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CureHunter Visual Medical “Dictionary” (MeSH Browser)

Dangit!

I finished writing this post last night, but hadn’t posted it yet. Since Berci has beat me to it, I’ll go ahead and post it now.

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Curehunter.com has a “visual medical dictionary” that I’m having lots of fun playing with, even though I’m not sure that it is best described as a “dictionary.”

Really, it’s a nifty third-party PubMed/MEDLNE tool to visually browse MeSH (as an alternative to the NLM’s MeSH browser). As shown in the screen capture below, it gives the MeSH scope note for “colitis, ulcereative” as the definition for “ulcerative colitis.”

Then it grabs related terms from the MeSH Tree Structures and counts the number of citation hits for each:

Lastly, it gives you a visual, color-coded representation of related strongly related terms from the literature…

…and it does this all in three side-by-side frames:

Neat!

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August 31st, 2007 | Category: 3rd Party PubMed/MEDLINE Tools, For Medical Libraryfolk, Interfaces, Technology | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed

Duncan:
August 31st, 2007 at 3:59 pm

This is quite a slick tool, but unfortunately it doesn’t map to MeSH headings if you type in a non-MeSH term. For example, typing in “heart attack” gives no results. Doing the same in Ovid or EBSCO Medline will bring up the correct MeSH term “Myocardial Infarction”.

This limits its effectiveness as a learning tool for students who are in the process of transitioning from popular vocabulary to describe medical conditions to the vocabulary used by medical professionals.