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To measure the accuracy of automated tuberculosis case detection.

The authors provide a survey of how images are used in radiation therapy to improve the precision of radiation therapy plans, and delivery of radiation treatment. In contrast to diagnostic radiology, where the focus is on interpretation of the images to decide if disease is present, radiation therapy quantifies the extent of the region to be treated, and relates it to the proposed treatment using a quantitative modeling system called [...]

To explore the informatic requirements in the home care of chronically ill patients.

We evaluate the ability of a microcomputer program (Automatch) to link patient records in our hospital's database (N = 253,836) with mortality files from California (N = 1,312,779) and the U.S. Social Security Administration (N = 13,341,581). We linked 96.5% of 3,448 in-hospital deaths, 99.3% for patients with social security numbers. None of 14,073 patients known to be alive (because they were subsequently admitted) was linked with California deaths, and [...]

Information contained in medical images differs considerably from that residing in alphanumeric format. The difference can be attributed to four characteristics: (1) the semantics of medical knowledge extractable from images is imprecise; (2) image information contains form and spatial data, which are not expressible in conventional language; (3) a large part of image information is geometric; (4) diagnostic inferences derived from images rest on an incomplete, continuously evolving model of [...]

A national public and private "grand challenge" initiative should be undertaken to assure the American public that the telecommunications and computing revolutions improve health care, health education, and biomedical and health services research, and secure accountability for cost, quality, and access. The initiative should focus on meeting the needs of the patient and society at large. It needs to be a national vision, but it also ought to have regional [...]

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care professionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language [...]

Kurzweil Applied Intelligence received a research grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Technology Program to develop a prototype voice-enabled, structured medical reporting system. In typical usage, the physician dictates to the system, which then uses automatic speech recognition and medical knowledge bases to produce a structured report. This report can then be formatted and viewed on a computer screen, stored in databases of patient information [...]