The validity of single item and domain specific sitting time questionnaires in a student population measured under free-living conditions

Sedentary time questionnaires provide a low cost, low participant burden way of assessing sedentary behavior, but their subjectivity is questionable. The aim of this study was to assess the validity of sedentary time questionnaires, both single item and domain specific, in a student population under free living conditions with accelerometry as criterion measure.It is hypothesised that both sedentary time questionnaires underestimate the sitting time. Twenty healthy subjects (15 male, 5 female) participated in a one-week observational study under free-living conditions. They wore an accelerometer (activPAL) continuously for 7 consecutive days and afterwards filled in a single item (IPAQ) and a domain specific sedentary time questionnaire (dsSTQ) about the same time period. Spearman correlations were used to assess relative validity and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and Bland-Altman plots were used to assess absolute agreement between questionnaires and accelerometry. Sitting time was significantly underestimated by the IPAQ and insignificantly overestimated by the dsSTQ compared to accelerometry for the full week average sitting times. Correlations between questionnaires and accelerometry were weak to moderate. For both questionnaires there were large individual differences in estimations compared to accelerometry. The correlation between questionnaire and accelerometer determined sitting events lasting 30 minutes or longer was moderate. The dsSTQ is the more accurate measure of the two questionnaires on sitting time on the population level. However, there were large individual differences in estimations, and thus it does not seem to be a valid, reliable measurement tool for sitting time in small populations and in studies were sitting time is an important outcome. For these studies, accelerometry or more preferably direct observation provides a better estimate of sitting time

Hart 3.0: stimulatie tot regeneratie

Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Douwe E. Atsma bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de cardiologie, in het bijzonder cardiale celtherapie aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 20 juni 2014Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Douwe E. Atsma bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar in de cardiologie, in het bijzonder cardiale celtherapie aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 20 juni 201

Joint optimization of a β\beta-VAE for ECG task-specific feature extraction

Electrocardiography is the most common method to investigate the condition of the heart through the observation of cardiac rhythm and electrical activity, for both diagnosis and monitoring purposes. Analysis of electrocardiograms (ECGs) is commonly performed through the investigation of specific patterns, which are visually recognizable by trained physicians and are known to reflect cardiac (dis)function. In this work we study the use of $\beta$-variational autoencoders (VAEs) as an explainable feature extractor, and improve on its predictive capacities by jointly optimizing signal reconstruction and cardiac function prediction. The extracted features are then used for cardiac function prediction using logistic regression. The method is trained and tested on data from 7255 patients, who were treated for acute coronary syndrome at the Leiden University Medical Center between 2010 and 2021. The results show that our method significantly improved prediction and explainability compared to a vanilla $\beta$-VAE, while still yielding similar reconstruction performance.Comment: Conference paper, 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Quality of life in breast cancer patients with cancer treatment-related cardiac dysfunction: a qualitative study

Contains fulltext : 251384.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: Although improved breast cancer (BC) treatment has decreased mortality, these anti-cancer regimens may have serious cardiovascular side effects that affect patients' long-term prognosis and quality of life (QoL). BC patients with cancer treatment-related cardiac dysfunction (CTRCD) can suffer from a variety of symptoms, such as dyspnoea and fatigue. The impact of CTRCD after BC treatment on patients' daily life has not been qualitatively explored yet. AIMS: This study aims to explore the influence of CTRCD on QoL of women with BC, as defined by the concept of positive health. Second, we aim to evaluate the personal experience with cardiac surveillance during the BC trajectory. METHODS AND RESULTS: A qualitative study with semi-structured interviews was conducted and thematically analysed to explore the QoL and healthcare experiences of BC patients with CTRCD. Twelve patients participated in this study. Five themes are selected in response to the study objective: (i) patients: overwhelming fatigue, (ii) patients: mental burden of anxiety, (iii) social setting: lack of understanding and acceptance, (iv) medical specialists: lack of knowledge and acknowledgement, and (v) patients: need for personalized care. CONCLUSION: This study identified core components of the impact CTRCD has on the QoL of BC patients. Patients experienced an increased health-related burden due to CTRCD, affecting their physical, social, and psychosocial well-being. Healthcare experiences were largely affected by a lack of acknowledgement and professional communication. Patients underlined the need for personalized care during follow-up

Effects of sea water and stanniectomy on branchial Ca2+ handling and drinking rate in eel (Anguilla anguilla L.)

Contains fulltext : JEB_VOL.202_Iss._18_p_2505-2511.PDF ( ) (Open Access

Post-ischemic myocardial inflammatory response: a complex and dynamic process susceptible to immunomodulatory therapies

Following acute occlusion of a coronary artery causing myocardial ischemia and implementing first-line treatment involving rapid reperfusion, a dynamic and balanced inflammatory response is initiated to repair and remove damaged cells. Paradoxically, restoration of myocardial blood flow exacerbates cell damage as a result of myocardial ischemia-reperfusion (MI-R) injury, which eventually provokes accelerated apoptosis. In the end, the infarct size still corresponds to the subsequent risk of developing heart failure. Therefore, true understanding of the mechanisms regarding MI-R injury, and its contribution to cell damage and cell death, are of the utmost importance in the search for successful therapeutic interventions to finally prevent the onset of heart failure. This review focuses on the role of innate immunity, chemokines, cytokines, and inflammatory cells in all three overlapping phases following experimental, mainly murine, MI-R injury known as the inflammatory, reparative, and maturation phase. It provides a complete state-of-the-art overview including most current research of all post-ischemic processes and phases and additionally summarizes the use of immunomodulatory therapies translated into clinical practice.Cardiolog

CentroidNetV2:A hybrid deep neural network for small-object segmentation and counting

This paper presents CentroidNetV2, a novel hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that has been specifically designed to segment and count many small and connected object instances. This complete redesign of the original CentroidNet uses a CNN backbone to regress a field of centroid-voting vectors and border-voting vectors. The segmentation masks of the individual object instances are produced by decoding centroid votes and border votes. A loss function that combines cross-entropy loss and Euclidean-distance loss achieves high quality centroids and borders of object instances. Several backbones and loss functions are tested on three different datasets ranging from precision agriculture to microbiology and pathology. CentroidNetV2 is compared to the state-of-the art networks You Only Look Once Version 3 (YOLOv3) and Mask Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (MRCNN). On two out of three datasets CentroidNetV2 achieves the highest F1 score and on all three datasets CentroidNetV2 achieves the highest recall. CentroidNetV2 demonstrates the best ability to detect small objects although the best segmentation masks for larger objects are produced by MRCNN. (c) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Working Papers, Open Access and Cyber-Infrastructure in Classical Studies

Princeton–Stanford Working Papers in Classics is a web-based series of work-in-progress scripts by members of two leading departments of classics. It introduces the humanities to a new form of scholarly communication and represents a major advance in the free availability of classical-studies scholarship in cyberspace. This article both reviews the initial performance of this open-access experiment and the benefits and challenges of working papers more generally for classical studies. After two years of operation Princeton–Stanford Working Papers in Classics has proven to be a clear success. This series has built up a large international readership and a sizeable body of preprints and performs important scholarly and community-outreach functions. As this performance is largely due to its congruency with the working arrangements of ancient historians and classicists and the global demand for open-access scholarship, the series confirms the viability of this means of scholarly communication and the likelihood of its expansion in our discipline. But modifications are required to increase the benefits this series brings and the amount of scholarship it makes freely available online. Finally departments wishing to replicate its success will have to consider other important developments, such as the increasing availability of postprints, the linking of research funding to open access, and the emergence of new cyber-infrastructure