Use of electronic health records to evaluate practice individualization.

Medical decisions are usually evaluated by checking their compliance with guidelines. We propose an approach to determine to which extent and how decisions are individualized to patients' particular needs, beyond or against guidelines. For this purpose, we have to link the content of electronic health records with a specific ontology to allow formal and detailed representations of cases.

A consensus approach to maintain a knowledge based system in pathology.

The IDEM (Images and Diagnosis from Example in Medicine) software is a computerized environment able to store unambiguous descriptions of histopathologic images from pathologists. Medical imaging could benefit from such environments if they can easily and continuously be maintained. Within the IDEM environment, we developed a knowledge management module coupled with a consensus module to support knowledge acquisition and maintenance by the experts of the domain. Two pathologists, a senior and junior pathologist, reviewed fifty-three cases of breast pathology. Our findings indicate 1) that the IDEM knowledge management module allows experts to describe images by selecting terms and defining new ones if necessary, allowing the construction of a glossary for the domain and 2) that the consensus module, developed to store valid multi-experts cases, contributes also to validate new terms of the glossary and to refine semantic distance between terms. Such methodology could be applied to others highly evolving medical domains.

Value of clonality studies of cutaneous T lymphocytes in the diagnosis and follow-up of patients with mycosis fungoides.

Histological features of early mycosis fungoides (MF) can simulate numerous inflammatory lesions and histological confirmation of MF is often delayed, compared with clinical diagnosis. Recently, using molecular techniques, the detection of a dominant T-lymphocyte clone has been reported in cutaneous lesions of MF. The aim of the present study was to determine the diagnostic value of a dominant T-lymphocyte clone as assessed by PCR-DGGE in early MF. Histopathological and molecular analyses were performed on cutaneous lesions from 104 patients clinically suspected as having MF. In this population, the positive predictive value of a PCR gamma(+) was 0.86. In addition, four of six patients whose lesions were PCR gamma(+) (detectable dominant T-cell clone) but not histologically MF progressed to MF within 2-48 months. In order to evaluate the relevance of PCR gamma-DGGE in MF follow-up, serial biopsies were performed in 24 patients. In 89 per cent of cases, the presence or absence of a PCR gamma(+) was constant during the course of the disease. When present, the DGGE imprint of PCR products was case-specific. These data demonstrate the diagnostic value in MF of T-lymphocyte clonality assessed by PCR gamma-DGGE on cutaneous lesions and show that the technique can be used in MF follow-up to evaluate residual disease with high specificity.

Unified modeling language and design of a case-based retrieval system in medical imaging.

One goal of artificial intelligence research into case-based reasoning (CBR) systems is to develop approaches for designing useful and practical interactive case-based environments. Explaining each step of the design of the case-base and of the retrieval process is critical for the application of case-based systems to the real world. We describe herein our approach to the design of IDEM--Images and Diagnosis from Examples in Medicine--a medical image case-based retrieval system for pathologists. Our approach is based on the expressiveness of an object-oriented modeling language standard: the Unified Modeling Language (UML). We created a set of diagrams in UML notation illustrating the steps of the CBR methodology we used. The key aspect of this approach was selecting the relevant objects of the system according to user requirements and making visualization of cases and of the components of the case retrieval process. Further evaluation of the expressiveness of the design document is required but UML seems to be a promising formalism, improving the communication between the developers and users.