Using a Java Dynamic Tree to manage the terminology in a suite of medical applications.

Objectives: Now that the National Library of Medicine has made SNOMED-CT widely available, we are trying to manage the terminology of a whole suite of medical applications and map our terminology into that in SNOMED.

Methods: This paper describes the design and implementation of the Java Dynamic Tree that provides structure to our medical terminology and explains how it functions as the core of our system.

Results: The tree was designed to reflect the stages in a patient interview, so it contains components for identifying the patient and the provider, a large set of chief complaints, review of systems, physical examination, several history modules, medications, laboratory tests, imaging, and special procedures.

An intelligent tutoring system that generates a natural language dialogue using dynamic multi-level planning.

Objective: The objective of this research was to build an intelligent tutoring system capable of carrying on a natural language dialogue with a student who is solving a problem in physiology. Previous experiments have shown that students need practice in qualitative causal reasoning to internalize new knowledge and to apply it effectively and that they learn by putting their ideas into words.

Methods: Analysis of a corpus of 75 hour-long tutoring sessions carried on in keyboard-to-keyboard style by two professors of physiology at Rush Medical College tutoring first-year medical students provided the rules used in tutoring strategies and tactics, parsing, and text generation.

Miscibility of small colloidal spheres with large polymers in good solvent.

Nearly athermal colloid-polymer mixtures were studied in the "protein limit." A fluid-fluid transition was observed in mixtures of stearyl-alcohol-coated silica particles and large polystyrene coils in toluene. The ratios of the polymer radius of gyration to the particle radii were q=4.

An empirical study of the Health Status Questionnaire System for use in patient-computer interaction.

Patient involvement in the health care process is very important to any attempt to improve health care quality and patient satisfaction. Although many computerized medical record systems have been introduced, physicians are the only players in the process of data collection and interpretation. A computerized version of the Health Status Questionnaire has been developed to provide a simple, inexpensive method of direct patient entry into the medical record.