Computer Applications in Medicine Elective
Computer Applications in Medicine Elective
2006 March
All assignments except number 1 are to be done as individuals.
Due Mar ?.
In teams of two, read one of the Applications chapters from Shortliffe & Perreault. Send me an e-mail message giving the names of your team and saying which chapter you want to read. Each team should read a different chapter, first come first served. As I receive the requests I shall mark the chapters in the following list this way.
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 chapter for the class discussion. Aim for a 10-minute presentation, to be followed by a 5-minute question period. Both team members should participate in the presentation; everyone is expected to participate in the question period.
Due Mar ?.
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.
Write a summary which includes three sections of about 100 words each:
Prepare the summary as an HTML file and include it in your Web site. You should include headings, subheadings, emphasised text and strongly emphasised text, using appropriate HTML tags.
Due: ongoing
Read at least one major section of the article by Andrew Grygus and discuss it with the class by e-mail. Check and comment on at least one of his references.
Due Mar ?.
Choose an e-mail discussion list, newsgroup, bulletin board or Web forum related to health care (not humour).
Analyse the traffic on the list for a week or two and post a brief report about it to the class by e-mail. 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.
Separately, send me by e-mail a brief discussion of the different types of Internet-based discussion facilities, and their pros and cons.
Due Mar ?.
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 narrative description of your search strategies and the results, and a comparison of the different tools.
Due Mar ?.
Do a Web search to find two or three Web pages particularly relevant to the chapter you're reading. Use
E-mail me a narrative description of your search strategies and the results, and a comparison of the different tools.
Due Mar ?.
Choose a topic for a second article. The topic should be different from that of the first article that you read.
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 ?.
Prepare a summary as an HTML file and include it in your Web site, as for your first article summary.
Due Mar ?.
Prepare Web pages and install them on
As a minimum, you should have an HTML file for each of the two article summaries that you've written, plus a home page containing links to the two article summaries and a link to your chapter summary as a PDF file. Each HTML file must contain the required elements discussed in class.
The required 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 already have experience with manual coding of HTML pages, let me know and we'll determine an appropriate alternate requirement.)
Note that you should not include copyrighted material on Web pages without permission from the copyright holder.