Bell Eapen MD, PhD.

Bringing Digital health & Gen AI research to life!

What is wrong with the culture of medicine?

“What is wrong with the culture of medicine?”

I posted an article about burnt-out doctors that got lots of comments in DsB. Here is an excellent TED talk from Dr Zubin Damania, Director of Healthcare Development for Downtown Project Las Vegas.

“Medical schools are like Hogwarts where doctor wizards are trained to cure muggles using arcane contraptions like pagers (owls)”.

He has a plan to fight back against a system that can dehumanize doctors and patients alike. He is just too good. Must watch!

This article proposes telehealth as the future of healthcare delivery through virtual consultation and remote diagnosis. It will not only reduce the burden on secondary health care provision, but also improve the quality where accessibility to secondary care is limited. With the dwindling number of dermatologists in many parts of Canada, teledermatology also has huge potential. I am working on a dermatology imaging standard called DICODerm. I am planning to propose it to DICOM standards committee through Canada health infoway once it is completed. WG-19 (DICOM dermatology group) discontinued such a move long back, but when I proposed this idea in DsB I received huge support. Our ongoing work is available here. Standardization is a huge bottleneck for teledermatology systems, and if we can agree on a DICOM standard for dermatology, existing PACS systems may be used for store-and-forward teledermatology.

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Best peptides for women

In continuation with my previous posts here and in skin deep, let me add few more things I found recently.

Peptide Synthesis Deprotection
Peptide Synthesis Deprotection (Photo credit: Beige Alert)

The article titled “Systematic Discovery of New Recognition Peptides Mediating Protein Interaction Networks “ published recently in PLOS Biology ( full text at : http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030405 ) describes the signalling by short peptide segments. Short peptide segments interact with globular protein domains that share a common sequence pattern (e.g., SH3 binding to PxxP). They also point out that sequence comparison experiments are unlikely to discover the optimum short motif. They recommend using data from genome-scale interaction studies. So the methodology adopted by the designers of peptide-21 may not be robust.

OK, now I am going to do something here that I rarely ever do on my blogs: I am going to shamelessly self promote me without actually giving away much information. My plan is to get noticed by the cosmetic tycoons and make some money out of this incessant babbling about beauty peptides 🙂

English: Example of mechanism of direct penetr...
English: Example of mechanism of direct penetrating peptide (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I used a newly published algorithm (not mine) for bioinformatics analysis and found some interesting information.

The most commonly occurring tetra peptide in collagen is in fact GXXG and PXXP the commonest being GPPG.

The commonest tetra peptide repeats were GERG, GEKG, GFPG, GENG, GPRG, GHRG.

This is what terapeptide-21 is based on and there is nothing new till here.

But here comes the most surprising part!

The highest scoring short peptide of probable biological (signal) function does not belong to the above list!!

Hey, Do I hear my phone ringing?????

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DermKnowledgeBASE – A Dermatology Knowledge Base with semi-automated knowledge discovery.
English: Map Summarizing Rosacea, It was creat...
English: Map Summarizing Rosacea, It was created by the author and Reem Al-Qudah using Clinical dermatology book Dahl, Mark V.; Weller, Richard E.; Hunter, John G.; Savin, John (2008). Clinical Dermatology. Wiley-Blackwell. Reference (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the last few weeks I have been working on DermKnowledgeBASE (DKB) that I believe is the first RDF knowledgebase for dermatology. It implements RDFS using RAP library for php. The terminology in dermatology facilitate the diagnostic process because many skin disorders have distinct features that can be represented by appropriate categories of terms. But dermatological terms are different from the traditional medical linguistics. Hence DKB is not rooted on MeSH  or any popular medical ontologies but on ONTODerm, the ontology I started developing for dermatology. I wrote about an offshoot of this project called slise before. DKB makes use of eutil webservices and whatizit from EBI. It is semi automated and can learn most of the relations on its own. But it relies on curators for confirming difficult rules. Its focus is on providing diagnostic support. Hence curators can add further information about the relevance of each feature in a particular disease. Features can be classified as pathognomonic, common, important, rare etc which helps in streamlining diagnostic accuracy. It provides a range of  functions and SOAP web services in addition to a ‘consult’ function to obtain differential diagnosis based on the description of clinical findings. It is still early days, but hopefully it may evolve into a very useful application for dermatology.

Click the banner below to access DermKnowledgeBASE:

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