The basic laboratory test for diagnosis of hematological diseases most widely used is microscopic examination of blood smear slides. The purpose of development of integrated hematological management program of microscopic examination is to improve effectiveness of microscopic examination of blood smear slides and to offer references consistent and easy to use. The lists of various blood cells and hematological diseases were prepared, and 2,589 microscopic photo slides were made corresponding to these lists. The images made of microscopic photo slides were developed through multimedia PC and slide scanner. Thirty-seven references always used for hernatological diagnosis were arranged in the form of tables and figures. With integration of these images and references, an application software consists of functions such as reports of peripheral blood cell morphology and bone marrow examination, stepwise learning of diagnostic procedures, finding hematology atlas and references, and reports of other special hematology laboratory tests was developed. The development tool was Visual FoxPro (version 5 .Oa, Microsoft, USA). Internet hematology atlas contained in the homepage of Department of Clinical Pathology of Seoul National University Hospital were also prepared. The contents developed in this study may be a good guideline for diagnosis of hematological diseases. As a good supporting material, hematology atlas, references and internet homepage will be basic study materials that will help medical students and clinicians understand the workflow of hematological diagnosis.
Blood Cells ; Bone Marrow Examination ; Diagnosis ; Education ; Hematologic Diseases ; Hematology* ; Humans ; Internet ; Learning ; Multimedia* ; Pathology, Clinical ; Seoul ; Students, Medical

No abstract available.

OBJECTIVES: In order to devise the combination module transmitting bio signal and signal data remotely, as defect of wirewireless combination module was complemented by designing a single combination of wireless module and power supply module, a single system was implemented. METHODS: Currently in case of wireless transmission, it had various problems causing by some factors such as buildings, obstruction, and entanglement of wires and so on. In order to overcome problems of wireless transmission, a single combination module design was researched, which transmits vital signal and sign data using basic electric line installed in the inner building or between others. Even though it was also possible of wireless communication and the internet, in case of a power supply without them, it could be possible to transfer data to underground or top ground in the inner building without any special communication line. RESULTS: Bio signal data was transmitted through a power supply line, a noise problem occurred would be solved by the designed noise filter. The filter showed that noise was cut off about more than 90%. It was also confirmed that the used ECG signals was stably received on transmission experiment. An internal PCB antenna could make the system be wireless communication without the disclosure of an antenna. CONCLUSIONS: In this study, in order to implement a useful system transmitting bio signal and data through wire and wireless management for combination design of wireless module and electrical line module, bio signal transmission system was implemented by design of noise break filter circuit to reduce power noise and PCB internal antenna design.
Complement System Proteins ; Disclosure ; Electric Power Supplies ; Electrocardiography ; Internet ; Noise ; Vital Signs

OBJECTIVES: We have developed a non.intrusive continuous PTT monitoring system, using a wearable device and wireless communication technology. METHODS: Pulse transit time (PTT) is a non.invasive measurement that shows promise in the continuous monitoring of blood pressure (BP) and the assessment of arterial stiffness. It has potential applications in wearable health monitoring devices. Generally, PTT is measured from the electrocardiogram (ECG) Rwave to a characteristic point on the peripheral pulse by photoplethysmography. However, for home healthcare applications, a system needs to be wearable and wireless. ECG and PPG were sampled at 1200 Hz and transmitted to a personal computer (PC) using Bluetooth communications. Heart rate (HR) and PTT were calculated by the PC from the signals received and waveforms of ECG, PPG, PTT and HR were displayed. RESULTS: In this study, we implemented a system that could be adapted to the wrist and measured ECG and a Photoplethysmogram (PPG). CONCLUSIONS: The wearable continuous PTT monitoring system developed in this study could be useful in home cardiovascular healthcare.
Blood Pressure ; Delivery of Health Care ; Electrocardiography ; Heart Rate ; Microcomputers ; Photoplethysmography ; Pulse Wave Analysis ; Vascular Stiffness ; Wrist

OBJECTIVE: Under ubiquitous-healthcare circumstances, interest of one's health condition has been increased. People were required the measurement of biosignal by the wearable computing technology. The purpose of this paper is to measure the portable ECG (Electro- cardiogram) with the application of wearable computing technology. Therefore, the normal ECG measurement can be measured with a chest belt either in direct contract state or loose contact state. METHODS: The belt type circuit for measuring ECG was developed. In order to remove noises in loosely contact condition, a shield circuit was assembled with the measuring electrodes. Both of High performance differential amplifiers and notch filters were incorporated into the main amplifier circuits. The ECG data was converted from analog to digital form by MCU (Micro Control Unit). The main memory was composed of a memory controller and a memory card. RESULTS: The ECG measurement having bad electrode contact to body would be usually done in daily life, so we measured the biosignal by using the loose contact potable belt for accurate ECG data. The belt can be used to measure ECG by loose contact method. CONCLUSION: In this study, we could measure ECG without any spatial-temporal restriction due to the portable belt. This device is suitable for the ubiquitous-healthcare environment.
Contracts ; Electrocardiography ; Electrodes ; Memory ; Noise ; Thorax

OBJECTIVE: CDA is a standard for the exchange and sharing of clinical documents among all entities in the healthcare domain. As it proliferates, the number of CDA documents will increase exponentially and it will require huge storage spaces to store them. The main goal of this study is to devise an efficient compression method optimized for CDA documents so that the storage requirement can be lowered. METHODS: The method proposed in this paper is based on a compression method called Xmill which has been designed specifically for XML documents at large, which requires human intervention for the effective compression, especially, of CDA. Our proposed method, CDACOM, automatically extracts type information from CDA documents to infer the data type, assigns data values of the same type to the same data container, and applies an optimized encoder to the container so that a better compression rate can be achieved. RESULTS: Experiments with various types of CDA documents were performed to evaluate the effectiveness of CDACOM over Xmill. The results show that CDACOM indeed outperforms Xmill and can decrease the output file size by about 24.1% on average, compared to Xmill. If documents are combined and compressed together, the gap gets even bigger to about 50%. CONCLUSION: The proposed compression method, CDACOM, is very effective and promising. It will help lowering the cost for systems to transmit and store CDA documents and, hence, expediting the adoption of the standard in the healthcare domain.
Adoption ; Delivery of Health Care ; Humans

OBJECTIVE: Applications to extract medical information from electronic medical records(EMRs) confront some serious obstacles such as spelling errors, ambiguous abbreviations, and unrecognizable words. Those obstacles hinder the process of finding medical entities, relations, and events. We present an efficient EMR refinement system for the purpose of medical information extraction from EMRs, not just for traditional text error correction. METHODS: The EMR refinement system has been designed and implemented through following steps: 1) Build domain constrained dictionary database, 2) Correct spelling errors in Korean-English EMR documents, 3) Resolve ambiguous abbreviations in the bilingual documents. The resulting EMR documents are now machine readable and can be applied to various applications including information extraction. RESULT: Precision rate of the refinement system for spelling error correction is 80.4% and for disambiguating abbreviations/acronyms is 94.7%. CONCLUSION: We developed an EMR refinement system to correct spelling errors and resolve ambiguous abbreviations as well as unrecognizable words. Our system can enhance the reliability of medical records and contribute to develop further application systems in the field of text mining and information extraction.
Data Mining ; Electronic Health Records ; Electronics ; Electrons ; Medical Records

OBJECTIVE: Unauthorized exit of emergency patients could cause serious safety problems in the emergency room. If the entry and exit of emergency patients can be monitored by RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology, such safety issues may be resolved. METHOD: We determined the fundamental requirements of the system for emergency patient safety, and chose an active RFID tag to conduct the recognition test. Subsequently, we performed the entrance recognition rate test and safety test using pacemakers. After developing the entrance management programs, we implemented the system in the emergency room and collected data for 6 months. RESULT: The overall success rate of the entrance recognition test was 99.5%, and during the safety test, pacemaker oversensing due to noise did not occur. We intended to fulfill the fundamental requirements in developing entrance management programs. A total of 508 patients were given RFID tags for the study period, and the recognition failure rate was 4.7%. "Alert" pop-ups occurred 62 times. CONCLUSION: An active RFID entrance management system would be very useful for safety management in emergency room because the system enables detection of the unauthorized exit of emergency patients in real. time.
Emergencies ; Humans ; Medical Records Systems, Computerized ; Noise ; Patient Identification Systems ; Patient Safety ; Radio Frequency Identification Device ; Safety Management

OBJECTIVE: We have developed a prototype Personal Health Record (PHR) system that can replace traditional paper-based personal health diary with structured clinical details for healthcare. Because numerous disparate electronic versions of medical record systems are found unable to share medical information among hospitals, pharmacies and clinicians, the proposed PHR system can be used to facilitate patient care. METHODS: The PHR system has been implemented on a flash memory (USB drive) that is found to be compact, light weight, cost-effective and sufficient enough to handle a large amount of clinical data. International communication standard HL7 has recommended Continuity of Care Document (CCD) that can provide complete and accurate summary of an individual health and medical history. Care documents stored in USB can also support alerts, reminders, self-management, and stakeholder communication in a standardized manner. RESULTS: The proposed PHR system consists of modules that help collect distributed patient information from multiple sources to generate individual care document (CCD) as personal health record. The preliminary experiment has demonstrated an acceptable performance. That is, the PHR is found to integrate and share various clinical data such as medications, procedures, patient demographics from admission system, test results from LIS, DICOM images from PACS, bio.signals from patient monitors. Especially, the PHR system was tested by connecting to standardized monitoring device (Mediana device) to collect ECG data. The PHR system had received 3410 HL7 messages for 1 hour, then generate CCD document.
Continuity of Patient Care ; Delivery of Health Care ; Demography ; Electrocardiography ; Electronics ; Electrons ; Health Records, Personal ; Humans ; Light ; Medical Records ; Memory ; Patient Care ; Pharmacies ; Self Care

OBJECTIVE: Cartoons have been known to motivate learners and make learning process easier by combining verbal and visual effects. But they are mostly applied to motivate the less able learners, and have limits in delivering comprehensive information. Thus, more careful and scientific validation for the pros and cons of using cartoons for everyday use in various subjects is in need. METHODS: In this research, we used Electroencephalography(EEG) to compare cartoon learning and text learning by measuring four characteristic brainwaves including theta, alpha, sensory motor rhythms(SMR), and beta, from the left and right brain. The EEG signals acquired from 24 subjects are analyzed using the mean difference of the left and right brain and canonical correlation analysis. RESULTS: The theta brainwave of the left brain and right brain shows significant differences (p<0.05) from cartoon learning versus text learning in the theta brainwave while the other brain waves show similar patterns. CONCLUSION: Cartoon learning produced significantly stronger theta brainwaves than text learning implicating that cartoon learning reduces more focused attention, SMR brainwaves and beta brainwaves from the left brain explained cartoon learning and text learning process while alpha brainwaves explained those processes in the right brain.
Brain ; Brain Waves ; Electroencephalography ; Learning