Leisure Activities and Personality Traits of Medical Librarians

Objectives: This study examines medical librarians’ personality based on their leisure activities to find out which personal characteristics prevail among working medical librarians.

Methods: An electronic survey was administered among medical librarians of the New England/South East regions. The collected statistics was compared to the national leisure statistics and previously published studies on personality traits.

Results: The respondent group exhibited prevailing Artistic, Investigative, and Conventional types, with a slightly higher number of introverts.

Conclusions: Personalities of the respondents fit into the job environment quite well, which could positively influence their interaction with patrons and the overall quality of work.     

Retrieval,visualization, and mining of large radiation dosage data

Radiation dose monitoring has become an essential service that hospitals must perform. Depending on the system in place, this can result in the collection of large quantities of data, ripe for analysis. These data should include a wide variety of variables for each study because assessment of the propriety of the patient’s dose is dependent on many factors, including patient age and size, as well as the body section that is being scanned. Moreover, the scanners themselves have many properties that affect patient dose, such as model, pitch and kVp. In this paper, we propose an engine that seamlessly integrated with a clinical PACS to retrieve radiation dosage data. We devised several schemes to analyze these data through visualization and mining techniques that examine it at different scopes. We demonstrate the utility of such visual methods at examining large, noisy, and multi-dimensional data, which is embodied in the collected radiation data.