Search

The amount of published information and its continuing growth can no longer be managed by an individual searcher. One of today's great challenges for the academic researcher and clinician is to find a relevant scientific article using bibliographic search strategies. We aimed to design and build a Virtual Room of Gastroenterology (VRG) generating real-time automated search strategies and producing bibliographic and full text search results. These results update and complement with the latest evidence the Clinical Guideline Program of the World Gastroenterology Organisation. The HTML driven interface provides a series of pre-formulated MeSH based search strategies for each Aula. For each topic between 10 and 20 specific terms, qualifiers and subheadings are identified. The functionality of the VRG is based on the PubMed's characteristic that allows a search strategy to be captured as a web address. The VRG is available in Spanish and English, and the access is free. There are 28 rooms currently available. All together these rooms provide an advanced bibliographic access using more than 900 pre-programmed MeSH driven strategies. In a further very recent development some of the topics of VRG now allow cascade based searches. These searches look at resource sensitive options and possible ethnic difference per topic. The VRG allows significant reductions in time required to design and carry out complex bibliographic searches in the areas of gastroenterology, hepatology and endoscopy. The system updates automatically in real-time thus ensuring the currency of the results.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) represents a group of idiopathic, chronic, inflammatory intestinal conditions. Its two main disease categories are: Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), which feature both overlapping and distinct clinical and pathological features. While these diseases have, in the past, been most evident in the developed world, their prevalence in the developing world has been gradually increasing in recent decades. This poses unique issues in diagnosis and management which have been scarcely addressed in the literature or in extant guidelines. Depending on the nature of the complaints, investigations to diagnose either form of IBD or to assess disease activity will vary and will also be influenced by geographic variations in other conditions that might mimic IBD. Similarly, therapy varies depending on the phenotype of the disease being treated and available resources. The World Gastroenterology Organization has, accordingly, developed guidelines for diagnosing and treating IBD using a cascade approach to account for variability in resources in countries around the world.