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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Champagne Terrace/Bordeaux (Novotel London West)
9:30 AM
Background: Autism is postulated to have etiology in gestational and postnatal exposures. Determining dates of exposures during gestation demands accurate date estimates. The Center for Autism and Developmental Disabilities Research Epidemiology (CADDRE) has developed and incorporated a gestation date calculator program into the CADDRE Information System (CIS) for the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED). The development process of gestation date forms and population of dates within telephone scripts is discussed.
Objectives: - Describe development process and technical issues of programming gestation date calculation algorithms in CIS
- Describe process of data storage and populating CADDRE study interviews with algorithmically calculated gestation dates.
- Discuss potential benefits of automatically populating scripts with algorithmically estimated gestation dates versus manually entering dates from spreadsheet into CIS.
Methods: CADDRE Data Coordinating Center received a paper form with description of pregnancy questionnaire process, in addition to a spreadsheet including due date calculation macros. From these documents and spreadsheet, DCC was tasked with developing an application that would estimate due date and gestation dates. The development from spreadsheet and paper forms to application will be described. Additionally, the advantages of populating of study telephone interview scripts will be discussed.
Results: A module in the CIS application was developed to define metadata for study scripts. This module utilizes an expression evaluator for question skips, caption editing, and population of gestation date fields. Algorithmically estimated dates are calculated and stored in the CIS database, and were used to populate study scripts.
Conclusions: Initial data suggests that populating study scripts using computer-based gestation date calculations improve the reliability of dates over data entry from spreadsheet into CIS. Additionally, labor is decreased when dates are automatically imported. References to automatically imported dates should yield greater accuracy in gestational exposure assessment.
Objectives: - Describe development process and technical issues of programming gestation date calculation algorithms in CIS
- Describe process of data storage and populating CADDRE study interviews with algorithmically calculated gestation dates.
- Discuss potential benefits of automatically populating scripts with algorithmically estimated gestation dates versus manually entering dates from spreadsheet into CIS.
Methods: CADDRE Data Coordinating Center received a paper form with description of pregnancy questionnaire process, in addition to a spreadsheet including due date calculation macros. From these documents and spreadsheet, DCC was tasked with developing an application that would estimate due date and gestation dates. The development from spreadsheet and paper forms to application will be described. Additionally, the advantages of populating of study telephone interview scripts will be discussed.
Results: A module in the CIS application was developed to define metadata for study scripts. This module utilizes an expression evaluator for question skips, caption editing, and population of gestation date fields. Algorithmically estimated dates are calculated and stored in the CIS database, and were used to populate study scripts.
Conclusions: Initial data suggests that populating study scripts using computer-based gestation date calculations improve the reliability of dates over data entry from spreadsheet into CIS. Additionally, labor is decreased when dates are automatically imported. References to automatically imported dates should yield greater accuracy in gestational exposure assessment.