Medical Digital Library Research Articles

Awareness, use and Satisfaction of Dental Assistants of Iranian Medical Digital Library

: Digital libraries provide suitable substrates for use in the field of electronic information resources. Obtain and introduce of electronic resources to targets may be challenging for operators. Thus, the objective of this study is to determine awareness, use and Satisfaction of dental assistants of Iranian Medical Digital Library.

Task-oriented search for evidence-based medicine

Research on how clinicians search shows that they pose queries according to three common clinical tasks: searching for diagnoses, searching for treatments and searching for tests. We hypothesise, therefore, that structuring an information retrieval system around these three tasks would be beneficial when searching for evidence-based medicine (EBM) resources in medical digital libraries. Task-oriented (diagnosis, test and treatment) information was extracted from free-text medical articles using a natural language processing pipeline. This information was integrated into a retrieval and visualisation system for EBM search that allowed searchers to interact with the system via task-oriented filters. The effectiveness of the system was empirically evaluated using TREC CDS—a gold standard of medical articles and queries designed for EBM search. Task-oriented information was successfully extracted from 733,138 articles taken from a medical digital library. Task-oriented search led to improvements in the quality of search results and savings in searcher workload. An analysis of how different tasks affected retrieval showed that searching for treatments was the most challenging and that the task-oriented approach improved search for treatments. The most savings in terms of workload were observed when searching for treatments and tests. Overall, taking into account different clinical tasks can improve search according to these tasks. Each task displayed different results, making systems that are more adaptive to the clinical task type desirable. A future user study would help quantify the actual cost-saving estimates.

The Comparison of the Minimum Data Set for Elderly Health in Selected Countries.

Introduction:Ongoing increase in the elderly population in many developed countries has drawn attention to health of this age group. Recording adequate and relevant data for the elderly is considered as the basis for future planning for this segment of society. So this study was conducted to compare minimum data about elderly health in selected countries.Methods:This review study was conducted through Internet and library studies. Key words were extracted from search engines and data bases including Google, Yahoo, Google Scholar, PubMed, ProQuest and Iranian National Medical Digital Library. Inclusion criteria included English language with no time limits. All articles, research projects, theses, guidelines and progress reports were retrieved from the United States, Sweden, Japan and Iran and reviewed. Also, websites of organizations responsible for elderly health in selected countries were visited and their documents were reviewed. Results from this search were provided narratively and finally were presented within comparison tables.Findings:The findings of this study showed that elderly data in the selected countries are collected around four axis including minimum demographic data, medical histories, health assessment and financial data of elderly health.Discussion and Conclusion:Given the importance of the minimum data set of elderly health for future planning, the use of experiences of leading countries in elderly health seems necessary; however, localization of it according to the country’s needs is inevitable.

간호학과 학생들의 전자형태 문서이용 및 문서읽기행태에 대한 분석

본 연구는 간호학과 학생들의 전자형태 문서의 이용 및 문서읽기 행태를 분석하기 위해 이들의 행태에서 나타나는 요소들에 대해 종합적으로 분석해 보고자 하였다. 이를 위해 본 연구는 간호학과 학생을 중심으로 지난 한 학기동안 학생들이 경험한 읽기행태를 조사하여 문서형태선호도와 요소 등을 다각적으로 분석하였다. 총 509명의 응답에 기초하여 분석한 결과, 간호학과 학생들은 일반적으로 전자형태문서에 대한 선호도가 높은 것으로 나타났으며, 소장하고 싶은 문서형태 또한 전자형태문서라고 응답하였다. 응답자 중, 약 94% 이상이 필요한 정보를 찾기 위해 30분 이상을 소요하고 있다고 나타났으며, 접근경로는 ‘네이버’ 검색엔진을 가장 많이 사용하는 것으로 응답하였다. 또한 주로 찾는 정보의 주제는 수업관련 정보가 가장 많았으며, 정보의 접근 장소로는 집에서 주로 정보를 찾고 이용하는 것으로 나타났다. 특히, 응답자들의 이동 중에 나타나는 문서선호도는 전자형태에 대한 선호도가 높게 나타났으며, 이동의 간편성과 접근의 용이성이 가장 높은 이유로 드러났다. 본 연구의 결과는 간호학과 학생들의 문서읽기행태를 분석하여 인쇄형태와 전자형태 문서의 읽기행태에 대한 이해를 증진시키고 향후 간호학 분야에서의 의학도서관 디지털정보이용의 서비스 설계 및 도구를 개발 또는 보완하기 위한 자료와, 더 나아가, 디지털 도서관 이용자 서비스 개선 방안을 모색하는 데 자료를 제시하고자 한다.

Query-driven approach of contextual ontology module learning using web snippets

The main objective of this work is to automatically build ontology modules that cover search terms of users in ontology-based question answering on the Web. Indeed, some arising approaches of ontology module extraction aim at solving the problem of identifying ontology fragment candidates that are relevant for the application. The main problem is that these approaches consider only the input of predefined ontologies, instead of the underlying semantics represented in texts. This work proposes an approach of contextual ontology module learning covering particular search terms by analyzing past user queries and by searching for web snippets provided by the traditional search engines. The obtained contextual modules will be used for query reformulation. The proposal has been evaluated on the ground of two criteria: the semantic cotopy measure of discovered ontology modules and the precision measure of the search results obtained by using the resulted ontology modules for query reformulation. The experiments have been carried out according to two case studies: an open domain web search and the medical digital library "PubMed".

A system for information retrieval in a medical digital library based on modular ontologies and query reformulation

Ontologies have proven to be useful in the area of Information Retrieval and the biomedical informatics community has acknowledged, in recent years, their utility. However, building and updating manually ontologies is a long and tedious task. This paper proposes a system that allows any search engine to develop its semantic layer by applying ontology learning techniques on Web snippets and applies it to a well-known medical digital library, PubMed. The new system (SemPubMed) automatically builds new ontology fragments related to the user's query and then it reformulates queries using the new concepts in order to improve information retrieval. Our system has endured a twofold evaluations. On the one hand, we have evaluated the quality of the modular ontologies built by the system. On the other hand, we have studied how the semantic reformulation of the queries has led to an improvement of the quality of the results given by PubMed, both in terms of precision and recall. Obtained results show that adding semantic layer to PubMed enables an improvement of query reformulation and predicted ranking score.

Citation analysis of graduate Dental thesis references: Before and after an intervention

Background: Introduction of Iranian National Medical Digital Library (INLM) was a huge investment during several years ago. The aim of this study was to discover the effectiveness of this scientific intervention by examination of citation pattern among graduate dental thesis during before and after of INLM accessibility. Methods: This analytical study was conducted among all of graduate dental thesis at Babol University of Medical Sciences (during 2007-2010) using citation analysis. The data were collected by means of a tailor-made data collection sheet and analyzed using descriptive statistical indexes and ANOVA test. Results: The outcome extracted of 111 theses and 5334 citations showed that journals were the most frequent format (80%) and there were not any statistical significant difference between numbers of cited references over the four years. Furthermore, there was not any positive effect on age of cited references. Conclusions: Overall, according to limited effect on number, age and types of cited references during before and after of INLM access, it can be concluded that INLM had negligible effect on citation pattern and more research in this regard is necessary.

Comparison of Four Search Engines and their efficacy With Emphasis on Literature Research in Addiction (Prevention and Treatment).

BackgroundSurveying valuable and most recent information from internet, has become vital for researchers and scholars, because every day, thousands and perhaps millions of scientific works are brought out as digital resources which represented by internet and researchers can’t ignore this great resource to find related documents for their literature search, which may not be found in any library. With regard to variety of documents presented on the internet, search engines are one of the most effective search tools for finding information.ObjectivesThe aim of this study is to evaluate the three criteria, recall, preciseness and importance of the four search engines which are PubMed, Science Direct, Google Scholar and federated search of Iranian National Medical Digital Library in addiction (prevention and treatment) to select the most effective search engine for offering the best literature research.Materials and MethodsThis research was a cross-sectional study by which four popular search engines in medical sciences were evaluated. To select keywords, medical subject heading (Mesh) was used. We entered given keywords in the search engines and after searching, 10 first entries were evaluated. Direct observation was used as a mean for data collection and they were analyzed by descriptive statistics (number, percent number and mean) and inferential statistics, One way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and post hoc Tukey in Spss. 15 statistical software. P Value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.ResultsResults have shown that the search engines had different operations with regard to the evaluated criteria. Since P Value was 0.004 < 0.05 for preciseness and was 0.002 < 0.05 for importance, it shows significant difference among search engines. PubMed, Science Direct and Google Scholar were the best in recall, preciseness and importance respectively.ConclusionsAs literature research is one of the most important stages of research, it's better for researchers, especially Substance-Related Disorders scholars to use different search engines with the best recall, preciseness and importance in that subject field to reach desirable results while searching and they don’t depend on just one search engine.

What impact do healthcare digital libraries have? An evaluation of national resource of infection control at the point of care using the Impact-ED framework

Over the last decade billions of dollars’ worth of investments have been directed into ICT solutions for healthcare. In particular, new evidence-based digital libraries and web portals designed to keep busy clinicians up to date with the latest evidence were created in the UK and US. While usability and performance of digital libraries were widely researched, evaluation of impact did not seem to be sufficiently addressed. This is of major concern for healthcare digital libraries as their success or failure has a direct impact on patients’ health, clinical practice, government policies and funding initiatives. In order to fill this gap, we developed the Impact-ED evaluation framework measuring impact on four dimensions of digital libraries—content, community, services and technology. Applying a triangulation technique we analysed pre- and post-visit questionnaires to assess the clinical query or aim of the visit and subsequent satisfaction with each visit, mapped it against weblogs analysis for each session and triangulated with data from semi-structured interviews. In this paper, we present the complete description of the Impact-ED framework, a definition of the comparative Impact score and application of the framework to a real-world medical digital library, the National Resource of Infection Control (NRIC, http://www.nric.org.uk), to evaluate its impact at the point of care and demonstrate the generalisability of this novel methodology. We analysed the data from a cohort of 53 users who completed the registration questionnaire, of which 32 completed pre- and post-visit questionnaires of which 72 sets were matched for analysis and five users out of these were interviewed using Dervin’s method. NRIC is generally perceived to be a useful resource with 93 % of users reporting it provides relevant information regularly or occasionally (\(n=28\)) and provided relevant information in over 65 % of visits (\(n=47\)). NRIC has a positive impact on user knowledge in over half of visits to the library (52.8 %), NRIC actual impact score \(I_{\text{ a}} = 0.65\) and the study revealed several areas for potential development to increase its impact.

Sem-PubMed: a Semantic Medical Digital Library that Integrates Ontology Learning and Query Reformulation.

Sem-PubMed: a Semantic Medical Digital Library that Integrates Ontology Learning and Query Reformulation.

Term Familiarity to indicate Perceived and Actual Difficulty of Text in Medical Digital Libraries.

With increasing text digitization, digital libraries can personalize materials for individuals with different education levels and language skills. To this end, documents need meta-information describing their difficulty level. Previous attempts at such labeling used readability formulas but the formulas have not been validated with modern texts and their outcome is seldom associated with actual difficulty. We focus on medical texts and are developing new, evidence-based meta-tags that are associated with perceived and actual text difficulty. This work describes a first tag, term familiarity , which is based on term frequency in the Google corpus. We evaluated its feasibility to serve as a tag by looking at a document corpus (N=1,073) and found that terms in blogs or journal articles displayed unexpected but significantly different scores. Term familiarity was then applied to texts and results from a previous user study (N=86) and could better explain differences for perceived and actual difficulty.

Compression evaluation of surgery video recordings retaining diagnostic credibility (compression evaluation of surgery video)

AbstractWider dissemination of medical digital video libraries is affected by two correlated factors, resource effective content compression that directly influences its diagnostic credibility. It has been proved that it is possible to meet these contradictory requirements halfway for long-lasting and low motion surgery recordings at compression ratios close to 100 (bronchoscopic procedures were a case study investigated). As the main supporting assumption, it has been accepted that the content can be compressed as far as clinicians are not able to sense a loss of video diagnostic fidelity (a visually lossless compression).Different market codecs were inspected by means of the combined subjective and objective tests toward their usability in medical video libraries. Subjective tests involved a panel of clinicians who had to classify compressed bronchoscopic video content according to its quality under the bubble sort algorithm. For objective tests, two metrics (hybrid vector measure and hosaka Plots) were calculated frame by frame and averaged over a whole sequence.

The medical digital library landscape

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify two medical digital libraries from each of the following three countries: Canada, the USA and the UK. It aims to discuss strengths and weaknesses in system design in an effort to provide a basis on which to improve both the organisation of, and the access to, electronic, scholarly information.Design/methodology/approachInclusion criteria for identifying the medical digital libraries were, those who: had primarily text‐based collections, intended for use by researchers or healthcare professionals; were freely accessible, and fulfilled the author's definition of a digital library as opposed to an online database. (Medical digital libraries with either a historical focus or that had primarily image/video collections were excluded.) To identify suitable medical digital libraries, the following resources were used: scholarly databases, online search engines, government and national library web sites, lists of online medical resources, and university web sites. Selection preference was given to those libraries with the most recent launch dates and service features. Each library was systematically evaluated, qualitatively and quantitatively, from the user's perspective in six distinct areas: administrative overview and site architecture, knowledge organisation, results management, interaction with the collection, additional information services, usability, and personalisation.FindingsThe study finds that each digital library had a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Each offered different services to help users identify relevant material and to quickly understand and assess their contents. However, this required that each library have a team of experts to obtain, assess, catalogue, and annotate the information. Where available, user comments were supportive of each effort and very positive.Research limitations/implicationsMedical digital libraries are an excellent conduit between authors and practitioners. However, they require intensive resources for establishment and maintenance. For these libraries to realise their full potential, emphasis must be placed on the currency and quality of their collections, maintaining pace with the technology employed by their users, providing services that facilitate the access and digestion of complex, scholarly information, and ensuring that online users are aware of the existence of these libraries.Practical implicationsThis paper contributes to the overall improvement of existing and future medical digital libraries.Originality/valueThis is the first ever evaluation and comparison of freely available medical digital libraries from three countries.

Development of a medical digital library managing multiple collections

PurposeAims to present the authors' efforts towards the development of a digital library environment supporting research at the Medical School of Athens University, Greece.Design/methodology/approachThe digital library facilitates access to medical material produced by laboratories for both research and educational purposes. As the material produced varies (regarding its type and structure) and the search requirements imposed by potential users differ, each laboratory develops its own collection. All collections must be bilingual, supporting both Greek and English. Extended requirements were imposed regarding the services offered by the digital library environment, due to the following reasons: end‐users actively participate in the cataloguing workflow; cataloguers should be able to create and manage multiple collections in a simplified manner; and different search requirements must be supported for different user groups. To formulate and then deal with these requirements, the authors introduced the term “dynamic collection management” denoting automated collection definition and unified collection management within an integrated digital library environment. Digital library components providing the desired functionality and the interaction between them are described. System performance, especially during collection search, and bilingual support are also explored.FindingsFinds that Athens Medical School Digital Library facilitates access to medical material to researchers and students for both research and educational purposes.Originality/valueThe paper provides useful information on a digital library environment which supports research.

Creation of an Online Collection of Emergency Medicine Literature

Residents and medical students are challenged to incorporate the latest medical literature into their clinical practice. However, retrieving influential articles in a timely manner can be difficult. To address this, the authors created a collection of influential primary research literature relevant to the practice of emergency medicine. The authors surveyed local experts as to the most influential articles in their area of expertise and then linked articles in the literature collection to full-text versions available through the medical school's digital library. A total of 154 articles were included in the literature collection. These were organized into 23 subject headings and 23 subheadings. Fifty-two residents were surveyed one month after the collection became available; 18 residents (35%) had used the literature collection at that time. An online collection has several advantages: it makes the most relevant literature immediately available during clinical care and allows residents to elaborate on their own knowledge when clinical problems arise. It also can be easily updated and password protected. Similar collections may be developed for use in other educational settings.

Implementing digital resources for clinicians' and patients' varying needs

This paper presents an overview of several evidence-based medicine and patient information studies conducted across the UK health service over a 4 year period, investigating clinicians', managers', and patients' perceptions of digital resources (primarily digital libraries) in hospitals, Primary Care Trusts, NHS Direct (patient call centre) and patient groups. In-depth interviews and focus groups are analysed using grounded theory methodologies and through content analysis used to produce quantitative finding. The perceived impacts of three different methods employed for delivering health informatics are presented. The findings highlight some generic issues relevant for health informatics in the UK health sector as well as some specific issues for medical digital libraries. This paper reviews in more detail the issues of medical technology implementation (traditional implementation, on the wards, and intermediaries within in communities). A breakdown of the clinicians' and patients' information journey (information initiation, facilitation and interpretation) is also presented with regard to medical digital libraries and online resources. Broad guidelines derived from these findings are provided for health-informatics deployment.

Customization in a unified framework for summarizing medical literature

We present the summarization system in the PErsonalized Retrieval and Summarization of Images, Video and Language (PERSIVAL) medical digital library. Although we discuss the context of our summarization research within the PERSIVAL platform, the primary focus of this article is on strategies to define and generate customized summaries. Our summarizer employs a unified user model to create a tailored summary of relevant documents for either a physician or lay person. The approach takes advantage of regularities in medical literature text structure and content to fulfill identified user needs. The resulting summaries combine both machine-generated text and extracted text that comes from multiple input documents. Customization includes both group-based modeling for two classes of users, physician and lay person, and individually driven models based on a patient record. Our research shows that customization is feasible in a medical digital library.

Acceptability of medical digital libraries

Evidenced-based medicine has increased the importance of quick accessibility to reputable, upto-date information. Web-accessible digital libraries (DLs) on the wards can address the demand for such information. The use and acceptability of these resources has, however, been lower than expected due to a poor understanding of the context of use. To appreciate the social and organizational impacts of ward-accessible DLs for clinicians, results of a study within a large London-based hospital are presented. In-depth interviews and focus groups with 73 clinicians (from pre-registration nurses to surgeons) were conducted, and the data analysed using the grounded theory method. It was found that clinical social structures interact with inadequate training provision (for senior clinicians), technical support and DL usability to produce a knowledge gap between junior and senior staff, resulting in information – and technology – hoarding behaviours. Findings also detail the perceived effectiveness of traditional and digital libraries and the impact of clinician status on information control and access. One important conclusion is that increased DL usability and adequate support and training for senior clinicians would increase perceptions of DLs as support for, rather than replacement of, their clinical expertise.

Secure medical digital libraries

In this paper, a secure medical digital library is presented. It is based on the CORBA specifications for distributed systems. The described approach relies on a three-tier architecture. Interaction between the medical digital library and its users is achieved through a Web server. The choice of employing Web technology for the dissemination of medical data has many advantages compared to older approaches, but also poses extra requirements that need to be fulfilled. Thus, special attention is paid to the distinguished nature of such medical data, whose integrity and confidentiality should be preserved at all costs. This is achieved through the employment of Trusted Third Parties (TTP) technology for the support of the required security services. Additionally, the proposed digital library employs smartcards for the management of the various security tokens that are used from the above services.

Cost effectiveness of a medical digital library

The rapid increase in the price of electronic journals has made the optimization of collection management an urgent task. As there is currently no standard procedure for the evaluation of this problem, we applied the Reading Factor (RF), an electronically computed indicator used for consultation of individual articles. The aim of our study was to assess the cost effective impact of modifications in our digital library (i.e. change of access from the Intranet to the Internet or change in editorial policy). The digital OVID library at Rouen University Hospital continues to be cost-effective in comparison with the interlibrary loan costs. Moreover, when electronic versions are offered alongside a limited amount of interlibrary loans, a reduction in library costs was observed.