The evaluation of partial binocular overlap on car maneuverability: A pilot study

An engineering approach to enlarge the helmet mounted display (HMD) field of view (FOV) and maintain resolution and weight by partially overlapping the binocular FOV has received renewed interest among human factors scientists. It is evident, based on the brief literature review, that any panoramic display with a binocular overlap, less than a minimum amount, annoys the viewer, degrades performance, and elicits undesirable behavior. The major finding is that across the 60 deg conditions, subjects moved their heads a greater distance (by about 5 degs on each side) than in the 180 deg condition, presumably to compensate for the lack of FOV. It is quite clear that the study, based on simple car maneuverability and two subjects, reveals differences in FOV, but nothing significant between binocular overlap levels and configurations. This tentatively indicates that some tradeoffs of binocular vision for a larger overall display FOV are acceptable

Ambience in social learning: student engagement with new designs for learning spaces

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cambridge Journal of Education on 22nd May 2012, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0305764X.2012.676627An imperative to develop the social experience of learning has led to the design of informal learning spaces within libraries. Yet little is known about how these spaces are used by students or how students perceive them. Field work in one such space is reported. The general private study practice of undergraduates was captured through audio diaries, while activity in the learning space was directly observed, and students provided reflective perspectives in focus groups and through spot conversations. Results suggest such spaces are popular and yet stimulate limited group work. Yet other, less intense, forms of productive collaboration did occur and a taxonomy of four such types of encounter is offered. Of particular importance to students was access to a ‘social ambience’ for study. The results encourage institutions to design for a mixed economy of student choice over learning spaces and to consider modes of encouraging diversity in their use

How Experiences Become Data: The Process of Eliciting Adverse Event, Medical History and Concomitant Medication Reports in Antimalarial and Antiretroviral Interaction Trials.

Accurately characterizing a drug's safety profile is essential. Trial harm and tolerability assessments rely, in part, on participants' reports of medical histories, adverse events (AEs), and concomitant medications. Optimal methods for questioning participants are unclear, but different methods giving different results can undermine meta-analyses. This study compared methods for eliciting such data and explored reasons for dissimilar participant responses. Participants from open-label antimalarial and antiretroviral interaction trials in two distinct sites (South Africa, n = 18 [all HIV positive]; Tanzania, n = 80 [86% HIV positive]) were asked about ill health and treatment use by sequential use of (1) general enquiries without reference to particular conditions, body systems or treatments, (2) checklists of potential health issues and treatments, (3) in-depth interviews. Participants' experiences of illness and treatment and their reporting behaviour were explored qualitatively, as were trial clinicians' experiences with obtaining participant reports. Outcomes were the number and nature of data by questioning method, themes from qualitative analyses and a theoretical interpretation of participants' experiences. There was an overall cumulative increase in the number of reports from general enquiry through checklists to in-depth interview; in South Africa, an additional 12 medical histories, 21 AEs and 27 medications; in Tanzania an additional 260 medical histories, 1 AE and 11 medications. Checklists and interviews facilitated recognition of health issues and treatments, and consideration of what to report. Information was sometimes not reported because participants forgot, it was considered irrelevant or insignificant, or they feared reporting. Some medicine names were not known and answers to questions were considered inferior to blood tests for detecting ill health. South African inpatient volunteers exhibited a "trial citizenship", working to achieve researchers' goals, while Tanzanian outpatients sometimes deferred responsibility for identifying items to report to trial clinicians. Questioning methods and trial contexts influence the detection of adverse events, medical histories and concomitant medications. There should be further methodological work to investigate these influences and find appropriate questioning methods

Systematic Evaluation of Candidate Blood Markers for Detecting Ovarian Cancer

Epithelial ovarian cancer is a significant cause of mortality both in the United States and worldwide, due largely to the high proportion of cases that present at a late stage, when survival is extremely poor. Early detection of epithelial ovarian cancer, and of the serous subtype in particular, is a promising strategy for saving lives. The low prevalence of ovarian cancer makes the development of an adequately sensitive and specific test based on blood markers very challenging. We evaluated the performance of a set of candidate blood markers and combinations of these markers in detecting serous ovarian cancer.We selected 14 candidate blood markers of serous ovarian cancer for which assays were available to measure their levels in serum or plasma, based on our analysis of global gene expression data and on literature searches. We evaluated the performance of these candidate markers individually and in combination by measuring them in overlapping sets of serum (or plasma) samples from women with clinically detectable ovarian cancer and women without ovarian cancer. Based on sensitivity at high specificity, we determined that 4 of the 14 candidate markers--MUC16, WFDC2, MSLN and MMP7--warrant further evaluation in precious serum specimens collected months to years prior to clinical diagnosis to assess their utility in early detection. We also reported differences in the performance of these candidate blood markers across histological types of epithelial ovarian cancer.By systematically analyzing the performance of candidate blood markers of ovarian cancer in distinguishing women with clinically apparent ovarian cancer from women without ovarian cancer, we identified a set of serum markers with adequate performance to warrant testing for their ability to identify ovarian cancer months to years prior to clinical diagnosis. We argued for the importance of sensitivity at high specificity and of magnitude of difference in marker levels between cases and controls as performance metrics and demonstrated the importance of stratifying analyses by histological type of ovarian cancer. Also, we discussed the limitations of studies (like this one) that use samples obtained from symptomatic women to assess potential utility in detection of disease months to years prior to clinical detection

The Impact of Thyroid Cancer and Post-Surgical Radioactive Iodine Treatment on the Lives of Thyroid Cancer Survivors: A Qualitative Study

BACKGROUND: Adjuvant treatment with radioactive iodine (RAI) is often considered in the treatment of well-differentiated thyroid carcinoma (WDTC). We explored the recollections of thyroid cancer survivors on the diagnosis of WDTC, adjuvant radioactive iodine (RAI) treatment, and decision-making related to RAI treatment. Participants provided recommendations for healthcare providers on counseling future patients on adjuvant RAI treatment. METHODS: We conducted three focus group sessions, including WDTC survivors recruited from two Canadian academic hospitals. Participants had a prior history of WDTC that was completely resected at primary surgery and had been offered adjuvant RAI treatment. Open-ended questions were used to generate discussion in the groups. Saturation of major themes was achieved among the groups. FINDINGS: There were 16 participants in the study, twelve of whom were women (75%). All but one participant had received RAI treatment (94%). Participants reported that a thyroid cancer diagnosis was life-changing, resulting in feelings of fear and uncertainty. Some participants felt dismissed as not having a serious disease. Some participants reported receiving conflicting messages from healthcare providers on the appropriateness of adjuvant RAI treatment or insufficient information. If RAI-related side effects occurred, their presence was not legitimized by some healthcare providers. CONCLUSIONS: The diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer significantly impacts the lives of survivors. Fear and uncertainty related to a cancer diagnosis, feelings of the diagnosis being dismissed as not serious, conflicting messages about adjuvant RAI treatment, and treatment-related side effects, have been raised as important concerns by thyroid cancer survivors

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

Accuracy of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for screening to detect major depression: individual participant data meta-analysis

Objective: To determine the accuracy of the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) for screening to detect major depression. Design: Individual participant data meta-analysis. Data sources: Medline, Medline In-Process and Other Non-Indexed Citations, PsycINFO, and Web of Science (January 2000-February 2015). Inclusion criteria: Eligible studies compared PHQ-9 scores with major depression diagnoses from validated diagnostic interviews. Primary study data and study level data extracted from primary reports were synthesized. For PHQ-9 cut-off scores 5-15, bivariate random effects meta-analysis was used to estimate pooled sensitivity and specificity, separately, among studies that used semistructured diagnostic interviews, which are designed for administration by clinicians; fully structured interviews, which are designed for lay administration; and the Mini International Neuropsychiatric (MINI) diagnostic interviews, a brief fully structured interview. Sensitivity and specificity were examined among participant subgroups and, separately, using meta-regression, considering all subgroup variables in a single model. Results: Data were obtained for 58 of 72 eligible studies (total n=17 357; major depression cases n=2312). Combined sensitivity and specificity was maximized at a cut-off score of 10 or above among studies using a semistructured interview (29 studies, 6725 participants; sensitivity 0.88, 95% confidence interval 0.83 to 0.92; specificity 0.85, 0.82 to 0.88). Across cut-off scores 5-15, sensitivity with semistructured interviews was 5-22% higher than for fully structured interviews (MINI excluded; 14 studies, 7680 participants) and 2-15% higher than for the MINI (15 studies, 2952 participants). Specificity was similar across diagnostic interviews. The PHQ-9 seems to be similarly sensitive but may be less specific for younger patients than for older patients; a cut-off score of 10 or above can be used regardless of age.. Conclusions: PHQ-9 sensitivity compared with semistructured diagnostic interviews was greater than in previous conventional meta-analyses that combined reference standards. A cut-off score of 10 or above maximized combined sensitivity and specificity overall and for subgroups. Registration: PROSPERO CRD42014010673

Probability of major depression diagnostic classification using semi-structured vs. fully structured diagnostic interviews

Background: Different diagnostic interviews are used as reference standards for major depression classification in research. Semi-structured interviews involve clinical judgement, whereas fully structured interviews are completely scripted. The Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), a brief fully structured interview, is also sometimes used. It is not known whether interview method is associated with probability of major depression classification. Aims: To evaluate the association between interview method and odds of major depression classification, controlling for depressive symptom scores and participant characteristics. Method: Data collected for an individual participant data meta-analysis of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) diagnostic accuracy were analyzed. Binomial Generalized Linear Mixed Models were fit. Results: 17,158 participants (2,287 major depression cases) from 57 primary studies were analyzed. Among fully structured interviews, odds of major depression were higher for the MINI compared to the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) [OR (95% CI) = 2.10 (1.15-3.87)]. Compared to semi-structured interviews, fully structured interviews (MINI excluded) were non-significantly more likely to classify participants with low-level depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 scores 6) as having major depression [OR (95% CI) = 3.13 (0.98-10.00)], similarly likely for moderate-level symptoms (PHQ-9 scores 7-15) [OR (95% CI) = 0.96 (0.56-1.66)], and significantly less likely for high-level symptoms (PHQ-9 scores 16) [OR (95% CI) = 0.50 (0.26-0.97)]. Conclusions: The MINI may identify more depressed cases than the CIDI, and semi- and fully structured interviews may not be interchangeable methods, but these results should be replicated

SARS-CoV-2-specific immune responses and clinical outcomes after COVID-19 vaccination in patients with immune-suppressive disease

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) immune responses and infection outcomes were evaluated in 2,686 patients with varying immune-suppressive disease states after administration of two Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines. Overall, 255 of 2,204 (12%) patients failed to develop anti-spike antibodies, with an additional 600 of 2,204 (27%) patients generating low levels (<380 AU ml−1). Vaccine failure rates were highest in ANCA-associated vasculitis on rituximab (21/29, 72%), hemodialysis on immunosuppressive therapy (6/30, 20%) and solid organ transplant recipients (20/81, 25% and 141/458, 31%). SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell responses were detected in 513 of 580 (88%) patients, with lower T cell magnitude or proportion in hemodialysis, allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and liver transplant recipients (versus healthy controls). Humoral responses against Omicron (BA.1) were reduced, although cross-reactive T cell responses were sustained in all participants for whom these data were available. BNT162b2 was associated with higher antibody but lower cellular responses compared to ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccination. We report 474 SARS-CoV-2 infection episodes, including 48 individuals with hospitalization or death from COVID-19. Decreased magnitude of both the serological and the T cell response was associated with severe COVID-19. Overall, we identified clinical phenotypes that may benefit from targeted COVID-19 therapeutic strategies