ELiRF-VRAIN at BioNLP Task 1B: Radiology Report Summarization

Resuelta son urgencia por sexenio[EN] This paper presents our system at the Radiology Report Summarization Shared Task-1B of the 22nd BioNLP Workshop 2023. Inspired by the work of the BioBART model, we continuously pre-trained a general domain BART model with biomedical data to adapt it to this specific domain. In the pre-training phase, several pre-training tasks are aggregated to inject linguistic knowledge and increase the abstractivity of the generated summaries. We present the results of our models, and also, we have carried out an additional study on the lengths of the generated summaries, which has provided us with interesting information.This work is partially supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, by the "European Union and 'NextGenerationEU/MRR', and by 'ERDF A way of making Europe' under grants PDC2021-120846-C44 and PID2021-126061OB-C41. It is also partially supported by the Generalitat Valenciana under project CIPROM/2021/023, and by the Spanish Ministerio de Universidades under the grant FPU21/05288 for university teacher training.Ahuir-Esteve, V.; Segarra Soriano, E.; Hurtado Oliver, LF. (2023). ELiRF-VRAIN at BioNLP Task 1B: Radiology Report Summarization. Association for Computational Linguistics. 524-529. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.bionlp-1.5252452

NASca and NASes: Two Monolingual Pre-Trained Models for Abstractive Summarization in Catalan and Spanish

[EN] Most of the models proposed in the literature for abstractive summarization are generally suitable for the English language but not for other languages. Multilingual models were introduced to address that language constraint, but despite their applicability being broader than that of the monolingual models, their performance is typically lower, especially for minority languages like Catalan. In this paper, we present a monolingual model for abstractive summarization of textual content in the Catalan language. The model is a Transformer encoder-decoder which is pretrained and fine-tuned specifically for the Catalan language using a corpus of newspaper articles. In the pretraining phase, we introduced several self-supervised tasks to specialize the model on the summarization task and to increase the abstractivity of the generated summaries. To study the performance of our proposal in languages with higher resources than Catalan, we replicate the model and the experimentation for the Spanish language. The usual evaluation metrics, not only the most used ROUGE measure but also other more semantic ones such as BertScore, do not allow to correctly evaluate the abstractivity of the generated summaries. In this work, we also present a new metric, called content reordering, to evaluate one of the most common characteristics of abstractive summaries, the rearrangement of the original content. We carried out an exhaustive experimentation to compare the performance of the monolingual models proposed in this work with two of the most widely used multilingual models in text summarization, mBART and mT5. The experimentation results support the quality of our monolingual models, especially considering that the multilingual models were pretrained with many more resources than those used in our models. Likewise, it is shown that the pretraining tasks helped to increase the degree of abstractivity of the generated summaries. To our knowledge, this is the first work that explores a monolingual approach for abstractive summarization both in Catalan and Spanish.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades and FEDER founds under the project AMIC (TIN2017-85854-C4-2-R), and by the Agencia Valenciana de la Innovacio (AVI) of the Generalitat Valenciana under the GUAITA (INNVA1/2020/61) project.Ahuir-Esteve, V.; Hurtado Oliver, LF.; González-Barba, JÁ.; Segarra Soriano, E. (2021). NASca and NASes: Two Monolingual Pre-Trained Models for Abstractive Summarization in Catalan and Spanish. Applied Sciences. 11(21):1-16. https://doi.org/10.3390/app11219872S116112

Hard revisionism : Turkish military interventions in Syria and Iraq

Aquesta recerca investiga el significat donat de termes com ordre internacional o revisionisme, i quina consistència tenen davant de realitats empíriques i conceptuals. D'aquesta manera, troba en les aportacions de la Escola Anglesa i el Constructivisme un terreny sòlid des del que edificat una definició consistent d'aquests. Així, ordre internacional queda definit com les normes i institucions internationals fonamentals vigents, i revisionisme com el descontent amb i desig de canviar aquestes. Aquesta actitud darrera pot ésser identificada mitjançant una simultània violació deslegitimització de les normes internacionals fonamentals per part dels estats. El treball teòric s'il·lumina a més amb la seva aplicació al cas concret de les intervencions unilaterals turques a Síria i Iraq a partir del 2016. D'aquesta es troba en aquestes operacions indicis de revisionisme de les normes regulant la coexistència dels estats per part de Turquia, la qual cosa s'enmarca dins d'un gir general a partir de 2011 de la política exterior turca.Esta investigación supone una búsqueda de significados consistentes i coherentes de conceptos como orden internacional i revisionismo, dadas ciertas realidades empíricas i teóricas. De esta manera, el trabajo edifica mediante nociones de la Escuela Inglesa i Constructivista de las Relaciones Internacionales, una aproximacion al orden internacional i al revisionism, quedando el uno definido por sus normas i instituciones internacionales vigentes, i el otro, por el decontento con i el deseo de alterar estas. La actitud revisionista se puede además identificar mediante la violación y esfuerzos deslegitimizadores de un estado hacia el orden internacional. El trabajo ilumina esta investigación teórica con la aportación de un caso concreto: las invasiones de territorio sirio y iraquí por parte de Turquia a partir del 2016. Investigando su relación con el orden internacional, y en que medida supone una violación y delegitimación de las normas, el trabajo concluye que Turquia actuó mediante estas intervenciones de una manera revisionista respecto las normas de coexistencia del orden internacional.This research amounts to an investigation on precise and coherent understandings of conceptual terms such as international order and revisionism, looking for definitions able to stand in front of different empirical realities and conceptual challenges. Thus, in this research both terms will be defined along English School of IR and Constructivist lines, being international order, as a result, defined by its fundamental norms and institutions. Consequently, revisionism amounts to the desire and intend to upend these, through a simultaneous violation and delegitimating discourses regarding the current norms and institutions. This theoretical endeavour is furthermore illuminated by its application to the case of Turkish invasions of Syria and Iraq. Finding in them both breaches of international order accompained with the introduction of new understandings of norms, the case is found to be a suitable example of revisionist attitude

ENOBIO - First Tests of a Dry Electrophysiology Electrode Using Carbon Nanotubes

We describe the development and first tests of ENOBIO, a dry electrode sensor concept for biopotential applications. In the proposed electrodes the tip of the electrode is covered with a forest of multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) that can be coated with Ag/AgCl to provide ionic–electronic transduction. The CNT brushlike structure is to penetrate the outer layers of the skin improving electrical contact as well as increase the contact surface area. In this paper we report the results of the first tests of this concept—immersion on saline solution and pig skin signal detection. These indicate performance on a par with state of the art researchoriented wet electrodes.</p

Hypertension in the very old; prevalence, awareness, treatment and control: a cross-sectional population-based study in a Spanish municipality

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Information on hypertension in the very elderly is sparse. Until recently evidence of benefits from pharmacological treatment was inconclusive. We estimated the prevalence of hypertension in subjects aged 80 or more, the proportion of awareness, treatment and control. Explanatory variables associated with good control were also studied.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Cross sectional, population-based study, conducted in Martorell, an urban Spanish municipality, in 2005. By simple random sampling from the census, 323 subjects aged 80 or more were included. Patients were visited at home or in the geriatric institution and after giving informed consent, the study variables were collected. These included: supine and standing blood pressure and information about diagnosis and treatment of hypertension. The estimation and 95% confidence interval were obtained and a logistic regression model was used to study explanatory variables associated with blood pressure below 140/90 mm Hg.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalence of hypertension was 72.8% (95%CI: 69.5 – 76.6%) and 93% of the patients were aware of this condition, of whom 96.3% (95%CI: 93.65 – 97.9%) had been prescribed pharmacological treatment and 30.7% (95%CI: 25.8 – 36.1%) had blood pressure below 140/90 mm Hg. Some of the patients (43%) had one antihypertensive drug and 39.5% had two in combination. Explanatory variables associated with blood pressure below 140/90 mm Hg included prescription of a diuretic, OR: 0.31 (95%CI: 0.14 – 0.66), and history of ischemic heart disease, OR: 0.21 (95%CI: 0.1 – 0.47).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The prevalence of hypertension in population aged 80 or more was over 70%. Most patients were aware of this condition and they had antihypertensive medication prescribed. Approximately one third of treated patients had blood pressure below 140/90 mm Hg. Patients with heart disease and with diuretics had more frequently blood pressure below this value.</p

Subcutaneous anti-COVID-19 hyperimmune immunoglobulin for prevention of disease in asymptomatic individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection : a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised clinical trial

Anti-COVID-19 hyperimmune immunoglobulin (hIG) can provide standardized and controlled antibody content. Data from controlled clinical trials using hIG for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 outpatients have not been reported. We assessed the safety and efficacy of subcutaneous anti-COVID-19 hyperimmune immunoglobulin 20% (C19-IG20%) compared to placebo in preventing development of symptomatic COVID-19 in asymptomatic individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection. We did a multicentre, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, in asymptomatic unvaccinated adults (≥18 years of age) with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection within 5 days between April 28 and December 27, 2021. Participants were randomly assigned (1:1:1) to receive a blinded subcutaneous infusion of 10 mL with 1 g or 2 g of C19-IG20%, or an equivalent volume of saline as placebo. The primary endpoint was the proportion of participants who remained asymptomatic through day 14 after infusion. Secondary endpoints included the proportion of individuals who required oxygen supplementation, any medically attended visit, hospitalisation, or ICU, and viral load reduction and viral clearance in nasopharyngeal swabs. Safety was assessed as the proportion of patients with adverse events. The trial was terminated early due to a lack of potential benefit in the target population in a planned interim analysis conducted in December 2021. registry: . 461 individuals (mean age 39.6 years [SD 12.8]) were randomized and received the intervention within a mean of 3.1 (SD 1.27) days from a positive SARS-CoV-2 test. In the prespecified modified intention-to-treat analysis that included only participants who received a subcutaneous infusion, the primary outcome occurred in 59.9% (91/152) of participants receiving 1 g C19-IG20%, 64.7% (99/153) receiving 2 g, and 63.5% (99/156) receiving placebo (difference in proportions 1 g C19-IG20% vs. placebo, −3.6%; 95% CI -14.6% to 7.3%, p = 0.53; 2 g C19-IG20% vs placebo, 1.1%; −9.6% to 11.9%, p = 0.85). None of the secondary clinical efficacy endpoints or virological endpoints were significantly different between study groups. Adverse event rate was similar between groups, and no severe or life-threatening adverse events related to investigational product infusion were reported. Our findings suggested that administration of subcutaneous human hyperimmune immunoglobulin C19-IG20% to asymptomatic individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection was safe but did not prevent development of symptomatic COVID-19.

Impact of mediterranean diet promotion on environmental sustainability: a longitudinal analysis

[EN]This article aims to estimate the differences in environmental impact (greenhouse gas [GHG] emissions, land use, energy used, acidification and potential eutrophication) after one year of promoting a Mediterranean diet (MD). Methods Baseline and 1-year follow-up data from 5800 participants in the PREDIMED-Plus study were used. Each participant's food intake was estimated using validated semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaires, and the adherence to MD using the Dietary Score. The influence of diet on environmental impact was assessed through the EAT-Lancet Commission tables. The influence of diet on environmental impact was assessed through the EAT-Lancet Commission tables. The association between MD adherence and its environmental impact was calculated using adjusted multivariate linear regression models.SIPublicación en abierto financiada por el Consorcio de Bibliotecas Universitarias de Castilla y León (BUCLE), con cargo al Programa Operativo 2014ES16RFOP009 FEDER 2014-2020 DE CASTILLA Y LEÓN, Actuación:20007-CL - Apoyo Consorcio BUCL

Correction : Chaparro et al. Incidence, Clinical Characteristics and Management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Spain: Large-Scale Epidemiological Study. J. Clin. Med. 2021, 10, 2885

The authors wish to make the following corrections to this paper [...]