October 03, 2007
Visual Medical Dictionary
Visual Medical Dictionary from Cure Hunter Inc is truly visual, an excellent example of information visualization. It displays the MeSH taxonomy of terms as a tree along with a network map showing the relationship of the disease or condition with other diseases, therapies, and treatments.
The dictionary has links to CureHunter's research, such as their Patient-Physician Summary Reports, for which there are fees. The free version does provide some sample data for key drugs and agents obtained from the FDA and other sources.
From the CureHunter website:
"The CureHunter Discovery Engine is the world's only fully unified and integrated numeric index of all known drugs, biologically active agents, diseases and empirical statements of all effective clinical outcomes published in the United States National Library of Medicine.The engine you are accessing online right now computes: 121,000 drug and biological agent data points X 11,600 diseases X 15,000,000 peer-reviewed research articles X several hundred thousand additional variables of Gene, Protein, Enzyme, Hormone, Growth Factor, Ligand, Kinase, Receptor, Inhibitor and other important small biologically active molecules. "
There is a 5 -minute introductory screencast at http://www.curehunter.com/screencast/research/
The lay person can use this dictionary to research diseases and treatments. The professional may want to register for the newsletter and updates.