Evaluation of gastrointestinal injury in blunt abdominal trauma "FAST is not reliable": the role of repeated ultrasonography

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To determine the diagnostic Accuracy of Focused Assessment Sonography for Trauma (FAST) and repeated FAST in the patients with blunt abdominal trauma.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In this retrospective study we collected the data of all patients from September 2007 to July 2011 with gastrointestinal injury. The intraoperative outcome was compared with FAST technique and the repeated or delayed sonography.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total number of 1550 patients with blunt abdominal trauma underwent FAST in a period of 4 years in our hospital. Eighty-eight (5.67%) patients were found to have gastrointestinal injury after exploratory laparotomy. Fifty-five (62.5%) patients had isolated gastrointestinal injury and 33 (37.5%) patients had concomitant injury to the other solid organs. In those with isolated gastrointestinal injury, the sensitivity of FAST was 38.5%. Repeated ultrsonography was performed in 34 patients with false negative initial FAST after 12-24 hours. The sensitivity of repeated ultrasonography in negative initial FAST patients in detection of gastrointestinal injury was 85.2% (95% CI, 68.1%, and 94.4%).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Repeated sonography after 12 to 24 hours in patients with negative initial FAST but sustain abdominal symptom can facilitated a diagnosis of GI tract injury and can be as effective method instead of Computed tomography in developing country.</p

Application of extreme environmental conditions to resuscitation of viable but non culturable E. coli DH5α

The resuscitation of Viable But Non-Culturable (VBNC) state in Escherichia coli DH5α as one of the most usable expression host was investigated. The VBNC state in bacteria is defined as while the cells are alive but unable to grow visibly on nonselective growth medium. After collecting several samples, Non-culturable E. coli DH5α (that has undertaken on various recombinant manipulations) were divided into different groups in order to carry-out different experiments. They were treated to heat shock at 42ºC in different periods of time, different concentration of Bile-salts and NaCl and combinational of these methods. The results showed that the almost of resuscitation treatment had positive effect on reactivation of VBNC E. coli DH5α. The combination of these parameters (various NaCl and bile salts concentration and heat shock method at 42 °C in different time) in a binary manner, also inferred to suitable results. Furthermore, by applying the three stresses simultaneously we achieved optical density up to 0.58 and 9×108 CFU/ml which had presented the best results. The results show that by applying some alterations in the condition of such recombinant E. coli DH5α, the growth path of these bacteria which remain to a VBNC phase can be changed to the normal status

Evaluation of retrobulbar blood flow in patients with age-related cataract; color Doppler ultrasonographic findings

Afshin Mohammadi1, Nilofar Khorasani2, Farzad Moloudi2, Mohammad Ghasemi-rad31Department of Radiology, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran; 2Student Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran; 3Genius and Talented Student Organization, Student Research Committee, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, IranObjectives: Cataracts are the most common cause of blindness worldwide, with cataract surgery being the most common ophthalmic procedure. To our best knowledge, this is the first case-control study with a large number of participants to evaluate ocular blood flow in patients with cataracts.Materials and methods: Color Doppler and duplex sonography of the orbital vessels was performed in 224 eyes of 112 patients with known bilateral age-related cataracts and in 76 eyes of 38 healthy age- and sex-matched volunteers.Results: The mean &amp;plusmn; (standard deviation [SD]) of peak systolic velocity (PSV) of the ophthalmic artery in patients with cataracts (34.59 &amp;plusmn; 22.49 cm/second) was significantly different to that in controls (52.11 &amp;plusmn; 14.01 cm/second) (P &amp;lt; 0.001). The mean &amp;plusmn; SD PSV of the central retinal artery in patients with cataracts (15.31 &amp;plusmn; 4.93 cm/second) was significantly different to that in controls (9.61 &amp;plusmn; 5.64 cm/second) (P &amp;lt; 0.001).Conclusion: The mean PSV and resistive index (RI) of the ophthalmic and central retinal arteries were lower in cataract patients when compared with normal subjects. This suggests that ocular hypoperfusion and changes in ocular hemodynamic may have a role in the formation of age-related cataracts.Keywords: retrobulbar blood flow, age-related, cataract, color Doppler ultrasonographi

Federated Learning in Medical Imaging:Part I: Toward Multicentral Health Care Ecosystems

With recent developments in medical imaging facilities, extensive medical imaging data are produced every day. This increasing amount of data provides an opportunity for researchers to develop data-driven methods and deliver better health care. However, data-driven models require a large amount of data to be adequately trained. Furthermore, there is always a limited amount of data available in each data center. Hence, deep learning models trained on local data centers might not reach their total performance capacity. One solution could be to accumulate all data from different centers into one center. However, data privacy regulations do not allow medical institutions to easily combine their data, and this becomes increasingly difficult when institutions from multiple countries are involved. Another solution is to use privacy-preserving algorithms, which can make use of all the data available in multiple centers while keeping the sensitive data private. Federated learning (FL) is such a mechanism that enables deploying large-scale machine learning models trained on different data centers without sharing sensitive data. In FL, instead of transferring data, a general model is trained on local data sets and transferred between data centers. FL has been identified as a promising field of research, with extensive possible uses in medical research and practice. This article introduces FL, with a comprehensive look into its concepts and recent research trends in medical imaging