Semiqualitative visual and quantitative morphometric evaluations of reduced scan time and wide-beam reconstruction in rest-gated stress SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging.

Unlabelled: SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) now accounts for well over 90% of all MPI studies performed in the United States. A means of reducing the acquisition time while maintaining diagnostic-quality images would be beneficial for both patients and nuclear cardiology clinics. Wide-beam reconstruction (WBR) is a processing algorithm that attempts to address the challenge of obtaining diagnostic-quality images with shorter counting times.

McMaster PLUS: a cluster randomized clinical trial of an intervention to accelerate clinical use of evidence-based information from digital libraries.

Background: Physicians have difficulty keeping up with new evidence from medical research.

Methods: We developed the McMaster Premium LiteratUre Service (PLUS), an internet-based addition to an existing digital library, which delivered quality- and relevance-rated medical literature to physicians, matched to their clinical disciplines. We evaluated PLUS in a cluster-randomized trial of 203 participating physicians in Northern Ontario, comparing a Full-Serve version (that included alerts to new articles and a cumulative database of alerts) with a Self-Serve version (that included a passive guide to evidence-based literature).

Second-order peer review of the medical literature for clinical practitioners.

Context: Most articles in clinical journals are not appropriate for direct application by individual clinicians.

Objective: To create a second order of clinical peer review for journal articles to determine which articles are most relevant for specific clinical disciplines.

Design And Setting: A 2-stage prospective observational study in which research staff reviewed all issues of over 110 (number has varied slightly as new journals were added or discarded from review but number has always been over 110) clinical journals and selected each article that met critical appraisal criteria from January 2003 through the present.

Developing optimal search strategies for retrieving clinically relevant qualitative studies in EMBASE.

Qualitative researchers address many issues relevant to patient health care. Their studies appear in an array of journals, making literature searching difficult. Large databases such as EMBASE provide a means of retrieving qualitative research, but these studies represent only a minuscule fraction of published articles, making electronic retrieval problematic.