A Natural Language Processing Tool for Large-Scale Data Extraction from Echocardiography Reports.

Large volumes of data are continuously generated from clinical notes and diagnostic studies catalogued in electronic health records (EHRs). Echocardiography is one of the most commonly ordered diagnostic tests in cardiology. This study sought to explore the feasibility and reliability of using natural language processing (NLP) for large-scale and targeted extraction of multiple data elements from echocardiography reports.

Website Sharing in Online Health Communities: A Descriptive Analysis.

Background: An increasing number of people visit online health communities to seek health information. In these communities, people share experiences and information with others, often complemented with links to different websites. Understanding how people share websites can help us understand patients' needs in online health communities and improve how peer patients share health information online.

Agile text mining for the 2014 i2b2/UTHealth Cardiac risk factors challenge.

This paper describes the use of an agile text mining platform (Linguamatics' Interactive Information Extraction Platform, I2E) to extract document-level cardiac risk factors in patient records as defined in the i2b2/UTHealth 2014 challenge. The approach uses a data-driven rule-based methodology with the addition of a simple supervised classifier. We demonstrate that agile text mining allows for rapid optimization of extraction strategies, while post-processing can leverage annotation guidelines, corpus statistics and logic inferred from the gold standard data.

An automated approach for ranking journals to help in clinician decision support.

Point of care access to knowledge from full text journal articles supports decision-making and decreases medical errors. However, it is an overwhelming task to search through full text journal articles and find quality information needed by clinicians. We developed a method to rate journals for a given clinical topic, Congestive Heart Failure (CHF).

Composite treatment for primary long-bone hydatidosis.

Hydatid disease is a parasitic tapeworm infection caused by the Echinococcus species. Involvement of the long tubular bones is rare in hydatid bone disease. Patients are initially asymptomatic and usually present at a later stage of the disease when the bony lesions are extensive.

What is the role of autologous blood transfusion in major spine surgery?

Major spine surgery is associated with significant blood loss, which has numerous complications. Blood loss is therefore an important concern when undertaking any major spine surgery. Blood loss can be addressed by reducing intraoperative blood loss and replenishing perioperative blood loss.

Harvesting the free fibular graft: A modified approach.

Background: The conventional technique of free non-vascularized fibular grafting is attended with some amount of morbidity and a long scar. We report a technique with little interference to the surrounding soft tissues to harvest more than one-third of whole length fibula.

Patients And Methods: Thirty four patients of average age 23.

Modified Boytchev procedure for the treatment of recurrent anterior dislocation of the shoulder.

From January 1990 to December 1998, 48 patients with 50 recurrent anterior dislocations of the shoulder were treated using a modified Boytchev procedure. The age of the patients varied from 18 to 35 years (average 24.7 years).