The role of domain models in maintaining consistency of large medical knowledge bases

Author(s):  
Andrzej Glowinski ◽  
Enrico Coiera ◽  
Mike O’Neil
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth G Nabel

The role of a physician as healer has grown more complex, and emphasis will increasingly be on patient and family-centric care. Physicians must provide compassionate, appropriate, and effective patient care by demonstrating competence in the attributes that are essential to successful medical practice. Beyond simply gaining medical knowledge, modern physicians embrace lifelong learning and need effective interpersonal and communication skills. Medical professionalism encompasses multiple attributes, and physicians are increasingly becoming part of a larger health care team. To ensure that physicians are trained in an environment that fosters innovation and alleviates administrative burdens, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has recently revamped the standards of accreditation for today’s more than 130 specialties and subspecialties. This chapter contains 6 references and 5 MCQs.


2013 ◽  
Vol 07 (04) ◽  
pp. 377-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
TRAVIS GOODWIN ◽  
SANDA M. HARABAGIU

The introduction of electronic medical records (EMRs) enabled the access of unprecedented volumes of clinical data, both in structured and unstructured formats. A significant amount of this clinical data is expressed within the narrative portion of the EMRs, requiring natural language processing techniques to unlock the medical knowledge referred to by physicians. This knowledge, derived from the practice of medical care, complements medical knowledge already encoded in various structured biomedical ontologies. Moreover, the clinical knowledge derived from EMRs also exhibits relational information between medical concepts, derived from the cohesion property of clinical text, which is an attractive attribute that is currently missing from the vast biomedical knowledge bases. In this paper, we describe an automatic method of generating a graph of clinically related medical concepts by considering the belief values associated with those concepts. The belief value is an expression of the clinician's assertion that the concept is qualified as present, absent, suggested, hypothetical, ongoing, etc. Because the method detailed in this paper takes into account the hedging used by physicians when authoring EMRs, the resulting graph encodes qualified medical knowledge wherein each medical concept has an associated assertion (or belief value) and such qualified medical concepts are spanned by relations of different strengths, derived from the clinical contexts in which concepts are used. In this paper, we discuss the construction of a qualified medical knowledge graph (QMKG) and treat it as a BigData problem addressed by using MapReduce for deriving the weighted edges of the graph. To be able to assess the value of the QMKG, we demonstrate its usage for retrieving patient cohorts by enabling query expansion that produces greatly enhanced results against state-of-the-art methods.


2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Britt-Louise Gunnarsson

The article presents a socio-semantic study of evaluative expressions in medical scientific articles from six periods from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Evaluations relating to the presentations of the medical case, the scientist’s own work and the work of other scientists were studied. The results of the analyses point to a gradual change in the directness of the evaluations; where the author earlier evaluated through his own voice, the modern author chooses to evaluate indirectly through facts and others’ voices. The evaluations were also found to gradually be less strong and more embedded in hedgings of various kinds. The changes in evaluative strength and style reveal the varied positions of the scientists and their scientific community as to the medical knowledge, the stage of the medical community and the role of the medical scientists in society.


2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Bright

Abstract This essay examines contemporary Tibetan medical literature that deals with menstruation, focusing on the relations among medical, religious and cultural perceptions of women and gender. Present-day medical writers present a hybrid account of menstruation, incorporating key aspects of Tibetan medicine, such as the refining processes of digestion and the red element, with biomedical knowledge, notably the role of hormones. The integration of biomedical thought by Tibetan writers works to substantiate and bolster the validity of Tibetan medical claims, rather than discredit them. Consequently, contemporary writers are able to articulate medical knowledge about women that is as much about Tibetan religious and cultural perceptions of gender and sexed-bodies, as it is ‘scientific’.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth G Nabel

The role of a physician as healer has grown more complex, and emphasis will increasingly be on patient and family-centric care. Physicians must provide compassionate, appropriate, and effective patient care by demonstrating competence in the attributes that are essential to successful medical practice. Beyond simply gaining medical knowledge, modern physicians embrace lifelong learning and need effective interpersonal and communication skills. Medical professionalism encompasses multiple attributes, and physicians are increasingly becoming part of a larger health care team. To ensure that physicians are trained in an environment that fosters innovation and alleviates administrative burdens, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has recently revamped the standards of accreditation for today’s more than 130 specialties and subspecialties. This review contains six references.


Author(s):  
Arne Sølvberg

The deep penetration of computers in all realms of society makes technological change the key driver for changing our lives. This will result in a change in approach, from viewing the role of IT as mainly supporting other disciplines, to the integration of IT concepts, tools and theory into modelling theories of the supported disciplines. This chapter discusses some aspects of the relationship between the IT as a modelling discipline, and the modelling disciplines of the domains where IT is applied. IT deals with data and data processes, while application domain models deal with entities of the domain and how they interact. Cross-competence models must deal with both, and with how models of the information technology discipline relate to the various models of the domain disciplines.


Author(s):  
Kabir C. Sen

Crowdsourcing has a role to play in solving healthcare-based problems as it can tap into a vast pool of global medical knowledge. This chapter first categorizes the various problems in the healthcare industry. It then describes the differences in various medical traditions in solving medical problems. The chapter also discusses the challenges in identifying the ideal medical solution. It notes the various types of obstacles to adopting effective healthcare solutions and suggests crowdsourcing solutions that could build up an impetus for bringing about positive change. Finally, the chapter emphasizes the potential of crowdsourcing to disrupt old ideas and introduce new ones as well as make a significant improvement in the social quality for different population groups.


1984 ◽  
Vol 23 (01) ◽  
pp. 9-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Miller

SummaryINTERNIST-1 is an experimental computer program for consultation in general internal medicine. On a series of test cases, its performance has been shown to be similar to that of staff physicians at a university hospital. Despite INTERNIST-1’s apparent success in dealing with complex cases involving multiple diagnoses in the same patient, many shortcomings in both its knowledge representation schemes and its diagnostic algorithms still remain. Among the known problems are lack of anatomical and temporal reasoning, inadequate representation of degrees of severity of findings and illnesses, and failure to reason properly about causality. These drawbacks must be corrected before INTERNIST-1’s successor program, CADUCEUS, can be used. It is estimated that CADUCEUS will not be ready for release to the general medical community for five to ten years.Broader problems faced by all medical diagnostic consultant systems are: design of an efficient human interface; development and completion of medical knowledge bases; expansion of diagnostic algorithms from simple heuristic rules to include a range of complex reasoning strategies, and development of a method for validating computer programs for clinical use.


2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 524-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Antonio Cantón Álvarez

The spread of Western medical practices to China, initiated during the Mongol dynasty, is often considered an example of “medical globalisation,” but few studies have looked at the actual level of adoption of Western medicine in the period after the Yuan dynasty. This essay analyses eighteen Ming dynasty medical sources in order to assess the role of opium, a Western drug, in post-Yuan medical practice. This essay concludes that opium was not widely used in the first centuries of the Ming dynasty, and, when finally adopted in the sixteenth century, its use was disconnected from the Yuan dynasty medical tradition. These findings make us question the continuity and even the existence of the “Mongol medical globalisation,” as well as the validity of the use of synchronic methodology for the study of centuries-long processes such as globalisation.


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