jump to navigation

Internet in Medicine University Course: Google Story and Medical Search Engines December 1, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Google, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Medicine 2.0 Course, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

The 9th week of the world’s first university accredited course focusing on medicine and social media was dedicated to the Google story and medical search engines.

First slideshow: The Google phenomenon

  • Also some of the dead ones: Google Lively and Knol
  • Google Demo Slam:
  • Talking about 23andme and how our genomic profiles will affect the future of healthcare

Take-home message: Google can make our lives easier. The question is how close we should let it come to us.

Second slideshow: Medical Search Engines

  • How to search on the web (Google tricks)

Take-home message: Search like a professional and help your patients search properly online.

Lectures this semester:

PhotoCalorie: Picture Your Diet November 11, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

Although I can check the calorie content of any food on WolframAlpha, it’s good to have a site which focuses only on this issue.

PhotoCalorie is an application inspired by the ideas of Dr. Mark Boguski of Harvard Medical School, who realized that the current methods available to track your daily nutrient intake are monotonous and simply too complicated.  As a result, people would lose interest in tracking their diet or stop the diet all together. Our mission is to create the easiest food journal on the planet to help dieters lose weight and monitor their diet with ease.

Quuertle: Relationship-Driven Biomedical Search November 3, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medical Search, science, Video, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

Quertle is a free website for searching the biomedical literature using cutting-edge, semantic-driven text analytics.

It’s easy – Quertle’s friendly interface makes it simple to search and refine results.

It’s powerful – Using advanced semantics, Quertle finds quality results, not just long lists.

It’s inclusive – All of PubMed, a growing number of full-text documents, news, and more.

Scienceroll Search: Improvements September 24, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Scienceroll Search, Web 2.0.
2 comments

WebLib made some improvements again to Scienceroll Search, the first personalized medical search engine.

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.

  • Now Webicina.com is added to the database
  • Clusters became better as there can be more results for the search queries
  • Source clustering is available

Search engine query data to track pharmaceutical utilization September 8, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medical Search, Medicine, Pharma, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

There is an interesting retrospective longitudinal study published in The American Journal of Managed Care by Schuster et al., Using search engine query data to track pharmaceutical utilization:

OBJECTIVE: To examine temporal and geographic associations between Google queries for health information and healthcare utilization benchmarks.

METHODS: Using Google Trends and Google Insights for Search data, the search terms Lipitor (atorvastatin calcium; Pfizer, Ann Arbor, MI) and simvastatin were evaluated for change over time and for association with Lipitor revenues.

RESULTS: Google queries for Lipitor significantly decreased from January 2004 through June 2009 and queries for simvastatin significantly increased (P <.001 for both), particularly after Lipitor came off patent (P <.001 for change in slope). The mean number of Google queries for Lipitor correlated (r = 0.98) with the percentage change in Lipitor global revenues from 2004 to 2008 (P <.001).

CONCLUSIONS: Specific search engine queries for medical information correlate with pharmaceutical revenue and with overall healthcare utilization in a community. This suggests that search query data can track community-wide characteristics in healthcare utilization and have the potential for informing payers and policy makers regarding trends in utilization.

Semantic MEDLINE Prototype August 17, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, pubmed, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, Web 3.0.
8 comments

I have to use Pubmed several times every day and in most cases I have to switch to Google Scholar as I think that is really user-friendly and I can customize my search queries more easily. Although, I would love to do the same with Pubmed. Well, the Semantic MEDLINE Prototype which is a research and development project of the Cognitive Science Branch, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, U.S. National Library of Medicine might solve my problems in the near future:

Semantic MEDLINE is a prototype Web application that summarizes MEDLINE citations returned by a PubMed search. Natural language processing is used to analyze salient content in titles and abstracts. This information is then presented in a graph that has links to the MEDLINE text processed.

Currently, the results from 35 PubMed searches (including a variety of disorders and drugs) are available to be processed. The 500 most recent citations (from the date of the search) are available for further processing by Semantic MEDLINE.

I just did a search for “Breast Cancer (clinicaltrials.gov), top 500 recruiting studies”:

European Federation for Medical Informatics and Webicina July 16, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Health, Health 2.0, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, PeRSSonalized Medicine, Web 2.0, Webicina.
add a comment

We created the free PeRSSonalized Medicine, the simplest medical information aggregator to help those patients and doctors who would like to be up-to-date easily, but don’t want to learn about RSS. Also it’s available in 11 languages: English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Hungarian, Greek, Polish, French, Italian and Finnish.

Now in co-operation with The European Federation for Medical Informatics, we will have even more languages covered as they have contacts in 32 countries.

The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) was conceived at a meeting, assisted by the Regional Office for Europe of the World Health Organisation (WHO ), in Copenhagen in September 1976. The representatives of national Health/Medical Informatics societies from ten European countries signed a declaration of intent.

Health 2.0 News: Palatometer, Telescopic Eye and Google Voice July 14, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Google, Health, Health 2.0, Innovation, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, Technology, Video, Virtuality, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.
1 comment so far
  • MedLibs Round 2.6: Jacqueline at Laikas MedLibLog just published a new blog carnival entry featuring several Scienceroll posts as well.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act identified secure patient-physician e-mail messaging as an objective of the meaningful use of electronic health records. In our study of 35,423 people with diabetes, hypertension, or both, the use of secure patient-physician e-mail within a two-month period was associated with a statistically significant improvement in effectiveness of care as measured by the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS). In addition, the use of e-mail was associated with an improvement of 2.0–6.5 percentage points in performance on other HEDIS measures such as glycemic (HbA1c), cholesterol, and blood pressure screening and control.

ToxSeek: meta-search engine in toxicology and environmental health July 9, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

ToxSeek is a meta-search engine in toxicology and environmental health created for the U.S. National Library of Medicine by the team that designed SciencerollSearch as well. Toxseek now has more new resources and even more detailed results:

ToxSeek uses natural language processing and artificial intelligence to retrieve, integrate, rank, and present search results as coherent and dynamic sets.  ToxSeek searches across diverse biomedical and environmental health resources and so provides a way to efficiently locate information resources on topics related to toxicology and environmental health.

In ToxSeek, select an information category (or choose to “view all categories”) and enter a search term/s in the box.  Boolean operators should NOT be used as the search is run against sources which handle queries in different ways.  The ToxSeek results page returns resources in relevance order; this can be changed  via the pull-down box to either alphabetical or source order.

ToxSeek’s results “clustering” feature helps users to more easily identify particular concepts. These “clusters” are created from what is retrieved in the original query, and can be useful in uncovering a specific concept or focus for more in-depth searching.

Health 2.0 News: Sistine Chapel, Android and Biometric Sensors July 8, 2010

Posted by Dr. Bertalan Meskó in eHealth, Health, Health 2.0, Infographics, Medical Search, Medicine, Medicine 2.0, science, Video, Web 2.0, What's on the web?.
2 comments

  • Detecting Depression in Blogs and Online Texts (Medgadget): “Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer-Sheva, Israel, have developed a program that detects depression in text without obvious terms like “depression” or “suicide”.”

It would appear that Microsoft has (re)released Microsoft Academic Search (again) — a search engine (re)designed for the scholarly search space focussing on information and computer science. This version was designed by its Asian affiliate and is emblematic of MS’s work in developing search niche tools. In that sense, MAS is a vertical search tool or vortal.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 134 other followers