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To determine whether there are statistically significant differences in the content of electronic mail (e-mail) and conventional mail sent to authors of papers published in medical journals.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) combines many well-established authoritative medical informatics terminologies in one knowledge representation system. Such a resource is very valuable to the health care community and industry. However, the UMLS is very large and complex and poses serious comprehension problems for users and maintenance personnel. The authors present a representation to support the user's comprehension and navigation of the UMLS.

To design a pattern recognition engine based on concepts derived from mammalian immune systems.

For the past decade, Stanford Medical Informatics has combined clinical informatics and bioinformatics research and training in an explicit way. The interest in applying informatics techniques to both clinical problems and problems in basic science can be traced to the Dendral project in the 1960s. Having bioinformatics and clinical informatics in the same academic unit is still somewhat unusual and can lead to clashes of clinical and basic science cultures [...]

Currently, when cytopathology images are archived, they are typically stored with a limited text-based description of their content. Such a description inherently fails to quantify the properties of an image and refers to an extremely small fraction of its information content. This paper describes a method for automatically indexing images of individual cells and their associated diagnoses by computationally derived cell descriptors. This methodology may serve to better index data [...]

The authors consider the problem of exact string pattern matching using algorithms that do not require any preprocessing. To choose the most appropriate algorithm, distinctive features of the medical language must be taken into account. The characteristics of medical language are emphasized in this regard, the best algorithm of those reviewed is proposed, and detailed evaluations of time complexity for processing medical texts are provided.

Integrating data that reside in different systems remains an often laborious process, requiring either manual steps or complicated programming. This paper describes a method for state-mandated reporting of childhood blood lead testing results that makes use of object linking and embedding technology and readily available software products to pull together information from different legacy systems. A terminal session emulator employs object linking and embedding automation to extract host data, and [...]

The "vocabulary problem" has long plagued the developers, implementers, and users of computer-based systems. The authors review selected activities of the Health Level 7 (HL7) Vocabulary Technical Committee that are related to vocabulary domain specification for HL7 coded data elements. These activities include: 1) the development of two sets of principles to provide guidance to terminology stakeholders, including organizations seeking to deploy HL7-compliant systems, terminology developers, and terminology integrators; 2) [...]