BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Providing patients access to their medical records offers many potential benefits including identification and correction of errors. The process by which patients ask for changes to be made to their records is called an 'amendment request'. Little is known about the nature of such amendment requests and whether they result in modifications to the chart. METHODS We con...

This is an algorithm for finding neighbors for point objects that can freely move and have no predefined position. The query sphere consists of a center location and a given radius within which nearby objects must be found. Space is discretized in cubic cells. This algorithm introduces an indexing scheme that gives the list of all the cells making up the query sphere, for any radius and any cen...

In the clinical toxicology laboratory, approximately 40% of the workload is usually serum alcohols and the remaining workload deals with drug screens, volatiles, other therapeutic drugs, over-the-counter drugs, and plant and animal toxins. GC is the gold standard for serum/blood alcohol determination. However, to determine serum alcohols in a busy medical center by GC is slow, costly, and requi...

Faith healing practices are common in the Indian subcontinent, for remedying physical as well as psychiatric disorders. Patients and/ or their family members often resort to such treatment, especially when dissatisfied with the usual medical care or when the patient has a terminal illness. The application of the principles of medical ethics varies across cultures and time, and with the ethical ...

In many mission-critical applications such as police and homeland security-related information systems, automated monitoring of relevant information sources is essential. Such monitoring results in a large number of periodic queries, which can significantly increase the load on a server that hosts information services. If the execution of these queries is not carefully scheduled on the server, ...

Ambiguous or open-ended requests to a dialogue system result in more complex dialogues. We present a semantic-specificity metric to gauge this complexity for dialogue systems that access a relational database. An experiment where a simulated user makes requests to a dialogue system shows that semantic specificity correlates with dialogue length.

The paper presents an approach to recommend a ranked list of expert developers to assist in the implementation of software change requests (e.g., bug reports and feature requests). An Information Retrieval (IR)-based concept location technique is first used to locate source code entities, e.g., files and classes, relevant to a given textual description of a change request. The previous commits ...

Web service specifications (WS*) have been designed with the aim of being composable to provide a rich set of tools for secure, reliable, and/or transacted web services. Due to the flexibility of SOAP-level security [1] mechanisms, web services may be vulnerable to a distinct class of attacks based on the malicious interception, manipulation, and transmission of SOAP messages, which are referre...