Evaluating the effects of cognitive support on psychiatric clinical comprehension.

Objective: Clinicians' attention is a precious resource, which in the current healthcare practice is consumed by the cognitive demands arising from complex patient conditions, information overload, time pressure, and the need to aggregate and synthesize information from disparate sources. The ability to organize information in ways that facilitate the generation of effective diagnostic solutions is a distinguishing characteristic of expert physicians, suggesting that automated systems that organize clinical information in a similar manner may augment physicians' decision-making capabilities. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of a theoretically driven cognitive support system (CSS) that assists psychiatrists in their interpretation of clinical cases.

Hippocampal volumes in patients with chronic combat-related posttraumatic stress disorder: a systematic review.

The authors and others have recently demonstrated that veterans with chronic combat-related PTSD (CR-PTSD) have a twofold increased risk of dementia. To understand this increased incidence, they performed a systematic review of the literature on neuroanatomical differences between veterans with chronic CR-PTSD and control subjects (22 included studies). The hippocampus was most commonly and consistently reported to differ between groups, thereby suggesting the hypothesis that PTSD is associated with smaller hippocampi, which increases the risk for dementia.

Comparative analysis of the 100 kb region containing the Pi-k(h) locus between indica and japonica rice lines.

We have recently cloned a pathogen inducible blast resistance gene Pi-k(h) from the indica rice line Tetep using a positional cloning approach. In this study, we carried out structural organization analysis of the Pi-k(h) locus in both indica and japonica rice lines. A 100 kb region containing 50 kb upstream and 50 kb downstream sequences flanking to the Pi-k(h) locus was selected for the investigation.