The National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine honored five software applications yesterday as part of its first software development challenge, Show Off Your Apps: Innovative Uses of NLM Information. The winning applications best helped the general public use medical and scientific information.
Winners and honorable mentions:
GLAD4U is a free, web-based tool to help researchers answer such questions as “Which genes are related to breast cancer?” GLAD4U (Gene List Automatically Derived for You) automates the process of creating gene lists. It makes use of the Entrez Programming Utilities of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of NLM. GLAD4U is the work of Jerome Jourquin, Ph.D., Bing Zhang, Ph.D., and Dexter Duncan with the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn.
iAnatomy is an electronic anatomy atlas available for the iPhone and iPod touch. The app enables people to learn anatomy interactively with the ability to zoom in on images for more detail. iAnatomy used data from the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project. iAnatomy was developed by Anouk Stein, M.D., a radiologist and computer programmer in Phoenix.
KNALIJ, pronounced knowledge, helps researchers, students and health consumers visualize large amounts of data such as the information in NLM’s repository PubMed. KNALIJ is a visualization tool built around the idea that the best pattern recognition system is a person’s own visual system. Presenting information in the form of visual, interactive maps can significantly improve researchers’ abilities to scan large amounts of information and dramatically reduce their time to discovery. KNALIJ was developed by Alan M. Finkel of iWakari LLC in Los Angeles and his partner Steven Melnikoff, Ph.D., honorary visiting fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia.
NLMplus is a semantic search and knowledge discovery application that simultaneously searches 59 NLM databases to allow users to discover NLM’s rich content offerings in all areas of biomedicine and health. NLMplus was developed by Weizhong Zhu, Ph.D. and Antonio Zamora, of WebLib LLC in Bethesda.
Quertle is an innovative website for searching and investigating the biomedical literature. It is geared to active life science professionals, including researchers and health care providers, and is designed to save them considerable time and effort in finding the literature they need. Quertle simultaneously searches multiple sources of life science literature, including the National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE and TOXLINE. Jeff Saffer, Ph.D. and Vicki Burnett, Ph.D. of Boulder, Colo. led the effort to create Quertle.
Honorable Mentions
The BioDigital Human is a web-based 3D platform that simplifies the understanding of anatomy, and disease. Interactive tools for exploring, dissecting and sharing custom views, combined with detailed descriptions derived from MedlinePlus provide a new visual format for patients, students and clinicians to learn about the body. The platform was developed by BioDigital Systems LLC in New York City.
DailyMedPlus provides online access to pharmaceutical information derived from several databases at the National Library of Medicine. The website is a comprehensive search engine that can be used by patients and healthcare professionals. DailyMedPLus was developed by a team at Medicos Consultants LLC in Baltimore.
Drug Diary is an iPhone application that enables users to inventory their prescription and over-the-counter medications and maintain notes on their experiences. The application enables users to communicate medication reports to health care providers. The application uses NLM’s Rx Terms dataset and medication information from MedlinePlus.gov. Drug Diary was developed by Jeff Rames, founder, Floodlight Software LLC, in Chicago.
Molecules is an iPhone, iPodTouch, and iPad application that provides 3-D molecular modeling. Molecules has a touch-based interface and uses information from NCBI’s Entrez and PubChem databases. Molecules is the work of Brad Larson, General Manager, Sunset Lake Software, LLC in Madison, Wis.
ORKOV is an iPhone and Android application that provides access to PubMed.gov. Orkov is a Greek term that refers to the Hippocratic Oath. The application is intended for use by medical researchers. ORKOV is the work of a team at Visual Soft, Inc., in Vienna, Va.
