IMM/Scrub is a pilot tool developed to assist in the deduplication of vaccination history records in childhood immunization registries. This problem is complicated by a number of factors including that fact that: (1) some doses are numbered and some are not, (2) doses may have different dose numbers, (3) doses may specify different preparations within a vaccine series, (4) one dose may indicate...

We report a novel computer method for automatic labeling of structures in 3D MRI data sets using expert anatomical knowledge that is coded in fuzzy sets and fuzzy rules. The method first identifies major structures and then uses spatial relationships to these landmarks to recognize other structures. This labeling process simulates the iterative process that we ourselves use to locate structures...

The RT interval is a measure of the ventricular repolarization and is partially influenced by the sympathovagal balance. The analysis of the variation of the duration of the RT and RR intervals might bring new information about the arrhythmogenic vulnerability and autonomic imbalance. The RR signal and its spectral density (SD) are characterized by two different patterns during the sleep period...

A closed-loop model of cardiopulmonary circulation has been developed for the study of right–left ventricular interaction under physiologically normal and altered conditions. The core model provides insight into the effects of ventricular interaction and pericardial mechanics on hemodynamics. The complete model contains realistic descriptions of (a) the interacting ventricular free walls and se...

Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of hypothyroidism worldwide but in areas of Iodine sufficiency, other causes including autoimmunity and iatrogenic factors are more common. During pregnancy, autoimmune thyroid disease, characterized by presence of specific thyroid auto antibodies, is mostly responsible for hypothyroidism. Such females, who often had previous history of repeated aborti...

Voluntary standards for "greening" the bio-medical research industry were the focus of a 1-2 November 1999 conference held at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. The conference was organized by the National Association of Physicians for the Environment (NAPE), the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers, the NIEHS, the Environmental Protection Agenc...

In 1980 Mark Ptashne published a review entitled How λ repressor and Cro work followed by another, in 1988, called How eukaryotic transcriptional activators work. The bold — almost, some might feel, naïve — ambition these titles betray is unashamedly the author’s: to generate a coherent picture of how genes are switched on and off. Mark Ptashne’s approach has always been transparent. During gro...

Event Graphs, conditional representations of stochastic relationships between discrete events, simulate disease dynamics. In this paper, we demonstrate how Event Graphs, at an appropriate abstraction level, also extend and organize scientific knowledge about diseases. They can identify promising treatment strategies and directions for further research and provide enough detail for testing combi...

A wavelet domain nonlinear filtering method for improving the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the evoked potentials (EP) is proposed. The method modifies the selective filtering technique proposed for edge detection in images by Xu et al. for the case of signals which require a smooth transition at the edge points. It identifies the significant features of a noisy signal based on the correlation...