PHOTOMICROGRAPHIC STUDY ON THE CAPILLARY NAIL BEDS OF MUSCULAR DYSTROPHY PATIENTS. (57/355)

Examination of the capillary nail beds in the right fourth finger was carried out on a group of patients suffering from muscular dystrophy. Direct visual examination and photographic recording of the pattern seen have led the authors to the conclusion that there are no significant differences between the capillary nail beds of patients suffering from muscular dystrophy and those seen in a large control series of young adults examined some years ago. Full-width studies were made of each nail bed, without any inconsistent or exotic types of capillary formations being found in the patients concerned. It is concluded that no relation is discernible between capillary pattern and muscular dystrophy in humans.  (+info)

Perceptions of science. The anatomical mission to Burma. (58/355)

Until the 1830s, most Americans were unfamiliar with the images of anatomy. Then a small vanguard of reformers and missionaries began to preach, at home and around the world, that an identification with the images and concepts of anatomy was a crucial part of the civilizing process. In his essay, Sappol charts the changes in the perception of self that resulted from this anatomical evangelism. Today, as anatomical images abound in the arts and the media, we still believe that anatomical images show us our inner reality.  (+info)

The 2003 anatomy ceremony: a service of gratitude. (59/355)

In keeping with a long-standing tradition, Yale Medical and Physician Associate students gather at a ceremony each year after the completion of the anatomy course. The ceremony is a chance to reflect and to give thanks. It gives students the opportunity to articulate their gratitude to the selfless individuals who donated their bodies for the benefit of education. Many family members of the donors attend the ceremony. By reading poetry, performing musical pieces, and presenting works of art, the students and their teachers express some of the emotions and thoughts that the anatomy course has evoked. The following are some of the contributions presented at this year's ceremony.  (+info)

Guided development of independent inquiry in an anatomy/physiology laboratory. (60/355)

Student-originated projects are increasingly utilized in the biology laboratory as a means of engaging students and revitalizing the laboratory experience by allowing them one to two weeks to collect data on a manipulated variable of their choice by use of an introduced technique. Such experiments fail as good models of investigative learning when they place more emphasis on novel ideas than on hypothesis testing, experimental design, statistical rigor, or use of the primary literature. In addition, students get used to the routine and tend to design the same type of simplistic experiments in each course unless challenged. Laboratories in a Comparative Anatomy and Physiology course at the University of St. Thomas were reorganized to encourage the development of investigative skills in a stepwise fashion throughout the semester. Initial labs concentrated on experimental design and statistical analysis, then use of the primary literature in interpretation of the data was emphasized, and finally, students were asked to design their experiments and analyze their data on the basis of models from the primary literature.  (+info)

Logic-based remodeling of the Digital Anatomist Foundational Model. (61/355)

This paper describes a development cycle for the engineering of large knowledge bases: A graphical tool is used for editing and the content is transformed into a logic-based representation language. This representation is used to check the consistency of the knowledge base as well as to facilitate the reviewing process. Showing the usefulness of this approach, aspects of the Digital Anatomist Foundational Model will be transformed into a Description Logics representation. We introduce a special modeling technique to account for the representation of the complex part/whole relationships in the biomedical domain.  (+info)

A prototype natural language interface to a large complex knowledge base, the Foundational Model of Anatomy. (62/355)

We describe a constrained natural language interface to a large knowledge base, the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA). The interface, called GAPP, handles simple or nested questions that can be parsed to the form, subject-relation-object, where subject or object is unknown. With the aid of domain-specific dictionaries the parsed sentence is converted to queries in the StruQL graph-searching query language, then sent to a server we developed, called OQAFMA, that queries the FMA and returns output as XML. Preliminary evaluation shows that GAPP has the potential to be used in the evaluation of the FMA by domain experts in anatomy.  (+info)

Representing complexity in part-whole relationships within the Foundational Model of Anatomy. (63/355)

The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) is a frame-based ontology that represents declarative knowledge about the structural organization of the human body. Part-whole relationships play a particularly important role in this representation. In order to assure that knowledge-based applications relying on the FMA as a resource can reason about anatomy, we have modified and enhanced currently available schemes of meronymic relationships. We have introduced and defined distinct partitions for decomposing anatomical structures and attributed the part relationships in order to eliminate ambiguity and enhance specificity in the richness of meronymic relationships within the FMA.  (+info)

An approach to the anatomical correlation of species through the Foundational Model of Anatomy. (64/355)

The increasing need for extrapolating information from one species to another has been highlighted by contemporary research in bioinformatics, genomics, proteomics, and animal models of human disease, as well as other fields. We propose an approach to correlating the anatomy of Homo sapiens with selected species, using the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) as a framework, and graph matching as a method, for determining similarities and differences in the nodes and relationships (edges) defined by the attributed graph of the FMA. We illustrate our approach by comparing anatomical structures of mouse and human that present prototypical mapping problems.  (+info)