BACKGROUND History supports the staff and single serpent, the asklepian, as the symbol of healing and medicine, yet its confusion with the caduceus (a winged staff with two snakes wrapped around it) persists. No population-based information on serpent symbol use exists. OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence of asklepian and caduceus display among Internet images of medical and health professi...

Forest plots are frequently used to display the results of meta-analyses and have been published in the medical literature since 1988 (Lewis & Clarke, 2001). A review of forest plots reveals that the format chosen can affect the accuracy with which the information is conveyed to the reader. One formatting convention is the use of symbol areas to reflect the relative contributions, or weights, o...

Curvilinear structures are common in medical imaging, which typically require dedicated processing techniques. We present a new structure to process these, that we call the polygonal path image, denoted (see text for symbol). We derive from (see text for symbol) some curvilinear structure enhancement and analysis algorithms. We show that (see text for symbol) has some interesting properties: it...