And here is number 5 out of 5 of the surgical guidelines of the Brain Trauma Foundation: depressed cranial fractures. In my earlier posts you read about on epidural hematoma, acute subdural hematoma, traumatic parenchymal lesions, and posterior fossa mass lesions. Before implementing the final part I needed to fix a technical problem. I ended up creating a workaround that does the job, so here we go…

Step 1: the original text-version of the guideline’s recommendations

Step 2: create a flowchart

(click for full size version)

Note that the double line around the first decision moment is my way to indicate that both factors should be present (a logical AND-operator).

Step 3: convert into an app!

As you can see, the text is a little too long for the iPhone’s display. Of course, on iPad there is no problem because of the larger screen. I have not tested this one on Android yet. At least this is something I have to work on, probably I should decrease the font size on iPhone a little bit.

So, here is how the full Brain Trauma Foundation section on the surgical guidelines look in the iPhone menu of NeuroMind 2:

Now they’re just in the order in which they appear in the guidelines. Probably I will change this into alphabetical order later on… The latest developments on NeuroMind 2 are available here.

Pieter Kubben
IT editor
Surgical Neurology International 

One month ago we gave you a sneak preview on our upcoming reference style to use with Papers, a Mac-alternative for EndNote. Now we made this style available for download at our Author Instructions page.

It has also been validated and uploaded to GitHub, according to the suggestion of our reader Rintze Zelle.

Android users, we have not forgotten you! Our SNI Mobile app is running on iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones, but not on Android tablets…. yet.

Take a look at these screenshots…. we are working on it! Click the image for a full size version.

The menu available on Android OS 3.0

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Pretty neat… There is no release date planned at the moment, but we’ll keep you posted on the progress!

While you have been reading our previous post on the work we are currently doing on videos, we have upgraded our Vimeo Plus account to Vimeo Pro. This gives us now the opportunity to combine the flexibility of JW Player with streaming media, which -in turn- allows the large files we are using to be displayed smoothly without waiting. Simply said: you’ll like it.

Here is an example:

Rather neat, right?

Pieter Kubben
IT editor Surgical Neurology International

Soon you’ll see a lot more of videos on Surgical Neurology International. For that reason we are currently exploring better ways of displaying the videos. This post is about JW Player, and below you see an embedded video that is displayed using the JW Player WordPress plugin. The video fragment is taken from the “How I Do It: Carotid Endarterectomy” video by Dr Atos Alves de Sousa from Brazil.

In this case the video file is loaded directly from our server, which only works for small files. In reality, most neurosurgical videos have a large filesize and for that reason a technique called “streaming” is used. This is also done on our Vimeo channel, where our videos are hosted.

The next step will be to combine these two: the JW Player should display the streaming media from our Vimeo channel. This gives us all the advantages of the (highly flexible) JW Player while keeping all the advantages that Vimeo has offered us so far.

We’ll keep you posted!

Pieter Kubben
IT editor Surgical Neurology International

Good news for those who are using Papers instead of EndNote for their scientific bibliography and (since the latest version) also as citation manager. We already have an EndNote style for SNI which can be downloaded in the Author Instructions. Now we are working and testing an SNI style for Papers.

In my personal experience (nothing to disclose!) it is a wonderful Mac-application that really facilitaties handling your bibliography and now also citations.

To read more about the upcoming style and a reference to the underlying Citation Style Language, you can continue reading this post at DigitalNeurosurgeon.com. You can also download the beta version of the corresponding CSL file for testing purposes.

Pieter Kubben
IT editor Surgical Neurology International

Chapter 4 out of 5: posterior fossa mass lesions! After implementing the Brain Trauma Foundation surgical guidelines on epidural hematoma, acute subdural hematoma, and traumatic parenchymal lesions, now it is time for posterior fossa mass lesions. As usual, I take my “three-step-approach”:

Step 1: the original text-version of the guideline’s recommendations

Step 2: create a flowchart

(click to enlarge)

Step 3: convert into an app!

More screenshots are available from DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

Pieter Kubben
Information Technology editor
Surgical Neurology International

Part 3 of the BTF Surgical Guidelines: traumatic parenchymal lesions. By now you will be familiar with the three steps I also used for the decision support systems on epidural hematoma and acute subdural hematoma:

Step 1: the original text-version of the guideline’s recommendations

Step 2: create a flowchart

(click to enlarge)

Step 3: convert into an app!

Here is one picture, more images are available at DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

(click to enlarge)

Pieter Kubben
Information Technology editor
Surgical Neurology International

After my previous post on epidural hematoma, I now converted the BTF surgical guideline on acute subdural hematoma into a decision supporting system. Following the same steps as described previously, here we go:

Step 1: the original text-version of the guideline’s recommendations

Step 2: create a flowchart

(click to enlarge)

Step 3: convert into an app!

Here is one picture, more images are available at DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

Although emulator screenshots are running at iOS4, the app has been tested successfully at iOS5 as well!

Pieter Kubben
Information Technology editor
Surgical Neurology International

(this is a guest post from DigitalNeurosurgeon.com, slightly modified for Surgical Neurology International)

The Brain Trauma Foundation has created and published guidelines on the treatment of brain trauma a few years ago. The Guidelines for the Surgical Management of Traumatic Brain Injury are available as PDF and in a searchable online format. What lacks, is the availability on a mobile platform, preferably as an interactive decision support system (like their Head Injury Prognosis calculator). Seems an excellent topic for NeuroMind 2 (appears in Q1-2012).

Approach

The guidelines are text-based, no flowcharts have been provided. This makes direct implementation of the guidelines in an app difficult, as I think I need to make clear what algorithm is used in the app. In the end, if you intend to use it to make decisions, you need to be able to check the algorithm in case you want to. So here is the 1-2-3 of converting a text-based guideline into an application:

1. Read the text of the guidelines (or in this case: the Recommendations)
2. Create a flowchart from the text
3. Build the app based on the flowchart

I will explain more about the symbols that are used in the flowchart in a separate topic. Until then, this Open Course Ware tutorial gives you a nice introduction.

Epidural hematoma

Now here is the flowchart I created:

And here is a screenshot of the app:

For some more details and screenshots, click here.

Pieter Kubben
Information Technology editor
Surgical Neurology International