In Response to the Letter to the Editor Regarding "Acute Hemorrhage After Intra-cerebral Biopsy in COVID-19 Patients: A Report of 3 Cases".

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A case report of rigidity and recurrent lower limb myoclonus: progressive encephalomyelitis rigidity and myoclonus syndrome, a chameleon.

Progressive encephalomyelitis with rigidity and myoclonus (PERM) syndrome is a rare neurological condition. Its clinical characteristics include axial and limb muscle rigidity, myoclonus, painful spasms and hyperekplexia. Diagnosis of this disease can be very challenging and optimal long-term treatment is unclear.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Surgical treatment of Arnold-Chiari type 1 malformations by decompression and duraplasty using pericranial flap: efficiency and complication rate evaluation

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Comparing deep brain stimulation in the ventral intermediate nucleus versus the posterior subthalamic area in essential tremor patients

The ventral intermediate nucleus (VIM) is the most commonly used target for deep brain stimulation (DBS) in patients with essential tremor (ET). Recent evidence suggests that the posterior subthalamic area (PSA) might be a better target for tremor reduction. We compared the outcome of VIM DBS with PSA DBS in our cohort of patients.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Acute hemorrhage after intra-cerebral biopsy in COVID-19 patients: a report of 3 cases.

When Belgium's COVID-19 outbreak began in March of 2020, our neurosurgical department followed the protocol of most surgical departments in the world and postponed elective surgery. However, patients with tumor-like brain lesions requiring urgent surgery still received treatment as usual, in order to ensure ongoing neuro-oncological care. From a series of 31 patients admitted for brain surgery, three were confirmed as infected by the novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Tremor assessment using smartphone sensor data and fuzzy reasoning

Background: Tremor severity assessment is an important step for the diagnosis and treatment decision-making of essential tremor (ET) patients. Traditionally, tremor severity is assessed by using questionnaires (e.g. ETRS and QUEST surveys). In this work we assume the possibility of assessing tremor severity using sensor data and computerized analyses. The goal of this work is to assess severity of tremor objectively, to be better able to asses improvement in ET patients due to deep brain stimulation or other treatments. Methods: We collect tremor data by strapping smartphones to the wrists of ET patients. The resulting raw sensor data is then pre-processed to remove any artifact due to patient’s intentional movement. Finally, this data is exploited to automatically build a transparent, interpretable, and succinct fuzzy model for the severity assessment of ET. For this purpose, we exploit pyFUME, a tool for the data-driven estimation of fuzzy models. It leverages the FST-PSO swarm intelligence meta-heuristic to identify optimal clusters in data, reducing the possibility of a premature convergence in local minima which would result in a sub-optimal model. pyFUME was also combined with GRABS, a novel methodology for the automatic simplification of fuzzy rules. Results: Our model is able to assess tremor severity of patients suffering from Essential Tremor, notably without the need for subjective questionnaires nor interviews. The fuzzy model improves the mean absolute error (MAE) metric by 78–81% compared to linear models and by 71–74% compared to a model based on decision trees. Conclusion: This study confirms that tremor data gathered using the smartphones is useful for the constructing of machine learning models that can be used to support the diagnosis and monitoring of patients who suffer from Essential Tremor. The model produced by our methodology is easy to inspect and, notably, characterized by a lower error with respect to approaches based on linear models or decision trees.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe