Intracranial aneurysms in sickle cell disease: Aneurysms characteristics and modalities of endovascular approach to treat these patients.

Introduction: The neurological complications of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) include cerebral infarction and haemorrhage with rarely subarachnoid haemorrhage due to cerebral aneurysms.

Materials And Methods: In our interventional department, working with SCD referral department, we reported our experience concerning management of adult's patients with cerebral aneurysms. We identified 26 adults with 48 intracranial aneurysms documented by imaging.

User-defined functions in the Arden Syntax: An extension proposal.

Background: The Arden Syntax is a knowledge-encoding standard, started in 1989, and now in its 10th revision, maintained by the health level seven (HL7) organization. It has constructs borrowed from several language concepts that were available at that time (mainly the HELP hospital information system and the Regenstrief medical record system (RMRS), but also the Pascal language, functional languages and the data structure of frames, used in artificial intelligence). The syntax has a rationale for its constructs, and has restrictions that follow this rationale.

Mapping ASTI patient's therapeutic-data model to virtual Medical Record: can VMR represent therapeutic data elements used by ASTI in clinical guideline implementations?

Lack of interoperability between health information systems is a major obstacle in implementing Clinical decision supports systems (CDSS) and their widespread disseminations. Virtual Medical Record (vMR) proposed by HL7 is a common data model for representing clinical information Inputs and outputs that can be used by CDSS and local clinical systems. A CDSS called ASTI used a similar model to represent clinical data and therapeutic history of patient.

Comparing the use of SNOMED CT and ICD10 for coding clinical conditions to implement laboratory guidelines.

Laboratory medicine is responsible for an important part of hospital expenditure. Providing appropriate decision support to laboratory test requesters at the point of care is one of the main incentives for implementing laboratory guidelines, which can improve medical care. Laboratory guidelines developed by local experts in the Parisian region and two national guidelines for dyslipidemia were analyzed to extract test ordering recommendations.

Sexual quality of life in women partnered with men using intracavernous alprostadil injections after radical prostatectomy.

Introduction: The effects of intracavernous alprostadil injection (IAI), a primary treatment for post-radical prostatectomy (RP) erectile dysfunction (ED) (pRPED), on the sex life of women partnered with men who have undergone RP have received little attention.

Aims: The aim of this study is to investigate the sexual quality of life in female partners of men receiving IAIs for pRPED.

Methods: We retrospectively studied the sex lives of 152 women partnered with men who were being treated for pRPED with IAI and previously had normal erectile function.

A generic system for critiquing physicians' prescriptions: usability, satisfaction and lessons learnt.

Clinical decision support systems have been developed to help physicians to take clinical guidelines into account during consultations. The ASTI critiquing module is one such systems; it provides the physician with automatic criticisms when a drug prescription does not follow the guidelines. It was initially developed for hypertension and type 2 diabetes, but is designed to be generic enough for application to all chronic diseases.

How to translate therapeutic recommendations in clinical practice guidelines into rules for critiquing physician prescriptions? Methods and application to five guidelines.

Background: Clinical practice guidelines give recommendations about what to do in various medical situations, including therapeutical recommendations for drug prescription. An effective way to computerize these recommendations is to design critiquing decision support systems, i.e.

An automated method for analyzing adherence to therapeutic guidelines: application in diabetes.

Background: Physicians' adherence to guidelines can be used for measuring prescribing appropriateness. We present a simple approach allowing the automation of this process.

Design: The drug therapy is described in terms of treatment type, pharmacotherapeutic classes, international non proprietary names (INN) and doses.

Use of the C4.5 machine learning algorithm to test a clinical guideline-based decision support system.

Well-designed medical decision support system (DSS) have been shown to improve health care quality. However, before they can be used in real clinical situations, these systems must be extensively tested, to ensure that they conform to the clinical guidelines (CG) on which they are based. Existing methods cannot be used for the systematic testing of all possible test cases.

Design of a decision support system for chronic diseases coupling generic therapeutic algorithms with guideline-based specific rules.

Clinical Decision Support Systems (DSS) help improve health care quality. They usually incorporate an Execution Engine (EE), defined for each disease. We have designed, and present here, a generic execution engine, coupled with guideline-based disease specific rules stored in knowledge base (KB) as part of the prescription-critiquing mode of the ASTI project.

Representing the Patient's Therapeutic History in Medical Records and in Guideline Recommendations for Chronic Diseases Using a Unique Model.

Computer-interpretable guidelines (CIGs) are more likely to affect the clinician's behavior when they deliver patient-specific and just-in-time clinical advice. CIGs must take into account the data stored in the patient's electronic medical records (EMR). For chronic diseases, the outcome of past and ongoing treatments (therapeutic history) is used in the clinical guidelines.