Measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals using Twitter

BACKGROUND: Patients routinely use Twitter to share feedback about their experience receiving healthcare. Identifying and analysing the content of posts sent to hospitals may provide a novel real-time measure of quality, supplementing traditional, survey-based approaches. OBJECTIVE: To assess the use of Twitter as a supplemental data stream for measuring patient-perceived quality of care in US hospitals and compare patient sentiments about hospitals with established quality measures. DESIGN: 404 065 tweets directed to 2349 US hospitals over a 1-year period were classified as having to do with patient experience using a machine learning approach. Sentiment was calculated for these tweets using natural language processing. 11 602 tweets were manually categorised into patient experience topics. Finally, hospitals with ≥50 patient experience tweets were surveyed to understand how they use Twitter to interact with patients. KEY RESULTS: Roughly half of the hospitals in the US have a presence on Twitter. Of the tweets directed toward these hospitals, 34 725 (9.4%) were related to patient experience and covered diverse topics. Analyses limited to hospitals with ≥50 patient experience tweets revealed that they were more active on Twitter, more likely to be below the national median of Medicare patients (p<0.001) and above the national median for nurse/patient ratio (p=0.006), and to be a non-profit hospital (p<0.001). After adjusting for hospital characteristics, we found that Twitter sentiment was not associated with Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) ratings (but having a Twitter account was), although there was a weak association with 30-day hospital readmission rates (p=0.003). CONCLUSIONS: Tweets describing patient experiences in hospitals cover a wide range of patient care aspects and can be identified using automated approaches. These tweets represent a potentially untapped indicator of quality and may be valuable to patients, researchers, policy makers and hospital administrators

Computational diagnosis and risk evaluation for canine lymphoma

The canine lymphoma blood test detects the levels of two biomarkers, the acute phase proteins (C-Reactive Protein and Haptoglobin). This test can be used for diagnostics, for screening, and for remission monitoring as well. We analyze clinical data, test various machine learning methods and select the best approach to these problems. Three family of methods, decision trees, kNN (including advanced and adaptive kNN) and probability density evaluation with radial basis functions, are used for classification and risk estimation. Several pre-processing approaches were implemented and compared. The best of them are used to create the diagnostic system. For the differential diagnosis the best solution gives the sensitivity and specificity of 83.5% and 77%, respectively (using three input features, CRP, Haptoglobin and standard clinical symptom). For the screening task, the decision tree method provides the best result, with sensitivity and specificity of 81.4% and >99%, respectively (using the same input features). If the clinical symptoms (Lymphadenopathy) are considered as unknown then a decision tree with CRP and Hapt only provides sensitivity 69% and specificity 83.5%. The lymphoma risk evaluation problem is formulated and solved. The best models are selected as the system for computational lymphoma diagnosis and evaluation the risk of lymphoma as well. These methods are implemented into a special web-accessed software and are applied to problem of monitoring dogs with lymphoma after treatment. It detects recurrence of lymphoma up to two months prior to the appearance of clinical signs. The risk map visualisation provides a friendly tool for explanatory data analysis.Comment: 24 pages, 86 references in the bibliography, Significantly extended version with review of lymphoma biomarkers and data mining methods (Three new sections are added: 1.1. Biomarkers for canine lymphoma, 1.2. Acute phase proteins as lymphoma biomarkers and 3.1. Data mining methods for biomarker cancer diagnosis. Flowcharts of data analysis are included as supplementary material (20 pages

Coherent photonuclear reactions for isotope transmutation

Coherent photonuclear isotope transmutation (CPIT) produces exclusively radioactive isotopes (RIs) by coherent photonuclear reactions via E1 giant resonances. Photons to be used are medium energy photons produced by laser photons backscattered off GeV electrons. The cross sections are as large as 0.2 - 0.6 b, being independent of individual nuclides. A large fraction of photons is effectively used for the photonuclear reactions, while the scattered GeV electrons remain in the storage ring to be re-used. CPIT with medium energy photons provides specific/desired RIs with the high rate and the high density for nuclear science, molecular biology and for nuclear medicines.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Does Brand Licensing Increase a Licensor's Shareholder Value?

This study examines 171 brand licensing announcements and subsequent changes in the licensor firms' shareholder values using the event study method. We find that although brand licensing announcements lead to positive abnormal returns on average, nearly 44% of the announcements in our sample are followed by negative abnormal returns. We argue that investors react more favorably to a brand licensing announcement when they believe (i) the brand has greater ability to stimulate licensee product sales (and thus generate higher royalties for the licensor) and (ii) the licensor firm has greater ability to limit licensee opportunism (and thus limit brand dilution and its adverse effect on sales of other products marketed under the brand name). In line with our hypotheses related to a brand's ability to stimulate licensee product sales, the study's findings suggest that investors react more favorably to announcements involving brands with greater brand fit and greater brand breadth. However, investors appear to react less favorably to announcements involving brands with higher advertising investments. In line with our hypotheses related to a licensor firm's ability to limit licensee opportunism, the study's findings suggest that investors react more favorably to announcements involving larger licensors; however, investors' reactions do not appear to be influenced by licensor firms' licensing experience. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing. </jats:p

Release of insecticidal transgenic crops and gap areas in developing approaches for more durable resistance

Transgenic cultivars expressing d-endotoxin coding genes of Bacillus thuringiensis are beinggrown globally on about 12 million hectares this year. Agriculture in India can benefit substan-tially by adopting transgenic insecticidal cultivars since, in contrast to the world average of 30%,of the total chemical pesticides used in India 75% are employed against insects. No other bio-logical approach, as safe as and yet as effective as the Bt technology is presently known to con-trol agricultural pests. The question at the center stage is to expedite the commercial release ofBt transgenics and also make a parallel effort to devise knowledge-based strategies aimed atachieving longer durability of crop resistance to insect pests. Plant breeders have encounteredsimilar situations in the past for improving crops against insects and other diseases. This articleidentifies the gap areas where research efforts are needed to develop strategies for enhancing thedurability of crop resistance

Population of isomers in decay of the giant dipole resonance

The value of an isomeric ratio (IR) in N=81 isotones ($^{137}$Ba, $^{139}$Ce, $^{141}$Nd and $^{143}$Sm) is studied by means of the ($\gamma, n)$ reaction. This quantity measures a probability to populate the isomeric state in respect to the ground state population. In ($\gamma, n)$ reactions, the giant dipole resonance (GDR) is excited and after its decay by a neutron emission, the nucleus has an excitation energy of a few MeV. The forthcoming $\gamma$ decay by direct or cascade transitions deexcites the nucleus into an isomeric or ground state. It has been observed experimentally that the IR for $^{137}$Ba and $^{139}$Ce equals about 0.13 while in two heavier isotones it is even less than half the size. To explain this effect, the structure of the excited states in the energy region up to 6.5 MeV has been calculated within the Quasiparticle Phonon Model. Many states are found connected to the ground and isomeric states by $E1$, $E2$ and $M1$ transitions. The single-particle component of the wave function is responsible for the large values of the transitions. The calculated value of the isomeric ratio is in very good agreement with the experimental data for all isotones. A slightly different value of maximum energy with which the nuclei rest after neutron decay of the GDR is responsible for the reported effect of the A-dependence of the IR.Comment: 16 pages, 4 Fig

Decay modes of 250No

The Fragment Mass Analyzer at the ATLAS facility has been used to unambiguously identify the mass number associated with different decay modes of the nobelium isotopes produced via 204Pb(48Ca,xn)(252-x)No reactions. Isotopically pure (>99.7%) 204Pb targets were used to reduce background from more favored reactions on heavier lead isotopes. Two spontaneous fission half-lives (t_1/2 = 3.7+1.1-0.8 us and 43+22-15 us) were deduced from a total of 158 fission events. Both decays originate from 250No rather than from neighboring isotopes as previously suggested. The longer activity most likely corresponds to a K-isomer in this nucleus. No conclusive evidence for an alpha branch was observed, resulting in upper limits of 2.1% for the shorter lifetime and 3.4% for the longer activity.Comment: RevTex4, 10 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PR

WormBase 2007

WormBase (www.wormbase.org) is the major publicly available database of information about Caenorhabditis elegans, an important system for basic biological and biomedical research. Derived from the initial ACeDB database of C. elegans genetic and sequence information, WormBase now includes the genomic, anatomical and functional information about C. elegans, other Caenorhabditis species and other nematodes. As such, it is a crucial resource not only for C. elegans biologists but the larger biomedical and bioinformatics communities. Coverage of core areas of C. elegans biology will allow the biomedical community to make full use of the results of intensive molecular genetic analysis and functional genomic studies of this organism. Improved search and display tools, wider cross-species comparisons and extended ontologies are some of the features that will help scientists extend their research and take advantage of other nematode species genome sequences

Compilation of Spectroscopic Data of Radium (Ra I and Ra II)

Energy levels, wavelengths, lifetimes and hyperfine structure constants for the isotopes of the first and second spectra of radium, Ra I and Ra II have been compiled. Wavelengths and wave numbers are tabulated for 226Ra and for other Ra isotopes. Isotope shifts and hyperfine structure constants of even and odd-A isotopes of neutral radium atom and singly ionized radium are included. Experimental lifetimes of the states for both neutral and ionic Ra are also added, where available. The information is beneficial for present and future experiments aimed at different physics motivations using neutral Ra and singly ionized Ra.Comment: Accepted version. Slightly different from published versio

Genome wide association mapping of grain arsenic, copper, molybdenum and zinc in rice (Oryza sativa L.) grown at four international field sites

Peer reviewedPublisher PD