Acute appendicitis (AA) is one of the most common causes of abdominal pain, accounting for about one-third of patients presenting to emergency services with acute abdomen. Surgeons perform about 280,000 appendectomies per year in the United States [1-3]. Despite the high prevalence, its diagnosis remains a challenge mainly among young, elderly and women of childbearing age, where a number of ot...

A lack of acceptance has hindered the widespread adoption and implementation of clinical prediction rules (CPRs). The use of clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) has been advocated as one way of facilitating a broader dissemination and validation of CPRs. This requires computable models of clinical evidence based on open standards rather than closed proprietary content. The on-going TRANSF...

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado is a Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine and is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute [4] Investigator. Born in Caracas, Venezuela, 24 February 1964, Sánchez Alvarado left his home to pursue education in the United States, where he received a Bachelor of Science in molecular biology and chemistry from Vanderbilt Universi...