Medical Vocabularies, bad laptop .. ugh

It's been a hectic week. 

Went to San Antonio last week to work on the FMDRL grant.  Didn't see much of the city – but we did get some things sorted out for the project .. and I enjoyed working with our team.

The project is to create a digital library of resources for family medicine education.  Here's an abstract of the grant.

If you're building a library – you've got to catalog the resources so that people can look for stuff.  Fortunately, the good folks at NLM have built some fantastic tools that we're using to put all of this together.

How's it work? 
  — top secret (for now) ..
But here's a sample.  Pointing the "catalog engine" at this random medical blog post .. returns this:

Sample Text:	Take two ximelegatran and call me in the morning [Addendum, 2/14/05: as has been pointed out by commenters, ximelagatran was turned down for approval by an FDA panel in September, 2004, because of concerns about hepato-toxicity. Whether it will ever …
Primary Subject(s):	ximelagatran (T121:Pharmacologic Substance) Marketing (T057:Occupational Activity) Coumadin (T121:Pharmacologic Substance)
Secondary Subject(s):	Diaphragm (Anatomy) (T023:Body Part, Organ, or Organ Component) Hemorrhage (T046:Pathologic Function)

Cool huh? 

Using this engine – we could catalog ALL of medlogs (and therefore the "medical blogworld") .. and map the concepts to MeSH or even SNOMED ..

My laptop died yesterday .. which really stinks.  It's an enormous hassle.  I never liked it anyway … it was a Compaq N800c.  Worked very well for speech recognition .. but it was too big and heavy to work well in the office.  Charlie ordered me a replacement yesterday.