Group items tagged

Reading is characterized by the successful coor- dination of a number of concurrent processing layers (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). Many pro- I cessing activities occur automatically for the ex- perienced reader, such as lexical access, anaphor resolution (deciding to whom the author refers), and proposition integration. Others require the allocation of conscious attention, for instance, when elaborating on text meaning or when generating bridging inferences to integrate meanings across paragraphs (Kintsch, 1993). Although reading requires a coordination between auto- matic and attention-demanding (control) processing activ- ities, existent models of reading provide at best only a partial understanding of how the two processing types interact.

The SPECIALIST Natural Language Processing (NLP) Tools have been developed by the The Lexical Systems Group of The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications to investigate the contributions that natural language processing techniques can make to the task of mediating between the language of users and the language of online biomedical information resources. The SPECIALIST NLP Tools facilitate natural language processing by helping application developers with lexical variation and text analysis tasks in the biomedical domain. The NLP Tools are open source resources distributed subject to these terms and conditions.

Clinical Document Collection: A collection of 7673 initial visit notes was obtained from the Columbia University Medical Center Milstein Hospitalist Service. This includes all resident and attending initial visit notes and initial consult notes for inpatient admissions of all types from late 2006 through early 2007. They are not filtered and should therefore be representative of all patients admitted to the Hospitalist Service. All notes from the Service are entered through semi-structured entry templates in a system called eNote11. PMH was entered into a coded field in eNote templates, but as free text within that field. The advantage for this analysis was that these lists were in the doctor's own words without any limits on structure or content imposed by the information system. The notes were stored using the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) XML schema. This allowed for a simple XSL transformation to filter protected health information (PHI) and convert sections of interest to text. A small Java application was written to perform this XSLT on each document and do basic preprocessing to prepare the text for natural language processing analysis. Data Preparation: The corpus was then parsed with the MedLEE natural language processor12 to obtain the semantic structure and UMLS codes of concepts represented in these notes. MedLEE output was generated as XML and a Java postprocessor was used to validate the XML output. Each note section was divided into a text section with numbered phrase tags around identifiable phrases and a structured element containing references describing the tagged phrases. Reference tags were named with the phrase's semantic type. MedLEE assigned a UMLS code to the phrase whenever it could map the clinical information detected to known UMLS concepts. MedLEE results were then merged into one large XML file to facilitate querying across all documents with XQuery.

Kanu E.O. Nkanginieme, MD, FmCPaed., University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital, Port Harcourt, Nigeria

"Too much time is spent manipulating data just to get analysis and visualization tools to read it. Wrangler is designed to accelerate this process: spend less time fighting with your data and more time learning from it."

Here, we show that practicing retrieval produces greater gains in meaningful learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. The advantage of retrieval practice generalized across texts identical to those commonly found in science education. The advantage of retrieval practice was observed with test questions that assessed comprehension and required students to make inferences. The advantage of retrieval practice occurred even when the criterial test involved creating concept maps. Our findings support the theory that retrieval practice enhances learning by retrieval-specific mechanisms rather than by elaborative study processes. Retrieval practice is an effective tool to promote conceptual learning about science.

"Creating an enabling and nurturing environment prior to and during residency training may be necessary to sustain the motivation to engage in health advocacy. Findings from this study suggest possibilities for a resident-guided participatory curriculum development process around health advocacy. Recommendations for promoting health advocacy in postgraduate training include effective integration of health advocacy in the curriculum by providing protected time and resources, providing experiential learning opportunities and fostering a community of practice for physician health advocates."

Simple explanation, using mammography as an example, of Bayes probability and frequency and why we get so confused.

PhD. Ailsa Peron University of Southampton 2007.