Motivated by our experiences of representing clinical information using OWL DL, which often resulted in highly complex expressions, we propose the use of ontology content patterns to facilitate this task. They are based on a set of formal ontologies, constrained by the concepts and relations of a top-level one, which reduces arbitrariness in ontology design. We propose their application to info...

When solving clinical decision-making problems with modern graphical decision-theoretic models such as influence diagrams, we obtain decision tables with optimal decision alternatives describing the best course of action for a given patient or group of patients. For real-life clinical problems, these tables are often extremely large. This is an obstacle to understand their content. KBM2L lists ...

Clinical pathways are widely adopted by many large hospitals around the world in order to provide high-quality patient treatment and reduce the length of hospital stay of each patient. The development of clinical pathways is a lengthy process, and may require the collaboration among physicians, nurses, and staffs in a hospital. However, the individual differences cause great variances in the ex...

INTRODUCTION Serological confirmation of an infectious acute myelitis injury is difficult to confirm as it is sometimes due to a post-infectious etiology. OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to define the clinical, biological and prognostic patterns of infectious myelitis. PATIENTS AND METHODS This retrospective study included 153 subjects hospitalized in the department of neurology betwee...

BACKGROUND Although many recent studies have shown the increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease in relatives of patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, clinical patterns of disease within families remain relatively poorly documented. AIMS In this study, clinical characteristics (disease type, extent, age on onset, need for surgery, and presence of extraintestinal manifestati...

Medical research would benefit from automatic methods that support eligibility evaluation for patient enrollment in clinical trials and design of eligibility criteria. In this study we addressed the problem of formalizing eligibility criteria. By analyzing a large set of breast cancer clinical trials we derived a set of patterns, that capture typical structure of conditions, pertaining to synta...

Objectives: To describe the Demographic, clinical and imaging patterns of Proptosis. Study Design: Historic cohort study. Subjects and methods: We retrospectively reviewed the clinical charts and imaging records of 87 patients with Proptosis. A detailed work up of data including age, sex, visual and orbital signs and symptoms was done. Imaging studies including orbital ultrasonography, CT scan ...

  Candida is an asexual, diploid, dimorphic fungus that is present on human body and his environment. Nowadays the number of patients, who are immunocompromised, aged, receiving prolonged antibacterial and aggressive cancer chemotherapy or undergoing invasive surgical procedures and organ transplantation, is on increase, and therefore candidiasis emerged itself as an alarming opportunistic dise...