WIRIS OM tools: a semantic formula editor

With the increasing reliance on computers for the automatic processing of information a new method is needed for editing mathematical formulae. We are used to WYSIWYG editors that produce beautiful presentations of formulae and store the typesetting primitives rather than the meaning of the formulas. However, new services such as database searching or calculation web-services work best if they have access to the semantic information behind a formula. This can only be done with a new generation of formula editors. In this paper we present WIRIS OM Tools [17], a semantic oriented formula editor which addresses these concerns. It is based on the OpenMath language and a suitable transformation process between OpenMath and MathML ex- pressions. Additionally, this approach adds new features for the users such as error, type and syntax checking. The editor is currently being used in the LeActiveMath and WebALT projects

Multicenter prospective clinical study to evaluate children short-term neurodevelopmental outcome in congenital heart disease (children NEURO-HEART) : study protocol

Altres ajuts: RETICS funded by the PN 2018-2021 (Spain).Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most prevalent congenital malformation affecting 1 in 100 newborns. While advances in early diagnosis and postnatal management have increased survival in CHD children, worrying long-term outcomes, particularly neurodevelopmental disability, have emerged as a key prognostic factor in the counseling of these pregnancies. Eligible participants are women presenting at 20 to < 37 weeks of gestation carrying a fetus with CHD. Maternal/neonatal recordings are performed at regular intervals, from the fetal period to 24 months of age, and include: placental and fetal hemodynamics, fetal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), functional echocardiography, cerebral oxymetry, electroencephalography and serum neurological and cardiac biomarkers. Neurodevelopmental assessment is planned at 12 months of age using the ages and stages questionnaire (ASQ) and at 24 months of age with the Bayley-III test. Target recruitment is at least 150 cases classified in three groups according to three main severe CHD groups: transposition of great arteries (TGA), Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) and Left Ventricular Outflow Tract Obstruction (LVOTO). The results of NEURO-HEART study will provide the most comprehensive knowledge until date of children's neurologic prognosis in CHD and will have the potential for developing future clinical decisive tools and improving preventive strategies in CHD. , on 4th December 2016 (retrospectively registered)

Interrelación de laboratorios de control y laboratorios de investigación en España para la armonización de metodologías de determinación de toxinas paralizantes

XII Congreso Nacional de Agricultura, Madrid 24-26 de noviembre de 2009Marketing of cultured and harvested shellfish is linked to monitoring programs for granting food safety. Its complexity requires constant cooperation between research and monitoring laboratories in order to improve sampling and analysing performances, achieve legal requirements, etc. for increasing consumer’s health protection but not reducing producer’s benefits. The JACUMAR project «Comparison of methodologies for the evaluation of Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) toxins in bivalves. Application for aquaculture in Spain» groups research and monitoring laboratories from Galicia, Andalucía and Cataluña. Efforts are focused on detection and quantification of PSP toxins, searching an analytical method able to fulfil technical and management requirementsEste proyecto está financiado por la Junta Asesora de Cultivos Marinos (JACUMAR), y los programas de control por los gobiernos autónomos de Galicia, Andalucía y CataluñaN

Relationship between the Clinical Frailty Scale and short-term mortality in patients ≥ 80 years old acutely admitted to the ICU: a prospective cohort study.

BACKGROUND: The Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS) is frequently used to measure frailty in critically ill adults. There is wide variation in the approach to analysing the relationship between the CFS score and mortality after admission to the ICU. This study aimed to evaluate the influence of modelling approach on the association between the CFS score and short-term mortality and quantify the prognostic value of frailty in this context. METHODS: We analysed data from two multicentre prospective cohort studies which enrolled intensive care unit patients ≥ 80 years old in 26 countries. The primary outcome was mortality within 30-days from admission to the ICU. Logistic regression models for both ICU and 30-day mortality included the CFS score as either a categorical, continuous or dichotomous variable and were adjusted for patient's age, sex, reason for admission to the ICU, and admission Sequential Organ Failure Assessment score. RESULTS: The median age in the sample of 7487 consecutive patients was 84 years (IQR 81-87). The highest fraction of new prognostic information from frailty in the context of 30-day mortality was observed when the CFS score was treated as either a categorical variable using all original levels of frailty or a nonlinear continuous variable and was equal to 9% using these modelling approaches (p < 0.001). The relationship between the CFS score and mortality was nonlinear (p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: Knowledge about a patient's frailty status adds a substantial amount of new prognostic information at the moment of admission to the ICU. Arbitrary simplification of the CFS score into fewer groups than originally intended leads to a loss of information and should be avoided. Trial registration NCT03134807 (VIP1), NCT03370692 (VIP2)

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

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

Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19. Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 non–critically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022). INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (n = 257), ARB (n = 248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; n = 10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; n = 264) for up to 10 days. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ support–free days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes. RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ support–free days among critically ill patients was 10 (–1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (n = 231), 8 (–1 to 17) in the ARB group (n = 217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (n = 231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ support–free days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570

Balloon removal after fetoscopic endoluminal tracheal occlusion for congenital diaphragmatic hernia

Isolated congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) defect allows viscera to herniate into the chest, competing for space with the developing lungs. At birth, pulmonary hypoplasia leads to respiratory insufficiency and persistent pulmonary hypertension that is lethal in up to 30% of patients. Antenatal measurement of lung size and liver herniation can predict survival after birth. Prenatal intervention aims at stimulating lung development, clinically achieved by percutaneous fetal endoscopic tracheal occlusion (FETO) under local anesthesia. This in utero treatment requires a second intevention to reestablish the airway, either before birth or at delivery.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: Balloon removal after fetoscopic endoluminal tracheal occlusion for congenital diaphragmatic hernia journaltitle: American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ajog.2017.02.041 content_type: article copyright: © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.status: publishe

Enhanced diversity of aquatic macroinvertebrate predators and biological pest control but reduced crop establishment in organic rice farming

Organic farming has been adopted as the main alternative to reduce the environmental impact of intensive agriculture by banning the use of synthetic inputs and bolstering key ecological functions such as biological pest control. Yet the potential cascading effects of farming management on the communities of natural enemies, the provisioning of pest control, and the ultimate impact on crop performance remain poorly explored. This is especially true for semi-aquatic crops such as rice (Oryza sativa, L) that largely depend on aquatic macroinvertebrate predators for biological pest control. Here we performed two consecutive landscape-scale field experiments by combining monthly surveys of macroinvertebrate aquatic predators with both pest predation and seed rice germination trials to assess differences between conventional and organic rice farming in all the above-mentioned issues. Specifically, we selected 6 organic and 6 conventionally managed rice paddies and evaluated differences in i) the diversity of aquatic macroinvertebrate predators (taxa richness and evenness), ii) the infestation level of a seed pest (chironomids larvae), iii) the efficiency of biological pest control provisioning and iv) the impact on germination of rice seeds. Communities of macroinvertebrate aquatic predators were more diverse (taxa richness) and abundant in organic than in conventional fields, yet community evenness was higher in conventionally-managed fields. Accordingly, we found that macroinvertebrate-mediated pest control was markedly more efficient in organic farms during the establishment crop stage. Pest infestation, however, remained also higher in organic farming, most likely because biological pest control in organic fields is not able to outcompete chemical control provided in conventional fields. Finally, the increased infestation level observed in organic fields ultimately resulted in reduced germination rates of rice seeds, thus limiting crop performance. Our results highlight the potential positive effects of pesticide banning in organic rice farming on aquatic macroinvertebrate communities and the consequently improvement of biological pest control provisioning. Yet conditions enhancing biodiversity may also favor pest infestation and ultimately increase crop damage. Management recommendations should therefore account for potential services and disservices associated to organic farming in order to avoid negative yield outcomes for rice farmers.This work was supported by a Grup Operatiu project of the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda (Generalitat de Catalunya) through the 'Operació 16.01.01 de Cooperació per a la innovació del Programa de desenvolupament rural de Catalunya 2014-2020' (56 21 006 2019 3A). Néstor Pérez-Méndez was granted with a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship (RYC2021-033599-I) funded by MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. We acknowledge Sofia Rivaes from SEO/Birdlife and the Riet Vell company to facilitate the fieldwork. We specially thank all field owners who participated in this study and allowed data collection on their lands. Finally, we acknowledge the technical staff that help in data collection: Juan Blas Fernández, Oriol Ferré, Andrea Bertomeu, Eva Pla, and Nùria Tomàs.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio