Types Of Medical Knowledge Research Articles

Tacit knowledge in medical consultations for patients with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities: An exploratory qualitative study

ABSTRACT Background Patients with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD) cannot clearly express themselves. Therefore, tacit knowledge (TK) is crucial in caring for individuals with PIMD, while it possibly also plays a significant role in medical consultations. Method A qualitative inductive, thematic analysis was performed of 14 audio-taped consultations with intellectual disability physicians for patients with PIMD to explore how TK is represented and considered between parents and physicians. Results Parents conveyed their TK by sensing and perceptions of changes of their child's behaviour. Our findings demonstrate that parents of individuals with PIMD primarily shared TK concerning pain, sleeping issues, and epilepsy. Physicians recognised and incorporated parents’ TK, highlighting its significance in patient care. Conclusion This study underscores the important role of TK in consultations for patients with PIMD. Parents’ TK help to shape medical-decisions, urging physicians to validate parents’ TK while relating this TK to other types of medical knowledge.

Knowledge matters: Chest radiology report generation with general and specific knowledge.

Automatic chest radiology report generation is critical in clinics which can relieve experienced radiologists from the heavy workload and remind inexperienced radiologists of misdiagnosis or missed diagnose. Existing approaches mainly formulate chest radiology report generation as an image captioning task and adopt the encoder-decoder framework. However, in the medical domain, such pure data-driven approaches suffer from the following problems: 1) visual and textual bias problem; 2) lack of expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-enhanced radiology report generation approach introduces two types of medical knowledge: 1) General knowledge, which is input independent and provides the broad knowledge for report generation; 2) Specific knowledge, which is input dependent and provides the fine-grained knowledge for chest X-ray report generation. To fully utilize both the general and specific knowledge, we also propose a knowledge-enhanced multi-head attention mechanism. By merging the visual features of the radiology image with general knowledge and specific knowledge, the proposed model can improve the quality of generated reports. The experimental results on the publicly available IU-Xray dataset show that the proposed knowledge-enhanced approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in almost all metrics. And the results of MIMIC-CXR dataset show that the proposed knowledge-enhanced approach is on par with state-of-the-art methods. Ablation studies also demonstrate that both general and specific knowledge can help to improve the performance of chest radiology report generation.

Austen’s Literary Alembic

Gregory Tate, “Austen’s Literary Alembic: Sanditon, Medicine, and the Science of the Novel” (pp. 336–362) This essay examines the representation of science in Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon. It argues that this text, written in the months before Austen’s death in 1817, points to a development in her understanding of the novel, one that associates the form with the emerging scientific disciplines of the early nineteenth century through its emphasis on empirical objectivity and professional expertise. These traits are exemplified in the medical profession, which is central to Sanditon’s plot. Austen’s text presents a range of different types of medical knowledge and practice, and it celebrates professional medical advice as a safe middle ground between the commercial exploitation of quackery and the uninformed subjectivism of hypochondria. Similar issues are at stake in the text’s considerations of the literary marketplace: while acknowledging some of the problems involved in the growing commodification of the novel, Sanditon also satirizes the undisciplined reading habits of careless readers, and it promotes a view of the novel as an objective and professional articulation of knowledge. Sanditon’s advocacy of professional objectivity is conveyed in its narrative stance as well as its plot: the text focuses not on the subjectivity of a single protagonist but on the objective observation and experimental comparison of the interactions between a number of characters and between those characters and their environment. The essay concludes that the methodologies of science, as they were practiced within the medical profession, played a significant part in Austen’s understanding of the profession of writing at the end of her career.

The 2005–2007 Chikungunya Epidemic in Réunion: Ambiguous Etiologies, Memories, and Meaning-Making

From March 2005 to April 2007 the French overseas department and Indian Ocean island of Réunion was significantly affected by an epidemic of chikungunya. Chikungunya is a vector-spread disease (by the aedes albopictus mosquito) that leads to painful rheumatic symptoms. The disease infected approximately one third of the island's total population of 802,000 inhabitants (Rallu 2009). This article is a discussion of local etiological accounts of chikungunya. The primary topic raised by informants was whether chikungunya was a vector- or air-borne disease. Even though informants had access to substantial biomedical information concerning the disease and its transmission, some were convinced by it and others were not. In order to make meaning of the disease, the Réunionese drew on various types of medical knowledge from different health sectors simultaneously. To understand people's experiences with chikungunya, we must account for all of their etiological explanations.

THE SOCIAL COGNITION OF MEDICAL KNOWLEDGE: WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO CHILDHOOD EPILEPSY

This article arose out of an engagement in medical communication courses at a Gulf university. It deploys a theoretical framework derived from a (critical) sociocognitive approach to discourse analysis in order to investigate three aspects of medical discourse relating to childhood epilepsy: the cognitive processes that are entailed in relating different types of medical knowledge to their communicative context; the types of medical knowledge that are constituted in the three different text types analyzed; and the relationship between these different types of medical knowledge and the discursive features of each text type. The article argues that there is a cognitive dimension to the human experience of understanding and talking about one specialized from of medical knowledge. It recommends that texts be studied in medical communication courses not just in terms of their discrete formal features but also critically in terms of the knowledge they produce, transmit, and reproduce.

A Linguistic Approach to Aligning Representations of Human Anatomy and Radiology

In the context of medical imaging different domain ontologies are necessary that provide complementary knowledge about anatomy and radiology. This is essential for realizing applications such as medical image search. Consequently, semantic integration of these different but nevertheless related types of medical knowledge from disparate domain ontologies becomes necessary. In our work we interpret semantic integration as aligning a taxonomy on radiology and an ontology on human anatomy to find equivalent concepts that represent their shared view on medical imaging. The resulting alignments describing this common view can then be used to annotate medical images and related textual patient data. Our alignment approach has three main aspects: (a) linguistic-based, (b) corpus-based, and (c) dialogue-based. In this paper, we describe the application of the first aspect on a representation of human anatomy and a representation of radiology and report on the results.

Handling risky knowledge: gender and scientific risk-taking

Like the practice of clinical medicine, medical research and the knowledge it generates involve their own risks. This paper examines various societal and career risks of working with certain types of medical knowledge, and discusses empirical research on gender and risk-taking in science. It considers the questions this literature raises regarding decision-making about risky knowledge, as women increasingly enter new roles as researchers, consultants, regulators, and bureaucrats in science and medicine. In particular, it focuses on the relative hesitance of women scientists to take risks in their careers, and asks whether this predicts how they will handle risky knowledge as they enter new positions of decision-making auihority in science and medicine. Limitations in existing data preclude firm predictions, but the paper sets out numerous questions for further study.