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

A new form of scientific medical meeting has emerged in the last few years--the virtual congress. This article describes the general role of computer technologies and the Internet in the development of this new means of scientific communication, by reviewing the history of "cyber sessions" in medical education and the rationale, methods, and initial results of the First Virtual Congress of Cardiology. Instructions on how to participate in this virtual [...]

A variety of methods have been proposed for presenting medical data visually on computers. Discussion of and comparison among these methods have been hindered by a lack of consistent terminology. A taxonomy of medical data presentations based on object-oriented user interface principles is presented. Presentations are divided into five major classes-list, table, graph, icon, and generated text. These are subdivided into eight subclasses with simple inheritance and four subclasses with [...]

Many adults with cancer are not enrolled in clinical trials because caregivers do not have the time to match the patient's clinical findings with varying eligibility criteria associated with multiple trials for which the patient might be eligible. The authors developed a point-of-use portable decision support tool (DS-TRIEL) to automate this matching process. The support tool consists of a hand-held computer with a programmable relational database. A two-level hierarchic decision [...]

The University of Utah has been educating health professionals in medical informatics since 1964. Over the 35 years since the program's inception, 272 graduate students have studied in the department. Most students have been male (80 percent) and have come from the United States (75 percent). Students entering the program have had diverse educational backgrounds, most commonly in medicine, engineering, computer science, or biology (59 percent of all informatics students) [...]

Richard T. West, IAIMS (Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems) Program Officer at the National Library of Medicine for 13 years, reflects on the origin, development, effectiveness, and future of IAIMS efforts. He dwells on the changes that have taken place as the concept of IAIMS has evolved from a technology-based to an organization-based level of integration. The role of IAIMS in patient care, education, and research is discussed, along with [...]

In 1887, Polish physician Ludovic Zamenhof introduced Esperanto, a simple, easy-to-learn planned language. His goal was to erase communication barriers between ethnic groups by providing them with a politically neutral, culturally free standard language. His ideas received both praise and condemnation from the leaders of his time. Interest in Esperanto peaked in the 1970s but has since faded somewhat. Despite the logical concept and intellectual appeal of a standard language [...]

The expanding health information infrastructure offers the promise of new medical knowledge drawn from patient records. Such promise will never be fulfilled, however, unless researchers first address policy issues regarding the rights and interests of both the patients and the institutions who hold their records. In this article, the authors analyze the interests of patients and institutions in light of public policy and institutional needs. They conclude that the multicenter [...]

This study examines how characteristics of clinical cases and physician users relate to the users' perceptions of the usefulness of the Quick Medical Reference (QMR) and their confidence in their diagnoses when supported by the decision support system.

This study examines how the information provided by a diagnostic decision support system for clinical cases of varying diagnostic difficulty affects physicians' diagnostic performance.