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In the USA, the national cyberinfrastructure refers to a system of research supercomputer and other IT facilities and the high speed networks that connect them. These resources have been heavily leveraged by scientists in disciplines such as high energy physics, astronomy, and climatology, but until recently they have been little used by biomedical researchers. We suggest that many of the 'Big Data' challenges facing the medical informatics community can be [...]

To develop a decision support system to identify patients at high risk for hyperlactatemia based upon routinely measured vital signs and laboratory studies.

Errors in community medication histories increase the risk of adverse events. The objectives of this study were to estimate the extent to which access to community-based pharmacy records provided more information about prescription drug use than conventional medication histories.

This study aimed to reduce reliance on large training datasets in support vector machine (SVM)-based clinical text analysis by categorizing keyword features. An enhanced Mayo smoking status detection pipeline was deployed. We used a corpus of 709 annotated patient narratives. The pipeline was optimized for local data entry practice and lexicon. SVM classifier retraining used a grouped keyword approach for better efficiency. Accuracy, precision, and F-measure of the unaltered and [...]

High-performance computing centers (HPC) traditionally have far less restrictive privacy management policies than those encountered in healthcare. We show how an HPC can be re-engineered to accommodate clinical data while retaining its utility in computationally intensive tasks such as data mining, machine learning, and statistics. We also discuss deploying protected virtual machines. A critical planning step was to engage the university's information security operations and the information security and privacy [...]

Electronic health records (EHRs) contain information to detect adverse drug reactions (ADRs), as they contain comprehensive clinical information. A major challenge of using comprehensive information involves confounding. We propose a novel data-driven method to identify ADR signals accurately by adjusting for confounders.

The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of clinician-entered data in imaging clinical decision support (CDS). We used CDS-guided CT angiography (CTA) for pulmonary embolus (PE) in the emergency department as a case example because it required clinician entry of d-dimer results which could be unambiguously compared with actual laboratory values. Of 1296 patients with CTA orders for suspected PE during 2011, 1175 (90.7%) had accurate d-dimer [...]

To examine the use of online social networking for cardiovascular care using Facebook. All posts and comments in a Facebook group between June 2011 and May 2012 were reviewed, and a survey was conducted. A total of 298 members participated. Of the 277 wall posts, 26.7% were question posts requesting rapid replies, and 50.5% were interesting cases shared with other members. The median response time for the question posts was [...]

Many cancer interventional clinical trials are not completed because the required number of eligible patients are not enrolled.