Exam: Midterm 1
                              
            (Introduction to Medical Informatics)
         (http://www.cpmc.columbia.edu/edu/textbook)

1. List 5 reasons why there has been a recent increase in
     the application of informatics in medicine.

2. You have been hired as CIO (chief information officer) of
     a large medical center. Your job is to give users
     access to the many disparate applications that have
     grown up over the years in the medical center. List 2
     approaches to accomplishing this, and list 1 advantage
     and 1 disadvantage for both of the approaches.

3. You are building a computer application, and you must
     decide whether to collect (1) coded data or (2)
     narrative text. Pick one of these two and explain why
     you chose it.

4. For the clinical laboratory, what tasks make up the
     extralaboratory and intralaboratory cycles for
     information processing?

5. What does it mean to need multiple views of a database?
     Give an example of the need for multiple views in
     medicine. How can a database management system help?

6. ICD-9 is a vocabulary that puts terms in a strict
     hierarchy (except for the root, every term has exactly
     one parent) instead of a directed acyclic graph (terms
     may have more than one parent). Eg, the only parent of
     "bacterial pneumonia" is "pneumonia". How does the use
     of a strict hierarchy affect the vocabulary (think in
     terms of in terms of completeness, ambiguity,
     redundancy, classification, and consistency)?

7. In the literature, there are a total of 100 articles on
     viral pneumonia in the intensive care unit. You do a
     free text query on "viral", "pneumonia", and "ICU", and
     you get back 25 references, 10 of which are pertinent.
     What is your precision and recall. How would you
     improve your recall?

8. "Design for monochrome" is one rule for using color in a
     user interface. Give at least 2 others.

9. Give at least 2 reasons to use an interface standard (eg,
     Common User Access CUA).

10. What is the difference between a syntactic and a
     semantic natural language processor.

11. What are closed-loop and open-loop control systems in
     medicine?

12. What are the functions of a picture-archiving and
     communications system in radiology?