A hospital registration system using syndromes' descriptions analysis and information retrieval technology.

Correct registration in the hospital can avoid wasting medical resources and shorten the time of diagnoses. The purpose of this research is to build a hospital registration system to help patients register in the hospital. This system can assist patients, who are not familiar with medical topics, to determine which department they should register by the spontaneous descriptions. Patients' spontaneous descriptions of syndromes were transcribed into text formation. These descriptive texts were analyzed by the keywords punctuation process and syndromes's descriptions analysis process to get the important features, including the syndrome words, degree words, affected region of body, frequency, time and place. Then, an information retrieval based department making process was employed to calculate the relation score between each department and these important features. Finally, the system suggested the most possible departments they should register to the patients. In the experiment, 50 descriptions collected from 50 patients are as the input to the system. The preliminary result shows the top one correct rate is 88%. The proposed system also shows the higher performance than the baseline system.

Ni(2+) doping DNA: a semiconducting biopolymer.

DNA is a one-dimensional nanowire in nature, and it may not be used in nanodevices due to its low conductivity. In order to improve the conducting property of DNA, divalent Ni(2+) are incorporated into the base pairs of DNA at pH≥8.5 and nickel DNA (Ni-DNA) is formed. Conducting scanning probe microscopy (SPM) analysis reveals that the Ni-DNA is a semiconducting biopolymer and the Schottky barrier of Ni-DNA reduces to 2 eV. Meanwhile, electrochemical analysis by cyclic voltammetry and AC impedance shows that the conductance of Ni-DNA is better than that of native DNA by a factor of approximately 20-fold. UV spectroscopy and DNA base pair mismatch analyses show that the conducting mechanism of Ni-DNA is due to electrons hopping through the π-π stacking of DNA base pairs. This biomaterial is a designable one-dimensional semiconducting polymer for usage in nanodevices.

Computer-aided auscultation learning system for nursing technique instruction.

Pulmonary auscultation is a physical assessment skill learned by nursing students for examining the respiratory system. Generally, a sound simulator equipped mannequin is used to group teach auscultation techniques via classroom demonstration. However, nursing students cannot readily duplicate this learning environment for self-study. The advancement of electronic and digital signal processing technologies facilitates simulating this learning environment. This study aims to develop a computer-aided auscultation learning system for assisting teachers and nursing students in auscultation teaching and learning. This system provides teachers with signal recording and processing of lung sounds and immediate playback of lung sounds for students. A graphical user interface allows teachers to control the measuring device, draw lung sound waveforms, highlight lung sound segments of interest, and include descriptive text. Effects on learning lung sound auscultation were evaluated for verifying the feasibility of the system. Fifteen nursing students voluntarily participated in the repeated experiment. The results of a paired t test showed that auscultative abilities of the students were significantly improved by using the computer-aided auscultation learning system.