International journal of medical informatics
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Comparative Study
Diagnostic accuracy of chest X-rays acquired using a digital camera for low-cost teleradiology.
Store-and-forward telemedicine, using e-mail to send clinical data and digital images, offers a low-cost alternative for physicians in developing countries to obtain second opinions from specialists. To explore the potential usefulness of this technique, 91 chest X-ray images were photographed using a digital camera and a view box. Four independent readers (three radiologists and one pulmonologist) read two types of digital (JPEG and JPEG2000) and original film images and indicated their confidence in the presence of eight features known to be radiological indicators of tuberculosis (TB). ⋯ There was no statistical difference in the overall performance between the readings from the original films and both types of digital images. The size of JPEG2000 images was approximately 120KB, making this technique feasible for slow internet connections. Our preliminary results show the potential usefulness of this technique particularly for tuberculosis and lung disease, but further studies are required to refine its potential.
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Health care professionals need information delivery tools for accessing information at the point of patient care. Personal digital assistants (PDAs), or hand-held devices demonstrate great promise as point of care information devices. An earlier study [The Constellation Project: experience and evaluation of personal digital assistants in the clinical environment, in: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, 1995, 678] on the use of PDAs at the point of care found that hardware constraints, such as memory capability limited their usefulness, however, they were used frequently for accessing medical references and drug information [The Constellation Project: experience and evaluation of personal digital assistants in the clinical environment, in: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care, 1995, 678]. ⋯ Concerns and drawbacks mentioned by these residents included physical size of the PDA and the potential for catastrophic data loss. Another issue raised by our results suggests that security and Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance need to be addressed, in part by resident education about securing patient data on PDAs. Overall, PDAs may become even more widely used if two issues can be addressed: (a) providing secure clinical data for the current patients of a given resident, and (b) allaying concerns of catastrophic data loss from their PDAs (e.g. by educating residents about procedures to recover information from PDA backup files).
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Content-based visual information retrieval (CBVIR) or content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been one on the most vivid research areas in the field of computer vision over the last 10 years. The availability of large and steadily growing amounts of visual and multimedia data, and the development of the Internet underline the need to create thematic access methods that offer more than simple text-based queries or requests based on matching exact database fields. Many programs and tools have been developed to formulate and execute queries based on the visual or audio content and to help browsing large multimedia repositories. ⋯ This article also identifies explanations to some of the outlined problems in the field as it looks like many propositions for systems are made from the medical domain and research prototypes are developed in computer science departments using medical datasets. Still, there are very few systems that seem to be used in clinical practice. It needs to be stated as well that the goal is not, in general, to replace text-based retrieval methods as they exist at the moment but to complement them with visual search tools.