AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2012
A usability problem: conveying health risks to consumers on the Internet.
Effectively designing risk information for the public is challenging and selecting the appropriate medium to deliver disease risk information is crucial. In a usability evaluation of a colon cancer risk website, we evaluated the public's understanding and interpretation of graphical displays of risk information (2 bar graphs). Results from this study suggest that many people do not understand risk and often misinterpret graphical displays of risk and associated terminology. This work shows the importance of not only including representational analysis within user-centered design of consumer health websites, but also evaluating the health and numerical literacy levels of these websites as an aspect of usability testing.
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We present and test the intuition that letters to the editor in journals carry early signals of adverse drug events (ADEs). Surprisingly these letters have not yet been exploited for automatic ADE detection unlike for example, clinical records and PubMed. Part of the challenge is that it is not easy to access the full-text of letters (for the most part these do not appear in PubMed). ⋯ We also involve natural language processing for feature definitions. Overall we achieve high accuracy in our experiments and our method also works well on a second new test set. Our results encourage us to further pursue this line of research.
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Clinical study has found early detection and intervention to be essential for preventing clinical deterioration in patients at general hospital units. In this paper, we envision a two-tiered early warning system designed to identify the signs of clinical deterioration and provide early warning of serious clinical events. The first tier of the system automatically identifies patients at risk of clinical deterioration from existing electronic medical record databases. ⋯ We employ machine-learning techniques to analyze data from both tiers, assigning scores to patients in real time. The assigned scores can then be used to trigger early-intervention alerts. Preliminary study of an early warning system component and a wireless clinical monitoring system component demonstrate the feasibility of this two-tiered approach.
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2011
Medical record and imaging evaluation to identify arterial tortuosity phenotype in populations at risk for intracranial aneurysms.
High arterial tortuosity may signify early arterial pathology which may precede development of intracranial aneurysms. We measured arterial tortuosity of intracranial vessels and reviewed the medical records of three groups of patients: with intracranial aneurysms, without aneurysms but at increased clinical risk, and controls without aneurysms or associated risk factors. ⋯ We found increased arterial tortuosity in the Loeys-Dietz syndrome cases. A combination of medical record screening for Marfan syndrome or Loeys-Dietz symptoms such as aneurysms and evaluation of arterial tortuosity by a curve of scores from medical images may identify previously undiagnosed cases of Loeys-Dietz syndrome.
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AMIA Annu Symp Proc · Jan 2011
Comparative StudyVoice-dictated versus typed-in clinician notes: linguistic properties and the potential implications on natural language processing.
In this study, we comparatively examined the linguistic properties of narrative clinician notes created through voice dictation versus those directly entered by clinicians via a computer keyboard. Intuitively, the nature of voice-dictated notes would resemble that of natural language, while typed-in notes may demonstrate distinctive language features for reasons such as intensive usage of acronyms. ⋯ The results suggest that between the narrative clinician notes created via these two different methods, there exists a considerable amount of lexical and distributional differences. Such differences could have a significant impact on the performance of natural language processing tools, necessitating these two different types of documents being differentially treated.