BACKGROUND It is important to stimulate the interest of all medical students in emergency medicine to further its growth nationally and internationally. Students focused on other specialties can benefit from exposure to the more common, less acute problems seen in the emergency department (ED). AIMS We developed a categorization system for chief complaints (CC) in an academic ED fast track (F...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether preprocessing chief complaints before automatically classifying them into syndromic categories improves classification performance. METHODS We preprocessed chief complaints using two preprocessors (CCP and EMT-P) and evaluated whether classification performance increased for a probabilistic classifier (CoCo) or for a keyword-based classifier (modification of the...

It is the purpose of this paper to present an approach to teaching a concise, focused method to obtain a medical history from patients in the Emergency Department. Diagnostic reasoning starts with the medical history. Nowhere is obtaining an accurate history more important than in the Emergency Department. Here the demand for a quick focused and effective assessment and presentation prompts som...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The clinical outcomes of some patients with pleural infection may be favorable with medical treatment alone, but in others, the disease progresses and requires additional surgical treatment. However, little is known about the factors affecting this difference. The aim of this study was to investigate the factors predictive of failure of medical treatment in patients with pleural...

Emergency department free-text chief complaints (CCs) are a major data source for syndromic surveillance. CCs need to be classified into syndromic categories for subsequent automatic analysis. However, the lack of a standard vocabulary and high-quality encodings of CCs hinder effective classification. This paper presents a new ontology-enhanced automatic CC classification approach. Exploiting s...

A 12 years old boy, diagnosed with psoriasis since childhoodwas referred to the dermatology clinic of Aleppo UniversityHospital,Syria with the chief complaint of erythematoushyperkeratotic lesions on the palms and soles.

OBJECTIVE Design, build and evaluate a symptom-based probabilistic chief complaint classifier for the Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance System (RODS). BACKGROUND Scientists have utilized many chief complaint (CC) classification techniques in biosurveillance including keyword search, weighted keyword search, and naïve Bayes. These techniques may utilize CC-to-syndrome or CC-to-symptom-...