Clinical decision support systems necessitate a disease knowledge base, which comprises a set of clinical findings for each disease. To efficiently represent the findings, this paper explores the relationship between clinical vocabulary and findings in medical literature through quantitative and qualitative analysis of representative disease databases. Although the data volume and the analyzed ...

MEDLINE is the premier source for access to the broad spectrum of medical literature. With > 15 000 000 references from > 4600 biomedical journals, the MEDLINE treasure trove contains citations for virtually all the gold that biomedical research enterprise has to offer. But finding exactly what you want in such a huge database has its challenges. First, the indexing is fairly coarsely grained, ...

I recognize many aspects of Mary’s journey in the stories of patients I care for every day as a palliative care physician. Mary’s experience traversing the last precious months of her life as a chronically and critically ill patient is unfortunately not unique. A palliative care team could have been an enormous help to Mary, her family, and her healthcare team. The future looks brighter as awar...