Fatigue is common in cancer patients treated with chemotherapy, and it has detrimental effects on their quality of life. Chemotherapy-induced anemia, however, is often under-recognized and under-treated. There is a clear association between hemoglobin (Hgb) levels and fatigue, with fatigue being greater in patients with lower Hgb levels. Managing fatigue requires that its causes be determined a...

Systematic reviews can help practitioners keep abreast of the medical literature by summarizing large bodies of evidence and helping to explain differences among studies on the same question. A systematic review involves the application of scientific strategies, in ways that limit bias, to the assembly, critical appraisal, and synthesis of all relevant studies that address a specific clinical q...

In this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, ALBRICH et al. [1] report on a randomised trial. Their hypothesis is that triage decisions in patients with respiratory infections, guided by adding measurements of the calcitonin-superfamily gene derived peptide, mid-regional proadrenomedullin, are more effective than if guided according to clinical assessment alone. Length of hospital stay is...

Implant placement in fresh extraction sockets in conjunction with appropriate guided bone regeneration is well documented. The decision to extract teeth and replace them with immediate implants is determined by many factors, which ultimately affect the total treatment plan. The goal of this article is to review some of the important clinical considerations when selecting patients for immediate ...

This paper is focused on how a general-purpose hierarchical planning representation, based on the HTN paradigm, can be used to support the representation of oncology treatment protocols. The planning algorithm used is a temporally extended HTN planning process capable of interpreting such representation and generating oncology treatment plans that have been proven to support clinical decisions ...

We have two main contributions in this work: 1. We explore the usage of a stacked denoising autoencoder, and a paragraph vector model to learn task-independent dense patient representations directly from clinical notes. We evaluate these representations by using them as features in multiple supervised setups, and compare their performance with those of sparse representations. 2. To understand a...

For the Clinical Decision Support Track of TREC 2014, we looked into the effect of modifying queries by adding or removing terms. We considered both automatic and manual query modifications that use either external data sources or a domain expert. While each method gave slightly different results, we discovered that the manual method still performed slightly better among the methods we consider...

Sze-jung Wu; Mark R. Lehto; Yuehwern Yih; Jason J. Saleem 3, ; B.N. Doebbeling 4, 5 School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA; VA HSR&D Center on Implementing Evidencebased Practice, Roudebush VAMC, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA; School of Engineering & Technology, IUPUI, Indianapolis, IN 46202, USA; IU Center for Health Services & Outcomes Research, Regen...

evidence-based principles (EBP) into the clinical decision-making process, I thought it would be worthwhile to assemble a special issue of JAAA concerned with how researcher-clinicians integrate evidence to create an effective treatment plan for their patients/clients. With this in mind, I asked the contributors to this special issue to “walk” the reader through the process of how they arrived ...