Best Practice Statement for Screening, Assessment and Management of Vision Problems in the First 30 Days after an Acute Stroke

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Criteria for the diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration

Current criteria for the clinical diagnosis of pathologically confirmed corticobasal degeneration (CBD) no longer reflect the expanding understanding of this disease and its clinicopathologic correlations. An international consortium of behavioral neurology, neuropsychology, and movement disorders specialists developed new criteria based on consensus and a systematic literature review. Clinical diagnoses (early or late) were identified for 267 nonoverlapping pathologically confirmed CBD cases from published reports and brain banks. Combined with consensus, 4 CBD phenotypes emerged: corticobasal syndrome (CBS), frontal behavioral-spatial syndrome (FBS), nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (naPPA), and progressive supranuclear palsy syndrome (PSPS). Clinical features of CBD cases were extracted from descriptions of 209 brain bank and published patients, providing a comprehensive description of CBD and correcting common misconceptions. Clinical CBD phenotypes and features were combined to create 2 sets of criteria: more specific clinical research criteria for probable CBD and broader criteria for possible CBD that are more inclusive but have a higher chance to detect other tau-based pathologies. Probable CBD criteria require insidious onset and gradual progression for at least 1 year, age at onset ≥50 years, no similar family history or known tau mutations, and a clinical phenotype of probable CBS or either FBS or naPPA with at least 1 CBS feature. The possible CBD category uses similar criteria but has no restrictions on age or family history, allows tau mutations, permits less rigorous phenotype fulfillment, and includes a PSPS phenotype. Future validation and refinement of the proposed criteria are needed

Dheergayu: Clinical Depression Monitoring Assistant

Depression is identified as one of the most common mental health disorders in the world. Depression not only impacts the patient but also their families and relatives. If not properly treated, due to these reasons it leads people to hazardous situations. Nonetheless existing clinical diagnosis tools for monitoring illness trajectory are inadequate. Traditionally, psychiatrists use one to one interaction assessments to diagnose depression levels. However, these cliniccentered services can pose several operational challenges. In order to monitor clinical depressive disorders, patients are required to travel regularly to a clinical center within its limited operating hours. These procedures are highly resource intensive because they require skilled clinician and laboratories. To address these issues, we propose a personal and ubiquitous sensing technologies, such as fitness trackers and smartphones, which can monitor human vitals in an unobtrusive manner

The Autism Toolbox : An Autism Resource for Scottish Schools

The Autism Toolbox will draw upon a range of practice experience, literature and research to offer guidance for authorities and schools providing for children and young people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD)

Brain image clustering by wavelet energy and CBSSO optimization algorithm

Previously, the diagnosis of brain abnormality was significantly important in the saving of social and hospital resources. Wavelet energy is known as an effective feature detection which has great efficiency in different utilities. This paper suggests a new method based on wavelet energy to automatically classify magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain images into two groups (normal and abnormal), utilizing support vector machine (SVM) classification based on chaotic binary shark smell optimization (CBSSO) to optimize the SVM weights. The results of the suggested CBSSO-based KSVM are compared favorably to several other methods in terms of better sensitivity and authenticity. The proposed CAD system can additionally be utilized to categorize the images with various pathological conditions, types, and illness modes

Telehealth as a tool for independent self-management by people living with long term conditions

Telehealth is seen as a key component of 21st century healthcare, and studies have explored its cost effectiveness and impact on hospital admissions. Research has been carried out into how to best implement it, and the barriers to its adoption. The impact of telehealth on self-management however has been a neglected area. An evaluation of the implementation of a telehealth programme in one area in the South of England found that some patients were using the telehealth equipment provided to enhance their own self management abilities. Whilst the nurses managing the scheme felt that they had an education role they did not involve their patients in setting goals. The patients equally did not feel that were being educated by their nurses. Patients were using the monitoring equipment independently of the nurses and the scheme to support their self-management strategies. Therefore the concept of graduating from telehealth once good self-management is established needs to be rethought. Patients in this study experienced less face to face contact with their nurse, but also reported that they were happy with the changes. This suggests that for some patients the contact with the nurse may well be able to be reduced or withdrawn however removing the monitoring equipment will remove the very tools essential to continued self-management

Knowledge-based modelling applied to synucleinopathies

The adoption of telemedicine technologies has enabled collaborative programs involving a variety of links among distributed medical structures and health officials and professionals. The use for telemedicine for transmission of medical data and the possibility for several distant physicians to share their knowledge on given medical cases provides clear benefits, but also raises several unsolved conceptual and technical challenges. The seamless exchange and access of medical information between medical structures, health professionals, and patients is a prerequisite for the harmonious development of this new medical practice. This paper proposes a new approach of semantic interoperability for enabling mutual understanding of terminologies and concepts used. The proposed semantic interoperability approach is based on conceptual graph to support collaborative activities by describing how different health specialists can apply appropriate strategies to eliminate differential medical diagnosis. Intelligent analysis strategies are used to narrow down and pinpoint medical disorders. The model proposed is fully verified by a case study in the context of elderly patients and specifically dealing with synucleinopathies, a group of neurodegenerative diseases that include Parkinson's disease (PD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), pure autonomic failure (PAF) and multiple system atrophy (MSA)

Through the Kinesthetic Lens : Observation of Social Attunement in Autism Spectrum Disorders

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).This paper will present a movement-informed perspective to social attunement in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). BACKGROUND: Dance movement therapy (DMT) is a psychotherapeutic intervention that is used with participants with ASD in various settings. Regular clinical outcome monitoring in an outpatient setting in the Netherlands had shown positive effects on social attunement capacities in young people with ASD. However, a systematic study of the development of social attunement movement behaviors of participants with ASD throughout a DMT intervention was not yet available. METHODS: A series of individual cases of DMT with young people with ASD (mean age 12.2 years.) were analyzed for changes in interpersonal movement behaviors employing video-based retrospective observation. RESULTS: The findings were summarized in an observation scale for interpersonal movement behaviors. This scale was then tested for its applicability for the monitoring of social attunement behaviors throughout therapy. DISCUSSION: A movement-informed perspective may be helpful to inventory changes in social attunement behaviors in participants with ASD. The relevance of a movement-informed perspective for the concept of social attunement in ASD will be discussed.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio