Scabies: Refine your exam, avoid these diagnostic pitfalls.

Nearly half of all infections are missed when first examined. Attentiveness to specific details, particularly in 3 common scenarios, can help ensure an accurate Dx.

Decision support in dermatology and medicine: history and recent developments.

This article is focused on diagnostic decision support tools and will provide a brief history of clinical decision support (CDS), examine the components of CDS and its associated terminology, and discuss recent developments in the use and application of CDS systems, particularly in the field of dermatology. For this article, we use CDS to mean an interactive system allowing input of patient-specific information and providing customized medical knowledge-based results via automated reasoning, for example, a set of rules and/or an underlying logic, and associations.

Dermatology and HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Human immunodeficiency virus and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) have greatly complicated dermatologic disease and the required care in most regions of Africa. Opportunistic infections, ectoparasites, Kaposi sarcoma, and skin manifestations of systemic infections are exceedingly common in patients with HIV/AIDS. Dermatologists have contributed significantly to our knowledge base about HIV/AIDS and have played an important educational role regarding the clinical manifestations historically.

Diagnostic accuracy in patients admitted to hospitals with cellulitis.

Misdiagnosis of non-infectious conditions such as cellulitis is a common error and can result in unnecessary hospitalization and antibiotic use. We sought to prospectively determine the misdiagnosis rate of cellulitis among hospitalized patients and to determine if a visually-based computerized diagnostic decision support system (VCDDSS, also named VisualDx) could generate an improved differential diagnosis (DDx) for misdiagnosed patients. In two separate institutions, attending dermatologists or infectious disease specialists evaluated all consecutive patients hospitalized for "cellulitis" by the emergency department.

Eye tracking users of a visual diagnostic clinical decision support system to discover decision-making strategies and to inform user interface design.

Clinical decision support systems (CDSS) assist physicians and other medical professionals in tasks such as differential diagnosis. End users may use different decision-making strategies depending on medical training. Study of eye movements reveals information processing strategies that are executed at a level below consciousness.

Differential diagnosis of the swollen red eyelid.

The differential diagnosis of eyelid erythema and edema is broad, ranging from benign, self-limiting dermatoses to malignant tumors and vision-threatening infections. A definitive diagnosis usually can be made on physical examination of the eyelid and a careful evaluation of symptoms and exposures. The finding of a swollen red eyelid often signals cellulitis.

Disparities in dermatology educational resources.

Patients with dark skin can present with morphologic variants, subtle disease presentations, and disease manifestations requiring unique management and therapies. With African Americans, Asians, and Hispanic Americans becoming a significant portion of the population, dermatologists must be able to diagnose and manage skin conditions in people of color. In this study, core dermatology educational sources were examined to determine if they provide dermatologists and trainees with the knowledge base necessary to diagnose and treat skin disease in the ethnic patient.

Framework for improved communication: the Dermatology Lexicon Project.

A standardized dermatology vocabulary is central to our collective ability to gather clinical information consistently for patient care, to retrieve information for research or disease management, as well as to conduct outcomes analysis for quality improvement. The deficiencies of current classifications have been recognized by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS) in their decision to fund the development of a standard complete reference terminology for dermatology. The Dermatology Lexicon will have a major impact both on clinical care and on dermatologic research.

Medical and dermatology dictionaries: an examination of unstructured definitions and a proposal for the future.

Medical dictionaries serve to describe and clarify the term set used by medical professionals. In this commentary, we analyze a representative set of skin disease definitions from 2 prominent medical dictionaries, Stedman's Medical Dictionary and Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary. We find that there is an apparent lack of stylistic standards with regard to content and form.