The results suggest that computer-assisted learning methods will be of greater help to students who do not find the traditional methods effective. Explorations of the factors behind this are a matter for future research.

Since 1989, the integration of medical images into the total hospital information system (HIS) at Kochi Medical School has been investigated. The developed system was put into practice in August 1997 after a test run was conducted between October 1995 and July 1997. The basic concept of the integration is that doctors can retrieve and view images same as the textual data of lab exams on the desktop personal computers (PC) used to operate the total HIS. During the realization process of the integration we found that several conditions should be satisfied in order to make the integrated system effective and attractive for doctors. Particular attention was paid to the processing time required to acquire images from the image database system using the image viewing station. The image access time should be at least less than a half minute. After making various improvements, very fast image accessing was realized. However, the final system still has three problems: quality of the image display, operation of multi-exams and quality assurance of the digital image.

No abstract

A new simulation system of diagnostic and therapeutic processes is developed. The aim is to train medical students for the practical use of their knowledge, utilizing patient data in a total hospital information system. The knowledge in the system is presented by the specialists for every case. In medical school there are many specialists in various fields. With their cooperation the system can grow up to a comprehensive CAI system for clinical education. The system is designed to work on the mainframe for easiness of development, maintenance and extensions of the system. The present framework has been applied to the simulation of diagnostic process. The usefulness of the present system has been confirmed by specialists and students.

In the t test analysis, the reduction rates of total cholesterol (TC) and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels for pravastatin administration were 18%, and 27%, respectively. These values were similar to previous reports. The high-density lipoprotein (HDL) level, however, did not change significantly, although previous reports have shown an elevation of HDL levels. In an attempt to explain the origin of this difference, we studied the pretreatment value dependence of the cholesterol change using regression analysis. We found that pravastatin raised the HDL level in those cases where pretreatment values were lower than 58 mg.dl-1 and reduced it for higher values. We also showed that the reductions of TC, LDL and triglyceride (TG) levels correlated positively with their pretreatment values.