PSI: The Dutch Academic Infrastructure for shared biobanks for translational research.

Translational research requires large patient populations. A single research institute is not able to build up such a population in a short period of time. The String of Pearls Initiative (in Dutch "Parelsnoer Initiatief", PSI) is a joint effort by the eight academic medical centers in the Netherlands to built an infrastructure for joint biobanking as to meet this challenge of establishing large collections of data and samples in relevant medical domains.

"The declaration of Innsbruck": some reflections.

In 2003 a workshop was held in Innsbruck, Austria, on the topic of evaluation of ICT applications in Health Care. A result of that workshop was the "Declaration of Innsbruck". In the current paper we will further elaborate on this declaration and discuss some of the activities that are currently undertaken as supportive measures to enable the realization of the vision expressed in the declaration.

The efficacy of an automated feedback system for general practitioners.

Objective: An automated feedback system that produces comments about the non-adherence of general practitioners (GPs) to accepted practice guidelines for ordering diagnostic tests was developed. Before implementing the automated feedback system in daily practice, we assessed the potential effect of the system on the test ordering behaviour of GPs.

Design: We used a randomised controlled trial with balanced block design.

Assessing the importance of features for multi-layer perceptrons.

In this paper we establish a mathematical framework in which we develop measures for determining the contribution of individual features to the performance of a classifier. Corresponding to these measures, we design metrics that allow estimation of the importance of features for a specific multi-layer perceptron neural network. It is shown that all measures constitute lower bounds for the correctness that can be obtained when the feature under study is excluded and the classifier rebuilt.