (e.g. between different types of biological processes) and random chance that this correlation is statistically significant is crucial for any bio-medical research, literature mining being no exception. This problem is especially visible when searching for information which hasn't been studied and described in many publications. Therefore a novel bio-linguistic statistical method is required, capable of "selecting" true correlations, even when they are low-frequency associations. In this paper we present such statistical approach based on Z-score and implemented in a web-based application "e-LiSe". Availability: The software is available at http://miron.ibb.waw.pl/elise/ Supplementary materials are available at http://miron.ibb.waw.pl/elise.supplementary/ Contact: piotr@ibb.waw.pl 10.1093/bioinformatics/btn086

Using wiki in an online record documentation systems course.

ST Harris — 2008-03-04T16:04:00-00:00

Perspect Health Inf Manag, Vol. 5 (2008)

We report a case study using a wiki tool, Confluence, including a brief history, current status, and motivations for using Confluence. We describe how we created two spaces on Confluence for two consecutive classes, 2006 and 2007, in a health information management baccalaureate online course, Record Documentation Systems. The 2006 class contained 12 groups consisting of 52 students. The 2007 class contained six groups consisting of 30 students. We describe how two collaborative pages for each of the groups are created and used by the groups for the group project. Survey results illustrated that 44 percent of the students in 2006 and 50 percent in 2007 agree Confluence is a tool for facilitating learning; 58 percent in 2006 and 50 percent in 2007 agree it is a tool for student activities; 52 percent in 2006 and 36 percent in 2007 agree it is a medium for reflective group interaction; and 38 percent in 2006 and 36 percent in 2007 want to see its application in other courses.

HealthMap: Global infectious disease monitoring through automated classification and visualization of Internet media reports.

Clark C Freifeld — 2008-01-06T17:21:34-00:00

J Am Med Inform Assoc (20 December 2007)

OBJECTIVE Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks. DESIGN This report describes the design principles, software architecture and implementation of HealthMap and discusses key challenges and future plans. MEASUREMENTS We describe the process by which HealthMap collects and integrates outbreak data from a variety of sources, including news media (e.g., Google News), expert-curated accounts (e.g., ProMED Mail), and validated official alerts. Through the use of text processing algorithms, the system classifies alerts by location and disease and then overlays them on an interactive geographic map. We measure the accuracy of the classification algorithms based on the level of human curation necessary to correct misclassifications, and examine geographic coverage. RESULTS As part of the evaluation of the system, we analyzed 778 reports with HealthMap, representing 87 disease categories and 89 countries. The automated classifier performed with 84% accuracy, demonstrating significant usefulness in managing the large volume of information processed by the system. Accuracy for ProMED alerts is 91% compared to Google News reports at 81%, as ProMED messages follow a more regular structure. CONCLUSION HealthMap is a useful free and open resource employing text-processing algorithms to identify important disease outbreak information through a user-friendly interface.

BioProber: software system for biomedical relation discovery from PubMed.

H Jang — 2008-03-03T08:09:59-00:00

Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc, Vol. 1 (2006), pp. 5779-5782.

The numbers of articles and journals that are published are increasing at a considerable rate, and the published information is growing continuously and fast. Because of this, researches to acquire knowledge automatically have been carried out in the areas of information retrieval, information extraction and text mining. Information retrieval approaches are good for specific topics that the number of related articles is small. But, if the number is bigger, searching skill and knowledge acquisition ability are useless. Though many efforts have been made to extract information from literature, many approaches have concentrated on specific entities, such as proteins, genes and their interactions, and much information is still remained in unstructured text. So, we have developed a system that discovers relations between various categories of biomedical entities. Our system collects abstracts from PubMed by queries representing a topic and visualizes relationship from the collection by automatic information extraction.

Health information seeking on the Internet: a double divide? Results from a representative survey in the Paris metropolitan area, France, 2005-2006

Emilie Renahy — 2008-02-21T14:09:02-00:00

BMC Public Health, Vol. 8 (21 February 2008), 69.

MScanner: a classifier for retrieving Medline citations

Graham Poulter — 2008-02-19T19:04:13-00:00

BMC Bioinformatics, Vol. 9, No. 1. (2008)

BACKGROUND:Keyword searching through PubMed and other systems is the standard means of retrieving information from Medline. However, ad-hoc retrieval systems do not meet all of the needs of databases that curate information from literature, or of text miners developing a corpus on a topic that has many terms indicative of relevance. Several databases have developed supervised learning methods that operate on a filtered subset of Medline, to classify Medline records so that fewer articles have to be manually reviewed for relevance. A few studies have considered generalisation of Medline classification to operate on the entire Medline database in a non-domain-specific manner, but existing applications lack speed, available implementations, or a means to measure performance in new domains.RESULTS:MScanner is an implementation of a Bayesian classifier that provides a simple web interface for submitting a corpus of relevant training examples in the form of PubMed IDs and returning results ranked by decreasing probability of relevance. For maximum speed it uses the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and journal of publication as a concise document representation, and takes roughly 90 seconds to return results against the 16 million records in Medline. The web interface provides interactive exploration of the results, and cross validated performance evaluation on the relevant input against a random subset of Medline. We describe the classifier implementation, cross validate it on three domain-specific topics, and compare its performance to that of an expert PubMed query for a complex topic. In cross validation on the three sample topics against 100,000 random articles, the classifier achieved excellent separation of relevant and irrelevant article score distributions, ROC areas between 0.97 and 0.99, and averaged precision between 0.69 and 0.92.CONCLUSIONS:MScanner is an effective non-domain-specific classifier that operates on the entire Medline database, and is suited to retrieving topics for which many features may indicate relevance. Its web interface simplifies the task of classifying Medline citations, compared to building a pre-filter and classifier specific to the topic. The data sets and open source code used to obtain the results in this paper are available on-line and as supplementary material, and the web interface may be accessed at http://mscanner.stanford.edu.

A new unsupervised method for document clustering by using WordNet lexical and conceptual relations

Diego Recupero — 2008-02-22T13:16:08-00:00

Inf. Retr., Vol. 10, No. 6. (December 2007), pp. 563-579.