Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis in Children: A Multicenter Cohort From the United States

This study presents a large multicenter cohort of children with cerebral venous thrombosis from 5 centers in the United States and analyzes their clinical findings and risk factors. Seventy Patients were included in the study (25 neonates, 35%). The age ranged from 6 days to 12 years. Thirty-eight (55%) were younger than 6 months of age, and 28 (40%) were male. Presenting features included seizures (59%), coma (30%), headache (18%), and motor weakness (21%). Common neurological findings included decreased level of consciousness (50%), papilledema (18%), cranial nerve palsy (33%), hemiparesis (29%), and hypotonia (22%). Predisposing factors were identified in 63 (90%) Patients. These included infection (40%), perinatal complications (25%), hypercoagulable/hematological diseases (13%), and various other conditions (10%). Hemorrhagic infarcts occurred in 40% of the Patients and hydrocephalus in 10%. Transverse sinus thrombosis was more common (73%) than sagittal sinus thrombosis (35%). Three children underwent thrombolysis, 15 Patients received anticoagulation, and 49 (70%) were treated with antibiotics and hydration. Nine (13%) Patients (6 of them neonates) died. Twenty-nine Patients (41%) were normal, whereas 32 Patients (46%) had a neurological deficit at discharge. Seizures and coma at presentation were poor prognostic indicators. In conclusion, cerebral venous thrombosis predominantly affects children younger than age 6 months. Mortality is high (25%) in neonatal cerebral venous thrombosis. Only 18 (25%) Patients were treated with anticoagulation or thrombolysis

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