The Role of Positive Communication in Hospital Social Work Service

Objective: To study the role of positive communication in the social work service. Method: 82 families who were treated and hospitalized in the hospital were studied through dividing them randomly into an observation group and a control group, each with 41 families. Specifically, the control group was provided with routine social work services, while the observation group involved positive communication by volunteers, medical workers and psychological social workers during services. Then, the satisfactions of both groups were compared. Result: Families in the observation group has significantly higher satisfactions in social work services than families in the control group. The difference is statistically significant (P<0.05). Conclusion: Using positive communication methods in hospital social work services contributes to effectively enhancing patients and their families’ satisfactions of the social work service as well as the hospital

Evidence for the critical role of nanoscale surface roughness on the retention and release of silver nanoparticles in porous media.

Although nanoscale surface roughness has been theoretically demonstrated to be a crucial factor in the interaction of colloids and surfaces, little experimental research has investigated the influence of roughness on colloid or silver nanoparticle (AgNP) retention and release in porous media. This study experimentally examined AgNP retention and release using two sands with very different surface roughness properties over a range of solution pH and/or ionic strength (IS). AgNP transport was greatly enhanced on the relatively smooth sand in comparison to the rougher sand, at higher pH, and lower IS and fitted model parameters showed systematic changes with these physicochemical factors. Complete release of the retained AgNPs was observed from the relatively smooth sand when the solution IS was decreased from 40 mM NaCl to deionized (DI) water and then the solution pH was increased from 6.5 to 10. Conversely, less than 40% of the retained AgNPs was released in similar processes from the rougher sand. These observations were explained by differences in the surface roughness of the two sands which altered the energy barrier height and the depth of the primary minimum with solution chemistry. Limited numbers of AgNPs apparently interacted in reversible, shallow primary minima on the smoother sand, which is consistent with the predicted influence of a small roughness fraction (e.g., pillar) on interaction energies. Conversely, larger numbers of AgNPs interacted in deeper primary minima on the rougher sand, which is consistent with the predicted influence at concave locations. These findings highlight the importance of surface roughness and indicate that variations in sand surface roughness can greatly change the sensitivity of nanoparticle transport to physicochemical factors such as IS and pH due to the alteration of interaction energy and thus can strongly influence nanoparticle mobility in the environment

Automatic view plane prescription for cardiac magnetic resonance imaging via supervision by spatial relationship between views

Background: View planning for the acquisition of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging remains a demanding task in clinical practice. Purpose: Existing approaches to its automation relied either on an additional volumetric image not typically acquired in clinic routine, or on laborious manual annotations of cardiac structural landmarks. This work presents a clinic-compatible, annotation-free system for automatic CMR view planning. Methods: The system mines the spatial relationship, more specifically, locates the intersecting lines, between the target planes and source views, and trains deep networks to regress heatmaps defined by distances from the intersecting lines. The intersection lines are the prescription lines prescribed by the technologists at the time of image acquisition using cardiac landmarks, and retrospectively identified from the spatial relationship. As the spatial relationship is self-contained in properly stored data, the need for additional manual annotation is eliminated. In addition, the interplay of multiple target planes predicted in a source view is utilized in a stacked hourglass architecture to gradually improve the regression. Then, a multi-view planning strategy is proposed to aggregate information from the predicted heatmaps for all the source views of a target plane, for a globally optimal prescription, mimicking the similar strategy practiced by skilled human prescribers. Results: The experiments include 181 CMR exams. Our system yields the mean angular difference and point-to-plane distance of 5.68 degrees and 3.12 mm, respectively. It not only achieves superior accuracy to existing approaches including conventional atlas-based and newer deep-learning-based in prescribing the four standard CMR planes but also demonstrates prescription of the first cardiac-anatomy-oriented plane(s) from the body-oriented scout.Comment: Medical Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.1171

Evaluation of Community Health Education Workshops among Chinese Older Adults in Chicago: A Community-Based Participatory Research Approach

Background: Health education is one of the proven ways to improve knowledge and change health attitudes and behaviors. This study is intended to assess the effectiveness of five health workshops in a Chinese community, focusing on depression, elder abuse, nutrition, breast cancer and stroke. Methods: A community-based participatory research approach was implemented to plan and organize the workshops. A total of 236 Chinese community-dwelling older adults participated in different health workshops. Quantitative questionnaires on knowledge, risk factors and outcomes of each health topic were distributed before and after the workshop. Pre and post workshop comparison analyses were conducted to examine the effectiveness of the workshops on knowledge and learning. Results: Overall, the health workshops have significantly improved participants’ understanding throughout the five health themes (P<0.05). Whereas Chinese older adults have limited knowledge on depression, nutrition and stroke, their health knowledge regarding depression and elder abuse were significantly improved after attending the workshops. In addition, health education workshops increased older adults’ understanding of the risk factors and consequences of depression, elder abuse and breast cancer. Conclusion: This study sheds light on the importance of promoting health education, and the complexity and challenges of designing health education for community dwelling Chinese older adults. Significant implications for researchers, community service providers, health service workers and policy makers are discussed

Comparison of different predictive biomarker testing assays for PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint inhibitors response: a systematic review and network meta-analysis

BackgroundAccurate prediction of efficacy of programmed cell death 1 (PD-1)/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibitors is of critical importance. To address this issue, a network meta-analysis (NMA) comparing existing common measurements for curative effect of PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy was conducted.MethodsWe searched PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library database, and relevant clinical trials to find out studies published before Feb 22, 2023 that use PD-L1 immunohistochemistry (IHC), tumor mutational burden (TMB), gene expression profiling (GEP), microsatellite instability (MSI), multiplex IHC/immunofluorescence (mIHC/IF), other immunohistochemistry and hematoxylin-eosin staining (other IHC&amp;HE) and combined assays to determine objective response rates to anti–PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy. Study-level data were extracted from the published studies. The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the predictive efficacy and rank these assays mainly by NMA, and the second objective was to compare them in subgroup analyses. Heterogeneity, quality assessment, and result validation were also conducted by meta-analysis.Findings144 diagnostic index tests in 49 studies covering 5322 patients were eligible for inclusion. mIHC/IF exhibited highest sensitivity (0.76, 95% CI: 0.57-0.89), the second diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) (5.09, 95% CI: 1.35-13.90), and the second superiority index (2.86). MSI had highest specificity (0.90, 95% CI: 0.85-0.94), and DOR (6.79, 95% CI: 3.48-11.91), especially in gastrointestinal tumors. Subgroup analyses by tumor types found that mIHC/IF, and other IHC&amp;HE demonstrated high predictive efficacy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), while PD-L1 IHC and MSI were highly efficacious in predicting the effectiveness in gastrointestinal tumors. When PD-L1 IHC was combined with TMB, the sensitivity (0.89, 95% CI: 0.82-0.94) was noticeably improved revealed by meta-analysis in all studies.InterpretationConsidering statistical results of NMA and clinical applicability, mIHC/IF appeared to have superior performance in predicting response to anti PD-1/PD-L1 therapy. Combined assays could further improve the predictive efficacy. Prospective clinical trials involving a wider range of tumor types are needed to establish a definitive gold standard in future

mmFormer: Multimodal Medical Transformer for Incomplete Multimodal Learning of Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is desirable to joint learning of multimodal images. However, in clinical practice, it is not always possible to acquire a complete set of MRIs, and the problem of missing modalities causes severe performance degradation in existing multimodal segmentation methods. In this work, we present the first attempt to exploit the Transformer for multimodal brain tumor segmentation that is robust to any combinatorial subset of available modalities. Concretely, we propose a novel multimodal Medical Transformer (mmFormer) for incomplete multimodal learning with three main components: the hybrid modality-specific encoders that bridge a convolutional encoder and an intra-modal Transformer for both local and global context modeling within each modality; an inter-modal Transformer to build and align the long-range correlations across modalities for modality-invariant features with global semantics corresponding to tumor region; a decoder that performs a progressive up-sampling and fusion with the modality-invariant features to generate robust segmentation. Besides, auxiliary regularizers are introduced in both encoder and decoder to further enhance the model's robustness to incomplete modalities. We conduct extensive experiments on the public BraTS $2018$ dataset for brain tumor segmentation. The results demonstrate that the proposed mmFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for incomplete multimodal brain tumor segmentation on almost all subsets of incomplete modalities, especially by an average 19.07% improvement of Dice on tumor segmentation with only one available modality. The code is available at https://github.com/YaoZhang93/mmFormer.Comment: Accepted to MICCAI 202

Design, synthesis, and biological activity of novel heptacyclic pyrazolamide derivatives : a new candidate of dual-target insect growth regulators

Insect growth regulators (IGRs) can cause abnormal growth and development in insects, resulting in incomplete metamorphosis or even death of the larvae. Ecdysone receptor (EcR) and chitinase in insects play indispensable roles in the molting process. Ecdysone analogues and chitinase inhibitors are considered as potential IGRs. In order to find new and highly effective IGR candidates, based on the structure-activity relationship and molecular docking results of the active compound 6i (3-(tert-butyl)-N-(4-(tert-butyl)phenyl)-1-phenyl-1H-pyrazole-5-carboxamide) discovered in our previous work, we changed the t-butyl group on the pyrazole ring into heptacycle to enhance the hydrophobicity. Consequently, a series of novel heptacyclic pyrazolamide derivatives were designed and synthesized. The bioassay results demonstrated that some compounds showed obvious insecticidal activity. Especially, D-27 (N-(4-(tert-butyl)phenyl)-2-phenyl-2,4,5,6,7,8-hexahydrocyclohepta[c]pyrazole-5-carboxamide) showed good activities against Plutella xylostella (LC50, 51.50 mg.L-1) and Mythimna separata (100% mortality at 2.5 mg.L-1). Furthermore, protein validation indicated that D-27 acts not only on the EcR but also on chitinase Of ChtI. Molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulation explained the vital factors in the interaction between D-27 and receptors. D-27 may be a new lead candidate with a dual target in which Of ChtI shall be the main one. This work created a new starting point for discovering a novel type of IGRs