A Retrieval System for a Library of Pathology Reports, Slides and Kodachromes

1972 ◽  
Vol 11 (03) ◽  
pp. 152-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. GAYNON ◽  
R. L. WONG

With the objective of providing easier access to pathology specimens, slides and kodachromes with linkage to x-ray and the remainder of the patient’s medical records, an automated natural language parsing routine, based on dictionary look-up, was written for Surgical Pathology document-pairs, each consisting of a Request for Examination (authored by clinicians) and its corresponding report (authored by pathologists). These documents were input to the system in free-text English without manual editing or coding.Two types of indices were prepared. The first was an »inverted« file, available for on-line retrieval, for display of the content of the document-pairs, frequency counts of cases or listing of cases in table format. Retrievable items are patient’s and specimen’s identification data, date of operation, name of clinician and pathologist, etc. The English content of the operative procedure, clinical findings and pathologic diagnoses can be retrieved through logical combination of key words. The second type of index was a catalog. Three catalog files — »operation«, »clinical«, and »pathology« — were prepared by alphabetization of lines formed by the rotation of phrases, headed by keywords. These keywords were automatically selected and standardized by the parsing routine and the phrases were extracted from each sentence of each input document. Over 2,500 document-pairs have been entered and are currently being utilized for purpose of medical education.

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao-Jen Hsu ◽  
Yu-Wei Fu ◽  
Taiwai Chin

Abstract Background Acute appendicitis (AA) is the most common surgical condition in children. Although a higher incidence of AA in summer has been reported, the reason for this observation remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical findings of AA patients who underwent appendectomies during the summer months with those who underwent the procedure during the non-summer months. Methods The clinical data of 171 patients who underwent appendectomy from January 2013 to December 2016 were reviewed. The patients were divided into a summer group (from May to October) and a non-summer group (from November to April) based on the month when appendectomy was performed. All patients were under 18 years of age at the time of surgery. The medical records including laboratory data, computed tomography scans, pathology reports and operative notes were reviewed. Results The number of patients with AA was higher in the summer group than in the non-summer group (101 vs. 70 patients). No significant differences in the laboratory results between the two groups of patients were observed. The percentage of AA patients who presented with a fecalith was significantly lower in the summer group (33.6%) than in the non-summer group (55.7%). No significant differences in the incidence of appendiceal perforations and abscesses, as well as postoperative complications were observed between the two groups. Conclusions The percentage of AA patients with fecaliths in summer was lower than that in the non-summer months. The increase in the number of AA patients in summer may be due to the increased occurrence of lymphoid hyperplasia, which may be correlated with the yearly outbreak of enterovirus infection during this period.


2004 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jules J. Berman

Abstract Context.—Abbreviations are used frequently in pathology reports and medical records. Efforts to identify and organize free-text concepts must correctly interpret medical abbreviations. During the past decade, the author has collected more than 12 000 medical abbreviations, concentrating on terms used or interpreted by pathologists. Objective.—The purpose of the study is to provide readers with a listing of abbreviations. The listing of abbreviations is reviewed for the purpose of determining the variety of ways that long forms are shortened. Design.—Abbreviations fell into different classes. These classes seemed amenable to distinct algorithmic approaches to their correct expansions. A discussion of these abbreviation classes was included to assist informaticians who are searching for ways to write software that expands abbreviations found in medical text. Classes were separated by the algorithmic approaches that could be used to map abbreviations to their correct expansions. A Perl implementation was developed to automatically match expansions with Unified Medical Language System concepts. Measurements.—The abbreviation list contained 12 097 terms; 5772 abbreviations had unique expansions. There were 6325 polysemous abbreviation/expansion pairs. The expansions of 8599 abbreviations mapped to Unified Medical Language System concepts. Three hundred twenty-four abbreviations could be confused with unabbreviated words. Two hundred thirteen abbreviations had different expansions depending on whether the American or the British spellings were used. Nine hundred seventy abbreviations ended in the letter “s.” Results.—There were 6 nonexclusive groups of abbreviations classed by expansion algorithm, as follows: (1) ephemeral; (2) hyponymous; (3) monosemous; (4) polysemous; (5) masqueraders of common words; and (6) fatal (abbreviations whose incorrect expansions could easily result in clinical errors). Conclusion.—Collecting and classifying abbreviations creates a logical approach to the development of class-specific algorithms designed to expand abbreviations. A large listing of medical abbreviations is placed into the public domain. The most current version is available at http://www.pathologyinformatics.org/downloads/abbtwo.htm.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao-Jen Hsu ◽  
Yu-Wei Fu ◽  
Taiwai Chin

Abstract Background Acute appendicitis (AA) is the most common surgical condition in children. Although a higher incidence of AA in summer has been reported, the reason for this observation remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical findings of AA patients who underwent appendectomies during the summer months with those who underwent the procedure during the non-summer months. Methods The clinical data of 171 patients who underwent appendectomy from January 2013 to December 2016 were reviewed. The patients were divided into a summer group (from May to October) and a non-summer group (from November to April) based on the month when appendectomy was performed. All patients were under 18 years of age at the time of surgery. The medical records including laboratory data, computed tomography scans, pathology reports and operative notes were reviewed. Results The number of patients with AA was higher in the summer group than in the non-summer group (101 vs. 70 patients). No significant differences in the laboratory results between the two groups of patients were observed. The percentage of AA patients who presented with a fecalith was significantly lower in the summer group (33.6%) than in the non-summer group (55.7%). No significant differences in the incidence of appendiceal perforations and abscesses, as well as postoperative complications were observed between the two groups. Conclusions The percentage of AA patients with fecaliths in summer was lower than that in the non-summer months. The increase in the number of AA patients in summer may be due to the increased occurrence of lymphoid hyperplasia, which may be correlated with the yearly outbreak of enterovirus infection during this period.


1993 ◽  
Vol 32 (01) ◽  
pp. 66-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.-F. Bassøe ◽  
J.-E. Rasmussen

Abstract:A program (LogStory) is described that was developed for the automatic semantic analysis of clinical narratives, stored in a computerized problem-oriented medical record (PROMED). The diagnoses were written in a free-text format during consultation, and later collected into diagnostic classes, e.g., diseases. A lexical parser automatically created dictionaries from the clinical narrative associated with each disease. Automatic (fuzzy) set operations were performed on the words associated with each class. The manifestations of 16 diseases were automatically extracted by pairwise operations on the word sets. The correlation between diseases and corresponding signs, symptoms and treatment was highly significant (p <0.001). Applying the difference operation on diseases with disjunct sets of clinical findings allowed the recovery of disease-specific knowledge. The evolution of a disease was accounted for, and the system was able to generalize its findings. The PROMED-LogStory concept enables the processing of natural language and may be a powerful tool for knowledge acquisition and clinical research.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao-Jen Hsu ◽  
Yu-Wei Fu ◽  
Taiwai Chin

Abstract Background Acute appendicitis (AA) is the most common surgical condition in children. Although a higher incidence of AA in summer has been reported, the reason for this observation remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical findings of AA patients who underwent appendectomies during the summer months with those who underwent the procedure during the non-summer months. Methods The clinical data of 171 patients who underwent appendectomy from January 2013 to December 2016 were reviewed. The patients were divided into a summer group (from May to October) and a non-summer group (from November to April) based on the month when appendectomy was performed. All patients were under 18 years of age at the time of surgery. The medical records including laboratory data, computed tomography scans, pathology reports and operative notes were reviewed. Results The number of patients with AA was higher in the summer group than in the non-summer group (101 vs. 70 patients). No significant differences in the laboratory results between the two groups of patients were observed. The percentage of AA patients who presented with a fecalith was significantly lower in the summer group (33.6%) than in the non-summer group (55.7%). No significant differences in the incidence of appendiceal perforations and abscesses, as well as postoperative complications were observed between the two groups. Conclusions The percentage of AA patients with fecaliths in summer was lower than that in the non-summer months. The increase in the number of AA patients in summer may be due to the increased occurrence of lymphoid hyperplasia, which may be correlated with the yearly outbreak of enterovirus infection during this period.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao-Jen Hsu ◽  
Yu-Wei Fu ◽  
Taiwai Chin

Abstract Background Acute appendicitis (AA) is the most common surgical condition in children. Although a higher incidence of AA in summer has been reported, the reason for this observation remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical findings of AA patients who underwent appendectomies during the summer months with those who underwent the procedure during the non-summer months. Methods The clinical data of 171 patients who underwent appendectomy from January 2013 to December 2016 were reviewed. The patients were divided into a summer group (from May to October) and a non-summer group (from November to April) based on the month when appendectomy was performed. All patients were under 18 years of age at the time of surgery. The medical records including laboratory data, computed tomography scans, pathology reports and operative notes were reviewed. Results The number of patients with AA was higher in the summer group than in the non-summer group (101 vs. 70 patients). No significant differences in the laboratory results between the two groups of patients were observed. The percentage of AA patients who presented with a fecalith was significantly lower in the summer group (33.6%) than in the non-summer group (55.7%). No significant differences in the incidence of appendiceal perforations and abscesses, as well as postoperative complications were observed between the two groups. Conclusions The percentage of AA patients with fecaliths in summer was lower than that in the non-summer months. The increase in the number of AA patients in summer may be due to the increased occurrence of lymphoid hyperplasia, which may be correlated with the yearly outbreak of enterovirus infection during this period.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Chavez ◽  
Vanessa Perez ◽  
Angélica Urrutia

BACKGROUND : Currently, hypertension is one of the diseases with greater risk of mortality in the world. Particularly in Chile, 90% of the population with this disease has idiopathic or essential hypertension. Essential hypertension is characterized by high blood pressure rates and it´s cause is unknown, which means that every patient might requires a different treatment, depending on their history and symptoms. Different data, such as history, symptoms, exams, etc., are generated for each patient suffering from the disease. This data is presented in the patient’s medical record, in no order, making it difficult to search for relevant information. Therefore, there is a need for a common, unified vocabulary of the terms that adequately represent the diseased, making searching within the domain more effective. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to develop a domain ontology for essential hypertension , therefore arranging the more significant data within the domain as tool for medical training or to support physicians’ decision making will be provided. METHODS The terms used for the ontology were extracted from the medical history of de-identified medical records, of patients with essential hypertension. The Snomed-CT’ collection of medical terms, and clinical guidelines to control the disease were also used. Methontology was used for the design, classes definition and their hierarchy, as well as relationships between concepts and instances. Three criteria were used to validate the ontology, which also helped to measure its quality. Tests were run with a dataset to verify that the tool was created according to the requirements. RESULTS An ontology of 310 instances classified into 37 classes was developed. From these, 4 super classes and 30 relationships were obtained. In the dataset tests, 100% correct and coherent answers were obtained for quality tests (3). CONCLUSIONS The development of this ontology provides a tool for physicians, specialists, and students, among others, that can be incorporated into clinical systems to support decision making regarding essential hypertension. Nevertheless, more instances should be incorporated into the ontology by carrying out further searched in the medical history or free text sections of the medical records of patients with this disease.


1982 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
S U Deshpande

Abstract IBM System 34 (central processing unit, 128 kilobytes; fixed disks, 128.4 megabytes) with seven cathode-ray tubes has been used by our clinical laboratories for the last 30 months. All data-entry programs are in a conversational mode, for on-line corrections of possible errors in patient identification and results. Daily reports are removed from the medical records after temporary and permanent cumulative weekly reports are received, which keep a three-month track of the results. The main advantages of the system are: (a) the increasing laboratory work load can be handled with the same staff; (b) the volume of the medical record files on the patients is decreased; (c) an easily retrievable large data base of results is formed for research purposes; (d) faster billing; and (e) the computer system is run without engaging any additional staff.


2014 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Syed Mohinuddin ◽  
Pankaj Sakhuja ◽  
Benjie Bermundo ◽  
Nandiran Ratnavel ◽  
Stephen Kempley ◽  
...  

Bilious vomiting in a neonate may be a sign of intestinal obstruction often resulting in transfer requests to surgical centres. The aim of this study was to assess the use of clinical findings at referral in predicting outcomes and to determine how often such patients have a time-critical surgical condition (eg, volvulus, where a delay in treatment is likely to compromise gut viability).Methods4-year data and outcomes of all term newborns aged ≤7 days with bilious vomiting transferred by a regional transfer service were analysed. Specificity, sensitivity, likelihood ratios, correlations, prior and posterior probability of clinical findings in predicting newborns with surgical diagnosis were calculated.ResultsOf 163 neonates with bilious vomiting, 75 (46%) had a surgical diagnosis and 23 (14.1%) had a time-critical surgical condition. The diagnosis of a surgical condition in neonates with bilious vomiting was significantly associated with abdominal distension (χ2=5.17, p=0.023), abdominal tenderness (χ2=5.90, p=0.015) and abnormal abdominal X-ray findings (χ2=5.68, p=0.017) but not with palpation findings of a soft as compared with a tense abdomen (χ2=3.21, p=0.073). Abnormal abdominal X-ray, abdominal distension and tenderness had 97%, 74% and 62% sensitivity, respectively, with regard to association with an underlying surgical diagnosis. Normal abdominal X-ray reduced the posterior probability of surgical diagnosis from 50% to 16%. Overall, clinical findings at referral did not differentiate between infants with or without surgical or time-critical condition.ConclusionsWe recommend that term neonates with bilious vomiting referred for transfer are prioritised as time critical.


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