Career Paths of Pathology Informatics Fellowship Alumni.

Background: The alumni of today's Pathology Informatics and Clinical Informatics fellowships fill diverse roles in academia, large health systems, and industry. The evolving training tracks and curriculum of Pathology Informatics fellowships have been well documented. However, less attention has been given to the posttraining experiences of graduates from informatics training programs.

The growing need for microservices in bioinformatics.

Objective: Within the information technology (IT) industry, best practices and standards are constantly evolving and being refined. In contrast, computer technology utilized within the healthcare industry often evolves at a glacial pace, with reduced opportunities for justified innovation. Although the use of timely technology refreshes within an enterprise's overall technology stack can be costly, thoughtful adoption of select technologies with a demonstrated return on investment can be very effective in increasing productivity and at the same time, reducing the burden of maintenance often associated with older and legacy systems.

Suggestions for a web based universal exchange and inference language for medicine. Continuity of patient care with PCAST disaggregation.

We describe here the applications of our recently proposed Q-UEL language to continuity of patient care between physicians, specialists and institutions as mediated via the Internet, giving examples derived from HL7 CDA and VistA of particular interest to workflow. Particular attention is given to the Universal Exchange Language for healthcare as requested by the US President׳s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released in December 2010, especially in regard to disaggregation of the patient record on the Internet. To illustrate many features and options, one of our most elaborate configurations combining them, for disaggregation and reaggregation, is described.

Pilot clinical trial of hedgehog pathway inhibitor GDC-0449 (vismodegib) in combination with gemcitabine in patients with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

Purpose: The hedgehog (HH) signaling pathway is a key regulator in tumorigenesis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma and is upregulated in pancreatic adenocarcinoma cancer stem cells (CSCs). GDC-0449 is an oral small-molecule inhibitor of the HH pathway. This study assessed the effect of GDC-0449-mediated HH inhibition in paired biopsies, followed by combined treatment with gemcitabine, in patients with metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma.

Suggestions for a Web based universal exchange and inference language for medicine.

Mining biomedical and pharmaceutical data generates huge numbers of interacting probabilistic statements for inference, which can be supported by mining Web text sources. This latter can also be probabilistic, in a sense described in this report. However, the diversity of tools for probabilistic inference is troublesome, suggesting a need for a unifying best practice.

Image microarrays derived from tissue microarrays (IMA-TMA): New resource for computer-aided diagnostic algorithm development.

Background: Conventional tissue microarrays (TMAs) consist of cores of tissue inserted into a recipient paraffin block such that a tissue section on a single glass slide can contain numerous patient samples in a spatially structured pattern. Scanning TMAs into digital slides for subsequent analysis by computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) algorithms all offers the possibility of evaluating candidate algorithms against a near-complete repertoire of variable disease morphologies. This parallel interrogation approach simplifies the evaluation, validation, and comparison of such candidate algorithms.

Application of a rules-based natural language parser to critical value reporting in anatomic pathology.

Critical values in anatomic pathology are rare occurrences and difficult to define with precision. Nevertheless, accrediting institutions require effective and timely communication of all critical values generated by clinical and anatomic laboratories. Provisional gating criteria for potentially critical anatomic diagnoses have been proposed, with some success in their implementation reported in the literature.

Analysis of factorial time-course microarrays with application to a clinical study of burn injury.

Time-course microarray experiments are capable of capturing dynamic gene expression profiles. It is important to study how these dynamic profiles depend on the multiple factors that characterize the experimental condition under which the time course is observed. Analytic methods are needed to simultaneously handle the time course and factorial structure in the data.