Chemotherapy use and associated factors among cancer patients near the end of life.

OBJECTIVES: We investigated the frequency of chemotherapy use and its associated factors in patients in all age groups in the last year of life. METHODS: We identified cancer patients who died in 2004 in any of 17 hospitals. We used demographic and treatment characteristics by computerized hospital information systems and by linking the identification numbers to the 2004 death registry. RESULTS: 48.7% of patients in the last 6 months of life, 43.9% in the last 3 months, and 30.9% in the last month of life received chemotherapy. The frequency of chemotherapy use was lower for older patients. In those > or =65 years old, there was no difference between women and men in the proportion that received chemotherapy. For patients <65 years of age, a larger proportion of women than men received chemotherapy, and chemotherapy use was significantly less frequent for patients with refractory disease than for those with responsive disease. Patients dying at a relatively small hospital without a hospice inpatient unit were significantly more likely to receive chemotherapy. CONCLUSIONS: Despite the fact that most cancer patients are resistant to chemotherapy at the end of life, it was administered often to all age groups.

Information extraction from Korean radiology reports mingled two language.

This study presents overall of Information Extraction (IE) for SNUH (Seoul National University Hospital) radiology reports coexisted Korean and English using Concept Node (CN) which is a case frame as extraction rule. The following steps are performed: design conceptual model by terminology exploration based on lexical analysis, create a CN definition based on syntactic relationship pattern and implement automatic IE system using CN. Main purposes is to investigate whether syntactic and semantic analysis technique using extraction rule (CN) is effective for typical Korean medical text in mixed two different languages.

A comparative study on concept representation between the UMLS and the clinical terms in Korean medical records.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is a rich source of knowledge in the biomedical domain. In this paper, we evaluated the coverage of UMLS as compared with Korean medical terms and identified differences in concept representation between two vocabulary sets. We measured the concept coverage by mapping clinical terms extracted from the discharge records of Seoul National University Hospital (SNUH) and the UMLS "Sign or Symptom" and "Disease or Syndrome" concepts. Thirty-five percent of the complaints in the SNUH were conceptually matched with the UMLS "Sign or Symptom" concept. Fifty-eight percent were found to be matched with the UMLS "Disease or Syndrome" concept rather than the "Sign or Symptom" concept. The remaining seven percent were not found in the UMLS concepts mapped above or those terms that used to special circumstances of a tertiary hospital in Korea. We then analyzed some of different expression patterns used by the two vocabulary sets and addressed issues to be taken into consideration.

The knowledge modeling for chronic urticaria assessment in clinical decision support system with PDA.

The benefits of a clinical information system would be enhanced by a clinical decision support system (CDSS). We have developed urticaria diagnosis knowledge model for clinical practice. In order to construct a more accurate, evidenced-based and comprehensive knowledge base for urticaria, we arranged and integrated knowledge from literatures-based knowledge, as provided by; The Korean Academy of Asthma and Allergy [1], the American Allergy Association based on an algorithm of chronic urticaria assessment. We presented this knowledge in a Boolean cross table frame and implemented these guidelines using the developed CDSS.