Studies in health technology and informatics
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Comparative StudyTeaching intravenous cannulation to medical students: comparative analysis of two simulators and two traditional educational approaches.
This study examines the effectiveness of two virtual reality simulators when compared with traditional methods of teaching intravenous (IV) cannulation to third year medical students. Thirty-four third year medical students were divided into four groups and then trained to perform an IV cannulation using either CathSim, Virtual I. V., a plastic simulated arm or by practicing IV placement on each other. ⋯ Students trained on the Virtual I. V. showed significantly greater improvement over baseline when compared with the simulated arm group (p<.026). Both simulators provided at least equal training to traditional methods of teaching, a finding with implications for future training of this procedure to novices.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Tools for statistical analysis with missing data: application to a large medical database.
Missing data is a common feature of large data sets in general and medical data sets in particular. Depending on the goal of statistical analysis, various techniques can be used to tackle this problem. Imputation methods consist in substituting the missing values with plausible or predicted values so that the completed data can then be analysed with any chosen data mining procedure. ⋯ The control chart was established for the 3 imputation methods studied here, assuming a multivariate normal distribution of data. The use of this tool on a large medical database was then investigated. We show how the control chart can be used to assess the quality of the imputation process in the pre-processing step upstream of data mining procedures.
-
This chapter describes a software process improvement framework, structured to ensure regulatory compliance for the software developed in medical devices. Software is becoming an increasingly important aspect of medical devices and medical device regulation. Medical devices can only be marketed if compliance and approval from the appropriate regulatory bodies of the Food and Drug Administration (US requirement), and the European Commission under its Medical Device Directives (CE marking requirement) is achieved.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
CAD generated mold for preoperative implant fabrication in cranioplasty.
Intraoperative fabrication of acrylic cranial implants may be difficult and will increase operation time. In addition forming implants directly on the defect, intracranial tissues are exposed to heat of polymerization and residual monomer, that occurs, when autopolymerizing methyl methacrylate is used intraoperatively. Furthermore the cosmetical result may be unacceptable. ⋯ We will present methods for preoperative fabrication of cranial implants for a cadaver specimen. Implants were fabricated using a Rapid prototyping (RP) models of the skull built by Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). In addition a mold of the defect was generated by CAD techniques, that can serve as a template for implant design.
-
Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2005
Integration of multiple ontologies in breast cancer pathology.
The diagnostic variability in pathology, widely reported in the literature, is partly due to the use of different classification systems by pathologists. The descriptions of morphological characteristics on the same image within different classification systems can be considered as different points of view of pathologists. Our aim is to represent the points of view of the experts in pathology during image interpretation and to propose a method ological and technical solution in order to implement interoperability between these points of view. ⋯ Our results show that the pathologists generally produce descriptions of the cases which do not follow rigorously the interpretation rules corresponding to the point of view they assert to adopt. While most of the concepts of local ontologies can be transcoded from a local ontology to another one (varying from 62.5 % to 100% according to the local ontology), the transcoding of a description which is valid according to a certain point of view, often results in a description which is not rigorously in accordance with the new point of view. These results underline the differences of interpretation rules existing in the different points of view.