Computerization of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) has been proposed as one solution to enhance the use of guidelines in influencing standard clinical care. However, the conversion of text guidelines to the format required by a computer program is a major barrier. Clinicians who best understand the content of CPGs are ...

The purpose of this work was to develop a computer program that assists optimization of controlled-release devices, both visually and mathematically, using response surface methodology (RSM). A Windows-based computer program, Optima, which interactively implemented a number of subroutines for the optimization procedure, was developed. Optima is an integrated, user-friendly, and ...

GELSTATS, a computer program for population genetics analyses utilizing genetic markers revealed with variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) multilocus probes, is described and made available (both as C++ source code and as an executable DOS program). The program calculates several population genetics parameters, including: (i) individual and population band numbers; ...

We described a computer program to manage a national external quality assurance (EQA) scheme in cytopathology which uses the international computer network, the Internet, to collect data directly from participants, thereby reducing errors of transcription and administrative costs. Feedback to screeners and pathologists is provided as high quality images of ...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this project was to increase use of the Physician Data Query and Patient Information File services of the National Cancer Institute in a clinical setting. OVERVIEW: A patient education demonstration project was conducted at the University of Rochester Cancer Center using a touch-screen computer program called ...

Sample size must be determined while planning a study to ensure that valid conclusions can be drawn when the study is over. different formulae for calculating the required size of the sample are used for different study designs and situations. A computer program is described here to ease the complexity ...

This study summarizes an extensive research project on closed-captioned television. Caption data were recorded from 205 television programs. Both roll-up and pop-on captions were analyzed. In the first part of the study, captions were edited to remove commercials and then processed by computer to get caption speed data. Caption rates ...

OBJECTIVE: To examine the utility of notebook computers in the collection of data in large scale surveys. METHODOLOGY: A notebook computer administered survey of health in adolescents was conducted in 1992 using a multi-instrument questionnaire. Students in school years 7, 9 and 11 in private and government schools in Melbourne ...

This article reports results from a study of the use of technology to support students with learning disabilities in the use of effective study strategies. Thirty secondary students were given laptop computers and taught a variety of computer-based study strategies designed to facilitate information recording, organization, and manipulation. Results suggest ...

We studied patients' acceptance of a computer-administered health assessment and educational program at an outpatient hypertension clinic. The program was designed to be user-friendly and minimized the need for keyboard skills. Thirty patients > or = 50 years of age participated. The computer assessment took an average of 39 minutes ...

Adults enter computer learning situations with diverse interests and backgrounds. They learn best when they can select from a variety of learning modalities with the goal of completing a desired task. Helping adults learn how to undo computer errors and identify support persons can be just as important as successful ...

BACKGROUND: Interactive Urology is a multimedia software program that has been written to provide computer-assisted interaction for medical students at the University of Sydney during their surgical term in urology. An evaluation sought to establish how the software will be used by medical students in the learning context and to ...

This article reviews the ways that computers can support writing by students with learning disabilities, with an emphasis applications that go beyond word processing. Following an overview of research on word processing is a discussion of software assists with the basic processes of transcription and sentence generation, including spelling checkers, ...

The personal computer has been available to medical education for many years, but the role of the computer has changed. We have required students to purchase a personal computer since 1984, and used this tool in several ways throughout the intervening years. Our experience has shown that students and faculty ...

Computer use and training may be of special benefit to people with spinal cord injuries (SCIs) because computer technology may help lessen the impact of mobility limitations that are inherent with this disability. This article summarizes several findings from a 1994 survey conducted of New Jersey residents who suffered SCIs ...

In a school for the blind, computer use and feelings toward computers by 34 visually impaired students receiving secondary education and by their 42 teachers were investigated with a questionnaire. Most subjects used computers effectively, but some students who had low vision did not wish to use them to avoid ...

An approach of computer-assisted learning in veterinary education at the University of Cambridge, involving the development of four types of learning module, is outlined. A tutorial on regional perineural anaesthesia in the horse, based on the familiar tape-slide format but with significant improvements, is described. A question and answer self-assessment ...

OBJECTIVE: Educational programs for the occupational therapist and the occupational therapy assistant are mandated to include content on technologies in their curricula. Given the increasing use of technology skills among occupational therapists, especially computer technology skills, it seemed judicious to ascertain the current and desired levels of skill of occupational ...

A computer-program "IR-Spectroscopy" for the interpretation of infrared spectra of organic compounds is described. It contains the following basic items for preprocessing and execution of the computer based interpretation process: handling of the rule-base CorTab, routines for automatic rule generation and interpretation modules on the basis of the programming languages ...

Computer programming knowledge can be classified into five levels of abstraction: objective, conceptual, functional, logical, and physical. An experiment was carried out to determine whether the mastering of knowledge at different levels of abstraction changed with the level of skill. Ten experts and ten novices in C computer programming participated ...

The past 10 years have seen prodigious efforts by many institutions to make use of the potential benefits of computer technology for teaching. One serious obstacle to the wider uptake of these benefits is a lack of knowledge of the specific technology-based learning strategies that can be adopted. This article ...

Computer-based assessment of potential toxicity has become increasingly popular in recent years. The knowledge-base system DEREK is developed under the guidance of a multinational Collaborative Group of expert toxicologists and provides a qualitative approach to toxicity prediction. Major developments of the DEREK program and knowledge-base have taken place in the ...

A computer program to evaluate the dose to water in a specified point for low, medium and high energy photon and electron radiotherapeutic beams using different ionization chambers, phantom materials and new dosimetric standard protocols has been developed. The absorbed dose to air cavity calibration factors of the ionization chambers ...

Computational tools are rapidly becoming an essential component of molecular biology research. However, there is as yet relatively little attention paid to computational biology in the standard curricula of most biology programs. We describe here some of the graduate computational biology courses we have developed in the Center for Bioengineering ...

The Minnesota code (MC) is a classification system for electrocardiograms (ECGs) that is used for ECG coding in epidemiologic studies. As the MC measurement procedures and rules are complex, visual coding is time-consuming and error-prone. Automation should reduce measurement and coding errors. The authors developed an MC program, closely adhering ...

Electrocardiographic (ECG) processing systems are operational in hospitals, outpatient clinics, primary care, and occupational medicine, and are used for population screening and epidemiologic studies. It appears that computer ECG analysis has been accepted, in spite of not yet performing quite as well as expert readers. The question is whether computerized ...

The purpose of this study was to determine how well novice nurses learned basic fetal monitoring concepts from a computer-assisted instructional program and a scripted lecture with equivalent content. A pretest-posttest experimental design was conducted. Forty-eight junior baccalaureate nursing students beginning their first maternity rotation were recruited for the study ...

Biologically motivated computing presents us with a measurement process in science. It triggers an epistemological shift from state-oriented physics to measurement-oriented physics, in which we can find a parallelism with Wittgenstein's shift from rule following to a language game. We argue here that an approximation or computing process can be ...

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, describe the benefits of "informationware" and how one of the most tradition-bound organizations, the armed forces, has substantially changed its operations. According to the authors, mere knowledge is not sufficient to prevail; how one manages or uses knowledge separates winners from losers. Further, the authors say ...

This computer program was designed to be used instead of a stimulator and an oscilloscope in whole-cell voltage-clamp experiments. It runs on IBM XT-AT compatible computers under MS-DOS. The program uses drivers for specific ADC-DAC boards, which are stored in separate files. The driver to be used is loaded on ...

A successful computer validation program requires a solid foundation of policies, guidelines, and procedures. An unstructured approach to validation may yield adequate results for a specific computerized system, but it will not sustain ongoing, consistent computer validation activities over time. The evolution of a strong computer validation program starts with ...

Data from 1199 students users formed the normative database for the Computer Hassles Scale, a 37-item measuring computer users' stress. The Computer Hassles Scale was scored to yield a severity of hassles score for the total scale and two subscales, Computer Runtime Errors and Computer Information Problems. The total scale ...

A computerized system, structured by 4 different models concerning urea depuration, and bicarbonate and sodium handling in acetate-free hemodiafiltration has been conceived for integrated use covering each step of the therapeutic cycle, from a) the prescription of the session to b) its delivery, up to c) the dose-response analysis: the ...

LabVIEW is a graphic object-oriented computer language developed to facilitate hardware/software communication. LabVIEW is a complete computer language that can be used like Basic, FORTRAN, or C. In LabVIEW one creates virtual instruments that aesthetically look like real instruments but are controlled by sophisticated computer programs. There are several levels ...

While much effort has gone into developing efficient algorithms for calculating multipoint likelihoods, these calculations still form a significant bottleneck in the construction of genetic linkage maps. Our approach to this problem is based on incremental processing techniques, which attempt to reduce the time required to perform iterative computations by ...

The notion of a mathematically defined optimally resolving gel concentration for components of a pair of molecular species of any given size was developed by Rodbard et al. (Electrophoresis and Isoelectric Focusing on Polyacrylamide Gel, pp. 28-62, de Gruyter, Berlin, 1974) 21 years ago. The mathematical treatment was incorporated into ...

The use of computers in the US workforce is expected to grow throughout the 1990s. Prolonged computer use, repetitive keying, awkward postures and psychosocial issues have been associated with injuries described as cumulative trauma disorders (CTDs). The incidence and reporting of occupationally induced CTDs has increased dramatically since 1980. Proper ...

The use of computers in healthcare settings has become increasingly common. However, issues of training and training assessment have received scant attention. The main aim of the current study was to assess the use of consumer satisfaction data for evaluation and development of computer training packages in healthcare settings. One ...

In designing a workstation, computer-aided human modelling programs can be used advantageously to analyse human-fit to the workstation components. The analysis is performed within a three-dimensional computer graphics environment. To illustrate the current state of development, six representative programs were selected: CYBERMAN, COMBIMAN, CREW CHIEF, JACK, SAMMIE, and MANNEQUIN. The ...

The call for medical students to become literate in the uses of information technology has become a familiar refrain. Over ten years ago, the Association of American Medical College's GPEP Report recommended that medical schools incorporate into their curricula training in the use of such technology; however, in the intervening ...

OBJECTIVE: To identify the computer knowledge, skills and attitudes of first-year family medicine residents. DESIGN: Cross-sectional survey of family medicine residents during the academic year 1993-94; sampling began in July 1993 and ended in October 1993. SETTING: Canada. PARTICIPANTS: All 727 first-year family medicine residents, of whom 433 (60%) responded. ...

The personal computer (PC) has evolved into a powerful, cost-effective computing platform capable of performing many tasks associated with the management of scientific, clinical, or other information. These activities include: Control of an instrument by the PC; Data acquisition from an experiment or subject; Analysis of the data that the ...

The alternation of stationary periods and periods of movement may be an important feature of an animal's search tactic. Unambiguously differentiating stops and moves may be difficult, especially from highly resolved digitized pathways, but their identification may be essential for understanding an animal's searching behavior. In this paper, we describe ...

It is shown that the use of a combination of two programs, MULTICASE and META can help assess the carcinogenic risk factor posed by the disposal of industrial organic materials in the ecosystem. MULTICASE is a knowledge-based computer system that had been trained to identify molecular substructures believed to be ...

Computer-based patient records can help a healthcare organization's business office achieve higher-quality service at lower cost by providing improved access to necessary financial as well as clinical information. The systemwide utility of a computer-based patient record that serves both clinical and financial needs helps justify its cost.

This article describes factors that contribute to the effectiveness of computer-assisted instruction as a teaching strategy. According to the literature reviewed, three major variables that can influence computer-assisted instruction are the quality of the software programs, the environment of use of the computer, and the characteristics of the learner. The ...

Myoelectric activity of the small intestine was recorded digitally in fasted, freely moving rats fitted with multiple pairs of electrodes in the antimesenterial smooth muscle. The electrodes were implanted under strict aseptic conditions to safeguard the animal's health and thereby benefit experimental results. As in many other mammalian species, the ...

This paper looks at the relationship between man and mosquitoes from the perspective of coevolution. From this perspective, the primacy of information processing in vector control programs becomes acutely evident. A composite mosquito control program is developed and illustrated to show the benefits derived from incremental increases in information. The ...

Using a "Who, What, Where, When, and How" approach, the author addresses multiple issues that must be considered during computer education planning and development. The nursing department usually has the largest number of people requiring computer education and their training must be coordinated with other departments, so a well-thought-out training ...

This article describes the steps involved in production of a computer teaching module on the radiographic diagnosis of arthritis. The module was part of a research project aimed at producing seven computer teaching modules. Several staff radiologists and residents were involved, as well as a consultant on medical education. A ...