568,037 research outputs found
Evaluating Adherence to the Sepsis Bundle and the Effectiveness of Best Practice Alerts
PURPOSE: To evaluate the adherence to the CMS sepsis recommendations and sepsis bundle used by the study health system before and after the implementation of Best Practice Alerts (BPAs) and assessing the effect of these alerts on patient outcomes.
METHODS: The study was a single-center, process evaluation through a retrospective chart review within a southwest healthcare system. The sample consisted of 73 patients for the pre-implementation period (May 1, 2016-September 7, 2016) and 75 patients for the post-implementation period (September 8, 2016-April 30, 2017).
RESULTS: No major differences were found between the two groups with regard to patient age, ethnicity, and time of admission. The post-implementation group had a higher incidence of timely antibiotic administration (p=.008) with 38% receiving initial antibiotic administration in 45 minutes or less of meeting sepsis criteria versus 21% in the pre-implementation group. In the post-implementation group, 89% of patients met sepsis criteria versus 67% in the pre-implementation group. The post-implementation group also collected blood cultures in 30 minutes or less in 61% of patients versus 41% in the pre-implementation group (p=.03). No significant difference was found in regard to antibiotic selection, mortality, or length of stay.
CONCLUSION: The post-implementation group achieved more timely antibiotic administration and blood culture collection; however, there was no significant improvement in appropriate antibiotic choice, length of stay, or mortality. BPAs were inconsistent with the time that patients met sepsis criteria. After years of research and protocol changes, outcomes have not improved, indicating a great need for consideration of alternative treatments to improve the care and outcomes of sepsis patients
VarArray Meets t-SOT: Advancing the State of the Art of Streaming Distant Conversational Speech Recognition
This paper presents a novel streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR)
framework for multi-talker overlapping speech captured by a distant microphone
array with an arbitrary geometry. Our framework, named t-SOT-VA, capitalizes on
independently developed two recent technologies; array-geometry-agnostic
continuous speech separation, or VarArray, and streaming multi-talker ASR based
on token-level serialized output training (t-SOT). To combine the best of both
technologies, we newly design a t-SOT-based ASR model that generates a
serialized multi-talker transcription based on two separated speech signals
from VarArray. We also propose a pre-training scheme for such an ASR model
where we simulate VarArray's output signals based on monaural single-talker ASR
training data. Conversation transcription experiments using the AMI meeting
corpus show that the system based on the proposed framework significantly
outperforms conventional ones. Our system achieves the state-of-the-art word
error rates of 13.7% and 15.5% for the AMI development and evaluation sets,
respectively, in the multiple-distant-microphone setting while retaining the
streaming inference capability.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure, 3 tables, v2: Appendix A has been adde
A Survey of Word Reordering in Statistical Machine Translation: Computational Models and Language Phenomena
Word reordering is one of the most difficult aspects of statistical machine
translation (SMT), and an important factor of its quality and efficiency.
Despite the vast amount of research published to date, the interest of the
community in this problem has not decreased, and no single method appears to be
strongly dominant across language pairs. Instead, the choice of the optimal
approach for a new translation task still seems to be mostly driven by
empirical trials. To orientate the reader in this vast and complex research
area, we present a comprehensive survey of word reordering viewed as a
statistical modeling challenge and as a natural language phenomenon. The survey
describes in detail how word reordering is modeled within different
string-based and tree-based SMT frameworks and as a stand-alone task, including
systematic overviews of the literature in advanced reordering modeling. We then
question why some approaches are more successful than others in different
language pairs. We argue that, besides measuring the amount of reordering, it
is important to understand which kinds of reordering occur in a given language
pair. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of word reordering
phenomena in a diverse sample of language pairs, based on a large collection of
linguistic knowledge. Empirical results in the SMT literature are shown to
support the hypothesis that a few linguistic facts can be very useful to
anticipate the reordering characteristics of a language pair and to select the
SMT framework that best suits them.Comment: 44 pages, to appear in Computational Linguistic
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