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
G2H--graphics-to-haptic virtual environment development tool for PC's.
For surgical training and preparations, the existing surgical virtual environments have shown great improvement. However, these improvements are more in the visual aspect. The incorporation of haptics into virtual reality base surgical simulations would enhance the sense of realism greatly. ⋯ G2H transforms graphical virtual environments (created or imported) to haptic virtual environments without programming. The G2H capability has been demonstrated using the complex 3D pelvic model of Lucy 2.0, the Stanford Visible Female. The pelvis was made haptic using G2H without any further programming effort.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2000
Opportunities for improving quality in the health care industry.
This paper discusses the current state of health care quality and describes some of the factors that are hindering efforts to move toward evidence-based practice. The President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality spent one year looking at the state of health care quality and developed a set of recommendations to tackle the serious quality problem in the health care industry. The Institute of Medicine has started an initiative, Quality of Health Care in America Project, which is addressing many of the quality of care areas identified by the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality. This paper discusses the work of these two groups and concludes with key issues in the advancement of quality health care.
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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.