Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2000
Multimedia-based courseware in the Virtual Learning Center at the Hannover Medical School.
The commercial use of the World Wide Web causes an extensive change in information technology. Web browser are becoming the universal front-end for all kinds of client-server applications. The possibilities of telematics offer a base for multimedia applications, for instance telelearning. ⋯ A very important part of graphic design in the context of multimedia applications is the creation and interactive use of images (still, moving). The growth and the complexity of medical knowledge as well as the need for continuous, fast, and economically feasible maintenance impose requirements on the media used for medical education and training. Web-based courseware in the Virtual Learning Center at the Hannover Medical School is an innovative education resource for medical students and professionals.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2000
Dimension reduction for highdimensional online-monitoring data in intensive care.
Nowadays high dimensional data in intensive care medicine can be captured, stored, and retrieved with the help of clinical information systems. Intelligent alarm systems are needed for an adequate bedside decision support, in the course of which the detection of qualitative patterns in physiologic monitoring data such as outliers, level changes, or trends aims at a proper classification of the patients state. ⋯ We describe methods for reducing the dimension and for keeping the computational efforts necessary for monitoring low. We present preliminary results of an ongoing study on monitoring critically ill patients.
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This paper will describe a suite of surgical simulators that we have designed and implemented to run on the WWW. The procedures that have been modelled include simulations of ventricular catheterisation, and lumbar puncture. We will present a detailed overview of implementation and operation of these simulators, and indicate results from early use. The advantages and disadvantages of our approach will be discussed.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2000
Healthcare knowledge acquisition: an ontology-based approach using the extensible markup language (XML).
The healthcare enterprise requires a great deal of knowledge to maintain premium efficiency in the delivery of quality healthcare. We employ Knowledge Management based knowledge acquisition strategies to procure 'tacit' healthcare knowledge from experienced healthcare practitioners. ⋯ We present a healthcare Tacit Knowledge Acquisition Info-structure (TKAI) that allows remote healthcare practitioners to record their tacit knowledge. TKAI employs (a) ontologies for standardisation of tacit knowledge and (b) XML to represent scenario instances for their transfer over the Internet to the server-side Scenario-Base and for the global sharing of acquired tacit healthcare knowledge.
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Measurement of arterial compliance is of interest in evaluating patients with atherosclerosis and other diseases which affect the vessels. Arterial compliance is the relation between changes in transmural pressure and volume of an arterial segment, where a high compliance signifies large changes in volume per change in transmural pressure. The relation between changes in transmural pressure and volume is far from linear as compliance increases progressively with decreases in blood pressure. ⋯ Using this method on normal subjects has shown that the arterial compliance decreases with increasing age and that females have lower compliance than males primarily due to a smaller diameter of their arteries. It has also been shown that patients with essential (diastolic) hypertension have compliances which are higher or equal to those of normal subjects, and that patients with systolic hypertension have lower arterial compliances than normal subjects. The former finding is in contrast with pulse wave velocity measurements, where diastolic hypertension was associated with low arterial compliance.