Mapping Japanese medical terms to UMLS Metathesaurus.

This paper introduces and reports the results for a project to map Japanese medical terms to the UMLS Metathesaurus. The "Thesaurus for Medical and Health related Terms version 5" published in 2003 by the Japan Medical Abstracts Society and UMLS version 2002AC provided by NLM were used in this study. The goal was to judge the validity of the correlation between the Japanese and English terms that belong to the same MeSH concept. Fifteen medicine, nursing, and library science professionals, excluding JAMAS, used a custom designed Web interface to perform this task. About 10% of the concepts were judged as invalid, and the reasoning behind these failures were analyzed. Experience from this project can be used to estimate the manpower required to revise the Japanese thesaurus after future revisions to UMLS or MeSH.

[Development of telepathology systems between different types of terminals based on the standard for image collaboration command protocol].

In Japan telepathology systems have been developed in medical or pathological environment such as a shortage and an uneven distribution of pathologists. More than 100 telepathology terminals are working mainly for intraoperative quick diagnosis. They cannot communicate with different types each other. In March 2000 the Medical Information System Development Center(MEDIS-DC) successfully demonstrated the interconnection between different types of telepathology terminals based on the Standard for Image Collaboration Command Protocol (SICCP). Nikon, NTTdata and Olympus had joined the development. In February 2002 MEDIS-DC examined these systems for pathological consultations in the fields of Okinawa-Kyoto, Kyoto-Mie and Mie-Okinawa. These successful examinations let us know that telepathology systems need new observation methodologies for telecytology and teleconsultation in addition to the flow for intraoperative quick diagnosis, new GUI guidelines for telepathology terminal design and, education and support for users of their smooth operation. Outcomes of MEDIS-DC activities encourageed us to challenge the next generation telepathology. We found some new trends in telepathology or pathology informatics such as virtual slide technologies and the internet applications in US and Europe. In order to keep Japanese priority, MEDIS-DC telepathology comittee has started investigations to construct a strategy for development of Japanese next generation telepathology.

[Internet: an infrastructure of evidence-based medicine in neurology].

EBM is a cyclic process. Medical evidences are created in clinical trials, which are published in medical literatures. The medical literatures are converted to literature database, from which clinical practice guidelines are made. They are provided to the clinicians, from whom a new clinical research is born again. Information technology, especially the use of internet has deeply related to every process of EBM, which is shown above. In clinical trials, data are accumulated through internet and the process is controlled by a coordinator using internet. In Japan, University Hospital Medical Information System (UMIN) has successfully provided such a tool to the clinical researchers. For the literature search. IT is mandatory and clinical practice guidelines are created on the base of various secondary information database, which are edited using advanced information technology Clinical practice guidelines are provided to hospitals through internet and they reach to the clinicians using a function of hospital information system, especially electronic medical record. In recent days, IT is an indispensable tool for daily practice of evidence-based medicine. However, in Japan the evidence has not been accumulated in national level, and for the future, the creation of national database of medical data should be explored.