Abdominal pain with a twist: a rare presentation of acute gastric volvulus.

Acute gastric volvulus is a life threatening condition requiring early diagnosis and aggressive management. Diagnosis of gastric volvulus remains a challenge for clinicians due to variable, non-specific clinical presentation, which requires a high level of suspicion. It should be considered in patients presenting with chest pain and/or epigastric pain, especially in the elderly population.

Latent physiological factors of complex human diseases revealed by independent component analysis of clinarrays.

Background: Diagnosis and treatment of patients in the clinical setting is often driven by known symptomatic factors that distinguish one particular condition from another. Treatment based on noticeable symptoms, however, is limited to the types of clinical biomarkers collected, and is prone to overlooking dysfunctions in physiological factors not easily evident to medical practitioners. We used a vector-based representation of patient clinical biomarkers, or clinarrays, to search for latent physiological factors that underlie human diseases directly from clinical laboratory data.

Special article: an optimistic prognosis for the clinical utility of laboratory test data.

It is hoped that anesthesiologists and other clinicians will be able to increasingly rely upon laboratory test data to improve the perioperative care of patients. However, it has been suggested that in order for a laboratory test to have clinically useful diagnostic performance characteristics (sensitivity and specificity), its performance must be considerably better than those that have been evaluated in most etiologic or epidemiologic studies. This pessimism about the clinical utility of laboratory tests is based upon the untested assumption that laboratory data are normally distributed within case and control populations.

Validating pathophysiological models of aging using clinical electronic medical records.

Bioinformatics methods that leverage the vast amounts of clinical data promises to provide insights into underlying molecular mechanisms that help explain human physiological processes. One of these processes is adolescent development. The utility of predictive aging models generated from cross-sectional cohorts and their applicability to separate populations, including the clinical population, has yet to be completely explored.

ChMP: A collaborative medical history portal.

Family medical histories play an invaluable role in disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Self reported medical histories frequently contain incorrect or incomplete information, severely diminishing the quality of care and clinical outcome of the patient. While tools for obtaining and analyzing medical histories are available to medical professionals, no system exists to allow families to actively participate in the collection and utilization of medical history data.

Clinical arrays of laboratory measures, or "clinarrays", built from an electronic health record enable disease subtyping by severity.

The severity of diseases has often been assigned by direct observation of a patient and by pathological examination after symptoms have appeared. As we move into the genomic era, the ability to predict disease severity prior to manifestation has improved dramatically due to genomic sequencing and analysis of gene expression microarrays. However, as the severity of diseases can be exacerbated by non genetic factors, the ability to predict disease severity by examining gene expression alone may be inadequate.

Novel integration of hospital electronic medical records and gene expression measurements to identify genetic markers of maturation.

Traditionally, the elucidation of genes involved in maturation and aging has been studied in a temporal fashion by examining gene expression at different time points in an organism's life as well as by knocking out, knocking in, and mutating genes thought to be involved. Here, we propose an in silico method to combine clinical electronic medical record (EMR) data and gene expression measurements in the context of disease to identify genes that may be involved in the process of human maturation and aging. First we show that absolute lymphocyte count may serve as a biomarker for maturation by using statistical methods to compare trends among different clinical laboratory tests in response to an increase in age.