The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer Early Lung Imaging Confederation.

PurposeTo improve outcomes for lung cancer through low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) early lung cancer detection. The International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer is developing the Early Lung Imaging Confederation (ELIC) to serve as an open-source, international, universally accessible environment to analyze large collections of quality-controlled LDCT images and associated biomedical data for research and routine screening care.MethodsELIC is an international confederation that allows access to efficiently analyze large numbers of high-quality computed tomography (CT) images with associated de-identified clinical information without moving primary imaging/clinical or imaging data from its local or regional site of origin. Rather, ELIC uses a cloud-based infrastructure to distribute analysis tools to the local site of the stored imaging and clinical data, thereby allowing for research and quality studies to proceed in a vendor-neutral, collaborative environment. ELIC's hub-and-spoke architecture will be deployed to permit analysis of CT images and associated data in a secure environment, without any requirement to reveal the data itself (ie, privacy protecting). Identifiable data remain under local control, so the resulting environment complies with national regulations and mitigates against privacy or data disclosure risk.ResultsThe goal of pilot experiments is to connect image collections of LDCT scans that can be accurately analyzed in a fashion to support a global network using methodologies that can be readily scaled to accrued databases of sufficient size to develop and validate robust quantitative imaging tools.ConclusionThis initiative can rapidly accelerate improvements to the multidisciplinary management of early, curable lung cancer and other major thoracic diseases (eg, coronary artery disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) visualized on a screening LDCT scan. The addition of a facile, quantitative CT scanner image quality conformance process is a unique step toward improving the reliability of clinical decision support with CT screening worldwide

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

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Safe and effective exercise training for patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension : putting current evidence into clinical practice

Introduction: While there have been significant advances in the medical treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), life expectancy, and quality of life remain reduced in this disease. Strenuous exercise may be hazardous for PAH patients; however, several relatively small trials have confirmed that exercise training programs can be used safely and effectively as adjunctive treatment for selected patients. The use of exercise training is now recommended in consensus international PAH treatment algorithms; however, there is no published guideline detailing how this intervention should be carried out. Areas covered: This review describes the evidence available and evaluates its applicability to ‘real life’ clinical practice. The limitations of current evidence are acknowledged, and we discuss how the existing data can be applied to management of PAH patients in Australia, New Zealand, and countries with similar healthcare systems. Recommendations for PAH exercise training are proposed including patient selection, program structure and duration, training modalities, training intensity, supervision, monitoring, safety precautions, and outcome assessments. Expert commentary: It is recognized that knowledge gaps remain and further research is required into physiological mechanisms associated with improved exercise capacity, optimal outpatient exercise regimen, durability of benefit, and whether there is any disease-modifying effect or impact on long-term prognosis

ISHLT consensus document on lung transplantation in patients with connective tissue disease: Part I: Epidemiology, assessment of extrapulmonary conditions, candidate evaluation, selection criteria, and pathology statements

Patients with connective tissue disease (CTD) and advanced lung disease are often considered suboptimal candidates for lung transplantation (LTx) due to their underlying medical complexity and potential surgical risk. There is substantial variability across LTx centers regarding the evaluation and listing of these patients. The International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation-supported consensus document on lung transplantation in patients with CTD standardization aims to clarify definitions of each disease state included under the term CTD, to describe the extrapulmonary manifestations of each disease requiring consideration before transplantation, and to outline the absolute contraindications to transplantation allowing risk stratification during the evaluation and selection of candidates for LTx

Additional file 5 of Worldwide clinical practices in perioperative antibiotic therapy for lung transplantation

Additional file 5. Answers to Case 3

Additional file 8 of Worldwide clinical practices in perioperative antibiotic therapy for lung transplantation

Additional file 8 Answers according to large et small volume centers. The groups were defined on the median of lung transplants performed in 2017 (n = 28). LTx: lung transplantation