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Posts Tagged ‘Curation methodology’

Old Industrial Revolution Paradigm of Education Needs to End: How Scientific Curation Can Transform Education

Curator: Stephen J. Williams, PhD.

Dr. Cathy N. Davidson from Duke University gives a talk entitled: Now You See It.  Why the Future of Learning Demands a Paradigm Shift

In this talk, shown below, Dr. Davidson shows how our current education system has been designed for educating students for the industrial age type careers and skills needed for success in the Industrial Age and how this educational paradigm is failing to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their future careers.

Or as Dr. Davidson summarizes

Designing education not for your past but for their future

As the video is almost an hour I will summarize some of the main points below

PLEASE WATCH VIDEO

Summary of talk

Dr. Davidson starts the talk with a thesis: that Institutions tend to preserve the problems they were created to solve.

All the current work, teaching paradigms that we use today were created for the last information age (19th century)

Our job to to remake the institutions of education work for the future not the one we inherited

Four information ages or technologies that radically changed communication

  1. advent of writing: B.C. in ancient Mesopotamia allowed us to record and transfer knowledge and ideas
  2. movable type – first seen in 10th century China
  3. steam powered press – allowed books to be mass produced and available to the middle class.  First time middle class was able to have unlimited access to literature
  4. internet- ability to publish and share ideas worldwide

Interestingly, in the early phases of each of these information ages, the same four complaints about the new technology/methodology of disseminating information was heard

  • ruins memory
  • creates a distraction
  • ruins interpersonal dialogue and authority
  • reduces complexity of thought

She gives an example of Socrates who hated writing and frequently stated that writing ruins memory, creates a distraction, and worst commits ideas to what one writes down which could not be changed or altered and so destroys ‘free thinking’.

She discusses how our educational institutions are designed for the industrial age.

The need for collaborative (group) learning AND teaching

Designing education not for your past but for the future

In other words preparing students for THEIR future not your past and the future careers that do not exist today.

In the West we were all taught to answer silently and alone.  However in Japan, education is arranged in the han or group think utilizing the best talents of each member in the group.  In Japan you are arranged in such groups at an early age.  The concept is that each member of the group contributes their unique talent and skill for the betterment of the whole group.  The goal is to demonstrate that the group worked well together.

see https://educationinjapan.wordpress.com/education-system-in-japan-general/the-han-at-work-community-spirit-begins-in-elementary-school/ for a description of “in the han”

In the 19th century in institutions had to solve a problem: how to get people out of the farm and into the factory and/or out of the shop and into the firm

Takes a lot of regulation and institutionalization to convince people that independent thought is not the best way in the corporation

keywords for an industrial age

  • timeliness
  • attention to task
  • standards, standardization
  • hierarchy
  • specialization, expertise
  • metrics (measures, management)
  • two cultures: separating curriculum into STEM versus artistic tracts or dividing the world of science and world of art

This effort led to a concept used in scientific labor management derived from this old paradigm in education, an educational system controlled and success measured using

  • grades (A,B,C,D)
  • multiple choice tests

keywords for our age

  • workflow
  • multitasking attention
  • interactive process (Prototype, Feedback)
  • data mining
  • collaboration by difference

Can using a methodology such as scientific curation affect higher education to achieve this goal of teaching students to collaborate in an interactive process using data mining to create a new workflow for any given problem?  Can a methodology of scientific curation be able to affect such changes needed in academic departments to achieve the above goal?

This will be the subject of future curations tested using real-world in class examples.

However, it is important to first discern that scientific content curation takes material from Peer reviewed sources and other expert-vetted sources.  This is unique from other types of content curation in which take from varied sources, some of which are not expert-reviewed, vetted, or possibly ‘fake news’ or highly edited materials such as altered video and audio.  In this respect, the expert acts not only as curator but as referee.  In addition, collaboration is necessary and even compulsory for the methodology of scientific content curation, portending the curator not as the sole expert but revealing the CONTENT from experts as the main focus for learning and edification.

Other article of note on this subject in this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include:

The above articles will give a good background on this NEW Conceived Methodology of Scientific Curation and its Applicability in various areas such as Medical Publishing, and as discussed below Medical Education.

To understand the new paradigm in medical communication and the impact curative networks have or will play in this arena please read the following:

Scientific Curation Fostering Expert Networks and Open Innovation: Lessons from Clive Thompson and others

This article discusses a history of medical communication and how science and medical communication initially moved from discussions from select individuals to the current open accessible and cooperative structure using Web 2.0 as a platform.

 

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Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence would like to announce their First Volume of their BioMedical E-Book Series A: eBooks on Cardiovascular Diseases

 

Perspectives on Nitric Oxide in Disease Mechanisms

Nitric Oxide coverwhich is now available on Amazon Kindle at

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DINFFYC

This book is a comprehensive review of Nitric Oxide, its discovery, function, and related opportunities for Targeted Therapy written by  Experts, Authors, Writers.  This book is a series of articles delineating the basic functioning of the NOS isoforms, their production widely by endothelial cells, and the effect of NITRIC OXIDE production by endothelial cells, by neutrophils and macrophages, the effect on intercellular adhesion, and the effect of circulatory shear and turbulence on NITRIC OXIDE production. The e-Book’s articles have been published on the  Open Access Online Scientific Journal, since April 2012.  All new articles on this subject, will continue to be incorporated, as published, in real time in the e-Book which is a live book.

 

We invite e-Readers to write an Article Reviews on Amazon for this e-Book.

 

All forthcoming BioMed e-Book Titles can be viewed at:

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/

 

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence, launched in April 2012 an Open Access Online Scientific Journal is a scientific, medical and business multi expert authoring environment in several domains of  life sciences, pharmaceutical, healthcare & medicine industries. The venture operates as an online scientific intellectual exchange at their website http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com and for curation and reporting on frontiers in biomedical, biological sciences, healthcare economics, pharmacology, pharmaceuticals & medicine. In addition the venture publishes a Medical E-book Series available on Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Analyzing and sharing the vast and rapidly expanding volume of scientific knowledge has never been so crucial to innovation in the medical field. WE are addressing need of overcoming this scientific information overload by:

  • delivering curation and summary interpretations of latest findings and innovations on an open-access, Web 2.0 platform with future goals of providing primarily concept-driven search in the near future
  • providing a social platform for scientists and clinicians to enter into discussion using social media
  • compiling recent discoveries and issues in yearly-updated Medical E-book Series on Amazon’s mobile Kindle platform

This curation offers better organization and visibility to the critical information useful for the next innovations in academic, clinical, and industrial research by providing these hybrid networks.

Table of Contents for Perspectives on Nitric Oxide in Disease Mechanisms

Chapter 1: Nitric Oxide Basic Research

Chapter 2: Nitric Oxide and Circulatory Diseases

Chapter 3: Therapeutic Cardiovascular Targets

Chapter 4: Nitric Oxide and Neurodegenerative Diseases

Chapter 5: Bone Metabolism

Chapter 6: Nitric Oxide and Systemic Inflammatory Disease

Chapter 7: Nitric Oxide: Lung and Alveolar Gas Exchange

Chapter 8. Nitric Oxide and Kidney Dysfunction

Chapter 9: Nitric Oxide and Cancer 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cancer Biology and Genomics for Disease Diagnosis (Vol. I) Now Available for Amazon Kindle

Cancer Biology and Genomics for Disease Diagnosis (Vol. I) Now Available for Amazon Kindle

Reporter: Stephen J Williams, PhD

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence would like to announce the First volume of their BioMedical E-Book Series C: e-Books on Cancer & Oncology

Volume One: Cancer Biology and Genomics for Disease Diagnosis

CancerandOncologyseriesCcoverwhich is now available on Amazon Kindle at                          http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013RVYR2K.

This e-Book is a comprehensive review of recent Original Research on Cancer & Genomics including related opportunities for Targeted Therapy written by Experts, Authors, Writers. This ebook highlights some of the recent trends and discoveries in cancer research and cancer treatment, with particular attention how new technological and informatics advancements have ushered in paradigm shifts in how we think about, diagnose, and treat cancer. The results of Original Research are gaining value added for the e-Reader by the Methodology of Curation. The e-Book’s articles have been published on the Open Access Online Scientific Journal, since April 2012.  All new articles on this subject, will continue to be incorporated, as published with periodical updates.

We invite e-Readers to write an Article Reviews on Amazon for this e-Book on Amazon. All forthcoming BioMed e-Book Titles can be viewed at:

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence, launched in April 2012 an Open Access Online Scientific Journal is a scientific, medical and business multi expert authoring environment in several domains of  life sciences, pharmaceutical, healthcare & medicine industries. The venture operates as an online scientific intellectual exchange at their website http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com and for curation and reporting on frontiers in biomedical, biological sciences, healthcare economics, pharmacology, pharmaceuticals & medicine. In addition the venture publishes a Medical E-book Series available on Amazon’s Kindle platform.

Analyzing and sharing the vast and rapidly expanding volume of scientific knowledge has never been so crucial to innovation in the medical field. WE are addressing need of overcoming this scientific information overload by:

  • delivering curation and summary interpretations of latest findings and innovations
  • on an open-access, Web 2.0 platform with future goals of providing primarily concept-driven search in the near future
  • providing a social platform for scientists and clinicians to enter into discussion using social media
  • compiling recent discoveries and issues in yearly-updated Medical E-book Series on Amazon’s mobile Kindle platform

This curation offers better organization and visibility to the critical information useful for the next innovations in academic, clinical, and industrial research by providing these hybrid networks.

Table of Contents for Cancer Biology and Genomics for Disease Diagnosis

Preface

Introduction  The evolution of cancer therapy and cancer research: How we got here?

Part I. Historical Perspective of Cancer Demographics, Etiology, and Progress in Research

Chapter 1:  The Occurrence of Cancer in World Populations

Chapter 2.  Rapid Scientific Advances Changes Our View on How Cancer Forms

Chapter 3:  A Genetic Basis and Genetic Complexity of Cancer Emerge

Chapter 4: How Epigenetic and Metabolic Factors Affect Tumor Growth

Chapter 5: Advances in Breast and Gastrointestinal Cancer Research Supports Hope for Cure

Part II. Advent of Translational Medicine, “omics”, and Personalized Medicine Ushers in New Paradigms in Cancer Treatment and Advances in Drug Development

Chapter 6:  Treatment Strategies

Chapter 7:  Personalized Medicine and Targeted Therapy

Part III.Translational Medicine, Genomics, and New Technologies Converge to Improve Early Detection

Chapter 8:  Diagnosis                                     

Chapter 9:  Detection

Chapter 10:  Biomarkers

Chapter 11:  Imaging In Cancer

Chapter 12: Nanotechnology Imparts New Advances in Cancer Treatment, Detection, &  Imaging                                 

Epilogue by Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FACP: Envisioning New Insights in Cancer Translational Biology

 

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Artificial Intelligence Versus the Scientist: Who Will Win?

Will DARPA Replace the Human Scientist: Not So Fast, My Friend!

Writer, Curator: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

scientistboxingwithcomputer

Last month’s issue of Science article by Jia You “DARPA Sets Out to Automate Research”[1] gave a glimpse of how science could be conducted in the future: without scientists. The article focused on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program called ‘Big Mechanism”, a $45 million effort to develop computer algorithms which read scientific journal papers with ultimate goal of extracting enough information to design hypotheses and the next set of experiments,

all without human input.

The head of the project, artificial intelligence expert Paul Cohen, says the overall goal is to help scientists cope with the complexity with massive amounts of information. As Paul Cohen stated for the article:

“‘

Just when we need to understand highly connected systems as systems,

our research methods force us to focus on little parts.

                                                                                                                                                                                                               ”

The Big Mechanisms project aims to design computer algorithms to critically read journal articles, much as scientists will, to determine what and how the information contributes to the knowledge base.

As a proof of concept DARPA is attempting to model Ras-mutation driven cancers using previously published literature in three main steps:

  1. Natural Language Processing: Machines read literature on cancer pathways and convert information to computational semantics and meaning

One team is focused on extracting details on experimental procedures, using the mining of certain phraseology to determine the paper’s worth (for example using phrases like ‘we suggest’ or ‘suggests a role in’ might be considered weak versus ‘we prove’ or ‘provide evidence’ might be identified by the program as worthwhile articles to curate). Another team led by a computational linguistics expert will design systems to map the meanings of sentences.

  1. Integrate each piece of knowledge into a computational model to represent the Ras pathway on oncogenesis.
  2. Produce hypotheses and propose experiments based on knowledge base which can be experimentally verified in the laboratory.

The Human no Longer Needed?: Not So Fast, my Friend!

The problems the DARPA research teams are encountering namely:

  • Need for data verification
  • Text mining and curation strategies
  • Incomplete knowledge base (past, current and future)
  • Molecular biology not necessarily “requires casual inference” as other fields do

Verification

Notice this verification step (step 3) requires physical lab work as does all other ‘omics strategies and other computational biology projects. As with high-throughput microarray screens, a verification is needed usually in the form of conducting qPCR or interesting genes are validated in a phenotypical (expression) system. In addition, there has been an ongoing issue surrounding the validity and reproducibility of some research studies and data.

See Importance of Funding Replication Studies: NIH on Credibility of Basic Biomedical Studies

Therefore as DARPA attempts to recreate the Ras pathway from published literature and suggest new pathways/interactions, it will be necessary to experimentally validate certain points (protein interactions or modification events, signaling events) in order to validate their computer model.

Text-Mining and Curation Strategies

The Big Mechanism Project is starting very small; this reflects some of the challenges in scale of this project. Researchers were only given six paragraph long passages and a rudimentary model of the Ras pathway in cancer and then asked to automate a text mining strategy to extract as much useful information. Unfortunately this strategy could be fraught with issues frequently occurred in the biocuration community namely:

Manual or automated curation of scientific literature?

Biocurators, the scientists who painstakingly sort through the voluminous scientific journal to extract and then organize relevant data into accessible databases, have debated whether manual, automated, or a combination of both curation methods [2] achieves the highest accuracy for extracting the information needed to enter in a database. Abigail Cabunoc, a lead developer for Ontario Institute for Cancer Research’s WormBase (a database of nematode genetics and biology) and Lead Developer at Mozilla Science Lab, noted, on her blog, on the lively debate on biocuration methodology at the Seventh International Biocuration Conference (#ISB2014) that the massive amounts of information will require a Herculaneum effort regardless of the methodology.

Although I will have a future post on the advantages/disadvantages and tools/methodologies of manual vs. automated curation, there is a great article on researchinformation.infoExtracting More Information from Scientific Literature” and also see “The Methodology of Curation for Scientific Research Findings” and “Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison” for manual curation methodologies and A MOD(ern) perspective on literature curation for a nice workflow paper on the International Society for Biocuration site.

The Big Mechanism team decided on a full automated approach to text-mine their limited literature set for relevant information however was able to extract only 40% of relevant information from these six paragraphs to the given model. Although the investigators were happy with this percentage most biocurators, whether using a manual or automated method to extract information, would consider 40% a low success rate. Biocurators, regardless of method, have reported ability to extract 70-90% of relevant information from the whole literature (for example for Comparative Toxicogenomics Database)[3-5].

Incomplete Knowledge Base

In an earlier posting (actually was a press release for our first e-book) I had discussed the problem with the “data deluge” we are experiencing in scientific literature as well as the plethora of ‘omics experimental data which needs to be curated.

Tackling the problem of scientific and medical information overload

pubmedpapersoveryears

Figure. The number of papers listed in PubMed (disregarding reviews) during ten year periods have steadily increased from 1970.

Analyzing and sharing the vast amounts of scientific knowledge has never been so crucial to innovation in the medical field. The publication rate has steadily increased from the 70’s, with a 50% increase in the number of original research articles published from the 1990’s to the previous decade. This massive amount of biomedical and scientific information has presented the unique problem of an information overload, and the critical need for methodology and expertise to organize, curate, and disseminate this diverse information for scientists and clinicians. Dr. Larry Bernstein, President of Triplex Consulting and previously chief of pathology at New York’s Methodist Hospital, concurs that “the academic pressures to publish, and the breakdown of knowledge into “silos”, has contributed to this knowledge explosion and although the literature is now online and edited, much of this information is out of reach to the very brightest clinicians.”

Traditionally, organization of biomedical information has been the realm of the literature review, but most reviews are performed years after discoveries are made and, given the rapid pace of new discoveries, this is appearing to be an outdated model. In addition, most medical searches are dependent on keywords, hence adding more complexity to the investigator in finding the material they require. Third, medical researchers and professionals are recognizing the need to converse with each other, in real-time, on the impact new discoveries may have on their research and clinical practice.

These issues require a people-based strategy, having expertise in a diverse and cross-integrative number of medical topics to provide the in-depth understanding of the current research and challenges in each field as well as providing a more conceptual-based search platform. To address this need, human intermediaries, known as scientific curators, are needed to narrow down the information and provide critical context and analysis of medical and scientific information in an interactive manner powered by web 2.0 with curators referred to as the “researcher 2.0”. This curation offers better organization and visibility to the critical information useful for the next innovations in academic, clinical, and industrial research by providing these hybrid networks.

Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute was not confident that using details from past knowledge could produce adequate roadmaps for future experimentation and noted for the article, “ “The expectation that the accumulation of details will tell us what we want to know is not well justified.”

In a recent post I had curated findings from four lung cancer omics studies and presented some graphic on bioinformatic analysis of the novel genetic mutations resulting from these studies (see link below)

Multiple Lung Cancer Genomic Projects Suggest New Targets, Research Directions for

Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

which showed, that while multiple genetic mutations and related pathway ontologies were well documented in the lung cancer literature there existed many significant genetic mutations and pathways identified in the genomic studies but little literature attributed to these lung cancer-relevant mutations.

KEGGinliteroanalysislungcancer

  This ‘literomics’ analysis reveals a large gap between our knowledge base and the data resulting from large translational ‘omic’ studies.

Different Literature Analyses Approach Yeilding

A ‘literomics’ approach focuses on what we don NOT know about genes, proteins, and their associated pathways while a text-mining machine learning algorithm focuses on building a knowledge base to determine the next line of research or what needs to be measured. Using each approach can give us different perspectives on ‘omics data.

Deriving Casual Inference

Ras is one of the best studied and characterized oncogenes and the mechanisms behind Ras-driven oncogenenis is highly understood.   This, according to computational biologist Larry Hunt of Smart Information Flow Technologies makes Ras a great starting point for the Big Mechanism project. As he states,” Molecular biology is a good place to try (developing a machine learning algorithm) because it’s an area in which common sense plays a minor role”.

Even though some may think the project wouldn’t be able to tackle on other mechanisms which involve epigenetic factors UCLA’s expert in causality Judea Pearl, Ph.D. (head of UCLA Cognitive Systems Lab) feels it is possible for machine learning to bridge this gap. As summarized from his lecture at Microsoft:

“The development of graphical models and the logic of counterfactuals have had a marked effect on the way scientists treat problems involving cause-effect relationships. Practical problems requiring causal information, which long were regarded as either metaphysical or unmanageable can now be solved using elementary mathematics. Moreover, problems that were thought to be purely statistical, are beginning to benefit from analyzing their causal roots.”

According to him first

1) articulate assumptions

2) define research question in counter-inference terms

Then it is possible to design an inference system using calculus that tells the investigator what they need to measure.

To watch a video of Dr. Judea Pearl’s April 2013 lecture at Microsoft Research Machine Learning Summit 2013 (“The Mathematics of Causal Inference: with Reflections on Machine Learning”), click here.

The key for the Big Mechansism Project may me be in correcting for the variables among studies, in essence building a models system which may not rely on fully controlled conditions. Dr. Peter Spirtes from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA is developing a project called the TETRAD project with two goals: 1) to specify and prove under what conditions it is possible to reliably infer causal relationships from background knowledge and statistical data not obtained under fully controlled conditions 2) develop, analyze, implement, test and apply practical, provably correct computer programs for inferring causal structure under conditions where this is possible.

In summary such projects and algorithms will provide investigators the what, and possibly the how should be measured.

So for now it seems we are still needed.

References

  1. You J: Artificial intelligence. DARPA sets out to automate research. Science 2015, 347(6221):465.
  2. Biocuration 2014: Battle of the New Curation Methods [http://blog.abigailcabunoc.com/biocuration-2014-battle-of-the-new-curation-methods]
  3. Davis AP, Johnson RJ, Lennon-Hopkins K, Sciaky D, Rosenstein MC, Wiegers TC, Mattingly CJ: Targeted journal curation as a method to improve data currency at the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. Database : the journal of biological databases and curation 2012, 2012:bas051.
  4. Wu CH, Arighi CN, Cohen KB, Hirschman L, Krallinger M, Lu Z, Mattingly C, Valencia A, Wiegers TC, John Wilbur W: BioCreative-2012 virtual issue. Database : the journal of biological databases and curation 2012, 2012:bas049.
  5. Wiegers TC, Davis AP, Mattingly CJ: Collaborative biocuration–text-mining development task for document prioritization for curation. Database : the journal of biological databases and curation 2012, 2012:bas037.

Other posts on this site on include: Artificial Intelligence, Curation Methodology, Philosophy of Science

Inevitability of Curation: Scientific Publishing moves to embrace Open Data, Libraries and Researchers are trying to keep up

A Brief Curation of Proteomics, Metabolomics, and Metabolism

The Methodology of Curation for Scientific Research Findings

Scientific Curation Fostering Expert Networks and Open Innovation: Lessons from Clive Thompson and others

The growing importance of content curation

Data Curation is for Big Data what Data Integration is for Small Data

Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Co-Curation The Art of Scientific & Medical Curation

Exploring the Impact of Content Curation on Business Goals in 2013

Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison

conceived: NEW Definition for Co-Curation in Medical Research

Reconstructed Science Communication for Open Access Online Scientific Curation

Search Results for ‘artificial intelligence’

 The Simple Pictures Artificial Intelligence Still Can’t Recognize

Data Scientist on a Quest to Turn Computers Into Doctors

Vinod Khosla: “20% doctor included”: speculations & musings of a technology optimist or “Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do”

Where has reason gone?

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  • Oracle Industry Connect Presents Their 2015 Life Sciences and Healthcare Program

 

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D. and Aviva Lev-Ari, Ph.D., R.N.

oraclehealthcare

Copyright photo Oracle Inc. (TM)

 

Transforming Clinical Research and Clinical Care with Data-Driven Intelligence

March 25-26 Washington, DC

For more information click on the following LINK:

https://www.oracle.com/oracleindustryconnect/life-sciences-healthcare.html

oracle-healthcare-solutions-br-1526409

https://www.oracle.com/industries/health-sciences/index.html  

Oracle Health Sciences: Life Sciences & HealthCare — the Solutions for Big Data

Healthcare and life sciences organizations are facing unprecedented challenges to improve drug development and efficacy while driving toward more targeted and personalized drugs, devices, therapies, and care. Organizations are facing an urgent need to meet the unique demands of patients, regulators, and payers, necessitating a move toward a more patient-centric, value-driven, and personalized healthcare ecosystem.

Meeting these challenges requires redesigning clinical R&D processes, drug therapies, and care delivery through innovative software solutions, IT systems, data analysis, and bench-to-bedside knowledge. The core mission is to improve the health, well-being, and lives of people globally by:

  • Optimizing clinical research and development, speeding time to market, reducing costs, and mitigating risk
  • Accelerating efficiency by using business analytics, costing, and performance management technologies

 

  • Establishing a global infrastructure for collaborative clinical discovery and care delivery models
  • Scaling innovations with world-class, transformative technology solutions
  • Harnessing the power of big data to improve patient experience and outcomes

The Oracle Industry Connect health sciences program features 15 sessions showcasing innovation and transformation of clinical R&D, value-based healthcare, and personalized medicine.

The health sciences program is an invitation-only event for senior-level life sciences and healthcare business and IT executives.

Complete your registration and book your hotel reservation prior to February 27, 2015 in order to secure the Oracle discounted hotel rate.

Learn more about Oracle Healthcare.

General Welcome and Joint Program Agenda

Wednesday, March 25

10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Oracle Industry Connect Opening Keynote

Mark Hurd, Chief Executive Officer, Oracle

Bob Weiler, Executive Vice President, Global Business Units, Oracle

Warren Berger, Author of “A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.”

12:00 p.m.–1:45 p.m.

Networking Lunch

1:45 p.m.–2:45 p.m.

Oracle Industry Connect Keynote

Bob Weiler, Executive Vice President, Global Business Units, Oracle

2:45 p.m.–3:45 p.m.

Networking Break

3:45 p.m.–5:45 p.m.

Life Sciences and Healthcare General Session

Robert Robbins, President, Chief Executive Officer, Texas Medical Center

Steve Rosenberg, Senior Vice President and General Manager Health Sciences Global Business Unit, Oracle

7:00 p.m.–10:00 p.m.

Life Sciences and Healthcare Networking Reception

National Museum of American History
14th Street and Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington DC 20001

Life Sciences Agenda

Thursday, March 26

7:00 a.m.–8:00 a.m.

Networking Breakfast

8:00 a.m.–9:15 a.m.

Digital Trials and Research Models of the Future 

Markus Christen, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Development, Proteus

Praveen Raja, Senior Director of Medical Affairs, Proteus Digital Health

Michael Stapleton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, R&D IT, Merck

9:15 a.m.–10:30 a.m.

Driving Patient Engagement and the Internet of Things 

Howard Golub, Vice President of Clinical Research, Walgreens

Jean-Remy Behaeghel, Senior Director, Client Account Management, Product Development Solutions, Vertex Pharmaceuticals

10:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m.

Break

10:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m.

Leveraging Data and Advanced Analytics to Enable True Pharmacovigilance and Risk Management 

Leonard Reyno, Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer, Agensys

 

Accelerating Therapeutic Development Through New Technologies 

Andrew Rut, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder and Director, MyMeds&Me

12:45 a.m.–1:45 p.m.

Networking Lunch

1:45 p.m.–2:30 p.m.

Oracle Industry Connect Keynote

2:30 p.m.–2:45 p.m.

Break

2:45 p.m.–3:15 p.m.

Harnessing Big Data to Increase R&D Innovation, Efficiency, and Collaboration 

Sandy Tremps, Executive Director, Global Clinical Development IT, Merck

3:15 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

Break

3:30 p.m.–4:45 p.m.

Transforming Clinical Research from Planning to Postmarketing 

Kenneth Getz, Director of Sponsored Research Programs and Research Associate Professor, Tufts University

Jason Raines, Head, Global Data Operations, Alcon Laboratories

4:45 p.m.–6:00 p.m.

Increasing Efficiency and Pipeline Performance Through Sponsor/CRO Data Transparency and Cloud Collaboration 

Thomas Grundstrom, Vice President, ICONIK, Cross Functional IT Strategies and Innovation, ICON

Margaret Keegan, Senior Vice President, Global Head Data Sciences and Strategy, Quintiles

6:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.

Oracle Customer Networking Event

Healthcare Agenda

Thursday, March 26

7:00 a.m.–8:15 a.m.

Networking Breakfast

8:30 a.m.–9:15 a.m.

Population Health: A Core Competency for Providers in a Post Fee-for-Service Model 

Margaret Anderson, Executive Director, FasterCures

Balaji Apparsamy, Director, Business Intellegence, Baycare

Leslie Kelly Hall, Senior Vice President, Policy, Healthwise

Peter Pronovost, Senior Vice President, Patient Safety & Quality, Johns Hopkins

Sanjay Udoshi, Healthcare Product Strategy, Oracle

9:15 a.m.–9:30 a.m.

Break

9:30 a.m.–10:15 a.m.

Population Health: A Core Competency for Providers in a Post Fee-for-Service Model (Continued)

10:15 a.m.–10:45 a.m.

Networking Break

10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.

Managing Cost of Care in the Era of Healthcare Reform 

Chris Bruerton, Director, Budgeting, Intermountain Healthcare

Tony Byram, Vice President Business Integration, Ascension

Kerri-Lynn Morris, Executive Director, Finance Operations and Strategic Projects, Kaiser Permanente

Kavita Patel, Managing Director, Clinical Transformation, Brookings Institute

Christine Santos, Chief of Strategic Business Analytics, Providence Health & Services

Prashanth Kini, Senior Director, Healthcare Product Strategy, Oracle

11:30 a.m.–11:45 a.m.

Break

11:45 a.m.–12:45 p.m.

Managing Cost of Care in the Era of Healthcare Reform (Continued)

12:45 p.m.–1:45 p.m.

Networking Lunch

1:45 p.m.–2:30 p.m.

Oracle Industry Connect Keynote

2:30 p.m.–2:45 p.m.

Break

2:45 p.m.–3:30 p.m.

Precision Medicine 

Annerose Berndt, Vice President, Analytics and Information, UPMC

James Buntrock, Vice Chair, Information Management and Analytics, Mayo Clinic

Dan Ford, Vice Dean for Clinical Investigation, Johns Hopkins Medicine

Jan Hazelzet, Chief Medical Information Officer, Erasmus MC

Stan Huff, Chief Medical Information Officer, Intermountain Healthcare

Vineesh Khanna, Director, Biomedical Informatics, SIDRA

Brian Wells, Vice President, Health Technology, Penn Medicine

Wanmei Ou, Senior Product Strategist, Healthcare, Oracle

3:30 p.m.–3:45 p.m.

Networking Break

3:45 p.m.–4:30 p.m.

Precision Medicine (Continued)

4:30 p.m.–4:45 p.m.

Break

6:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.

Oracle Customer Networking Event

Additional Links to Oracle Pharma, Life Sciences and HealthCare

 
Life Sciences | Industry | Oracle <http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/overview/>

http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/overview/

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle Applications for Life Sciences deliver a powerful combination of technology and preintegrated applications.

  • Clinical

<http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/clinical/overview/index.html>

  • Medical Devices

<http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/medical/overview/index.html>

  • Pharmaceuticals

<http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/pharmaceuticals/overview/index.html>

 
Life Sciences Solutions | Pharmaceuticals and … – Oracle <http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/solutions/index.html>

http://www.oracle.com  Industries  Life Sciences

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Life Sciences Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology.

 
Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub – Overview | Oracle <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/health-sciences/e-clinical/data-hub/index.html>

http://www.oracle.com  …  E-Clinical Solutions

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle Life Sciences Data Hub. Better Insights, More Informed Decision-Making. Provides an integrated environment for clinical data, improving regulatory …

 
Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology | Oracle Life Sciences <http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/pharmaceuticals/overview/index.html>

http://www.oracle.com/us/…/life-sciences/…/index.html

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle Applications for Pharmaceuticals and Biotechnology deliver a powerful combination of technology and preintegrated applications.

 
Oracle Health Sciences – Healthcare and Life Sciences … <https://www.oracle.com/industries/health-sciences/>

https://www.oracle.com/industries/health-sciences/

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle Health Sciences leverages industry-shaping technologies that optimize clinical R&D, mitigate risk, advance healthcare, and improve patient outcomes.

 
Clinical | Oracle Life Sciences | Oracle <http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/clinical/overview/index.html>

http://www.oracle.com  Industries  Life Sciences  Clinical

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle for Clinical Applications provides an integrated remote data collection facility for site-based entry.

 
Oracle Life Sciences | Knowledge Zone | Oracle … <http://www.oracle.com/partners/en/products/industries/life-sciences/get-started/index.html>

http://www.oracle.com/partners/…/life-sciences/…/index.ht&#8230;

 
Oracle Corporation

 
This Knowledge Zone was specifically developed for partners interested in reselling or specializing in Oracle Life Sciences solutions. To become a specialized …

 
[PDF]Brochure: Oracle Health Sciences Suite of Life Sciences … <http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/life-sciences/oracle-life-sciences-solutions-br-414127.pdf>

http://www.oracle.com/…/life-sciences/oracle-life-sciences-s&#8230;

 
Oracle Corporation

 
Oracle Health Sciences Suite of. Life Sciences Solutions. Integrated Solutions for Global Clinical Trials. Oracle Health Sciences provides the world’s broadest set …

 

 

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Twitter is Becoming a Powerful Tool in Science and Medicine

 Curator: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

Updated 4/2016

Life-cycle of Science 2

A recent Science article (Who are the science stars of Twitter?; Sept. 19, 2014) reported the top 50 scientists followed on Twitter. However, the article tended to focus on the use of Twitter as a means to develop popularity, a sort of “Science Kardashian” as they coined it. So the writers at Science developed a “Kardashian Index (K-Index) to determine scientists following and popularity on Twitter.

Now as much buzz Kim Kardashian or a Perez Hilton get on social media, their purpose is solely for entertainment and publicity purposes, the Science sort of fell flat in that it focused mainly on the use of Twitter as a metric for either promotional or public outreach purposes. A notable scientist was mentioned in the article, using Twitter feed to gauge the receptiveness of his presentation. In addition, relying on Twitter for effective public discourse of science is problematic as:

  • Twitter feeds are rapidly updated and older feeds quickly get buried within the “Twittersphere” = LIMITED EXPOSURE TIMEFRAME
  • Short feeds may not provide the access to appropriate and understandable scientific information (The Science Communication Trap) which is explained in The Art of Communicating Science: traps, tips and tasks for the modern-day scientist. “The challenge of clearly communicating the intended scientific message to the public is not insurmountable but requires an understanding of what works and what does not work.” – from Heidi Roop, G.-Martinez-Mendez and K. Mills

However, as highlighted below, Twitter, and other social media platforms are being used in creative ways to enhance the research, medical, and bio investment collaborative, beyond a simple news-feed.  And the power of Twitter can be attributed to two simple features

  1. Ability to organize – through use of the hashtag (#) and handle (@), Twitter assists in the very important task of organizing, indexing, and ANNOTATING content and conversations. A very great article on Why the Hashtag in Probably the Most Powerful Tool on Twitter by Vanessa Doctor explains how hashtags and # search may be as popular as standard web-based browser search. Thorough annotation is crucial for any curation process, which are usually in the form of database tags or keywords. The use of # and @ allows curators to quickly find, index and relate disparate databases to link annotated information together. The discipline of scientific curation requires annotation to assist in the digital preservation, organization, indexing, and access of data and scientific & medical literature. For a description of scientific curation methodologies please see the following links:

Please read the following articles on CURATION

The Methodology of Curation for Scientific Research Findings

Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison

Science and Curation: The New Practice of Web 2.0

  1. Information Analytics

Multiple analytic software packages have been made available to analyze information surrounding Twitter feeds, including Twitter feeds from #chat channels one can set up to cover a meeting, product launch etc.. Some of these tools include:

Twitter Analytics – measures metrics surrounding Tweets including retweets, impressions, engagement, follow rate, …

Twitter Analytics – Hashtags.org – determine most impactful # for your Tweets For example, meeting coverage of bioinvestment conferences or startup presentations using #startup generates automatic retweeting by Startup tweetbot @StartupTweetSF.

 

  1. Tweet Sentiment Analytics

Examples of Twitter Use

A. Scientific Meeting Coverage

In a paper entitled Twitter Use at a Family Medicine Conference: Analyzing #STFM13 authors Ranit Mishori, MD, Frendan Levy, MD, and Benjamin Donvan analyzed the public tweets from the 2013 Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM) conference bearing the meeting-specific hashtag #STFM13. Thirteen percent of conference attendees (181 users) used the #STFM13 to share their thoughts on the meeting (1,818 total tweets) showing a desire for social media interaction at conferences but suggesting growth potential in this area. As we have also seen, the heaviest volume of conference-tweets originated from a small number of Twitter users however most tweets were related to session content.

However, as the authors note, although it is easy to measure common metrics such as number of tweets and retweets, determining quality of engagement from tweets would be important for gauging the value of Twitter-based social-media coverage of medical conferences.

Thea authors compared their results with similar analytics generated by the HealthCare Hashtag Project, a project and database of medically-related hashtag use, coordinated and maintained by the company Symplur.  Symplur’s database includes medical and scientific conference Twitter coverage but also Twitter usuage related to patient care. In this case the database was used to compare meeting tweets and hashtag use with the 2012 STFM conference.

These are some of the published journal articles that have employed Symplur (www.symplur.com) data in their research of Twitter usage in medical conferences.

B. Twitter Usage for Patient Care and Engagement

Although the desire of patients to use and interact with their physicians over social media is increasing, along with increasing health-related social media platforms and applications, there are certain obstacles to patient-health provider social media interaction, including lack of regulatory framework as well as database and security issues. Some of the successes and issues of social media and healthcare are discussed in the post Can Mobile Health Apps Improve Oral-Chemotherapy Adherence? The Benefit of Gamification.

However there is also a concern if social media truly engages the patient and improves patient education. In a study of Twitter communications by breast cancer patients Tweeting about breast cancer, authors noticed Tweeting was a singular event. The majority of tweets did not promote any specific preventive behavior. The authors concluded “Twitter is being used mostly as a one-way communication tool.” (Using Twitter for breast cancer prevention: an analysis of breast cancer awareness month. Thackeray R1, Burton SH, Giraud-Carrier C, Rollins S, Draper CR. BMC Cancer. 2013;13:508).

In addition a new poll by Harris Interactive and HealthDay shows one third of patients want some mobile interaction with their physicians.

Some papers cited in Symplur’s HealthCare Hashtag Project database on patient use of Twitter include:

C. Twitter Use in Pharmacovigilance to Monitor Adverse Events

Pharmacovigilance is the systematic detection, reporting, collecting, and monitoring of adverse events pre- and post-market of a therapeutic intervention (drug, device, modality e.g.). In a Cutting Edge Information Study, 56% of pharma companies databases are an adverse event channel and more companies are turning to social media to track adverse events (in Pharmacovigilance Teams Turn to Technology for Adverse Event Reporting Needs). In addition there have been many reports (see Digital Drug Safety Surveillance: Monitoring Pharmaceutical Products in Twitter) that show patients are frequently tweeting about their adverse events.

There have been concerns with using Twitter and social media to monitor for adverse events. For example FDA funded a study where a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School and other academic centers examined more than 60,000 tweets, of which 4,401 were manually categorized as resembling adverse events and compared with the FDA pharmacovigilance databases. Problems associated with such social media strategy were inability to obtain extra, needed information from patients and difficulty in separating the relevant Tweets from irrelevant chatter.  The UK has launched a similar program called WEB-RADR to determine if monitoring #drug_reaction could be useful for monitoring adverse events. Many researchers have found the adverse-event related tweets “noisy” due to varied language but had noticed many people do understand some principles of causation including when adverse event subsides after discontinuing the drug.

However Dr. Clark Freifeld, Ph.D., from Boston University and founder of the startup Epidemico, feels his company has the algorithms that can separate out the true adverse events from the junk. According to their web site, their algorithm has high accuracy when compared to the FDA database. Dr. Freifeld admits that Twitter use for pharmacovigilance purposes is probably a starting point for further follow-up, as each patient needs to fill out the four-page forms required for data entry into the FDA database.

D. Use of Twitter in Big Data Analytics

Published on Aug 28, 2012

http://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i29…

Course: Information 290. Analyzing Big Data with Twitter
School of Information
UC Berkeley

Lecture 1: August 23, 2012

Course description:
How to store, process, analyze and make sense of Big Data is of increasing interest and importance to technology companies, a wide range of industries, and academic institutions. In this course, UC Berkeley professors and Twitter engineers will lecture on the most cutting-edge algorithms and software tools for data analytics as applied to Twitter microblog data. Topics will include applied natural language processing algorithms such as sentiment analysis, large scale anomaly detection, real-time search, information diffusion and outbreak detection, trend detection in social streams, recommendation algorithms, and advanced frameworks for distributed computing. Social science perspectives on analyzing social media will also be covered.

This is a hands-on project course in which students are expected to form teams to complete intensive programming and analytics projects using the real-world example of Twitter data and code bases. Engineers from Twitter will help advise student projects, and students will have the option of presenting their final project presentations to an audience of engineers at the headquarters of Twitter in San Francisco (in addition to on campus). Project topics include building on existing infrastructure tools, building Twitter apps, and analyzing Twitter data. Access to data will be provided.

Other posts on this site on USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND TWITTER IN HEALTHCARE and Conference Coverage include:

Methodology for Conference Coverage using Social Media: 2014 MassBio Annual Meeting 4/3 – 4/4 2014, Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, MA

Strategy for Event Joint Promotion: 14th ANNUAL BIOTECH IN EUROPE FORUM For Global Partnering & Investment 9/30 – 10/1/2014 • Congress Center Basel – SACHS Associates, London

REAL TIME Cancer Conference Coverage: A Novel Methodology for Authentic Reporting on Presentations and Discussions launched via Twitter.com @ The 2nd ANNUAL Sachs Cancer Bio Partnering & Investment Forum in Drug Development, 19th March 2014 • New York Academy of Sciences • USA

PCCI’s 7th Annual Roundtable “Crowdfunding for Life Sciences: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters?” May 12 2014 Embassy Suites Hotel, Chesterbrook PA 6:00-9:30 PM

CRISPR-Cas9 Discovery and Development of Programmable Genome Engineering – Gabbay Award Lectures in Biotechnology and Medicine – Hosted by Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, 10/27/14 3:30PM Brandeis University, Gerstenzang 121

Tweeting on 14th ANNUAL BIOTECH IN EUROPE FORUM For Global Partnering & Investment 9/30 – 10/1/2014 • Congress Center Basel – SACHS Associates, London

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/press-coverage/

Statistical Analysis of Tweet Feeds from the 14th ANNUAL BIOTECH IN EUROPE FORUM For Global Partnering & Investment 9/30 – 10/1/2014 • Congress Center Basel – SACHS Associates, London

1st Pitch Life Science- Philadelphia- What VCs Really Think of your Pitch

What VCs Think about Your Pitch? Panel Summary of 1st Pitch Life Science Philly

How Social Media, Mobile Are Playing a Bigger Part in Healthcare

Can Mobile Health Apps Improve Oral-Chemotherapy Adherence? The Benefit of Gamification.

Medical Applications and FDA regulation of Sensor-enabled Mobile Devices: Apple and the Digital Health Devices Market

E-Medical Records Get A Mobile, Open-Sourced Overhaul By White House Health Design Challenge Winners

Read Full Post »

Scientific Curation Fostering Expert Networks and Open Innovation: Lessons from Clive Thompson

Life-cycle of Science 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Curators and Writer: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D. with input from Curators Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Dr. Justin D. Pearlman, MD, PhD, FACC and Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

(this discussion is in a three part series including:

Using Scientific Content Curation as a Method for Validation and Biocuration

Using Scientific Content Curation as a Method for Open Innovation)

 

Every month I get my Wired Magazine (yes in hard print, I still like to turn pages manually plus I don’t mind if I get grease or wing sauce on my magazine rather than on my e-reader) but I always love reading articles written by Clive Thompson. He has a certain flair for understanding the techno world we live in and the human/technology interaction, writing about interesting ways in which we almost inadvertently integrate new technologies into our day-to-day living, generating new entrepreneurship, new value.   He also writes extensively about tech and entrepreneurship.

October 2013 Wired article by Clive Thompson, entitled “How Successful Networks Nurture Good Ideas: Thinking Out Loud”, describes how the voluminous writings, postings, tweets, and sharing on social media is fostering connections between people and ideas which, previously, had not existed. The article was generated from Clive Thompson’s book Smarter Than you Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.Tom Peters also commented about the article in his blog (see here).

Clive gives a wonderful example of Ory Okolloh, a young Kenyan-born law student who, after becoming frustrated with the lack of coverage of problems back home, started a blog about Kenyan politics. Her blog not only got interest from movie producers who were documenting female bloggers but also gained the interest of fellow Kenyans who, during the upheaval after the 2007 Kenyan elections, helped Ory to develop a Google map for reporting of violence (http://www.ushahidi.com/, which eventually became a global organization using open-source technology to affect crises-management. There are a multitude of examples how networks and the conversations within these circles are fostering new ideas. As Clive states in the article:

 

Our ideas are PRODUCTS OF OUR ENVIRONMENT.

They are influenced by the conversations around us.

However the article got me thinking of how Science 2.0 and the internet is changing how scientists contribute, share, and make connections to produce new and transformative ideas.

But HOW MUCH Knowledge is OUT THERE?

 

Clive’s article listed some amazing facts about the mountains of posts, tweets, words etc. out on the internet EVERY DAY, all of which exemplifies the problem:

  • 154.6 billion EMAILS per DAY
  • 400 million TWEETS per DAY
  • 1 million BLOG POSTS (including this one) per DAY
  • 2 million COMMENTS on WordPress per DAY
  • 16 million WORDS on Facebook per DAY
  • TOTAL 52 TRILLION WORDS per DAY

As he estimates this would be 520 million books per DAY (book with average 100,000 words).

A LOT of INFO. But as he suggests it is not the volume but how we create and share this information which is critical as the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon noted “Ninety percent of everything is crap” AKA Sturgeon’s Law.

 

Internet live stats show how congested the internet is each day (http://www.internetlivestats.com/). Needless to say Clive’s numbers are a bit off. As of the writing of this article:

 

  • 2.9 billion internet users
  • 981 million websites (only 25,000 hacked today)
  • 128 billion emails
  • 385 million Tweets
  • > 2.7 million BLOG posts today (including this one)

 

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of the Scientific Internet (The Wild West?)

 

So how many science blogs are out there? Well back in 2008 “grrlscientistasked this question and turned up a total of 19,881 blogs however most were “pseudoscience” blogs, not written by Ph.D or MD level scientists. A deeper search on Technorati using the search term “scientist PhD” turned up about 2,000 written by trained scientists.

So granted, there is a lot of

goodbadugly

 

              ….. when it comes to scientific information on the internet!

 

 

 

 

 

I had recently re-posted, on this site, a great example of how bad science and medicine can get propagated throughout the internet:

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2014/06/17/the-gonzalez-protocol-worse-than-useless-for-pancreatic-cancer/

 

and in a Nature Report:Stem cells: Taking a stand against pseudoscience

http://www.nature.com/news/stem-cells-taking-a-stand-against-pseudoscience-1.15408

Drs.Elena Cattaneo and Gilberto Corbellini document their long, hard fight against false and invalidated medical claims made by some “clinicians” about the utility and medical benefits of certain stem-cell therapies, sacrificing their time to debunk medical pseudoscience.

 

Using Curation and Science 2.0 to build Trusted, Expert Networks of Scientists and Clinicians

 

Establishing networks of trusted colleagues has been a cornerstone of the scientific discourse for centuries. For example, in the mid-1640s, the Royal Society began as:

 

“a meeting of natural philosophers to discuss promoting knowledge of the

natural world through observation and experiment”, i.e. science.

The Society met weekly to witness experiments and discuss what we

would now call scientific topics. The first Curator of Experiments

was Robert Hooke.”

 

from The History of the Royal Society

 

Royal Society CoatofArms

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge.

(photo credit: Royal Society)

(Although one wonders why they met “in-cognito”)

Indeed as discussed in “Science 2.0/Brainstorming” by the originators of OpenWetWare, an open-source science-notebook software designed to foster open-innovation, the new search and aggregation tools are making it easier to find, contribute, and share information to interested individuals. This paradigm is the basis for the shift from Science 1.0 to Science 2.0. Science 2.0 is attempting to remedy current drawbacks which are hindering rapid and open scientific collaboration and discourse including:

  • Slow time frame of current publishing methods: reviews can take years to fashion leading to outdated material
  • Level of information dissemination is currently one dimensional: peer-review, highly polished work, conferences
  • Current publishing does not encourage open feedback and review
  • Published articles edited for print do not take advantage of new web-based features including tagging, search-engine features, interactive multimedia, no hyperlinks
  • Published data and methodology incomplete
  • Published data not available in formats which can be readably accessible across platforms: gene lists are now mandated to be supplied as files however other data does not have to be supplied in file format

(put in here a brief blurb of summary of problems and why curation could help)

 

Curation in the Sciences: View from Scientific Content Curators Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Dr. Justin D. Pearlman, MD, PhD, FACC and Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Curation is an active filtering of the web’s  and peer reviewed literature found by such means – immense amount of relevant and irrelevant content. As a result content may be disruptive. However, in doing good curation, one does more than simply assign value by presentation of creative work in any category. Great curators comment and share experience across content, authors and themes. Great curators may see patterns others don’t, or may challenge or debate complex and apparently conflicting points of view.  Answers to specifically focused questions comes from the hard work of many in laboratory settings creatively establishing answers to definitive questions, each a part of the larger knowledge-base of reference. There are those rare “Einstein’s” who imagine a whole universe, unlike the three blind men of the Sufi tale.  One held the tail, the other the trunk, the other the ear, and they all said this is an elephant!
In my reading, I learn that the optimal ratio of curation to creation may be as high as 90% curation to 10% creation. Creating content is expensive. Curation, by comparison, is much less expensive.

– Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

Curation is Uniquely Distinguished by the Historical Exploratory Ties that Bind –Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

The explosion of information by numerous media, hardcopy and electronic, written and video, has created difficulties tracking topics and tying together relevant but separated discoveries, ideas, and potential applications. Some methods to help assimilate diverse sources of knowledge include a content expert preparing a textbook summary, a panel of experts leading a discussion or think tank, and conventions moderating presentations by researchers. Each of those methods has value and an audience, but they also have limitations, particularly with respect to timeliness and pushing the edge. In the electronic data age, there is a need for further innovation, to make synthesis, stimulating associations, synergy and contrasts available to audiences in a more timely and less formal manner. Hence the birth of curation. Key components of curation include expert identification of data, ideas and innovations of interest, expert interpretation of the original research results, integration with context, digesting, highlighting, correlating and presenting in novel light.

Justin D Pearlman, MD, PhD, FACC from The Voice of Content Consultant on The  Methodology of Curation in Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Co-Curation The Art of Scientific & Medical Curation

 

In Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison, Drs. Larry Bernstein and Aviva Lev-Ari likens the medical and scientific curation process to curation of musical works into a thematic program:

 

Work of Original Music Curation and Performance:

 

Music Review and Critique as a Curation

Work of Original Expression what is the methodology of Curation in the context of Medical Research Findings Exposition of Synthesis and Interpretation of the significance of the results to Clinical Care

… leading to new, curated, and collaborative works by networks of experts to generate (in this case) ebooks on most significant trends and interpretations of scientific knowledge as relates to medical practice.

 

In Summary: How Scientific Content Curation Can Help

 

Given the aforementioned problems of:

        I.            the complex and rapid deluge of scientific information

      II.            the need for a collaborative, open environment to produce transformative innovation

    III.            need for alternative ways to disseminate scientific findings

CURATION MAY OFFER SOLUTIONS

        I.            Curation exists beyond the review: curation decreases time for assessment of current trends adding multiple insights, analyses WITH an underlying METHODOLOGY (discussed below) while NOT acting as mere reiteration, regurgitation

 

      II.            Curation providing insights from WHOLE scientific community on multiple WEB 2.0 platforms

 

    III.            Curation makes use of new computational and Web-based tools to provide interoperability of data, reporting of findings (shown in Examples below)

 

Therefore a discussion is given on methodologies, definitions of best practices, and tools developed to assist the content curation community in this endeavor.

Methodology in Scientific Content Curation as Envisioned by Aviva lev-Ari, PhD, RN

 

At Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence, site owner and chief editor Aviva lev-Ari, PhD, RN has been developing a strategy “for the facilitation of Global access to Biomedical knowledge rather than the access to sheer search results on Scientific subject matters in the Life Sciences and Medicine”. According to Aviva, “for the methodology to attain this complex goal it is to be dealing with popularization of ORIGINAL Scientific Research via Content Curation of Scientific Research Results by Experts, Authors, Writers using the critical thinking process of expert interpretation of the original research results.” The following post:

Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Curation and Co-Curation

 

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/07/29/cardiovascular-original-research-cases-in-methodology-design-for-content-curation-and-co-curation/

demonstrate two examples how content co-curation attempts to achieve this aim and develop networks of scientist and clinician curators to aid in the active discussion of scientific and medical findings, and use scientific content curation as a means for critique offering a “new architecture for knowledge”. Indeed, popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or even scientific search engines such as NCBI’s PubMed and the OVID search engine rely on keywords and Boolean algorithms …

which has created a need for more context-driven scientific search and discourse.

In Science and Curation: the New Practice of Web 2.0, Célya Gruson-Daniel (@HackYourPhd) states:

To address this need, human intermediaries, empowered by the participatory wave of web 2.0, naturally started narrowing down the information and providing an angle of analysis and some context. They are bloggers, regular Internet users or community managers – a new type of profession dedicated to the web 2.0. A new use of the web has emerged, through which the information, once produced, is collectively spread and filtered by Internet users who create hierarchies of information.

.. where Célya considers curation an essential practice to manage open science and this new style of research.

As mentioned above in her article, Dr. Lev-Ari represents two examples of how content curation expanded thought, discussion, and eventually new ideas.

  1. Curator edifies content through analytic process = NEW form of writing and organizations leading to new interconnections of ideas = NEW INSIGHTS

i)        Evidence: curation methodology leading to new insights for biomarkers

 

  1. Same as #1 but multiple players (experts) each bringing unique insights, perspectives, skills yielding new research = NEW LINE of CRITICAL THINKING

ii)      Evidence: co-curation methodology among cardiovascular experts leading to cardiovascular series ebooks

Life-cycle of Science 2

The Life Cycle of Science 2.0. Due to Web 2.0, new paradigms of scientific collaboration are rapidly emerging.  Originally, scientific discovery were performed by individual laboratories or “scientific silos” where the main method of communication was peer-reviewed publication, meeting presentation, and ultimately news outlets and multimedia. In this digital era, data was organized for literature search and biocurated databases. In an era of social media, Web 2.0, a group of scientifically and medically trained “curators” organize the piles of data of digitally generated data and fit data into an organizational structure which can be shared, communicated, and analyzed in a holistic approach, launching new ideas due to changes in organization structure of data and data analytics.

 

The result, in this case, is a collaborative written work above the scope of the review. Currently review articles are written by experts in the field and summarize the state of a research are. However, using collaborative, trusted networks of experts, the result is a real-time synopsis and analysis of the field with the goal in mind to

INCREASE THE SCIENTIFIC CURRENCY.

For detailed description of methodology please see Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Co-Curation The Art of Scientific & Medical Curation

 

In her paper, Curating e-Science Data, Maureen Pennock, from The British Library, emphasized the importance of using a diligent, validated, and reproducible, and cost-effective methodology for curation by e-science communities over the ‘Grid:

“The digital data deluge will have profound repercussions for the infrastructure of research and beyond. Data from a wide variety of new and existing sources will need to be annotated with metadata, then archived and curated so that both the data and the programmes used to transform the data can be reproduced for use in the future. The data represent a new foundation for new research, science, knowledge and discovery”

— JISC Senior Management Briefing Paper, The Data Deluge (2004)

 

As she states proper data and content curation is important for:

  • Post-analysis
  • Data and research result reuse for new research
  • Validation
  • Preservation of data in newer formats to prolong life-cycle of research results

However she laments the lack of

  • Funding for such efforts
  • Training
  • Organizational support
  • Monitoring
  • Established procedures

 

Tatiana Aders wrote a nice article based on an interview with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, where he emphasized the need for curation in a world where “Twitter is the replacement of the Associated Press Wire Machine” and new technologic platforms are knocking out old platforms at a rapid pace. In addition he notes that curation is also a social art form where primary concerns are to understand an audience and a niche.

Indeed, part of the reason the need for curation is unmet, as writes Mark Carrigan, is the lack of appreciation by academics of the utility of tools such as Pinterest, Storify, and Pearl Trees to effectively communicate and build collaborative networks.

And teacher Nancy White, in her article Understanding Content Curation on her blog Innovations in Education, shows examples of how curation in an educational tool for students and teachers by demonstrating students need to CONTEXTUALIZE what the collect to add enhanced value, using higher mental processes such as:

  • Knowledge
  • Comprehension
  • Application
  • Analysis
  • Synthesis
  • Evaluation

curating-tableA GREAT table about the differences between Collecting and Curating by Nancy White at http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/2012/07/07/understanding-content-curation/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

University of Massachusetts Medical School has aggregated some useful curation tools at http://esciencelibrary.umassmed.edu/data_curation

Although many tools are related to biocuration and building databases but the common idea is curating data with indexing, analyses, and contextual value to provide for an audience to generate NETWORKS OF NEW IDEAS.

See here for a curation of how networks fosters knowledge, by Erika Harrison on ScoopIt

(http://www.scoop.it/t/mobilizing-knowledge-through-complex-networks)

 

“Nowadays, any organization should employ network scientists/analysts who are able to map and analyze complex systems that are of importance to the organization (e.g. the organization itself, its activities, a country’s economic activities, transportation networks, research networks).”

Andrea Carafa insight from World Economic Forum New Champions 2012 “Power of Networks

 

Creating Content Curation Communities: Breaking Down the Silos!

 

An article by Dr. Dana Rotman “Facilitating Scientific Collaborations Through Content Curation Communities” highlights how scientific information resources, traditionally created and maintained by paid professionals, are being crowdsourced to professionals and nonprofessionals in which she termed “content curation communities”, consisting of professionals and nonprofessional volunteers who create, curate, and maintain the various scientific database tools we use such as Encyclopedia of Life, ChemSpider (for Slideshare see here), biowikipedia etc. Although very useful and openly available, these projects create their own challenges such as

  • information integration (various types of data and formats)
  • social integration (marginalized by scientific communities, no funding, no recognition)

The authors set forth some ways to overcome these challenges of the content curation community including:

  1. standardization in practices
  2. visualization to document contributions
  3. emphasizing role of information professionals in content curation communities
  4. maintaining quality control to increase respectability
  5. recognizing participation to professional communities
  6. proposing funding/national meeting – Data Intensive Collaboration in Science and Engineering Workshop

A few great presentations and papers from the 2012 DICOSE meeting are found below

Judith M. Brown, Robert Biddle, Stevenson Gossage, Jeff Wilson & Steven Greenspan. Collaboratively Analyzing Large Data Sets using Multitouch Surfaces. (PDF) NotesForBrown

 

Bill Howe, Cecilia Aragon, David Beck, Jeffrey P. Gardner, Ed Lazowska, Tanya McEwen. Supporting Data-Intensive Collaboration via Campus eScience Centers. (PDF) NotesForHowe

 

Kerk F. Kee & Larry D. Browning. Challenges of Scientist-Developers and Adopters of Existing Cyberinfrastructure Tools for Data-Intensive Collaboration, Computational Simulation, and Interdisciplinary Projects in Early e-Science in the U.S.. (PDF) NotesForKee

 

Ben Li. The mirages of big data. (PDF) NotesForLiReflectionsByBen

 

Betsy Rolland & Charlotte P. Lee. Post-Doctoral Researchers’ Use of Preexisting Data in Cancer Epidemiology Research. (PDF) NoteForRolland

 

Dana Rotman, Jennifer Preece, Derek Hansen & Kezia Procita. Facilitating scientific collaboration through content curation communities. (PDF) NotesForRotman

 

Nicholas M. Weber & Karen S. Baker. System Slack in Cyberinfrastructure Development: Mind the Gaps. (PDF) NotesForWeber

Indeed, the movement of Science 2.0 from Science 1.0 had originated because these “silos” had frustrated many scientists, resulting in changes in the area of publishing (Open Access) but also communication of protocols (online protocol sites and notebooks like OpenWetWare and BioProtocols Online) and data and material registries (CGAP and tumor banks). Some examples are given below.

Open Science Case Studies in Curation

1. Open Science Project from Digital Curation Center

This project looked at what motivates researchers to work in an open manner with regard to their data, results and protocols, and whether advantages are delivered by working in this way.

The case studies consider the benefits and barriers to using ‘open science’ methods, and were carried out between November 2009 and April 2010 and published in the report Open to All? Case studies of openness in research. The Appendices to the main report (pdf) include a literature review, a framework for characterizing openness, a list of examples, and the interview schedule and topics. Some of the case study participants kindly agreed to us publishing the transcripts. This zip archive contains transcripts of interviews with researchers in astronomy, bioinformatics, chemistry, and language technology.

 

see: Pennock, M. (2006). “Curating e-Science Data”. DCC Briefing Papers: Introduction to Curation. Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre. Handle: 1842/3330. Available online: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/introduction-curation– See more at: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/introduction-curation/curating-e-science-data#sthash.RdkPNi9F.dpuf

 

2.      cBIO -cBio’s biological data curation group developed and operates using a methodology called CIMS, the Curation Information Management System. CIMS is a comprehensive curation and quality control process that efficiently extracts information from publications.

 

3. NIH Topic Maps – This website provides a database and web-based interface for searching and discovering the types of research awarded by the NIH. The database uses automated, computer generated categories from a statistical analysis known as topic modeling.

 

4. SciKnowMine (USC)- We propose to create a framework to support biocuration called SciKnowMine (after ‘Scientific Knowledge Mine’), cyberinfrastructure that supports biocuration through the automated mining of text, images, and other amenable media at the scale of the entire literature.

 

  1. OpenWetWareOpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering. Learn more about us.   If you would like edit access, would be interested in helping out, or want your lab website hosted on OpenWetWare, pleasejoin us. OpenWetWare is managed by the BioBricks Foundation. They also have a wiki about Science 2.0.

6. LabTrove: a lightweight, web based, laboratory “blog” as a route towards a marked up record of work in a bioscience research laboratory. Authors in PLOS One article, from University of Southampton, report the development of an open, scientific lab notebook using a blogging strategy to share information.

7. OpenScience ProjectThe OpenScience project is dedicated to writing and releasing free and Open Source scientific software. We are a group of scientists, mathematicians and engineers who want to encourage a collaborative environment in which science can be pursued by anyone who is inspired to discover something new about the natural world.

8. Open Science Grid is a multi-disciplinary partnership to federate local, regional, community and national cyberinfrastructures to meet the needs of research and academic communities at all scales.

 

9. Some ongoing biomedical knowledge (curation) projects at ISI

IICurate
This project is concerned with developing a curation and documentation system for information integration in collaboration with the II Group at ISI as part of the BIRN.

BioScholar
It’s primary purpose is to provide software for experimental biomedical scientists that would permit a single scientific worker (at the level of a graduate student or postdoctoral worker) to design, construct and manage a shared knowledge repository for a research group derived on a local store of PDF files. This project is funded by NIGMS from 2008-2012 ( RO1-GM083871).

10. Tools useful for scientific content curation

 

Research Analytic and Curation Tools from University of Queensland

 

Thomson Reuters information curation services for pharma industry

 

Microblogs as a way to communicate information about HPV infection among clinicians and patients; use of Chinese microblog SinaWeibo as a communication tool

 

VIVO for scientific communities– In order to connect this information about research activities across institutions and make it available to others, taking into account smaller players in the research landscape and addressing their need for specific information (for example, by proving non-conventional research objects), the open source software VIVO that provides research information as linked open data (LOD) is used in many countries.  So-called VIVO harvesters collect research information that is freely available on the web, and convert the data collected in conformity with LOD standards. The VIVO ontology builds on prevalent LOD namespaces and, depending on the needs of the specialist community concerned, can be expanded.

 

 

11. Examples of scientific curation in different areas of Science/Pharma/Biotech/Education

 

From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0 Q&A with Hervé Basset

http://digimind.com/blog/experts/pharma-3-0/

Hervé Basset, specialist librarian in the pharmaceutical industry and owner of the blog “Science Intelligence“, to talk about the inspiration behind his recent book  entitled “From Science 2.0 to Pharma 3.0″, published by Chandos Publishing and available on Amazon and how health care companies need a social media strategy to communicate and convince the health-care consumer, not just the practicioner.

 

Thomson Reuters and NuMedii Launch Ground-Breaking Initiative to Identify Drugs for Repurposing. Companies leverage content, Big Data analytics and expertise to improve success of drug discovery

 

Content Curation as a Context for Teaching and Learning in Science

 

#OZeLIVE Feb2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty-ugUA4az0

Creative Commons license

 

DigCCur: A graduate level program initiated by University of North Carolina to instruct the future digital curators in science and other subjects

 

Syracuse University offering a program in eScience and digital curation

 

Curation Tips from TED talks and tech experts

Steven Rosenbaum from Curation Nation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpncJd1v1k4

 

Pawan Deshpande form Curata on how content curation communities evolve and what makes a good content curation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QENhIU9YZyA

 

How the Internet of Things is Promoting the Curation Effort

Update by Stephen J. Williams, PhD 3/01/19

Up till now, curation efforts like wikis (Wikipedia, Wikimedicine, Wormbase, GenBank, etc.) have been supported by a largely voluntary army of citizens, scientists, and data enthusiasts.  I am sure all have seen the requests for donations to help keep Wikipedia and its other related projects up and running.  One of the obscure sister projects of Wikipedia, Wikidata, wants to curate and represent all information in such a way in which both machines, computers, and humans can converse in.  About an army of 4 million have Wiki entries and maintain these databases.

Enter the Age of the Personal Digital Assistants (Hellooo Alexa!)

In a March 2019 WIRED article “Encyclopedia Automata: Where Alexa Gets Its Information”  senior WIRED writer Tom Simonite reports on the need for new types of data structure as well as how curated databases are so important for the new fields of AI as well as enabling personal digital assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant decipher meaning of the user.

As Mr. Simonite noted, many of our libraries of knowledge are encoded in an “ancient technology largely opaque to machines-prose.”   Search engines like Google do not have a problem with a question asked in prose as they just have to find relevant links to pages. Yet this is a problem for Google Assistant, for instance, as machines can’t quickly extract meaning from the internet’s mess of “predicates, complements, sentences, and paragraphs. It requires a guide.”

Enter Wikidata.  According to founder Denny Vrandecic,

Language depends on knowing a lot of common sense, which computers don’t have access to

A wikidata entry (of which there are about 60 million) codes every concept and item with a numeric code, the QID code number. These codes are integrated with tags (like tags you use on Twitter as handles or tags in WordPress used for Search Engine Optimization) so computers can identify patterns of recognition between these codes.

Now human entry into these databases are critical as we add new facts and in particular meaning to each of these items.  Else, machines have problems deciphering our meaning like Apple’s Siri, where they had complained of dumb algorithms to interpret requests.

The knowledge of future machines could be shaped by you and me, not just tech companies and PhDs.

But this effort needs money

Wikimedia’s executive director, Katherine Maher, had prodded and cajoled these megacorporations for tapping the free resources of Wiki’s.  In response, Amazon and Facebook had donated millions for the Wikimedia projects.  Google recently gave 3.1 million USD$ in donations.

 

Future postings on the relevance and application of scientific curation will include:

Using Scientific Content Curation as a Method for Validation and Biocuration

 

Using Scientific Content Curation as a Method for Open Innovation

 

Other posts on this site related to Content Curation and Methodology include:

The growing importance of content curation

Data Curation is for Big Data what Data Integration is for Small Data

6 Steps to More Effective Content Curation

Stem Cells and Cardiac Repair: Content Curation & Scientific Reporting

Cancer Research: Curations and Reporting

Cardiovascular Diseases and Pharmacological Therapy: Curations

Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Co-Curation The Art of Scientific & Medical Curation

Exploring the Impact of Content Curation on Business Goals in 2013

Power of Analogy: Curation in Music, Music Critique as a Curation and Curation of Medical Research Findings – A Comparison

conceived: NEW Definition for Co-Curation in Medical Research

The Young Surgeon and The Retired Pathologist: On Science, Medicine and HealthCare Policy – The Best Writers Among the WRITERS

Reconstructed Science Communication for Open Access Online Scientific Curation

 

 

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PCCI’s 7th Annual Roundtable “Crowdfunding for Life Sciences: A Bridge Over Troubled Waters?”

Reporter: Stephen J. Williams, Ph.D.

 

http://www.rxpcci.com/meetings.htm

Monday, May 12 2014 Embassy Suites Hotel, Chesterbrook PA 6:00 -9:30 PM

Pharmaceutical Consulting Consortium International Inc. presents their 7th annual Roundtable on Crowdfunding for the Life Sciences and how this funding mechanism applies to early stage life science companies and changes the funding landscape. The conference will examine the types of crowdfunding out there and attempts to answer many questions including:

  • Which one is right for which new companies at which stage of the funding process?
  • And how will choosing the right or wrong one influence follow-on funders and funding rounds?
  • Will the advent of crowdfunding speed up the investment process?
  • Will it really bridge the yawning “valley of death”?

The panel is made up of notables and practitioners who will be called upon to deal with the pros and cons of crowdfunding in real life and let them discuss how all this is likely to apply to life science entrepreneurs and investors.

The panel includes:

  1. Mark Roderick, Attorney Flaster/Greenberg PC (Moderator)
  2. Valerie Gaydos, President, Capital Growth (represents angel/venture community)
  3. Samuel Wertheimer, Chief Investment Officer, Poliwogg Darrick Mix
  4. Duane Morris, LLP (journalist who covers crowdfunding

Register by clicking on www.rxpcci.com and following directions The event will be webcast.

Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence had recently launched a new, real-time based methodology for meeting coverage using social media as a platform to foster discussion and commentary.

This methodology is described in the following post REAL TIME Cancer Conference Coverage: A Novel Methodology for Authentic Reporting on Presentations and Discussions launched via Twitter.com @ The 2nd ANNUAL Sachs Cancer Bio Partnering & Investment Forum in Drug Development, 19th March 2014 • New York Academy of Sciences • USA

This new method was successfully used and curated at the 2nd Annual Sachs Cancer Bio Partnering &Investment Forum at the New York Academy of Sciences and will be featured at the forthcoming Sachs Global Conferences in 2014 and 2015.

Related articles on this site include:

conceived: NEW Definition for Co-Curation in Medical Research

Cancer Biology and Genomics for Disease Diagnosis, Volume One Pre-ePub Announcement

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) as Biomarkers in Cancer Detection: • Alnion Ranked #1 in “Top 10 Israeli medical advances to watch in 2014”.

Investing and inventing: Is the Tango of Mars and Venus Still on

SACHS Associates, London – Planning Forthcoming Conferences: 2014 – 2015

 

 

 

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The Cost to Value Conundrum in Cardiovascular Healthcare Provision

The Cost to Value Conundrum in Cardiovascular Healthcare Provision

Author: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP

 

I write this introduction to Volume 2 of the e-series on Cardiovascular Diseases, which curates the basic structure and physiology of the heart, the vasculature, and related structures, e.g., the kidney, with respect to:

1. Pathogenesis
2. Diagnosis
3. Treatment

Curation is an introductory portion to Volume Two, which is necessary to introduce the methodological design used to create the following articles. More needs not to be discussed about the methodology, which will become clear, if only that the content curated is changing based on success or failure of both diagnostic and treatment technology availability, as well as the systems needed to support the ongoing advances.  Curation requires:

  • meaningful selection,
  • enrichment, and
  • sharing combining sources and
  • creation of new synnthesis

Curators have to create a new perspective or idea on top of the existing media which supports the content in the original. The curator has to select from the myriad upon myriad options available, to re-share and critically view the work. A search can be overwhelming in size of the output, but the curator has to successfully pluck the best material straight out of that noise.

Part 1 is a highly important treatment that is not technological, but about the system now outdated to support our healthcare system, the most technolog-ically advanced in the world, with major problems in the availability of care related to economic disparities.  It is not about technology, per se, but about how we allocate healthcare resources, about individuals’ roles in a not full list of lifestyle maintenance options for self-care, and about the important advances emerging out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), impacting enormously on Medicaid, which depends on state-level acceptance, on community hospital, ambulatory, and home-care or hospice restructuring, which includes the reduction of management overhead by the formation of regional healthcare alliances, the incorporation of physicians into hospital-based practices (with the hospital collecting and distributing the Part B reimbursement to the physician, with “performance-based” targets for privileges and payment – essential to the success of an Accountable Care Organization (AC)).  One problem that ACA has definitively address is the elimination of the exclusion of patients based on preconditions.  One problem that has been left unresolved is the continuing existence of private policies that meet financial capabilities of the contract to provide, but which provide little value to the “purchaser” of care.  This is a holdout that persists in for-profit managed care as an option.  A physician response to the new system of care, largely fostered by a refusal to accept Medicaid, is the formation of direct physician-patient contracted care without an intermediary.

In this respect, the problem is not simple, but is resolvable.  A proposal for improved economic stability has been prepared by Edward Ingram. A concern for American families and businesses is substantially addressed in a macroeconomic design concept, so that financial services like housing, government, and business finance, savings and pensions, boosting confidence at every level giving everyone a better chance of success in planning their personal savings and lifetime and business finances.

http://macro-economic-design.blogspot.com/p/book.html

Part 2 is a collection of scientific articles on the current advances in cardiac care by the best trained physicians the world has known, with mastery of the most advanced vascular instrumentation for medical or surgical interventions, the latest diagnostic ultrasound and imaging tools that are becoming outdated before the useful lifetime of the capital investment has been completed.  If we tie together Part 1 and Part 2, there is ample room for considering  clinical outcomes based on individual and organizational factors for best performance. This can really only be realized with considerable improvement in information infrastructure, which has miles to go.  Why should this be?  Because for generations of IT support systems, they are historically focused on billing and have made insignificant inroads into the front-end needs of the clinical staff.

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Curation is Uniquely Distinguished by the Historical Exploratory Ties that Bind

Author and Curator: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP

The description and definition of curation has been introduced in a Forward to Series A: e-Books on Cardiovascular DiseasesVolume Two, by Dr. Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN, the Founder of Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence’s  Scientific Journal http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com, acting as Curator, Co-Curator, and e-Publishing Article Architecture Designer and, chiefly, Editor-in-Chief of a Five e-Series in BioMed,

http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/

Forward to Volume Two

Volume Two: Cardiovascular Original Research: Cases in Methodology Design for Content Co-Curation

Curation is explained by it being contrasted with the Art of Scientific Creation, both are expored below by examples.

Part 1: The Scientific Creation

I shall try to identify the important features and criteria that contribute to scientific curation of medical, biological, and pharmaceutical research, including structural and functional content from the sciences of anatomy, physiology, physics and chemistry.

The principles that I seek to realized is a foundation in the body of knowledge that precedes the discovery or innovation.  Is the discovery essential, but unnoticed because of unlinkings to prior established concepts.  This is extremely difficult to cull out, but it has had a recurrent history.  It might be easiest to refer to examples in physics, such as, the unique Nobel Prize discovery of pseudo-crystals that has had an impact on materials science. But actually, in the history of mathematics, astronomy, and physics, and later in anatomy and physiology, we have an “audit trail” in writings from the Hellenistic period, interrupted by the dark ages and the Bubonic Plague, and a reawakening in the period preceding and through the enlightenment and reformation. This carried significant risks for great thinkers in a society that changes slowly, and with repeated interruptions throughout all periods by wars.  One might say that this has no relevance to curation, but repeatedly, libraries and museums preserved discovery that could be re-examined later. Thus, we can’t discard the brilliance of Hipparchos, whose influence on Ptolemy is known, and who discovered the centrality of the Sun to our universe, even though the extent to which he accepted societal belief in astrology is at best limited.  The work of Copernicus later was under great duress, but gave precedence to Galileo and Newton.  The Hellenistic period also gave us Euclid and Archimedes, which was critical for the development of mathematics and measurement, and El Gibr’ gave us algebra. In his time, Archimedes found no-one who he could share his ideas with other than Conon, who died too early, but he was later read by Omar Kayyam,  Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo and Newton.  The Greek diagrams used by Archimedes of Syracuse were a major contribution to cognition and inference.  The Archimedes Palimpses, which were given to us as by the priest-scribe, Ioannes Myronas in 1229, is historically a major contribution revealing Archimedes work in the Method. There is the center of gravity of a triangle, and the treatise on Balancing Planes, from which he deduces that if you place two objects on a balance on which the distances are movable from the fulcrum, the distance of the lighter object is five times the distance of the heavier object.  The rule is that weights balance when they are reciprocal to their distance. Then there is Fermat’s Last Theorem, unsolved problem for centuries since the seventeenth century.The theorem state that while the square of a whole number can can be broken down into two other squares of whole numbers the same cannot be done for cubes or any higher power. The theorem took seven years to write, with a ynother year to edit.The principle was incorporated into the Pythagorean Theorem, and in 1955 two japanese mathematicians made a far reaching conjecture that paved the way to the solution by Andrew Wiles at Princeton in 1995.

Notably, the great mathematician, Gauss, who published Disquisition on Mathematics in 1801, on  number theory at age 24, refused to engage in the solution, but his work in complex analysis, based on earlier work by Euler involving imaginary numbers was crucial to the 20th century understanding.Perhaps another apt example is Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the prediction of gravitational radiation bringing a new attention to the tiny ripples in space-time that has opened our eyes to modern cosmology. Finally, we find that a small piece of our universe is viewed as a chunk of Hilbert space, developing as a nest of interacting probability waves. The waves of Hilbert space are actually the waves Schroedinger derived before we had the tools to observe their behavior.The mathematics of entanglement identifies the high-probability areas of a joint-Hilbert space developed from the interaction having consistent histories. This has led to the description of Schroedinger’s principle, the things that we consider to be real are stable persistent patterns. This gives rise to debate about many worlds.

We leave the seemingly esoteric world of problems in mathematics and theoretic physics and return to the world of biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics, proteomics and allied medical sciences.

The scientific underpinnings of biology and medicine transitioned from a largely observational and descriptive phase in the 19th century with the scientifc leadership of Rudolph Virchow, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, John Hunter, Edward Jennings, Walter Reed, Karl Landsteiner, and Thomas Hunt Morgan.  Pasteur, Koch, Landsteiner and Morgan were outstanding experimentalists.  The latter two were to receive Nobel Prizes that began in 2001.  The idea of a more fundamental basis for biological sciences was concerned with studying the chemical structures and processes of biological phenomena that involve the basic units of life, and it developed out of the related fields of biochemistrygenetics, and biophysics. The primary focus became the study of proteins and nucleic acids—i.e., the macromolecules that are essential to life processes. A great impetus was provided by enabling the three-dimensional structure of these macromolecules through such techniques as X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy. In seeking to understand the molecular basis of genetic processes; molecular biologists map the location of genes on specific chromosomes, associate these genes with particular characters of an organism, and use recombinant DNA technology to isolate, sequence, and modify specific genes.

The above is tied to a dominance of Western scientific discovery, as seen in the recipients of the Nobel Prize, but it is only a two dimensional view. Here another type of graphical display would be more informative, and it has been developed. I might consider a separation by type for physics, chemistry and medicine, leaving out the others, and then, in combination. I would bet that there are interactions.

For instance – 2001 – Roentgen, Physics; Pierre and Marie Curie, Physics; E.O. Lawrence, Chemistry, Berkeley Radiation Lab; Max Planck, following on Boltzmann and on Josiah Willard Gibbs (pre-Nobel) work. Then you have radiology and radioisotope chemistry and photosynthesis, Martin Kamen. Of course, modern physiology and metabolism traces back to the work on oxygen, carcon dioxide, and heat, adiabatic systems, and leads to the calorimeter, the Warburg apparatus, which credits Pasteur’s work 60 years earlier. The fruit fly genetics was an impetus for cracking the genetic code, but the impetus for that was both from Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, and then the mathematical work of Pearson and of Fischer. The work on the chemical bond by Linus Pauling really opened up a foundation for understanding organic and inorganic reactions based on atomic orbital theory that was essential for pursuit of the double helix. This was so important that it unlocked the structure of polymeric proteins through the disulfide bond, and also metalloprotein complexes (heme, …). Wouldn’t it be incredible to map the Nobel work to seminal work done in the 100 years before the Prize with different colored arrows to show stromg and weaker associations? This is in a strong sense, a method of CURATION (as opposed to creation), that is very important for a fundamental grasp of the growth of and ties in the development of the knowledgebase.

Wouldn’t it be incredible to map the Nobel work to seminal work done in the 100 years before the Prize with different colored arrows to show stromg and weaker associations? This is in a strong sense, a method of CURATION (as opposed to creation), that is very important for a fundamental grasp of the growth of and ties in the development of the knowledge-base.

Such a discussion in depth is the curation that is intended for http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/biomed-e-books/series-e-titles-in the strategic-plan-for-2014-1015/2014-milestones-in-physiology-discoveries-in-medicine

Part 2: Scientifc Results – The Art of Curation

Dr. Lev-Ari continued her work, beyond Volume Two, above, on Curation as a Methodology for Critique of the Scientific Frontier and the most effective method for synthesis of scientific milestones in the following selective list of articles:

e-Recognition via Friction-free Collaboration over the Internet: “Open Access to Curation of Scientific Research by Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Digital Publishing Promotes Science and Popularizes it by Access to Scientific Discourse by Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

Synthetic Biology: On Advanced Genome Interpretation for Gene Variants and Pathways: What is the Genetic Base of Atherosclerosis and Loss of Arterial Elasticity with Aging

The Heart: Vasculature Protection – A Concept-based Pharmacological Therapy including THYMOSIN

Paradigm Shift in Human Genomics – Predictive Biomarkers and Personalized Medicine – Part 1

The Fatal Self Distraction of the Academic Publishing Industry: The Solution of the Open Access Online Scientific Journals

For a complete list of her Curations, go to

REFERENCES

1. George Sarton. A History of Science: Hellenistic Science and Culture in the last three centuries B.C. 1959. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA, USA.
2. Reviel Netz & William Noel. The Archimedes Codex: How a medieval prayer book is revealing the true genius of antiquity’s greatest scientist. 2007. Da Capo Press.
Perseus Books Group, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
3. Amir D Aczel. Fermat’s last theorem: Unlocking the secret of an ancient methematical problem.  Four Walls Eight Windows. 1996. New York, NY, USA.
4. Colin Bruce. Schroedinger’s Rabbits: the many worlds of quantum.  2004. Joseph Henry Press. Washington, DC, USA.
5. Marcia Bartusiak. Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony: listening to the sounds of spac^2 E-time.  The Berkley Publishing Group, New York, NY, USA.

Other related articles in published in this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include the following: 

The amazing history of the Nobel Prize, told in maps and charts
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/12/31/the-amazing-history-of-the-nobel-prize-told-in-maps-and-charts/

Quantum Biology And Computational Medicine
Curator: Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/04/03/quantum-biology-and-computational-medicine/

Metabolite Identification Combining Genetic and Metabolic Information: Genetic association links unknown metabolites to functionally related genes
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2012/10/22/metabolite-identification-combining-genetic-and-metabolic-information-genetic-association-links-unknown-metabolites-to-functionally-related-genes/

Breast Cancer, drug resistance, and biopharmaceutical targets
Reporter: Larry H Bernstein, MD
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2012/09/18/breast-cancer-drug-resistance-and-biopharmaceutical-targets/

The Initiation and Growth of Molecular Biology and Genomics – Part I
Curator: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/02/08/the-initiation-and-growth-of-molecular-biology-and-genomics/

Nitric Oxide and Sepsis, Hemodynamic Collapse, and the Search for Therapeutic Options
Curator, Reporter, EAW: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2012/10/20/nitric-oxide-and-sepsis-hemodynamic-collapse-and-the-search-for-therapeutic-options/

Sepsis, Multi-organ Dysfunction Syndrome, and Septic Shock: A Conundrum of Signaling Pathways Cascading Out of Control
Curator and Author: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FCAP
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2012/10/13/sepsis-multi-organ-dysfunction-syndrome-and-septic-shock-a-conundrum-of-signaling-pathways-cascading-out-of-control/

How Methionine Imbalance with Sulfur-Insufficiency Leads to Hyperhomocysteinemia
Curator: Larry H Bernstein, MD, FACP
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/04/04/sulfur-deficiency-leads_to_hyperhomocysteinemia/

Vegan Diet is Sulfur Deficient and Heart Unhealthy
Larry H. Bernstein, MD, FCAP, Curator
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/11/17/vegan-diet-is-sulfur-deficient-and-heart-unhealthy/

Portrait of a great scientist and mentor: Nathan Oram Kaplan
Author: Larry H. Bernstein, MD
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/2013/01/26/portrait-of-a-great-scientist-and-mentor-nathan-oram-kaplan/

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