Whole utterance approaches in AAC.

Increased communication rate has long been a goal of both individuals who use AAC and device manufacturers. There is evidence that utterance-based approaches have the potential to deliver faster rates without loss of coherence. An overview of the historical development of devices that embody such approaches is set out here.

Diagnosis of hip fracture by the auscultatory percussion technique.

Traumatic hip pain is a commonly encountered complaint in the emergency department. Occasionally, initial radiographs fail to show a fracture. A delayed diagnosis can result in significant patient morbidity.

Misunderstanding between knowledge engineers and domain experts: a re-evaluation of the use of induction for medical expert systems.

The effectiveness of an induction algorithm for making decisions was investigated using a complete set of diagnoses and corresponding outcomes for all possible distinct cases of thyroid disorders. Investigation of both diagnoses and outcomes followed a late discovery of a misunderstanding between the knowledge engineers and the expert. The knowledge engineers had erroneously equated the expert's terms 'diagnosis' and 'outcome'.

Comparison of smoking habits between patients with surgically confirmed herniated lumbar and cervical disc disease and controls.

There have been numerous studies that implicate cigarette smoking as a risk factor for the development of back pain or disc disease. The purpose of this article is to review patients who underwent surgery for cervical or lumbar radiculopathy and to investigate the relationship between cigarette smoking and development of surgical disc disease. A cigarette smoking study of 205 surgical patients with lumbar and cervical disc diseases was done, with the surgical patients compared to 205 age-sex-matched inpatient controls during 1987-1988.

Evaluation of the use of induction in the development of a medical expert system.

In an earlier study, two medical expert systems for diagnosing thyroid disorders, developed by the application of induction on a sample of previously diagnosed cases and on expert-generated rules, diagnosed a set of test cases better than an expert system developed by the more traditional method of collaboration between a knowledge engineer and an expert. In this paper, an alternative measure of the accuracy of diagnosis of each system is used to evaluate the systems. Diagnoses for every distinct case represented by a combination of indicating factors are compared with diagnoses that the expert made.

Comparing two objects for size after a comparison of one of the objects with other objects.

When shown the names of two objects, subjects determine which object is larger more slowly as the difference in the sizes of the objects decreases. This might result from variations in the time taken to access sufficient information to perform the task; information which crudely specifies size is accessed first and can be used when the sizes differ greatly; information which specifies size on a more finely graded scale must be accessed when they do not. This hypothesis was tested.