J Med Syst
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The aim of this study was to assess procedures with high turnover time to procedure time ratios, estimate the effect of productivity changes on case efficiency, and determine causative factors. We specifically focused on suspension direct microlaryngoscopy (SML) (CPT 31526) cases because significantly greater productivity was possible for these cases in terms of ratios. After determining process times, we developed economic scenarios that employed time-reductions, and then assessed involved staff opinions using brainstorming and cause--effect methods. Improving all process times by 30% achieved up to a 50% improvement in revenue and the return on investment in additional scope equipment occurred within 2 months.
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Recognition of lung sounds is an important goal in pulmonary medicine. In this work, we present a study for neural networks-genetic algorithm approach intended to aid in lung sound classification. Lung sound was captured from the chest wall of The subjects with different pulmonary diseases and also from the healthy subjects. ⋯ Multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network employing backpropagation training algorithm was used to predict the presence or absence of adventitious sounds (wheeze and crackle). We used genetic algorithms to search for optimal structure and training parameters of neural network for a better predicting of lung sounds. This application resulted in designing of optimum network structure and, hence reducing the processing load and time.
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To develop a system for checking indication and contraindication of medicines in prescription order entry system, a master table consisting of the disease names corresponding to the medicines adopted in a hospital is needed. The creation of this table requires a considerable manpower. We developed a Web-based system for constructing a medicine/disease thesaurus and a knowledge base. ⋯ When a disease name or medicine name was added to the thesaurus, the check table was automatically updated. We constructed a thesaurus and a knowledge base in the field of circulatory system disease. The knowledge base linked with the thesaurus proved to be efficient for making the check master table for indication/contraindication of medicines.
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Listening to various lung sounds has proven to be an important diagnostic tool for detecting and monitoring certain types of lung diseases. In this study a computer-based system has been designed for easy measurement and analysis of lung sound using the software package DasyLAB. The designed system presents the following features: it is able to digitally record the lung sounds which are captured with an electronic stethoscope plugged to a sound card on a portable computer, display the lung sound waveform for auscultation sites, record the lung sound into the ASCII format, acoustically reproduce the lung sound, edit and print the sound waveforms, display its time-expanded waveform, compute the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), and display the power spectrum and spectrogram.
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This paper utilizes the diffusion of innovation framework to discuss factors affecting adoption of telemedicine. Empirical and anecdotal findings are organized across five attributes affecting innovation adoption rates for the following four adopter groups: physicians, patients, hospital administrators, and payers. A discussion of the implications is included.