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Posts from the ‘Computer’ Category

Oct 29

13 Comments

RSS and Firefox Add-ons in medicine

I’ve written several times about how you can use RSS in medicine. I’ve featured:

  • PubMed Save Search
  • Third-Party PubMed tools
  • Intelligent RSS
  • Tags, Google Alert and many more

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Source

But here is a new and extremely detailed video about what RSS is and how it is useful. RSS is just awesome! Kudos to the author! Now I have to go and create the RSS feeds of my Technorati pages.

Don’t miss today’s best post of the medical blogosphere, Firefox Add-ons for Molecular and Cell Biologists at Bitesize Bio.

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Oct 17

1 Comment

Software Applications for Pathology Laboratory

Today, I came across an interesting site. I’ve never thought there were so many useful software applications for pathologists. On the page of Juha Nickels, MD, PhD, a Docent in Clinical Pathology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, you can find and download these:

  • Prostate cancer volume calculation ( with 3D rendering and T-classification)
  • Cerebrospinal fluid expert system using fuzzy logic
  • Hematological calculator
  • Bronchoalveolar lavage expert system
  • Bronchoalveolar lavage expert system on the web
  • Online appointment scheduling system(“IT Solution in Finnish Healthcare” Award winning 2004)
  • Tumour area and volume calculator

Isn’t it fantastic to have a software guru in your laboratory of pathology? :)

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Prostate cancer volume calculation (Click to enlarge! )

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Hematological calculator

Oct 11

What to do if you’re tired?

I’m going to write plenty of interesting articles in the next few days, but the only thing I can do now is to post these funny, web-related images. Enjoy and drop me a mail in case you have more!

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Evolution, Mr. Anderson:

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Oct 6

23 Comments

Open Letter to the Physicians of the World

Dear Medical Professionals,

I’m writing to you to describe why to use web 2.0′s features in your practice.

I’m pretty sure web 2.0, the new generation of web services, will play an important role in the future of medicine. These web tools, expert-based community sites, medical blogs and wikis can ease the work of physicians, scientists, medical students or medical librarians. We, medical bloggers, believe the new generation of web services will change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered.

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In the field of medicine, the most important thing is to get the right information in time. With the tools, services and sites of web 2.0, it’s getting easier and even more comfortable. Those physicians, who want to be up-to-date in their fields, should be open to the improvements and new opportunities of the world wide web.

Let’s take a look at how you can use these tools in your own practice.

Most physicians and scientists I know, go back to PubMed from time to time and search for the old terms to see whether there are new additions to the database. If you use the Save Search function, you can get your PubMed updates via e-mail or RSS. You don’t have to search again and again, just sit back and wait for the next letter containing the newest articles in your field.

If you have to track more and more papers and online journals, then you should start using RSS. It’s the best and most comfortable way of getting the selected information automatically what means you can read the articles of medical journals in one place.

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Medical blogs (web log or internet diary) provide content and express opinion on healthcare that you can never find in a medical paper. As there are plenty of medical blogs out there, and you definitely don’t have enough time to run through all of these blogs and other sites, so blog carnivals are created for you! These carnivals collect the best posts on a subject from time to time.

Reading blogs is even easier and more comfortable with podcasts and videocasts. A podcast is a portable audio file (a videocast is a video file) that you can listen to while working, doing exercises or just sitting in a traffic jam. And these are just some examples of the features of web 2.0, or the so-called medicine 2.0.

You can also take part in constructing the future of medical education in Second Life, the virtual world. Train medical students and nurses in the virtual medical center.

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You can browse among the great medical wikis created and maintained by physicians from around the world (you may start with Ask Dr Wiki). These are databases specifically constructed for physicians who are not IT experts but would like to search easily for medical terms. Moreover, search engines (like Google, Yahoo) don’t select among sources, so many of the medical search results can’t be relevant. But medical search engines use peer-reviewed sources and sites selected by experts providing the most relevant and reliable medical information of the best quality.

Web 2.0 is based on communities and collaboration, that’s why you should join one of the best medical communities at Tiromed.com. Ask a mentor or become a mentor. Upload your CV and find collaborators from around the world, or find a job via this community.

I hope you’re going to be open to these opportunities and you’re going to understand why it’s so crucial to use these tools to keep yourself perfectly up-to-date in your field. Let me know please if you have any kind of questions or would like to know more about these tricks and methods. I’m looking forward to reading your answer.

Regards,

Bertalan Meskó
Medical Student
Medical and Health Science Centre
University of Debrecen
http://Scienceroll.com

Oct 2

15 Comments

Visualization Software of IBM for the Future of Medicine: Interview!

ibm-logo.jpg I’ve recently come across a really interesting announcement, IBM Research Unveils 3-D Avatar to Help Doctors Visualize Patient Records and Improve Care. You know well how important it is to have electronic health records while constructing the basis of personalized medicine. That’s why this new software of IBM Zurich Research Lab using a 3D representation of the human body could be very useful for physicians in the future. The Anatomic and Symbolic Mapper Engine (ASME) visualizes patient medical records.

“It’s like Google Earth for the body,” said IBM Researcher Andre Elisseeff, who leads the healthcare projects at IBM’s Zurich Research Lab. “In hopes of speeding the move toward electronic healthcare records, we’ve tried to make information easily accessible for healthcare providers by combining medical data with visual representation, making it as simple as possible to interact with data that can improve patient care.”

The ASME 3-D avatar will allow doctors to “click” on the 3-D avatar of the human body–here the spine–and instantly see all the available medical history and information related to that patient’s spine, including text entries, lab results and medical images such as radiographs or MRIs. Or the doctor might be interested only in information related to a particular part of the spine; in this case, the practitioner can zoom in, narrowing the search parameters by time or other factors.

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Click to enlarge!

Today, I asked Andre Elisseeff at IBM Research, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory to answer some of my questions and he kindly agreed:

  • Is the software in beta testing or it has already been released?

The software is still in beta testing and is not scheduled before fall next year. We are working with clinicians in Denmark who help us designing the user interaction.

  • Does it work similarly to ReliefInsite.com, the virtual pain diary?

The idea is to search over the set of medical records of a single patient. By clicking on the human body, you can enter new information or search the medical history of a patient that relates to the area that was just clicked
on. The user interaction will be based on a 3D model of the human body (with different layers, capability to zoom in and out etc…). The current model shown on the pictures is rather simple compared to what is planned
for the first release.

  • What about the privacy issues? How can you store medical information about a patient?

Privacy issues are solved in the back-end: the current prototype is built on top of IBM Health Information Exchange, a set of components to integrate and get the medical records of a single patient spread over different IT systems. This includes a set of flexible security rules and policies as well as a tool for e-consent. The patients can therefore decide who to show the information to.

  • Can the patient add information to his own database? I mean can the patient send his symptoms to his physician?

That is a possibility that we are investigating but that is not implemented nor planned in the release because we are currently focusing on the clinicians. There is no technical barrier to what you’re suggesting (besides security rules). The user interaction is still under development and would have to be adapted so that anyone can quickly understand how to make an entry.

One of the “vision” of the project is to make the communication between patients and physicians easier by using IT. Letting a patient prepare a medical visit by adding virtual needles where it feels pain, or by highlighting the areas which do not work properly, would be great and would typically make the discussion easier with the medical professionals.

  • We know well how hard it is to introduce new and technology-based tools to physicians. What about the first feedbacks?

We got overall a very positive feedback from the physicians we showed the tool to. They understand very quickly how this could help them. Many agree now that they will have to use IT. There is a pressure from society to get more accountable healthcare. That means more reporting and a more frequent usage of standards which are rather complex. A system like ASME is supposed to ease that task. It somehow makes IT more aligned with what physicians think about when they see a patient. Most current electronic medical record
systems assume the clinician works like office-workers, happy to see a web form or an excel sheet to enter data. And that’s not exactly the case… By discussing with medical professionals, they told us they would like to see
a human body. This project somehow is their project: we worked on the technology and still are working on importing what they’re telling us, but first, they tell us how they would like to access and use electronic
medical information.

As a side note, the clinicians we work with are in Denmark (opinions might vary significantly from country to country).

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Click to enlarge!

Follow Scienceroll for more about this futuristic medical software!

Follow-up posts

Sep 30

1 Comment

10 future web trends including personalized medicine

Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb recently highlighted 10 future web trends to look out for over the next 10 years.

  1. semantic web
  2. artificial intelligence
  3. virtual worlds including Second Life
  4. mobile web
  5. attention economy
  6. web sites as web services
  7. online video / internet tv
  8. rich internet apps
  9. international web
  10. personalization

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And after getting a lot of useful comments, he created an other list.

  1. Integration into everyday devices: health-monitoring bathroom?
  2. Hyperlocal
  3. Data retrievel/manipulation agents
  4. Read/Write/Request Web (a.k.a. a “living machine agent”)
  5. User-controlled, open Internet Identity
  6. New forms of Internet Interaction: “flexible OLED touch-screens, new visualisation technologies”
  7. Extended Reality: full sensory coupling with the virtual world
  8. Expert Systems
  9. Blog reading automatically input into our brain:

    In 10 years time, we won’t have to worry about RSS Readers at all – everything we need to know on a daily basis will be automatically input into our brains each morning while we’re eating our breakfast.

  10. Personalized Medicine:

this has been on the cards for some time, but in the not too distant future our medical details will be online and the networking aspects of the Internet will be utilized to improve the way medicine is prescribed. As a recent report noted: “Imagine this: you visit your clinician, undergo genetic testing, and then you are handed a miniature hard drive containing your personal genome sequence, which is subsequently uploaded onto publicly accessible databases.” See also the blog ScienceRoll.

Fantastic thoughts! If you’re interested in the future trends of personalized medicine, check out this category!

Related links:

Sep 23

4 Comments

How not to use Powerpoint: Laugh with me!

It’s not new, I know, but as I’m going to present several slideshows this week, it turned out to be extremely useful for me and it’s really funny. From Davidairey.com:

Don McMillan gives a short comedy sketch (in the video above) around powerpoint presentations and the common mistakes that people make.

Sep 19

19 Comments

How and Why to use Second Life for Education?

Do you think Second Life, the virtual world is still about gambling and pornography? Forget it! While gambling is being forbidden in SL, education has it’s golden age. Let’s see why we should use Second Life for education:

  • Collaboration: You can contact people of the same field of interest from around the world.
  • Without boundaries: You can work with people without boundaries (neither technical or geographical).
  • Interactivity: It’s better than a videoconference because you can use videos, presentations, images and weblinks at the same time in one place. It means you can easily create links between in-world activity and real-world information resources.
  • Support: If you’re a patient, you can easily find people dealing with the same problems. You can meet them virtually, discuss your problems, listen to doctors attending in SL.
  • Learning: In some fields, there are just a few experts and it’s far not simple to find them in real. But in SL, it becomes possible by presentations and e-learning tools. You can also use tutorials.
  • Search: You can do PubMed searches or you can browse among the many books of the virtual libraries.
  • Exhibits: How could you create an exhibition in a videoconference or a website? Well, you could, but it’d be complicated while in SL, it works like that:

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And how can we use Second Life for education? Here are some examples:

  • Ann Myers Medical Center: a virtual medical training center where medical education gets a unique opportunity to find new ways in training medical students. During the first exercises, I could learn more about medical cases with images, videos, patient stories and weblinks. I’ve had a chance to discuss those cases with medical students and physicians from around the world. (Teleport!)

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  • SciFoo lives on session: This is the perfect example how to do something virtually when you have no chance to do it in reality. I couldn’t participate in such a great conference like SciFoo was, but now I’m the co-organizer of this virtual session with Jean-Claude Bradley. I’ve already presented my slideshow about web 2.0′s impact on medicine at several clinics and department at my university. Through SL, I could present it to people from Nature Precedings, Connotea, Biowizard.com, Tiromed.com and scientists, physicians from around the world. It was a unique experience for me.

  • Genomic Island: Max Chatnoir has been working hard to create such an interesting and useful island totally devoted to the education of genetics and genomics. Several floors with genetic quizes, images, virtual experiments, texts, videos and plenty of links to genetic resources. (Teleport)

  • Drexel University: Jean-Claude’s main project: “With the growing popularity of gaming, we anticipate that more students and faculty will use virtual platforms like ‘Second Life’ to extend the education experience. On this platform — where anything is possible — the Library gets to explore new ways of supporting academic programs, research and student learning, limited only by the scope of the imagination.” Anyway, Harvard, Stanford and MIT are among the universities using SL. This is the example of how to construct a real university’s virtual form.

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The blue obelisks are an interactive quiz

  • Learning languages: Plenty of tutorials, texts, links, online learning groups.

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  • Presenting slideshows: There are many rooms, sites and buildings created for conferences, meetings, etc.

meetingeducation.pngThere are so many other examples, I only wanted to persuade some educators and students to give it a try as Second Life is going to become one of the best tools for education.

Related posts:

Sep 13

My new friends

I haven’t been blogging for the last few days as I spend all of my spare time in the lab and while working on new projects in a unique team, I have to realize I’ve got new “friends” as well. I hope you’ll find them interesting:

  • GeneSpring: far not freely usable, but extremely useful. In analysis, Genespring is the best tool you can have (or rather your lab) in case you want to analyze gene expression data.

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  • Geneious: Geneious Pro is an integrated bioinformatics software suite for manipulating, finding, sharing, and exploring biological data such as DNA sequences or proteins, phylogenies, 3D structure information, publications, etc.

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  • Gadwin Diagram Studio: It’s crucial to have well-structured, understandable slides in your presentations. This program helps you how to do well-designed, clear diagrams (for 50$…).

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Related links:

Sep 5

5 Comments

WikiProfessional Alpha Testing: a wiki of web 3.0

I’ve already talked about WikiProfessional.org, a semantic medical and scientific wiki. This is a new site (currently in alpha testing) on which you can create now your personalized free Internet Desktop. What does it mean?

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You can upload information about you and your scientific work and there is a Knowlet Space as well:

Exploring concepts using the Knowlet Space gives the user a view on the relationships between concepts found in a huge number of scientific publications in just a glance. The Knowlet histogram displaying the concepts related to the source concepts can be adjusted to give different views on the literature. A view on the experts publishing on the concepts of concepts of interest is also easily accessible in the Knowlet Space.

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As you see, we can filter the results by semantic groups (anatomy, disease, etc.), you can browse among your own publications; but as it contains a lot of bugs and has just a few terms to search for, it’s hard to tell why this will be useful and valuable to the scientific community. The WikiProfessional.org is going to be the desktop for all the branch-wikis, like WikiProteins:

WikiProteins is a consortium initiative and is technically supported by the Open Progress Foundation and the company Knewco Inc. Wikiproteins functionality and content will be free to contributing scientists in perpetuity.

WikiProteins is in fact much broader than just a ‘proteomics’ oriented environment, although a main focus is on proteins and their role in biology and disease. Many other focused planned Wikis for Professionals will be developed but these will all operate on the same database system and will be fully interactive.

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I’ve got three invitations to give away! Check out Scienceroll later for more information on this futuristic wiki!

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