The Use of Immersive Environments for the Early Detection and Treatment of Neuropsychiatric Disorders.

Neuropsychiatric disorders are highly prevalent conditions with significant individual, societal, and economic impacts. A major challenge in the diagnosis and treatment of these conditions is the lack of sensitive, reliable, objective, quantitative tools to inform diagnosis, and measure symptom severity. Currently available assays rely on self-reports and clinician observations, leading to subjective analysis. As a step toward creating quantitative assays of neuropsychiatric symptoms, we propose an immersive environment to track behaviors relevant to neuropsychiatric symptomatology and to systematically study the effect of environmental contexts on certain behaviors. Moreover, the overarching theme leads to connected tele-psychiatry which can provide effective assessment.

Comparing structural perspectives on Medical Informatics: EMBASE vs. MEDLINE.

Previous bibliometric analyses of Medical Informatics' internal structure used MEDLINE records as the unit of study. EMBASE, a product of Excerpta Medica, carries a wider international scope and offers complementary retrieval results to MEDLINE. Since much medical informatics critical thinking originated abroad and migrated to North America, this difference in coverage may also indicate a different perspective of "what constitutes medical informatics." Using traditional bibliometric and multivariate data analysis techniques, the present work examines EMBASE indexing records for the same 1995-1999 time frame as earlier MEDLINE studies to identify and compare structural features of the field.

Medical informatics as a market for IS/IT.

Medical informatics is "the application of information science and information technology to the theoretical and practical problems of biomedical research, clinical practice, and medical education." A key difference between the two streams lies in their perspectives of "What Is Important in MI to Me?" MI may be seen as the marketplace where biomedicine consumes products and services provided by information science and information technology.