Note: I had stopped writing posts in 2017. Started again in late-2024, mostly for AI.
Scientific and medical research has seen explosive growth in the past few decades. Since 1996, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) has maintained PubMed, a free portal providing access to references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. PubMed now has over 21 million citations going back to 1966, and continues to add a staggering amount (about 500,000 new...
In July 1999, Jason and Charlotte Maude started Isabel Healthcare after their then 3 year old daughter Isabel was nearly fatally misdiagnosed during a hospital stay. They involved clinical experts to lead the research and development of a pediatric diagnostic decision support system, and in June 2002 Isabel diagnostic tool was launched. The tool that helped clinicians generate differential...
VisualDx is healthcare's answer to the visual search trend led by companies like search-cube.com, like.com etc. VisualDx helps identify dental and medical diseases by letting providers search for diagnosis based on how a disease looks and presents itself. Rochester, NY based Logical Images is the company behind VisualDx. Understandably enough, it was founded by two dermatologists from University...
iTriage is a mobile app that helps users understand, prioritize their acute health-related symptoms and seek appropriate and close-by care. Its service is also available on the web at iTriageHealth. At the core is a symptom-checker that lets users do a high-level categorization of what could be wrong with them, and how serious/not can it be. That functionality is nothing special, since there are...
Around 1989, Steven Schueler started working on a computer program that could perform symptom triage. The intent was to create something that patients could use to safely decide what to do when they were sick. In 1990, his company DSHI Systems released “Home Medical Advisor” on a floppy disk. Later it was issued on CD-ROM’s, and claims to have sold over 2 million copies over the years. A major...
David M. Eddy, MD, PhD is a legend when it comes to Evidence-Based Medicine. He coined the term in 1980s, actually. Being exceptionally skilled in mathematics, it was perhaps natural for him to apply it to medicine. The result is Archimedes Model- a mathematical simulation of the human physiology and how it interacts with healthcare interventions. At the heart of the model are a set of ordinary...
PharmaSurveyor is a free service that analyzes your medications to point out potential drug interaction and side-effect risks. It was founded in 2006 by Linda and Erick Von Schweber to commercialize the 'knowledge surveying' technology they have developed over the last 25 years or so. Given the fact that Adverse Drug Effects (ADE) are one of the leading cause of death in the US, there is...
Google.org's flutrend is an attempt to model flu activity across US based on the search terms that Google.com users enter around flu symptoms, treatment etc. The underlying premise is that there is a relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people have flu symptoms. Think of it as a virtual public health surveillance proxy. If you are not convinced that...
Healthmap is a perfect example of what technology can do to advance healthcare information. It aggregates online media reports to enable infectious disease intelligence on a global level. Its a near real-time internet-based infectious disease surveillance that is free from political and geographical restraints. Healthmap extracts real-time information from more than 10,000 sites every hour and...
SimulConsult is a diagnostic decision support system started by Dr.Michael Segal. It covers 1,800 diseases that have at least one neurological finding in them. SimulConsult has an interesting logic behind it. Roughly speaking, its knowledge is derived from a 'computational wiki' that is restricted to physician users only. So its database is not only open for viewing, but users can submit...