Health data collecting and sharing: case studies of Czech e-health applications.

The paper shows the importance of e-health applications for electronic healthcare development. It describes several e-health applications for health data collecting and sharing that are running in the Czech Republic. These are IZIP system, electronic health record MUDR and K4CARE project applications.

Measuring diversity in medical reports based on categorized attributes and international classification systems.

Background: Narrative medical reports do not use standardized terminology and often bring insufficient information for statistical processing and medical decision making. Objectives of the paper are to propose a method for measuring diversity in medical reports written in any language, to compare diversities in narrative and structured medical reports and to map attributes and terms to selected classification systems.

Methods: A new method based on a general concept of f-diversity is proposed for measuring diversity of medical reports in any language.

Voice-controlled data entry in dental electronic health record.

The EuroMISE Center focuses on new approaches in the field of electronic health record (EHR). Among others, the structured health documentation in dentistry in the form of an EHR is being systematically studied. This paper describes the evolution of the EHR developed at the EuroMISE Center named MUDRLite and its graphical component for dentists called DentCross.

Medical knowledge representation system.

The aim of this article is to present a design of a Medical Knowledge Representation System (MEKRES). The system automatically offers relevant formalized knowledge by extended GLIF (Guidelines Interchange Format) models to participants (patient, physician, operator, ..

Formalization of clinical practice guidelines.

Clinical practice guidelines are textual recommendations based on the consensus of medical experts with the aim to solve diagnostic and therapeutic problems. For more advanced use in real medical applications it is necessary to find out mathematical models of physicians' decision-making processes. The acquisition of a formal model from text-based guidelines is a crucial point for development of decision support systems.

Gaining insight from flexible models--assessment of the secondary prevention trial of CHD in the Czech male population with MI history.

Objectives: We present results from a secondary prevention trial of coronary heart disease (CHD) in the Czech male population from northern Bohemia with the history of myocardial infarction (MI) and high prevalence of metabolic syndrome. We compare several approaches to analyzing survival data from our study in terms of respective model assumptions.

Methods: While both the Cox and Weibull survival regression models assume proportionality of the hazard functions over time, in many instances this assumption appears incompatible with the data at hand.

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy--molecular genetic analysis of exons 9 and 11 of the TNNT2 gene in Czech patients.

Objectives: Our research is a pilot study that specializes in the molecular genetic investigation of the TNNT2 gene in Czech patients with HCM/FHC disease. This study was initiated with exons 9 and 11 of TNNT2 because of their crucial role in the binding ability of cardiac troponin T to alpha-tropomyosin, and continued with analyses in other regions of the gene.

Methods: Hundred and eighty-one Czech probands with HCM/FHC were enrolled in this study.

Method of GLIF Model Construction and Implementation.

Knowledge acquired in medicine is possible to represent by medical guidelines. The most important and nowadays mostly used for formalisation of guidelines is the GLIF (Guideline Interchange Format) model. Final model can be coded in XML (eXtensible Markup Language).

Universal electronic health record MUDR.

One of the important research tasks of the European Centre for Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology - Cardio (EuroMISE Centre - Cardio) is the applied research in the field of electronic health record design including electronic medical guidelines and intelligent systems for data mining and decision support. The research in the field of data storage and data acquisition was inspired by several European projects and standards, mostly by the I4C and TripleC projects. Based on experience gathered during cooperation in the TripleC project we have proposed a description of a flexible information storage model.

User interface of MUDR electronic health record.

Development of the electronic health record architecture at the EuroMISE Center was inspired by existing European standards and several European projects. The developed EHR named MUDR implements a 3-layer architecture, using XML for communication between application layer and clients. A decision support module implementing the "1999 WHO/ISH Guidelines for the Management of Hypertension" is part of an application layer.

Psychological questionnaires application and processing for detection of psychosomatic states of an operator.

This paper describes the method of detection of psychosomatic states of an operator. Understanding of these states can be used in closing of external human feedback. Detection uses psychological self-diagnostic questionnaires and is supported by experimentally gained data.

Inverse relationship between serum bilirubin and atherosclerosis in men: a meta-analysis of published studies.

Bilirubin, a major intravascular product of heme catabolism, is a potent antioxidant compound. Numerous studies have been published showing the relationship between serum bilirubin levels and atherosclerosis. In the present investigation all the epidemiological studies available on the effect of serum bilirubin levels and atherosclerotic disease were analyzed.

Information theoretical approach to constitution and reduction of medical data.

In medical decision problems it is very important to use the most relevant piece of information for decision making. We focus on a special case of diagnostic decision making when we can measure many symptoms and signs and we have to make diagnostic conclusions. We can state the problem as follows.

Epidemiology tools program and selected medical applications.

In epidemiological research the calculation of appropriate measures of disease frequency is the basis for a comparison of populations and, therefore, the identification of disease determinants. Two frequencies being compared can be combined into a single summary parameter that estimates the association between an exposure and a disease. This can be accomplished by calculating either the ratio of the measures of disease frequency for two populations which indicates how much more likely one population is to develop a disease than another, or the difference between the frequencies which indicates how much greater the frequency of a disease is in one population compared with the other.

Comparison of survival between two groups using software SAS, S-PLUS and STATISTICA.

In survival analysis, comparison of survival times between two groups of patients is often the goal. For this purpose, Mantel-Haenszel (or log-rank) test is usually used. This paper introduces a concrete example to illustrate similarities as well as differences among the statistical programs SAS, S-PLUS and STATISTICA, when performing Mantel-Haenszel test.