Pre-operative trichiatic eyelash pattern predicts post-operative trachomatous trichiasis

Importance Trichiasis surgery programs globally have faced high rates of poor surgical outcomes. Identifying correctable risk factors for improving long-term outcomes is essential for countries targeting elimination of trachoma as a public health problem. Objective To determine whether the location of trichiatic eyelashes prior to surgery influences development of post-operative trichiasis (PTT) within two years after surgery. Design Secondary data analysis of four randomized clinical trials evaluating methods to improve trichiasis surgery outcomes. These include the Surgery for Trichiasis, Antibiotics for Recurrence (STAR) trial, Partnership for Rapid Elimination of Trachoma (PRET-Surgery), absorbable versus silk sutures trial, and epilation versus surgery for minor trichiasis trial. Setting Primary trials were conducted in rural areas of Ethiopia and Tanzania Interventions or exposures Trichiasis surgery performed with either the bilamellar tarsal rotation procedure or posterior lamellar rotation procedure Main outcomes Prevalence of PTT within two years after surgery, location of trichiatic eyelashes pre-operatively and post-operatively Results 6,747 eyelids that underwent first-time trichiasis surgery were included. PTT rates varied by study, ranging from 10–40%. PTT was less severe (based on number of trichiatic eyelashes) than initial trichiasis for 72% of those developing PTT, and only 2% of eyelids were worse at follow up than pre-operatively. Eyelids with central only-trichiasis pre-operatively had lower rates of PTT than eyelids with peripheral only trichiasis in each of the three trials that included severe TT cases. 10% of eyelids with peripheral trichiasis pre-operatively that develop PTT have central TT post-operatively. Conclusions and relevance Pre-operative central trichiasis is less likely than peripheral trichiasis to be associated with subsequent PTT. Regardless of type of surgery, surgeon skill levels, or pre-operative trichiasis severity, the presence of peripheral trichiasis pre-operatively is associated with higher rates of PTT. Making an incision that extends the length of the eyelid and adequately rotating the nasal and temporal aspects of the eyelid when suturing may help to minimize the chance of developing peripheral PTT

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Risky business: gay identity disclosure in a masculinized industry

Gay former BP chief executive Lord John Browne resigned his position in 2007 after losing a legal battle to keep a tabloid from printing stories that would ‘out’ him, and purport false accusations of professional misconduct involving a former partner. A comprehensive view of the circumstances leading to Browne's resignation provided a basis for the study of how organizations that value masculine standards work to marginalize gay men. Browne arguably chose not to disclose his sexual orientation for fear of a negative career impact. The purpose of this article is to explore the challenges of disclosure for gay male professionals in masculinized industries and to situate the conversation within Human Resource Development (HRD). Our analysis of the archives of Browne's experiences as an involuntarily outed gay executive in a male-dominated career suggest he struggled with issues of fear related to coping with his gay identity. Implications for HRD practice, research and policy are discussed

Observation of bulk plasticity in a polycrystalline titanium alloy by diffraction contrast tomography and topotomography

International audienceThe mechanical properties of polycrystalline metals are governed by the interaction of defects that are generated by deformation within the 3D microstructure. In materials that deform by slip, the plasticity is usually highly heterogeneous within the microstructure. Many experimental tools can be used to observe the results of slip events at the free surface of a sample; however, there are only a few methods for imaging these events in the bulk. In this article, the imaging of bulk slip events within the 3D microstructure is enabled by the combined use of X-ray diffraction contrast tomography and topotomography. Correlative measurements between high-resolution digital image correlation, X-ray diffraction contrast tomography, topotomography and electron backscattered diffraction are performed during deformation of Ti-7Al to investigate the sensitivity of the X-ray topotomography method for the observation of slip events in the bulk. High-resolution digital image correlation and electron backscattered diffraction measurements uniquely provide slip and lattice rotation activities at the surface of the specimen during deformation and are used to corroborate the diffraction contrast tomography and topotomography measurements. Much larger neighborhoods of grains were mapped by topotomography measurements than in previous studies, enabling quantitative measurements of slip transmission. Significant differences were observed between surface and bulk grains, indicating the need for 3D observations of plasticity to better understand deformation in polycrystalline materials