Creating your own medical Internet library

Many physicians struggle to keep up with new developments in their fields. The internet can provide a solution to this problem by allowing rapid access to a broad spectrum of reliable information. Becoming familiar with a few clinically relevant and freely available medical resources on the World Wide Web may enhance a physician''s efforts to provide evidence-based care on a daily basis. This article outlines a simple strategy for physicians to make the internet a useful tool.     

Diabetes and the internet

This paper examines what the World Wide Web has to offer patients, families and professionals in relation to diabetes. The potential pitfalls and dangers are discussed, leading to a wider debate on how the Internet can be expected to impact upon diabetes and other health care provision in the near future, and how health care professionals' practices will have to change. Themes include: the World Wide Web (finding material, assessing authenticity, pitfalls for patients, personalized pages, chat rooms, security); e-mail consultation (benefits, risks, minimizing risk, what to tell patients, legal constraints, security); telemedicine (telemetry, surveillance, security); search engines (journals, etc.); looking ahead (digital television, web-based medical records).     

An overview on biodiversity information in databases

The massive development of biodiversity related information systems over the WWW (World Wide Web) has created much excitement in recent years. These arrays of new data sources are counterbalanced by the difficulty in knowing their location and nature. However, biologists and computer scientists have started to pull together in a rising tide of coherence and organization to address this issue. The fledging field of biodiversity informatics is expected to deliver major advances that could turn the WWW into a giant global biodiversity information system. The present paper briefly reviews the databases in preserving the biodiversity data.     

The Internet and medicine: past,present, and future.

The enormous growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has made these two technologies an important potential adjunct to cost-effective health care research and delivery. This article surveys some recent developments in telecommunications, networking and artificial intelligence that are likely to have a significant impact on improving the efficiency and quality of future health care. Issues discussed include: clinical record keeping on the Internet, Internet-assisted medical diagnosis, privacy and security matters, financial transactions, digital money, bandwidth concerns, multimedia (music, audio and video) information delivery via the Internet, intellectual property, and the concept of Information Philanthropy.     

SHORT COMMUNICATION: Olfactory Receptor Database (ORDB): A Resource for Sharing and Analyzing Published and Unpublished Data

An olfactory receptor database (ORDB) is being developed tofacilitate analysis of this large gene family. ORDB currentlycontains over 400 olfactory receptor sequences and related information,and is available via the World Wide Web. We plan to incorporatefunctional data, structural models, spatial localization andother categories of information, toward an integrated modelof olfactory receptor function. Chem. Senses 22: 321–326,1997.     

Laboratory protocols on the internet

Summary The World Wide Web (WWW) is of major significance to the Biotechnologist. One of the fastest growing and most useful areas of the internet, the WWW contains information sites, genome and sequence databases, newsgroups and forums, search and comparison tools, and electronic journals. To many scientists, the WWW has become an indispensable research tool. This paper lists some of the sites providing a wide range of relevant protocols and techniques and describes how to access this information.     

Life Sciences and the web: a new era for collaboration

The World Wide Web has revolutionized how researchers from various disciplines collaborate over long distances. This is nowhere more important than in the Life Sciences, where interdisciplinary approaches are becoming increasingly powerful as a driver of both integration and discovery. Data access, data quality, identity, and provenance are all critical ingredients to facilitate and accelerate these collaborative enterprises and it is here where Semantic Web technologies promise to have a profound impact. This paper reviews the need for, and explores advantages of as well as challenges with these novel Internet information tools as illustrated with examples from the biomedical community.     

The metabolic pathway collection from EMP: the enzymes and metabolic pathways database.

The Enzymes and Metabolic Pathways database (EMP) is an encoding of the contents of over 10 000 original publications on the topics of enzymology and metabolism. This large body of information has been transformed into a queryable database. An extraction of over 1800 pictorial representations of metabolic pathways from this collection is freely available on the World Wide Web. We believe that this collection will play an important role in the interpretation of genetic sequence data, as well as offering a meaningful framework for the integration of many other forms of biological data.     

Improving the quality of care via maintenance of certification and the Web: an early status report

Few question the need for continuous professional development throughout a physician's career, but rapid changes in health care are creating demand for physicians to acquire new knowledge, skills, and attitudes to implement quality improvement in clinical practice. The Internet and World Wide Web are technologies that have the potential to facilitate deep change in physician practice and lifelong learning. This paper describes how the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) has utilized the Web and the Internet to engage physicians in the competencies of practice-based learning and improvement and systems-based practice. Specifically, we describe how the ABIM developed and implemented Web-based practice improvement modules (PIMs) to help physicians measure and improve their clinical practice.     

The haemophilia A mutation search test and resource site, home page of the factor VIII mutation database: HAMSTeRS.

In order to facilitate easy access to and aid understanding of the causes of haemophilia A at the molecular level we have constructed HAMSTeRS, the third release of the factor VIII mutation database and the first release of this database that may be accessed and interrogated over the internet through a World Wide Web browser. The database also presents a review of the structure and function of factor VIII and the molecular genetics of haemophilia A, a real time update of the biostatistics of each parameter in the database, a molecular model of the A1, A2 and A3 domains of the factor VIII protein (based on the crystal structure of caeruloplasmin) and a bulletin board for discussion of issues in the molecular biology of factor VIII.     

Biological SOAP servers and web services provided by the public sequence data bank

A number of biological data resources (i.e. databases and data analytical tools) are searchable and usable on-line thanks to the internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) servers. The output from the web server is easy for us to browse. However, it is laborious and sometimes impossible for us to write a computer program that finds a useful data resource, sends a proper query and processes the output. It is a serious obstacle to the integration of distributed heterogeneous data resources. To solve the issue, we have implemented a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) server and web services that provide a program-friendly interface. The web services are accessible at http://www.xml.nig.ac.jp/.     

Bioinformatics data distribution and integration via Web Services and XML

It is widely recognized that exchange, distribution, and integration of biological data are the keys to improve bioinformatics and genome biology in post-genomic era. However, the problem of exchanging and integrating biological data is not solved satisfactorily. The extensible Markup Language (XML) is rapidly spreading     

The ENZYME data bank in 1995.

The ENZYME data bank is a repository of information relative to the nomenclature of enzymes. The current version (October 1995) contains information relevant to 3594 enzymes. It is available from a variety of file and ftp servers as well as through the ExPASy World Wide Web server (http://expasy.hcuge.ch/).     

The Human PAX6 Mutation Database.

The Human PAX6 Mutation Database contains details of 94 mutations of the PAX6 gene. A Microsoft Access program is used by the Curator to store, update and search the database entries. Mutations can be entered directly by the Curator, or imported from submissions made via the World Wide Web. The PAX6 Mutation Database web page at URL http://www.hgu.mrc.ac.uk/Softdata/PAX6/ provides information about PAX6, as well as a fill-in form through which new mutations can be submitted to the Curator. A search facility allows remote users to query the database. A plain text format file of the data can be downloaded via the World Wide Web. The Curation program contains prior knowledge of the genetic code and of the PAX6 gene including cDNA sequence, location of intron/exon boundaries, and protein domains, so that the minimum of information need be provided by the submitter or Curator.     

The fibril_one on-line database: mutations,experimental conditions,and trends associated with amyloid fibril formation

The association of amyloid fibril formation with a number of important diseases, and the extensive study of this process in vitro, has resulted in a large literature containing a vast amount of information about the fibril formation process. This includes mutations and experimental conditions that promote or protect against fibril formation. A database (fibril_one) was designed to hold information relating to the formation of fibrils. It was populated by extensive searches of the literature and other databases. A powerful World Wide Web query interface to the database was developed, enabling a simple and effective method to view amyloidogenic mutations associated with specific proteins. The Web interface was used to identify trends in the data. This revealed that mutations promoting fibril formation through altered folding tend to be associated with destabilization of the native fold. In particular, tendencies of mutations to disrupt the native secondary structure and packing in the hydrophobic core were discovered to be significant. Query access to the database is available freely on the World Wide Web at http://www.bioinformatics.leeds.ac.uk/group/online/fibril_one.     

GenBank.

The GenBank sequence database continues to expand its data coverage, quality control, annotation content and retrieval services. GenBank is comprised of DNA sequences submitted directly by authors as well as sequences from the other major public databases. An integrated retrieval system, known as Entrez, contains data from GenBank and from the major protein sequence and structural databases, as well as related MEDLINE abstracts. Users may access GenBank over the Internet through the World Wide Web and through special client-server programs for text and sequence similarity searching. FTP, CD-ROM and e-mail servers are alternate means of access.     

SubViral RNA: a database of the smallest known auto-replicable RNA species

We describe here the establishment of an online database containing a large number of sequences and related data on viroids, viroid-like RNAs and human hepatitis delta virus (vHDV) in a customizable and user-friendly format. This database is available on the World Wide Web at http://penelope.med.usherb.ca/subviral.     

Database on the structure of small ribosomal subunit RNA.

The Antwerp database on small ribosomal subunit RNA offers over 4300 nucleotide sequences (August 1995). All these sequences are stored in the form of an alignment based on the adopted secondary structure model, which in turn is corroborated by the observation of compensating substitutions in the alignment. Besides the primary and secondary structure information, literature references, accession numbers and detailed taxonomic information are also compiled. The complete database is made available to the scientific community through anonymous ftp and World Wide Web(WWW).     

Internet information on urology

Keeping up with all the current information in the field of urology is not as difficult anymore, with the many sources available on the World Wide Web. But which sites will give you the most and best data? Where can you go for continuing medical education? For sources of patient education information? For a list of upcoming meetings? Check below for recommendations on general medical, urology-specific, and reference resources.