Computer Applications in Medicine Elective
Computer Applications in Medicine Elective
2005 March
Change your password on Funsan.
Use SSH (e.g., PuTTY) to connect to
funsan.biomed.mcgill.ca, login to Unix, and use the
passwd command to change your password.
Change your password to one that only you know, using the
passwd command. Your username and initial password will be
given to you in class.
Due Mar 17.
Read one of the Applications chapters from Shortliffe & Perreault. Post a message to WebCT saying which chapter you want to read; each student should read a different chapter.
Prepare a summary (double spaced, about two pages long) using OpenOffice.org Writer. The summary should include
Your document must contain
E-mail the word-processing
document to me as an attachment, using the native .sxw format.
Due Mar 22.
Choose an article related to computers in medicine. E-mail me the title, author, source, year and page numbers of the article, by Mar 16.
The article must be at least four full pages long, and must have been published in the scientific literature within the past two years. It should discuss a specific medical application of computers, and not be just a general review of how to use the Web.
Prepare a presentation using OpenOffice.org Impress, taking into account the guidelines discussed in class. The presentation should include the objectives of the article, highlights of the article, and your own comments about the article. Use Impress in your oral presentation of the article for the class discussion. Aim for a 10-minute presentation, to be followed by a 5-minute question period. Everyone is expected to participate in the question period.
Due: ongoing
Read at least one major section of the article by Andrew Grygus and discuss it on the WebCT Bulletin Board.
Due Mar 23.
Choose an e-mail discussion list related to health care. Subscribe to the list, and post a description of the list to the Camel bulletin board on WebCT by Mar 18. If, within a day or two, the list appears to be inactive or not what you expected, unsubscribe and choose another one.
Monitor the list for one week and post a brief report about it to the bulletin board. The report should include discussion of items like how busy the list was, the ratio of useful messages to junk messages, how useful the list was, and what audience it might be most useful for.
Due Mar 23.
Choose a newsgroup related to health care. Check the current messages and make sure there are at least a few messages per day. Post the name of the newsgroup and a brief description to the Camel bulletin board on WebCT by Mar 18.
Review the existing messages, and monitor the group for a few days, then post a brief report about it to the bulletin board. The report should include discussion of items like how busy the group was, the ratio of useful messages to junk messages, how useful the group was, and what audience it might be most useful for.
Due: on-going
Contribute to class discussions via the Camel bulletin board on WebCT; e.g., comment on or ask about the reports about e-mail discussion lists and newsgroups, or topics discussed in class.
Due Mar 24.
Do a Medline search related to the topic of the book chapter you're reading, identifying a small number of recent and particularly relevant articles. Use the MeSH subject headings, at least to start with. Use Boolean operations or Limits to reduce the number of articles to no more than ten, from which you should select the two or three most relevant.
Do a search for the same topic using Current Contents. Compare the results with those from Medline.
Pick an old reference related to the same topic, and do a Citation Index search for recent articles which cite it. Compare the results with the results of your Medline and Current Contents searches.
E-mail me a brief narrative description of your search strategies and the results. Append the actual final search output from Ovid to your e-mail message; do not send it to me directly from Ovid.
Due Mar 24.
Do a Web search to find two or three Web pages particularly relevant to the chapter you're reading. Use
Due Mar 30.
Choose a topic for a second article. The topic should be different from that of the article that you read for Assignment 1. As before, the article must be at least four full pages long; must have been published in the scientific literature within the past two years; and should discuss a specific medical application of computers, and not be just a general review of how to use the Web.
E-mail me the title, author, source, year and page numbers of the article, by Mar 24.
Prepare a summary as an HTML file and include it in your Web site. The requirements for the length and nature of the summary are the same as for your first article summary. The only formatting requirement is that you should include headings, subheadings, emphasised text and strongly emphasised text, using appropriate HTML tags.
Due Apr 1.
Prepare Web pages and install on
Create a patient case presentation for display on your Web site. Include a relevant multiple-choice question, with links to pages explaining why each answer is right or wrong.
Your Web pages must be manually coded using a text editor or, equivalently, using a word processor and saving as a plain-text file. Do not use the Save as HTML feature of your word processor, nor any specialised HTML editor.
If you have photos or illustrations to include in your Web site, you can scan them using the scanner in the computer lab. Note that we can't include copyrighted material on Web pages without permission from the copyright holder.
Due Mar 29.
Send me an e-mail message containing your birth date with both decimal and binary numbers for the year, month and day. (You only need to include the last two digits of the year, e.g., 96.)
Due Mar 30.
Do the Camel software quiz on WebCT. Note that you may take the quiz multiple times in order to improve your score.