Background Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) are used to standardize care according to evidence-based recommendations. However, the implementation of CPGs in the real world varies; a possible reason for this is the lack of a systematic approach to the implementation of CPG. We, therefore, aimed to develop an intervention to improve the implementation of a local hypertension CPG based on the n...

We present an information extraction system for patient records which has been submitted to the ShARe/CLEF eHealth Evaluation Lab 2014 Task 2. The task was information extraction from clinical text in terms of a disease/disorder template filling process. The system uses a lexicalized parser to annotate grammatical relations between diseases, disorders, and other constituents on a sentence level...

One indispensable precondition for designing a functional software product for the modeling and execution of a computerized clinical practice guideline (CPG) is the comprehensive investigation of the different user groups involved and the issues they encounter. This led us to conduct a comprehensive literature study about the tasks involved in modeling a CPG into a formal representation as well...

The purpose of this research was to investigate the potential effectiveness of digital speech processing and pattern recognition techniques for the automatic recognition of gender from speech segments. In this paper "coarse" acoustic coefficients (autocorrelation, linear prediction, cepstrum, and reflection) were used to form test and reference templates for vowels, voiced fricatives, and unvoi...

This paper describes a generic blackboard development system (GBB) that unifies many characteristics of the blackboard systems constructed to date. The goal of GBB is to provide flexibility, ease of implementation, and efficient execution of the resulting application system. Efficient insertion/retrieval of blackboard objects is achieved using a language for specifying the detailed structure of...

Clinicians confront the classical problem of decision making under uncertainty, but a universal procedure by which they deal with this situation, both in diagnosis and therapy, can be defined. This consists in the choice of a specific course of action from available alternatives so as to reduce uncertainty. Formal analysis evidences that the expected value of this process depends on the a prior...

A framework has been developed that automatically generates context-specifi c query, and determines its query type, from computerized clinical practice guidelines (CPGs). The generated query can be submitted to PubMed using web services to retrieve and link relevant medical literature pertaining to the computerized CPGs content. This framework makes use of contexts, semantics, statistical infor...

Currently two hypotheses exist as to how insects process visual images, as photograph-like 'retinotopic-templates', or as a set of features extracted by the visual system. Several results obtained in honeybees cannot be reconciled with a retinotopic-template matching. (i) Bees discriminated between two patterns that should not be distinguished according to the template hypothesis. (ii) Bees pre...

There is a tremendous amount of effort involved in the definition of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) by physicians. Because the quality of medical assistance is highly impacted by the use of CPG, and establishing their use is difficult, we consider necessary to develop an effective solution that implements CPG through Decision Support Systems (DSS). Among the many existing representation mod...

Decision support systems based on computerized Clinical Protocols (CP) and Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) fall short when dealing with patient co-morbidites, as this demands the concurrent merging of multiple CP/CPG. We present an ontology-based approach for the merging of CPG and CP at two levels–i.e. knowledge modeling level and knowledge execution level. We have developed specialized ont...