Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.

First published in 1918, William Strunk Jr.'s The Elements of Style is a guide to writing in American English. The boolk outlines eight "elementary rules of usage", ten "elementary principles of composition", "a few matters of form", a list of 49 "words and expressions commonly misused", and a list of 57 "words often misspelled". A later edition, enhanced by E B White, was named by Time magazine in 2011 as one of the 100 best and most influential books written in English since 1923.

It is a turbulent time for STM publishing. With moves towards open access to scientific literature, the future of medical journals is uncertain and unpredictable. This is the only book of its kind to address this problematic issue. Richard Smith, a previous editor of the British Medical Journal for twenty five years and one of the most influential people within medical journals and medicine depicts a compelling picture of medical publishing. Drawn from the author's own extensive and unrivalled experience in medical publishing, Smith provides a refreshingly honest analysis of current and future trends in journal publishing including peer review, ethics in medical publishing, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry as well as that of the mass media, and the risk that money can cloud objectivity in publishing. Full of personal anecdotes and amusing tales, this is a book for everyone, from researcher to patient, author to publisher and editor to reader. The controversial and highly topical nature of this book, will make uncomfortable reading for publishers, researchers, funding bodies and pharmaceutical companies alike making this useful resource for anyone with an interest in medicine or medical journals. Topic covered include: Libel and medical journals; Patients and medical journals; Medical journals and the mass media; Medical journals and pharmaceutical companies: uneasy bedfellows; Editorial independence; misconduct; and accountability; Ethical support and accountability for journals; Peer review: a flawed process and Conflicts of interest: how money clouds objectivity. This is a unique offering by the former BMJ editor- challenging, comprehensive and controversial. This must be the most controversial medical book of the 21st Century John Illman, MJA News Lively, full of anecdote and he [Smith] is brutally honest British Journal of Hospital Medicine ************************************************************************************************* Please note that the reference to Arup Banerjee on page 100 of this book should be to Anjan Banerjee. We apologise to Professor Arup Banerjee for this oversight. *************************************************************************************************

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, AIME 2019, held in Poznan, Poland, in June 2019. The 22 revised full and 31 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 134 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: deep learning; simulation; knowledge representation; probabilistic models; behavior monitoring; clustering, natural language processing, and decision support; feature selection; image processing; general machine learning; and unsupervised learning.