First successful treatment of Clostridium perfringens-associated emphysematous hepatitis: a case report

Emphysematous diseases of the abdomen are rare with an often inconspicuous presentation of symptoms and rapid lethal outcome if untreated. We report the first successfully treated case of Clostridium perfringens-associated emphysematous hepatitis. In the emergency room, a 79-year-old man presented with shortness of breath and deteriorated general condition since the morning of admission. Initial CT scans showed a small but rapidly expanding gas collection in liver segment 6. Emergency surgery with atypical liver resection was performed immediately. With early resection and prolonged administration of antibiotics in the presence of sepsis, the patient recovered successfully and was discharged 37 days after admission. As in our case, prompt diagnosis with early surgical treatment is crucial for the management of emphysematous hepatitis

Feasibility of Intestinal MR Elastography in Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background: While MR enterography allows detection of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), the findings continue to be of limited use in guiding treatment-medication vs. surgery. Purpose: To test the feasibility of MR elastography of the gut in healthy volunteers and IBD patients. Study type: Prospective pilot. Population: Forty subjects (healthy volunteers: n = 20, 37 ± 14 years, 10 women; IBD patients: n = 20 (ulcerative colitis n = 9, Crohn's disease n = 11), 41 ± 15 years, 11 women). Field strength/sequence: Multifrequency MR elastography using a single-shot spin-echo echo planar imaging sequence at 1.5 T with drive frequencies of 40, 50, 60, and 70 Hz. Assessment: Maps of shear-wave speed (SWS, in m/s) and loss angle (φ, in rad), representing stiffness and solid-fluid behavior, respectively, were generated using tomoelastography data processing. Histopathological analysis of surgical specimens was used as reference standard in patients. Statistical tests: Unpaired t-test, one-way analysis of variance followed by Tukey post hoc analysis, Pearson's correlation coefficient and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) with 95%-confidence interval (CI). Significance level of 5%. Results: MR elastography was feasible in all 40 subjects (100% technical success rate). SWS and φ were significantly increased in IBD by 21% and 20% (IBD: 1.45 ± 0.14 m/s and 0.78 ± 0.12 rad; healthy volunteers: 1.20 ± 0.14 m/s and 0.65 ± 0.06 rad), whereas no significant differences were found between ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease (P = 0.74 and 0.90, respectively). In a preliminary assessment, a high diagnostic accuracy in detecting IBD was suggested by an AUC of 0.90 (CI: 0.81-0.96) for SWS and 0.84 (CI: 0.71-0.95) for φ. Data conclusion: In this pilot study, our results demonstrated the feasibility of MR elastography of the gut and showed an excellent diagnostic performance in predicting IBD. Evidence level: 1 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 1

Association of smoking and physical inactivity with MRI derived changes in cardiac function and structure in cardiovascular healthy subjects

We aimed to investigate the association of smoking and physical exercise on ventricular function and structure, determined by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR), in subjects without known cardiovascular diseases. A total of 381 participants (median age 57 years) of the Cooperative Health Research in the Region of Augsburg (KORA) FF4 cohort underwent CMR. The participants' smoking and sporting habits were measured by a questionnaire. Physical inactivity was associated with a reduction of left ventricular ejection fraction (LV-EF), stroke volume, early diastolic peak filling rate and peak ejection rate of the left ventricle as well as right ventricular stroke volume. LV-EF was reduced in subjects with almost no physical activity compared to subjects with regular physical activity (68.4%, 95%CI 66.8-70.1% vs. 70.8%, 95%CI 69.2-72.3%, p < 0,05). Smokers had lower right ventricular end-diastolic volumes (80.6 ml/m(2), 95%CI 76.7-84.5 ml/m(2);never-smokers: 85.5 ml/m(2), 95%CI 82.6-88.3 ml/m(2);p < 0.05) but higher extracellular volume fractions (ECV) and fibrosis volumes (34.3 ml, 95%CI 32.5-36.0 ml, vs. 31.0 ml, 95%CI 29.6-32.3 ml, p < 0.01). We conclude that asymptomatic individuals without known cardiovascular diseases show differences in cardiac function and structure depending on their physical activity and smoking habits. This underlines the importance of prevention and health education

The ACM Multimedia 2022 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge: vocalisations, stuttering, activity, & mosquitoes

The ACM Multimedia 2022 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the Vocalisations and Stuttering Sub-Challenges, a classification on human non-verbal vocalisations and speech has to be made; the Activity Sub-Challenge aims at beyond-audio human activity recognition from smartwatch sensor data; and in the Mosquitoes Sub-Challenge, mosquitoes need to be detected. We describe the Sub-Challenges, baseline feature extraction, and classifiers based on the 'usual' ComParE and BoAW features, the auDeep toolkit, and deep feature extraction from pre-trained CNNs using the DeepSpectrum toolkit; in addition, we add end-to-end sequential modelling, and a log-mel-128-BNN