Searching online for answers to health questions can be challenging for any user, especially those without medical expertise. One of the best ways to make this process easier is to provide an easily digestible summary of each web page. While it is impossible to manually curate summaries for every user’s specific query, recent advancements in deep learning algorithms now make it possible to automatically summarize health information. But before these algorithms can be allowed to provide...

The NIH Director’s Awards recognize exceptional performance and achievements of all Institutes, Centers, and Offices within the NIH. Awards are given in various categories, including scientific/medical, administrative, technical/clerical support, and mentoring. The 2020 edition of the NIH Director's Awards includes several LHC staff:

We are renovating our website! 

LHNCBC is updating the look and feel of our webpages to reflect the new design principles being adopted by the main NLM website. Our website renovation will be gradual. Some of our content will remain using legacy formatting and functionality, but we will gradually transition our entire content to the new unified design.

Five interns presented posters at the 2019 NIH Summer Poster Day (SPD) August 8 and one at the Postbac Poster Day (PPD) on May 2 with both events held at the NIH Natcher Building. The interns ranged from high school seniors to PhD candidates and the data science related areas of medical informatics research were image analysis, natural language processing and machine learning (deep learning).   Presenters and poster titles are as follows:

Intern(s)

Affiliation

Poster...

The Visible Human Project (VHP) is 25 years old and still going strong. The VHP digital images, representing the complete anatomy of a man and a woman, revolutionized our ability to view and understand human anatomy.

So what’s new? NLM has eliminated the requirement for a license in order to access the images.

Images from the VHP are now open access and available from the NLM Data Distribution webpage https://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/download/data_distrib_main.html.

The...

Pill Image Collection is now open access and available from the NLM Data Distribution webpage https://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/download/data_distrib_main.html.

Congratulations to LHC’s own Travis Goodwin who was elected to the JAMIA Student Editorial Board (SEB). The SEB are assigned several manuscripts per year to review and members learn about the operation of a scientific medical journal as they assist with managing the monthly online JAMIA Journal Club.

More information about the SEB is available on the AMIA website https://www.amia.org/jamia-student-editorial-board.

The Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) celebrated its 50th anniversary in FY2018. Established by an act of Congress in 1968 “as an urgently required facility for the improvement of communications necessary for health, education, research, and practice,” the Center has led and continues to lead a number of significant research and development initiatives in the dissemination of high quality imagery, natural language processing, high-speed access to biomedical...

This presentation is from the talk given by Dr. George R. Thoma upon his retirement on November 29, 2018.

Where we’ve been.. And where we’re going.

To read an interview with Dr. Thoma, see NLM In Focus article of September 14, 2017.

Siva Rajaraman, LHC’s postdoctoral fellow is placed in the top 1% of reviewers on Publons’ global reviewer database, determined by the number of peer review reports performed during the 2017-18 award year. He performed 31 reviews for 14 different international journals including IEEE, Elsevier, and Springer.

https://publons.com/awards/2018/esi/?name=Sivaramakrishnan-Rajaraman&esi=23

https://publons.com/author/1377618/sivaramakrishnan-rajaraman#profile

Drs. Stefan Jaeger and Sivarama Rajaraman, Lister Hill Center researchers, presented posters at the 2018 NIH Research Festival. Dr. Jaeger and Dr. Mahdieh Poostchi received a FARE (Fellows Award for Research Excellence) award which provides recognition for the outstanding scientific research performed by intramural fellows who have less than five years of research experience at the NIH. The research here involved deep learning applied to pediatric chest x-rays and malaria parasite detection...

San Francisco, CA

Download the schedule as Word doc

Booth 601 Schedule Word doc

Eleven summer Interns presented posters at the 2018 NIH Summer Poster Day August 9, 2018 at the NIH Natcher Building. The summer interns ranged from high school juniors to PhD candidates and the focus areas of the research were image analysis, natural language processing and machine learning (deep learning).  Presenters and poster titles are as follows:

Intern(s)

Affiliation

Poster Title

Mentor

Priya Deshpande

PhD Candidate at DePaul...

Within days of publication, a paper by Dr. Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman and colleagues published in the premier journal PeerJ was downloaded 100 times. Entitled “'Pre-trained convolutional neural networks as feature extractors toward improved malaria parasite detection in thin blood smear images,” this is the first study to evaluate the performance of Deep Learning models in classifying parasitic and uninfected red blood cells for improved malaria screening – at both cell and patient level,...

Today Genetics Home Reference launched our new guide to direct-to-consumer genetic testing. These popular tests are provided by 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and many other companies.

https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer#dtcgenetictesting

The guide covers choosing a service, privacy considerations, insurance risks, and more. It also explains whether these tests can accurately predict your risk of cancer or Alzheimer disease, and what it means to have Neanderthal DNA. There’s a PDF version of...

Mr. Nikhil Sardana, senior at Thomas Jefferson High School, Alexandria, VA, has been named a semi-finalist in the Regeneron 2018 Science Talent Search.  This award placed Mr. Sardana’s work in the top 300 of the 1818 entrants in this competition.  Each semi-finalist, or “STS Scholar” was given a $2,000 award, with an additional $2,000 going to his or her school.   According to the Web site (https://student.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts-2018-scholars) for the award,...

In honor of Morris F. Collen, this prestigious award is the highest honor in informatics that is presented by the American College of Medical Informatics (AMIA) to an individual whose personal commitment and dedication to biomedical informatics has made a lasting impression on healthcare and biomedicine. The National Library of Medicine has produced this video tribute to Dr. Carol Friedman, available on YouTube at 2017 Morris F. Collen Award of Excellence: Carol Friedman, PhD, FACMI.

Liz Amos: NIH CDE Repository

Patti Brennan: Data Science @ NIH

Dina Demner-Fushman: Imaging Informatics: Open-i ® Update

Valerie Florance: NIH Next Generation Researchers Initiative

Kin Wah Fung: SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM map and the I-MAGIC tool

Kathryn Funk: Data Discovery in PMC (and PubMed)

Stacy Lathrop and Julie McVey: NCBI Bookshelf

Zhiyong Lu: PubMed Labs: A new test site for improving literature search

Clement McDonald: The Use of Big Medicare...

View or download the NLM Schedule

View or download the NLM booth theater schedule

NLM staff will be on hand at the AMIA Symposium Saturday, November 4 through Wednesday, November 8 at the Washington Hilton Hotel.

Special treat for early risers: NLM Director Dr. Patricia Brennan begins the day with the NLM Update, Monday, November 6, 7:00am.

AMIA Annual Symposium actively supports research and practice in the five domains in informatics: translational bioinformatics,...

LHNCBC announces the first major release of the SimpleITK Toolkit, an easy-to-use interface to ITK, the NLM Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit.

SimpleITK helps broaden the ITK user community beyond experienced software developers to include students, researchers, domain scientists, and novice software developers. For example, the concise interface lets students explore how well-known image segmentation (partitioning an image into segments) and registration (transformation...

The IEEE (http://www.ieee.org/index.html), the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, has elevated Dr. Sameer Antani (https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/personnel/sameer-antani) to the grade of IEEE Senior Member. IEEE Senior Membership is an honor bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession. Dr. Antani was recognized for his leadership and scientific contributions to advancing the role...

Dr. Nina Woo Matheson is a medical librarian and vocal supporter for the importance of librarians in medical informatics.

Nina Woo Matheson, ML, DSc, is perhaps best remembered in the Medical Informatics community as the lead author of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ 1982 Matheson-Cooper report, which described the future role of medical libraries and led to the creation of the National Library of Medicine’s Integrated Academic (later changed to Advanced) Information...

Don Eugene Detmer, MD, served a pivotal role in crafting the US National Health Information Infrastructure. He chaired a 1991 Institute of Medicine (IOM) committee charged with improving the patient record, which generated a landmark report called “The Computer-based Patient Record.”

Dr. Detmer is University Professor of Health Policy Emeritus and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Virginia and Visiting Professor at the University College London’s Centre for Health...

Although he described himself humbly as “just a country doctor,” Dr. G. Octo Barnett altered the course of the practice of medicine when he suggested, in the 1950s, “We ought to try using timesharing computer systems to improve medical care.”

Octo Barnett, MD served as the Senior Scientific Director of the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) —a medical and bioinformatics research and development group at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) —and a Professor of Medicine at Harvard...

Homer R. Warner, MD, PhD, was a cardiologist who pioneered many aspects of using computers to augment the practice of medicine, including clinical decision support tools. Homer R. Warner was born in 1922 at the Latter Day Saints (LDS) Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah and went on to create that hospital’s first cardiovasculardiagnostic laboratory in 1954. In 1964, Dr. Warner originally founded and became the first Chair of the Biophysics and Bioengineering department in the College of...

Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg retired in March 2015 after serving for more than 30 years as the Director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

NLM is proud to recognize some of his many achievements by publishing interviews that Drs. Joan Ash and Dean Sittig conducted with him in 2005, as part of an oral history project about the Pioneers of the field of Medical Informatics Pioneers.

Download the interviews as a PDF here.

Wilson Lin and Agam Mittal, high school students who worked at CEB in the summer of 2014, displayed their senior research work on February 19 at the Annual Research Convention and Poster Session held by Montgomery Blair High School, a prominent magnet school in Montgomery County, Maryland. They were among about 100 students participating at the session. Mr. Lin, mentored...

In Memoriam.

Morris F. Collen, MD (11/12/1913 - 9/27/2014)

Dr. Morris Collen was an internationally respected leader in medical informatics and a pioneer in electronic medical record systems.

NLM is honored to present a 2005 interview with Dr. Collen, conducted by Dean Sittig.

This interview is part of an oral history project featuring Conversations with Medical Informatics Pioneers.

Dr. Sittig recalls:

Morris was a wonderful man. Always so giving of his time...

The Lister Hill Center’s Kenya X-ray Project, formally known as Automatic X-Ray Screening for Rural Areas, was selected as one of 13 teams out of more than 70 nominees for HHS Ignite, a departmental initiative of the HHS Innovation Council to catalyze projects by exposing teams to a network of innovators, technical experts and mentors drawn from HHS and the University of Maryland. The cash award from HHS Ignite was used to acquire field deployable equipment.

This award recognizes...

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recently awarded Dr. Terry S. Yoo the 2013 Hubert H. Humphrey Award for Service to America. This is one of the highest awards given annually to select individuals within HHS who contribute to the common good and well-being of our nation’s citizens through leadership and service. Dr. Yoo was specifically cited for his leadership in open science through his work on public software that has become the standard for 3-dimensional biomedical...

Congratulations to the 2014-2015 Student Editorial Board (SEB). The six newly elected student members will contribute to the peer-review process for JAMIA by attending Editorial Board meetings and reviewing manuscripts. The SEB will receive feedback about their reviews as they learn about the operation of a scientific medical journal.

Congratulations to Kirk Roberts, PhD, Postoctoral Researcher, National Library of Medicine, Lister Hill Center, on being elected to the...

The National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) TriagePic® software is used by Suburban Hospital during the March 18, 2014 region-wide PARK PLEX 2014 disaster drill to keep track of simulated patients and to demonstrate family reunification.

Many hospitals in Maryland Region V (Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince George's, and St. Mary's counties) participated in the drill which involved a coordinated response to a simulated disaster incident. Some of the “victims” were treated by Suburban...

Mr. Samuel (Sam) Maynard received “First Place Computer Science” for his Senior Research Project work with Dr. Dina Demner-Fushman of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) on February 27, 2014. Judging for this 2014 Magnet Science Research Award was by a panel from the Washington Academy of Sciences. Mr. Maynard is a senior at the Montgomery Blair High School Math, Science, Computer Science Magnet Program in Silver Spring, Maryland. Mr. Maynard’s work is entitled “Developing Supervised...

The National Library of Medicine has announced the addition of Sir William Osler papers to the Profiles in Science Web site. This presentation is made possible in collaboration with the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, both of which are repositories of William Osler collections.

Born to Anglican missionaries in the Canadian frontier territory north of Toronto, Ontario,...

The National Library of Medicine's (NLM) Medical Text Indexer (http://ii.nlm.nih.gov) is being used as one of the baselines for the international BioASQ challenge (http://www.bioasq.org/). The Medical Text Indexer (MTI), a system for producing indexing recommendations, assists in the indexing process at NLM. The BioASQ challenge is a series of challenges on biomedical semantic indexing and question answering with the aim of advancing the state of the art accessibility for researchers and...

INDIANAPOLIS, USA, and COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- The Regenstrief Institute Inc. and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation have signed a long-term agreement to begin cooperative work linking their leading global health care terminologies: Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes, or LOINC, and SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT).

This timely and significant agreement will help improve safety, functionality and interoperability for the rapidly growing...

Some persons displaced during the recent flooding in Uttarakhand India now may be found via NLM’s People Locator®. NLM’s People Locator, which began in 2010 to ease the confusion to find lost men and women after a natural or human disaster, became available shortly after the flooding began. 

Some persons displaced during the recent Boston Marathon explosions now may be found via NLM’s People Locator®. NLM’s People Locator, which began in 2010 to ease the confusion to find lost men and women after a natural or human disaster, became available within hours after the Boston Marathon bombings occurred.  The full transcript of this NLM Podcast is available.

On April 25, 2003, the National Library of Medicine launched Genetics Home Reference (GHR), a free online resource about human genetics created for patients, families, and the general public (http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/). The Web site provides a bridge between the public's questions about human genetics and the rich technical data that has emerged from the Human Genome Project (observing the 10th anniversary of its completion on April 25th) and other genomic research.

GHR provides...

The Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care, a privately endowed research institute renowned for the study of healthcare quality and economic issues, are establishing an endowed chair named in honor of Clem McDonald, MD,  director of the NLM Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC). The holder of the Clem McDonald Chair in Biomedical Informatics will be responsible for furthering the academic mission in Biomedical and...

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is putting a fresh emphasis on health informatics, with Director Francis Collins, MD, creating a new advisory position and recruiting an associate director for Data Science.

Collins, a physician and geneticist, said there’s recently been an “exponential growth of biomedical research data” from genomics, imaging and electronic...

The ClinicalTrials.gov Web site underwent a complete redesign and features new site navigation, new appearance, and new content for the public, patients and families, clinicians, researchers and study record data providers.

ClinicalTrials.gov is the LHNCBC-developed Web-based registry of results database of clinical research studies. Since its launch in 2000, ClinicalTrials.gov has expanded in terms of scope, features, and intended audiences in response to the evolving policies and laws...

Two presentations from SNOMED CT 2012 Implementation Showcase present details about the IHTSDO-Regenstrief collaboration.

The National Library of Medicine and the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications announce the release of The Anatomy of an Horse, one of the most comprehensive and beautifully illustrated books about horses. This virtual book is the next in the Turning the Pages series available on its Web site, via iPad App, and in kiosks onsite at the NLM.

Printed in London in 1683, the book contains numerous engravings of horses, mainly on the dissecting table, including the...

This unusual version of a dendritic cell might be how it appears to the hunter searching for pathogens through the body. Using 3D NIH microbiology data as reference, a model was constructed by researchers in the Audiovisual Program Development Branch to interpret the dendritic cell architecture. The cell’s surface is covered by folding sheets of membranes rather than more traditionally understood tree-like or dendritic projections.

This photgraph of the Space Shuttle Discovery, with the Lister Hill Center in the foreground, was taken by NIH staff member Hanzhen Sun of NCBI from a nearby building. The escort plane is visible to the upper left of the shuttle.

On April 17, 2012, the Space Shuttle Discovery flew around the nation's Capitol as it made its final flight aboard a 747 Shuttle Carrier from Florida to Washington, DC, where it will be on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy...

American surgeon Henry Swan II (1913-1996) pioneered the use of hypothermia - cooling patients to a very low body temperature - to make possible the first open-heart surgeries. Between 1953 and 1963, while heart-lung bypass technology was still being perfected, Swan performed hundreds of successful cardiac repairs using hypothermia to temporarily stop the heart. His clinical work built on his extensive surgical lab research, which made major contributions to medical understanding of the...