Detailed Annotations of Chest X-Rays via CT Projection for Report Understanding

In clinical radiology reports, doctors capture important information about the patient's health status. They convey their observations from raw medical imaging data about the inner structures of a patient. As such, formulating reports requires medical experts to possess wide-ranging knowledge about anatomical regions with their normal, healthy appearance as well as the ability to recognize abnormalities. This explicit grasp on both the patient's anatomy and their appearance is missing in current medical image-processing systems as annotations are especially difficult to gather. This renders the models to be narrow experts e.g. for identifying specific diseases. In this work, we recover this missing link by adding human anatomy into the mix and enable the association of content in medical reports to their occurrence in associated imagery (medical phrase grounding). To exploit anatomical structures in this scenario, we present a sophisticated automatic pipeline to gather and integrate human bodily structures from computed tomography datasets, which we incorporate in our PAXRay: A Projected dataset for the segmentation of Anatomical structures in X-Ray data. Our evaluation shows that methods that take advantage of anatomical information benefit heavily in visually grounding radiologists' findings, as our anatomical segmentations allow for up to absolute 50% better grounding results on the OpenI dataset as compared to commonly used region proposals. The PAXRay dataset is available at https://constantinseibold.github.io/paxray/.Comment: 33rd British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC 2022

A multicenter study of Clostridium difficile infection-related colectomy, 2000-2006

BACKGROUND: The incidence of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) has been increasing. Previous studies report that the number of colectomies for CDI is also rising. Outside of a few notable outbreaks, there are few published data documenting increasing severity of CDI. The specific aims of this multiyear, multicenter study were to assess CDI-related colectomy rates and compare CDI-related colectomy rates by CDI surveillance definition. METHODS: Cases of CDI and patients who underwent colectomy were identified electronically from 5 US tertiary-care centers from July 2000 through June 2006. Chart review was performed to determine if a colectomy was for CDI. Monthly CDI-related colectomy rates were calculated as the number of CDI-related colectomies per 1,000 CDI cases. Data between observational groups were compared using χ(2) and Mann-Whitney U tests. Logistic regression was performed to evaluate risk factors for CDI-related colectomy. RESULTS: 8569 cases of CDI were identified and 75 patients had CDI-related colectomy. The overall colectomy rate was 8.7/1,000 CDI cases. The CDI-related colectomy rate ranged from 0 to 23 per 1,000 CDI episodes across hospitals. The colectomy rates for healthcare facility (HCF)-onset CDI was 4.3/1000 CDI cases and 16.5 /1000 CDI cases for community-onset CDI (p <.05). There were significantly more CDI-related colectomies at hospitals B and C (p<.05). CONCLUSIONS: The overall CDI-related colectomy rate was low, and there was no significant change in the CDI-related colectomy rate over time. Onset of disease outside of the study hospital was an independent risk factor for colectomy

Deposition of impurity metals during campaigns with the JET ITER-like Wall

Post mortem analysis shows that mid and high atomic number metallic impurities are present in deposits on JET plasma facing components with the highest amount of Ni and W, and therefore the largest sink, being found at the top of the inner divertor. Sources are defined as “continuous” or “specific”, in that “continuous” sources arise from ongoing erosion from plasma facing surfaces and “specific” are linked with specific events which decrease over time until they no longer act as a source. This contribution evaluates the sinks and estimates sources, and the balance gives an indication of the dominating processes. Charge exchange neutral erosion is found to be the main source of nickel, whereas erosion of divertor plasma facing components is the main source of tungsten. Specific sources are shown to have little influence over the global mid- and high-Z impurity concentrations in deposits.Peer reviewe

Implementing automated surveillance for tracking Clostridium difficile infection at multiple healthcare facilities

Automated surveillance utilizing electronically available data has been found to be accurate and save time. An automated CDI surveillance algorithm was validated at four CDC Prevention Epicenters hospitals. Electronic surveillance was highly sensitive, specific, and showed good to excellent agreement for hospital-onset; community-onset, study facility associated; indeterminate; and recurrent CDI

Socialización escolar : procesos, experiencias y trayectos

En los artículos que forman parte de este libro se despliega un conjunto de temas, problemas y debates que, en un primer momento, se hicieron presentes entre el equipo coordinador del libro y que luego fueron compartidos con los investigadores miembros del Grupo de Trabajo "Juventudes, Infancias: Políticas, Culturas e Instituciones Sociales" (GT) del Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO). En tal sentido, el propósito de la compilación consiste en aportar a la actualización de un área o campo que, desde sus inicios, fue y es pensado por las ciencias sociales: la escuela y los sistemas educativos. Sin embargo, en los últimos años, el campo de estudios sobre la escuela se ha diversificado y especializado, encontrando nuevos objetos de estudio y ampliando los ya existentes, al tiempo que los temas y problemas educativos se hablan y debaten por toda la sociedad

Updated standardized definitions for efficacy endpoints in adjuvant breast cancer clinical trials: STEEP Version 2.0

Purpose The Standardized Definitions for Efficacy End Points (STEEP) criteria, established in 2007, provide standardized definitions of adjuvant breast cancer clinical trial end points. Given the evolution of breast cancer clinical trials and improvements in outcomes, a panel of experts reviewed the STEEP criteria to determine whether modifications are needed.Methods We conducted systematic searches of ClinicalTrials.gov for adjuvant systemic and local-regional therapy trials for breast cancer to investigate if the primary end points reported met STEEP criteria. On the basis of common STEEP deviations, we performed a series of simulations to evaluate the effect of excluding non-breast cancer deaths and new nonbreast primary cancers from the invasive disease-free survival end point.Results Among 11 phase III breast cancer trials with primary efficacy end points, three had primary end points that followed STEEP criteria, four used STEEP definitions but not the corresponding end point names, and four used end points that were not included in the original STEEP manuscript. Simulation modeling demonstrated that inclusion of second nonbreast primary cancer can increase the probability of incorrect inferences, can decrease power to detect clinically relevant efficacy effects, and may mask differences in recurrence rates, especially when recurrence rates are low.Conclusion We recommend an additional end point, invasive breast cancer-free survival, which includes all invasive disease-free survival events except second nonbreast primary cancers. This end point should be considered for trials in which the toxicities of agents are well-known and where the risk of second primary cancer is small. Additionally, we provide end point recommendations for local therapy trials, low-risk populations, noninferiority trials, and trials incorporating patient-reported outcomes

Leave entitlements, time off work and the household financial impacts of quarantine compliance during an H1N1 outbreak

The Australian state of Victoria, with 5.2 million residents, enforced home quarantine during a H1N1 pandemic in 2009. The strategy was targeted at school children. The objective of this study was to investigate the extent to which parents’ access to paid sick leave or paid carer’s leave was associated with (a) time taken off work to care for quarantined children, (b) household finances, and (c) compliance with quarantine recommendations.This project was funded by two NHMRC Strategic Awards: “Call for research on H1N1 influenza 09 to inform public policy” (#628962) and “Changing patterns of work: Impacts on physical and mental health and the mediating role of resilience and social capital” (#375196). JM is supported by a NHMRC Career Development Award; DS is funded by an ARC Federation Fellowship

Reproducibility and Characterization of Head Kinematics During a Large Animal Acceleration Model of Traumatic Brain Injury

Acceleration parameters have been utilized for the last six decades to investigate pathology in both human and animal models of traumatic brain injury (TBI), design safety equipment, and develop injury thresholds. Previous large animal models have quantified acceleration from impulsive loading forces (i.e., machine/object kinematics) rather than directly measuring head kinematics. No study has evaluated the reproducibility of head kinematics in large animal models. Nine (five males) sexually mature Yucatan swine were exposed to head rotation at a targeted peak angular velocity of 250 rad/s in the coronal plane. The results indicated that the measured peak angular velocity of the skull was 51% of the impulsive load, was experienced over 91% longer duration, and was multi- rather than uni-planar. These findings were replicated in a second experiment with a smaller cohort (N = 4). The reproducibility of skull kinematics data was mostly within acceptable ranges based on published industry standards, although the coefficients of variation (8.9% for peak angular velocity or 12.3% for duration) were higher than the impulsive loading parameters produced by the machine (1.1 vs. 2.5%, respectively). Immunohistochemical markers of diffuse axonal injury and blood–brain barrier breach were not associated with variation in either skull or machine kinematics, suggesting that the observed levels of variance in skull kinematics may not be biologically meaningful with the current sample sizes. The findings highlight the reproducibility of a large animal acceleration model of TBI and the importance of direct measurements of skull kinematics to determine the magnitude of angular velocity, refine injury criteria, and determine critical thresholds

A Viral Discovery Methodology for Clinical Biopsy Samples Utilising Massively Parallel Next Generation Sequencing

Here we describe a virus discovery protocol for a range of different virus genera, that can be applied to biopsy-sized tissue samples. Our viral enrichment procedure, validated using canine and human liver samples, significantly improves viral read copy number and increases the length of viral contigs that can be generated by de novo assembly. This in turn enables the Illumina next generation sequencing (NGS) platform to be used as an effective tool for viral discovery from tissue samples