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Lecture notes in medical informatics
84
BOOKRFJVIEWS
Lecture Notes in Medical Informatics, edited by D. A. B. Lindberg and P. L. Reichertz, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978,822 pp. ($28.00).
This vast book of 822 pages presents a daunting task to any reviewer and it is inevitable that my comments (after hours of reading) will be brief. As far as facts are concerned, the book divides up into no less than nineteen sections, ranging from medical records and text processing through to modelling, health care, planning and nursing. The emphasis is on the use of various information processing methods and this particular volume is a record of Medical Informatics Europe 78-the proceedings of a conference at Cambridge, England and this volume in particular was edited by J. Anderson. The first article that caught my eye was on ACIS-A Clinical Information System-described by Michael Fox, from the Department of Biomathematics at the City of Hope National Medical Center in California. ACIS is a file generating system and uses a compiler with suitable definitions and languages to generate PL/l programs. The origin of ACIS was a data base system containing information on some 30 000 of the hospital’s patients. The high degree of flexibility of the system allows quick retrieval of relevant data on patients with various diseases, and statistical analyses were performed on many sets of figures. The whole system seems to be a paradigm for such a file-generating system and of immense value to the hospital. Such systems have, of course, to be carefully guarded for privacy reasons. A somewhat similar system called MFS has been developed in Milan, Italy by E. Guidotti and R. Arrigoni, and this is described in another paper. In the same interesting first section of the book, there are several other interesting articles and one especially that caught my eye was on neurology which comes from J. L. Golmard and his associates in France. Holland, Poland, Belgium and Germany are all represented in the first section alone, which brings out clearly the international flavour of this book. Of great interest in the section on Text Processing, is the fact that artificial languages are of great benefit to man-computer interaction ; this is a fact already widely accepted among human users of data bases. The development of the language called MUMPS is a good illustration of what is required in man-computer interaction; this is the subject of yet another paper in this massive and extremely interesting book. The book is well produced and covers an enormous amount of information in what is a very quickly developing field. It could be said that this is a text for the specialist, but that would be slightly misleading since the techniques involved are of considerable universality. F. H. GEORGE
BOOKRFJVIEWS
Lecture Notes in Medical Informatics, edited by D. A. B. Lindberg and P. L. Reichertz, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1978,822 pp. ($28.00).
This vast book of 822 pages presents a daunting task to any reviewer and it is inevitable that my comments (after hours of reading) will be brief. As far as facts are concerned, the book divides up into no less than nineteen sections, ranging from medical records and text processing through to modelling, health care, planning and nursing. The emphasis is on the use of various information processing methods and this particular volume is a record of Medical Informatics Europe 78-the proceedings of a conference at Cambridge, England and this volume in particular was edited by J. Anderson. The first article that caught my eye was on ACIS-A Clinical Information System-described by Michael Fox, from the Department of Biomathematics at the City of Hope National Medical Center in California. ACIS is a file generating system and uses a compiler with suitable definitions and languages to generate PL/l programs. The origin of ACIS was a data base system containing information on some 30 000 of the hospital’s patients. The high degree of flexibility of the system allows quick retrieval of relevant data on patients with various diseases, and statistical analyses were performed on many sets of figures. The whole system seems to be a paradigm for such a file-generating system and of immense value to the hospital. Such systems have, of course, to be carefully guarded for privacy reasons. A somewhat similar system called MFS has been developed in Milan, Italy by E. Guidotti and R. Arrigoni, and this is described in another paper. In the same interesting first section of the book, there are several other interesting articles and one especially that caught my eye was on neurology which comes from J. L. Golmard and his associates in France. Holland, Poland, Belgium and Germany are all represented in the first section alone, which brings out clearly the international flavour of this book. Of great interest in the section on Text Processing, is the fact that artificial languages are of great benefit to man-computer interaction ; this is a fact already widely accepted among human users of data bases. The development of the language called MUMPS is a good illustration of what is required in man-computer interaction; this is the subject of yet another paper in this massive and extremely interesting book. The book is well produced and covers an enormous amount of information in what is a very quickly developing field. It could be said that this is a text for the specialist, but that would be slightly misleading since the techniques involved are of considerable universality. F. H. GEORGE