Uptake of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) and impact on invasive procedures in a tertiary referral center

Purpose: The introduction of non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) by isolation of cell-free fetal DNA from maternal blood is a new diagnostic option in prenatal care. The aim of the study was to investigate the algorithm of prenatal testing before and after the introduction of NIPT in a tertiary referral center and to investigate the influence of NIPT on the frequency of invasive procedures. Methods: Retrospective data analysis was conducted of all singleton pregnancies that presented for first trimester screening 17months before and after the introduction of NIPT (n=2271). Women were categorized into three risk groups: low risk for trisomy 21 (<1:1000), intermediate risk (1:101-1:1000) and high risk (≥1:100). The choice of diagnostic testing after FTS was analyzed. Results: 1093 (group 1) presented before and 1178 (group 2) after the introduction of NIPT. The rate of high-risk patients was equal in both groups (14.4 vs. 15.4%). No differences were found with regard to invasive testing (11.6 vs. 11.3%). NIPT was chosen by 3.7% (44/1178) in group 2. Of those with NIPT, 72.7% had a risk estimate of <1:100, but 90.9% were ≥35years old. The rate of NIPT among high-risk patients with a normal ultrasound examination was 25%. Conclusion: At present, NIPT is chosen mainly for reassurance by patients not considered to be at high risk. In the high-risk group, NIPT can be offered if the ultrasound examination is normal and the risk is high due to maternal age or serum screening alone. The rate of invasive testing was not reduced in this selected population

SemEval-2022 Task 8: multilingual news article similarity

Thousands of new news articles appear daily in outlets in different languages. Understanding which articles refer to the same story can not only improve applications like news aggregation but enable cross-linguistic analysis of media consumption and attention. However, assessing the similarity of stories in news articles is challenging due to the different dimensions in which a story might vary, e.g., two articles may have substantial textual overlap but describe similar events that happened years apart. To address this challenge, we introduce a new dataset of nearly 10,000 news article pairs spanning 18 language combinations annotated for seven dimensions of similarity as SemEval 2022 Task 8. Here, we present an overview of the task, the best performing submissions, and the frontiers and challenges for measuring multilingual news article similarity. While the participants of this SemEval task contributed very strong models, achieving up to 0.818 correlation with gold standard labels across languages, human annotators are capable of reaching higher correlations, suggesting space for further progress