Scienceroll.com: Weekly Introduction January 15, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medicine.1 comment so far
I would like to share my favourite and ongoing projects with you so I can give you a proper introduction to Scienceroll.com. You can also find me on Twitter or on Friendfeed.
For news and articles about the impact of web 2.0 on medicine and healthcare, please follow the Medicine 2.0 Friendfood room.
For news and articles about personalized medicine and genetics, please follow the Gene Genie Friendfeed room.
Medicine 2.0 University Course: This is the third semester of the first university course that focuses on web 2.0 and medicine for medical students. Now, almost 100 students attend the 20 slideshows through 10 weeks and they fill a survey out before and after the course.
Medicine 2.0 Collection: I maintain the biggest collection of links and posts focusing on web 2.0 and medicine.
Webicina.com is my service that aims to help medical professionals and patients enter the web 2.0 era by providing them with e-courses, consulting and personalized packages.
PeRSSonalized Medicine is a free tool that lets you select your favourite resources and read the latest news and articles in one personalized place. You can create your own “medical journal” and as we are totally open to suggestions, let us add the journals, blogs and websites that you would like to follow.
Scienceroll Search is a personalized medical search engine powered by PolyMeta search and clustering engine. You can choose which databases to search in and which one to exclude from your list. It works with well-known medical search engines and databases and we’re totally open to add new ones or remove those you don’t really like.
List of biomedical and scientific community sites: More than 30 communities with links, descriptions and screenshots.
List of Biomedical video sites: Almost 40 sites featuring scientific or medical videos and videocasts.
Learning Tools Directory 2010 January 15, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Education, Web 2.0.add a comment
Jane Hart, a Social Learning Consultant and founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies has a great blog where she has recently featured the Learning Tools Directory 2010 containing more than a thousand (!) quality resources in the following fields:
- Instructional Tools
- Live Tools
- Document & Presentation Tools
- Blogging, Web & Wiki Tools
- Image, Audio & Video Tools
- Communication Tools
- Micro-blogging Tools
- More collaboration tools
- Social Networking and Collaboration Spaces
- Personal Productivity Tools
- Browsers, Players & Readers
- Mobile Tools
Doctors Fighting for Gifts from Pharma Companies January 11, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Fun, Medicine, Pharma, Video.5 comments
In many countries, prescription drug advertising is banned, but pharma companies can still give little gifts to doctors. Now a Spanish blog covers, as reported by Advertising in Health, a lot of gadgets and gifts which sometimes are quite weird or have no functionality.
And if you think doctors are fed up with these, just take a look at the two videos below. The first one becomes interesting at 0:35.
For more information on prescription drug advertising, see the website of the Food and Drug Administration and also EthicAd.org.
Historical Medical Videos from Wellcome Trust January 11, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Art, Health, Healthcare, Medicine, Video, Web 2.0, Youtube channel.add a comment
Wellcome Trust has a Youtube channel on which they feature videos from the 20th century including films about surgeries, medical issues and the everyday lives of doctors.
A new digital collection of moving images on 20th-century healthcare and medicine is now online. Over 450 titles – 100 hours of film and video – have been transferred and are freely available under Creative Commons licences.
Here are a few examples:
Cruel Kindness: a 1967 UK educational film about childhood obesity
Acute appendicitis from 1931:
Caesarean section from 1930:
(Hat tip: BoingBoing)
Eurogene.eu: Open Community for Medical Genetics January 10, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Community Site, genetics, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science.1 comment so far
A new initiative called EUROGENE is an open community portal which provides a vast amount of multimedia educational materials in the field of genetic medicine. Authors and educators can freely use it to publish and organize their own materials or to create new teaching courses. There are now almost 90,000 content units on the site.
There is a domain specific Ontology as well as advanced multilingual search tools that can guide users in the editing and “assembly” of educational packages. Thanks to the use of the Eurogene Ontology, these materials are annotated with the relevant concepts and automatically correlated to all the other related content on the system.
Special Medical Exhibit January 10, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Art, Fun, Medicine.1 comment so far
I came across quite a special medical exhibit on BoingBoing featuring fascinating images and ancient medical gadgets:
There’s a fascinating exhibit at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo right now called Medicine and Art: Imagining a Future for Life and Love. It showcases 150 works of art that represent our fascination with the human body, both as a living machine that we’re constantly trying to understand and as an artistic medium. The iconic example of this is Leonardo Da Vinci’s cranium drawings from the 15th century (pictured right), part of the Royal Collection belonging to Queen Elizabeth II.
Gilles Barbier; L’Hospice / The Nursing Home; 2002; six wax figures, television, various elements dimension variable; Courtesy: Galerie G.-P. & N. Vallois, Paris
Image source: BoingBoing
Top 10 SNPs on SNPedia.com January 10, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in genetics, List, Medicine, Web 2.0, Wiki.add a comment
SNPedia is a wiki investigating human genetics, sharing information about the effects of variations in DNA, citing peer-reviewed scientific publications. The blog of SNPedia just published the list of the 10 most popular SNPs accessed on the site.
SNPedia now contains nearly 10,000 SNPs and to welcome 2010 we’d like to highlight at least 10. These SNPs have been selected based on an elusive and ultimately subjective combination of medical importance, statistical believability, and overall general interest. This isn’t objective science though, so feel free to comment about why your favorite SNPs should have made the list.
Here is the list with the medical conditions or drugs they are related to.
- rs4244285: SNP in the CYP2C19 gene related to the antiplatelet drug clopidogrel.
- rs4149056: Determining risk for statin-triggered myopathy.
- rs1799853, rs1057910 & rs8050894: These SNPs in the CYP2C9 & VKORC1 genes help determine the optimal dose of the anticoagulant drug warfarin.
- rs10757278: Risk for coronary artery disease and it’s consequences (like heart attacks).
- rs1537415: Risk for periodontitis.
- rs3892097: This SNP encodes the CYP2D6*4 allele determining poorer outcome among breast cancer patients treated with tamoxifen
- rs1447295: Risk for prostate cancer.
- gs138, gs139, gs140: Represent the rapid, intermediate, and slow metabolizers for the detoxifying enzyme NAT2.
- rs17646946 & rs11803731: Hair curliness.
- rs2395029: A variety of conditions (like psoriasis, abacavir hypersensitivity) plus liver damage among patients taking the antibiotic flucloxacillin.
Muscle-Computer Interfaces January 6, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Innovation, Invention, Medgadget, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Robotics, Technology, Video.4 comments
Medgadget just featured a video describing how EMG (electromyography) could be used in tools created for people with disabilities. Here is an excerpt from the Microsoft announcement:
Many human-computer interaction technologies are currently mediated by physical transducers such as mice, keyboards, pens, dials, and touch-sensitive surfaces. While these transducers have enabled powerful interaction paradigms and leverage our human expertise in interacting with physical objects, they tether computation to a physical artifact that has to be within reach of the user.
As computing and displays begin to integrate more seamlessly into our environment and are used in situations where the user is not always focused on the computing task, it is important to consider mechanisms for acquiring human input that may not necessarily require direct manipulation of a physical implement. We explore the feasibility of muscle-computer input: an interaction methodology that directly senses and decodes human muscular activity rather than relying on physical device actuation or user actions that are externally visible or audible.
Infographic: Healthcare spending and life expectancy January 6, 2010
Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Healthcare, Visualization.add a comment
The blog of National Geographic published a very informative graph on which we can compare health care spending per person in US dollars (on the left) to average life expectancy at birth (on the right). The lines represent the number of average doctor visits. US spends far the most on healthcare, but life expectancy is only in the middle category. On the other hand, Japan spends an average on healthcare, has the biggest number of doctor visits but life expectancy is also the best. Hungary spends almost the less and life expectancy is the worst. Different countries, totally different healthcare scenarios. Click for the original, larger image.
