Author: Eugene

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A new PDA in the house

PEGTJ37.jpg
We now have one of these, a Sony TJ37. The wife decided she just couldn’t wait any longer and decided she needed to have one of these. And since she wanted to listen to MP3s, we needed to get a Memory Stick. Of course that also meant we needed to get a Memory Stick reader for the computer. I decided on one of those multiformat memory card readers that reads CF I/II, SM, SD, MS, Microdrive and several others. I was trying to avoid this Flash media bloat, but now it’s unavoidable. My digital camera uses SM, my PDA uses SD, and now her PDA uses MS. All small little bits ot try and keep track of.

So now, several hundred dollars later my wife has a PDA again, and she can go back to organizing her life again.

It’s actually a pretty nice little unit, although I think Sony could have made it more attractive going with a Virtual Grafitti area (DIA). MP3s are stored and played off the MS card, and pictures can be stored either to RAM or MS card. It even comes with a little strap that you can use to hang onto it with. Put your hand through the strap, and no worries about accidentally dropping the thing. Stylus leaves a lot to be desired though. It’s pretty thin, and I can’t imagine using it to write for any length of time.

Navigating with the jog roller is pretty easy, although the buttons can be a little tough to press. They’re small and nearly flush with the surface, so if you have big fat thumbs or fingers, pressing them might be a bit of a challenge.

The pictures it takes are fairly decent quality. Not great, but acceptable for quick snapshots. Max picture size is 640×480. If I can get it away from her for long enough, I’ll play with it a bit and maybe post a few pictures.

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Beta testing MT3

I get to be a beta tester for MT3! I won’t be converting over right away though. I thought I’d set up a duplicate database and test the beta using that so that I can iron out what changes I’ll need to make to my templates. So for a little while, I’ll be running parallel weblogs.

Upgrading the MT database was pretty simple. Had everything up and running in a matter of a few minutes, although I haven’t rebuilt an of my weblogs yet. I’ve recently run into few issues with plugins that I’m trying to sort out. After I get those resolved, I’ll start messing around with MT3.

Looking forward to this.

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PHP5 fixed

Oh goody, the problem I was having building PHP 5.0 RC2 seems to have been fixed. I can go back to experimenting again.

FIX: Solaris compile failure.
Daniel Fahlgren reported that following Wez Furlong’s latest changes to proc_open(), PHP will no longer build on Solaris. Daniel had a quick fix for this, but Wez foresaw implications for other platforms in his workaround, and suggested areas where the Solaris build problem might be genuinely resolved. Daniel took this on board and came up with a patch that was acceptable to all, which now happily lives in the PHP source tree. This will be included in PHP 5.0.0.

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Journal Club: Diagnostic CT Scans: Assessment of Patient, Physician, and Radiologist Awareness of Radiation Dose and Possible Risks

A news article titled “Patients, physicians unaware of CT radiation exposure” in Radiology 2004;231:393-398 and posted at Aunt Minnie talks about just how much patients and physicians don’t know about radiation exposures from CT.

The article raises a some interesting points about the need to educate health professionals about radiation. About the only radiology education most physicians receive is a 3 or 4 month rotation through radiology where they learn what it is they’re looking at when looking at an x-ray. Even some radiologists don’t know as much about radiation as you might think. The trouble is, squeezing more education into the curriculum is difficult at best.

Yes, radiation exposures from CT are significantly higher than regular radiographic exposures. Yes, there might be an increase in the risk of getting cancer. It’s a small risk but one that is dwarfed by risks from other activities such as smoking or environmental exposure to chemical carcinogens. Radiation can be bad for you, but saves lives when used properly.

Ultimately, when it comes to any diagnostic imaging involving radiation, it comes down to a risk versus benefit thing. This is one of the things I try to emphasize to residents when I’m teaching them. Does the benefit of diagnosing an immediate problem in the patient outweigh the small increased long term cancer risk? Will the exam provide significantly more information useful for treatment than another exam that uses less or now radiation?

For the past 7 years I’ve been involved in teaching radiology residents all about the physics of medical imaging. I teach them (try to anyway) about radiation, how it interacts with matter, the different imaging modalities and how they work and generate images, radiation safety and biology. It’s part of the board exams they need to pass. But I don’t teach them because they have to pass the board exam. I teach them because down the road, they will be the “radiation experts” in whatever community they end up working in. They’re the ones that people expect to know about the risks and benefits of getting radiation. They’re the ones that people will go to for answers.

And my education efforts go beyond the classroom as well. Dose/exposure charts for all the equipment I survey are generated and distributed for posting so that people can see (if they care to look) what kinds of exposures the machine produces. I probably need to advertise this a little more though.

It’s one of the activities I enjoy about my job.

Abstract:

PURPOSE: To determine the awareness level concerning radiation dose and possible risks associated with computed tomographic (CT) scans among patients, emergency department (ED) physicians, and radiologists.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: Adult patients seen in the ED of a U.S. academic medical center during a 2-week period with mild to moderate abdominopelvic or flank pain and who underwent CT were surveyed after acquisition of the CT scan. Patients were asked whether or not they were informed about the risks, benefits, and radiation dose of the CT scan and if they believed that the scan increased their lifetime cancer risk. Patients were also asked to estimate the radiation dose for the CT scan compared with that for one chest radiograph. ED physicians who requested CT scans and radiologists who reviewed the CT scans were surveyed with similar questions and an additional question regarding the number of years in practice. The 2 test of independence was used to compare the three respondent groups regarding perceived increased cancer risk from one abdominopelvic CT scan.
RESULTS: Seven percent (five of 76) of patients reported that they were told about risks and benefits of their CT scan, while 22% (10 of 45) of ED physicians reported that they had provided such information. Forty-seven percent (18 of 38) of radiologists believed that there was increased cancer risk, whereas only 9% (four of 45) of ED physicians and 3% (two of 76) of patients believed that there was increased risk (X22 = 41.45, P < .001). All patients and most ED physicians and radiologists were unable to accurately estimate the dose for one CT scan compared with that for one chest radiograph.
CONCLUSION: Patients are not given information about the risks, benefits, and radiation dose for a CT scan. Patients, ED physicians, and radiologists alike are unable to provide accurate estimates of CT doses regardless of their experience level.
© RSNA, 2004

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Recovering MT entries from HTML archives

This script might come in handy some day. There are always posts on the MT support forum about how someone’s lost their database, hadn’t made a backup and only have the archive HTML files generated by MT to restore from. And I’m always forgetting what search terms I used to find the original post.

It won’t restore everything. You still need to rebuild your templates and modules. Not sure about the comments, but at least you can recover your entries. Still, it’s no substitute for having a good database backup or SQL dump of your MT database.

Don’t thank me, thank Jason. He wrote it.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Date::Manip;
# mtfix.pl - parse HTML files to import into Movable Type
# usage: mtfix.pl *html &gt; import.mt
# Note: you _will_ need to adjust the regex
while (&lt;&gt;) { # for each file on the command line
# read in entire file to $content, line feeds and all
# using slurp mode
{ local $/; $content = &lt;&gt;;}
# locate the fields we need using regex
# some matches may include newlines
($author) =($content =~ m|&lt;div class="posted"&gt;\s+(.+?)\s+/|s);
($title) = ($content =~ m|&lt;span class="title"&gt;(.+)&lt;/span&gt;|);
($text) = ($content =~ m|&lt;p&gt;(.+)&lt;a name="more"&gt;|s);
($more) = ($content =~ m|&lt;a name="more"&gt;(.+)&lt;span class="posted"&gt;|s);
($date) = ($content =~ m|&lt;div class="date"&gt;(.+)&lt;/div&gt;|);
($time) = ($content =~ m|Posted\sat\s(.+)&lt;br /&gt;|);
# Read in all the comments as one big block of text
($comments) = ($content =~ m|&lt;/a&gt;Comments&lt;/div&gt;\n(.+)&lt;div class="comments-head"&gt;|s);
# Break up each comment into it's own element in an array
@comm = split (/&lt;\/div&gt;\n/, $comments);
# convert the date to MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm:ss
$datetime = "$date $time";
$parsed = ParseDate($datetime);
$datetime = UnixDate($parsed,"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S");
# Strip out the paragraph tags, MT will add them later anyways.
$text =~ s|\&lt;p\&gt;||g;
$text =~ s|\&lt;/p\&gt;||g;
$more =~ s|\&lt;p\&gt;||g;
$more =~ s|\&lt;/p\&gt;||g;
# printout the fields in the proper format
print "AUTHOR: $author\n";
print "TITLE: $title\n";
print "DATE: $datetime\n";
print "-----\n";
print "BODY:\n$text\n";
print "-----\n";
print "EXTENDED BODY:\n$more\n";
foreach (@comm) { # For every comment in our aray, printout the necessary formating.
if (length $_ &gt; 7) { # this is here to ignore the last comment record.
($CText) = ($_ =~ m|&lt;div class="comments-body"&gt;\n(.+)\n\&lt;span|s);
($CDate) = ($_ =~ m|&lt;/a&gt;\son\s(.+)&lt;/span&gt;|);
($Ctemp) = ($_ =~ m|Posted\sby:\s(.+)\/a\&gt;|);
($CAuthor) = ($Ctemp =~ m|\&gt;(.+)\&lt;|);
($CURL) = ($Ctemp =~ m|href=\"(.+)\"|);
$CText =~ s|\&lt;p\&gt;||g;
$CText =~ s|\&lt;/p\&gt;||g;
$parsed = ParseDate($CDate);
$CDate = UnixDate($parsed,"%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S");
print "-----\n";
print "COMMENT:\n";
print "AUTHOR: $CAuthor\n";
print "URL: $CURL\n";
print "DATE: $CDate\n";
print "$CText\n\n";
}
}
print "--------\n";
}