BIOMEDICINE: Natural Sunblock

Natural Language Processing in Biomedicine: A Unified System Architecture Overview

In contemporary electronic medical records much of the clinically important data-signs and symptoms, symptom severity, disease status, etc.-are not provided in structured data fields but rather are encoded in clinician-generated narrative text. Natural language processing (NLP) provides a means of unlocking this important data source for applications in clinical decision support, quality assura...

Tropical Biomedicine

Biomedicine Select

Autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, are complex disorders characterized by an inflammatory response against the body's own tissues. Recent findings reveal new insights into how these diseases are initiated and progress and the factors that contribute to their clinical symptoms. Such work also pinpoints potential new therapeutic targets including the integra...

Biomedicine Select

This issue’s Biomedicine Select highlights new insights into the role of mitochondria in disease. Several new studies implicate abnormal mitochondria in the destruction of neurons of the substantia nigra, the cause of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Meanwhile, an elegant computational approach has enabled identification of candidate genes for several mitochondrial diseases including the mitochondrial...

Biomedicine Select

Angiogenesis (the recruitment and formation of new blood vessels) may be a limiting step in the growth of tumors. Recent work in animal models of human cancer suggests that even transient angiogenic signals can irreversibly block tumor dormancy, promoting tumor growth. Another report concludes that the production of an-giogenic factors may result from activation of a signaling pathway in the in...