The effects of the nonextensivity on the dimerization process and nematic ordering

The influence of the dimerization process on the nematic ordering is investigated by using a nonextensive thermostatistics, namely Tsallis thermostatistics(TT). A theoretical model taking into account the dimerization influence on the nematic scalar order parameter has been recently presented[1]. Our study considers this model and the theoretical predictions for the nematic order parameter are improved by using TT

Strategies to preserve autologous blood in patients operated on heart under extracorporeal circulation

Departamentul Chirurgie Cardiacă, IMSP Spitalul Clinic Republican, Chișinău, Republica Moldova, Conferința stiințifică „Nicolae Anestiadi – nume etern al chirurgiei basarabene” consacrată centenarului de la nașterea profesorului Nicolae Anestiadi 26 august 2016Introducere. Atât chirurgie cardiaca cît si caracteristicile tehnice ale circulație extracorporală (CEC) necesita transfuzie de sânge de la donatori, care implică o serie de riscuri pentru pacienți. Scop. explorarea posibilităților de reducere a volumului de transfuzii sângelui homolog, la diferite grupe de vârstă de pacienți care necesită intervenții chirurgicale cardiace. Materiale și metode. Primul lot de studiu a inclus 250 de copii (131 băieți, 119 fete), cu greutatea mai mică de 10 kg (10 .45 ± 3.15) și 1,4 ± 0.7 ani - vârsta medie, cu vicii cardiace congenitale, care au suportat intevenții chirurgicale în condiţii de CEC. În cadrul lotului II, au fost incluși 223 adulți (122 barbati, 101 femei) cu vicii cardiace dobândite, operați în condiții de CEC. Rezultate. La toti copii a fost utilizat metoda de restituire a volumului de umplere cu sânge propriu a pacienților, datorit acestei metode a fost recuperate până 45 % din “priming” . În primul lot de studiu nu a fost nevoie de hemostaza chirurgicală repetată. Pierderea de sânge a reprezentat 6,2 ml / kg / 24h. Transfuzie postoperatorie de sânge homolog (masa eritrocitara) au necesitat 73 de copii, 48,66% din întregul grup. În grupul II au necesitat hemostaza chirurgicală repetată 5 pacienți. Letalitatea a fost de 1,8%(4 pacienți). Concluzii. Minimalizarea perderilor, restituirea primingului cu sânge autolog,utilizarea “ Cell saver “, ultrafiltrare și autotransfuzia intraoperatorie ar putea diminua necesitatea de transfuzie de sânge homolog la pacienții cu intervenții chirurgicale pe cord deschis.Introduction. Both severity of cardiac surgery and technical features of extracorporeal circulation (CEC) circuit demands blood transfusion from donors, which involves a number of risks for the patient. Purpose. To explore the possibilities of reducing the volume of homologous blood transfusion in different age groups of cardiac surgery patients. Material and methods. The study group I included 250 children (131 boys, 119 girls) weighting less than 10kg (10 .45 ± 3.15) and 1.4 ± 0.7 years average age with congenital heart disease, operated on heart under CPB. In group II patients were included 223 adults (122 men, 101women) with acquired heart disease, operated under CPB conditions. Results. No hospital lethality occurred in 1st group and no surgical hemostasis was performed. Blood loss accounted 6.2 ml/kg /24h. Postoperative transfusion of homologous blood (erythrocyte mass) were needed in 73 children, which consists only 48,66% of whole group. Retrograde autologus blood priming was used with recuperation till 45 “ of priming.In 2nd group surgical hemostasis demanded 5 patients. Lethality was 1,8% (4 patients). Conclusions. Priming minimalisation and autologous blood priming, Cell Saver usage, ultrafiltration, preand intraoperative auto transfusion could diminish the necessity of homologous blood transfusion in cardiac surgery patients

Supporting systematic reviews using LDA-based document representations

BACKGROUND: Identifying relevant studies for inclusion in a systematic review (i.e. screening) is a complex, laborious and expensive task. Recently, a number of studies has shown that the use of machine learning and text mining methods to automatically identify relevant studies has the potential to drastically decrease the workload involved in the screening phase. The vast majority of these machine learning methods exploit the same underlying principle, i.e. a study is modelled as a bag-of-words (BOW). METHODS: We explore the use of topic modelling methods to derive a more informative representation of studies. We apply Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), an unsupervised topic modelling approach, to automatically identify topics in a collection of studies. We then represent each study as a distribution of LDA topics. Additionally, we enrich topics derived using LDA with multi-word terms identified by using an automatic term recognition (ATR) tool. For evaluation purposes, we carry out automatic identification of relevant studies using support vector machine (SVM)-based classifiers that employ both our novel topic-based representation and the BOW representation. RESULTS: Our results show that the SVM classifier is able to identify a greater number of relevant studies when using the LDA representation than the BOW representation. These observations hold for two systematic reviews of the clinical domain and three reviews of the social science domain. CONCLUSIONS: A topic-based feature representation of documents outperforms the BOW representation when applied to the task of automatic citation screening. The proposed term-enriched topics are more informative and less ambiguous to systematic reviewers. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13643-015-0117-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Feature engineering and a proposed decision-support system for systematic reviewers of medical evidence

Objectives: Evidence-based medicine depends on the timely synthesis of research findings. An important source of synthesized evidence resides in systematic reviews. However, a bottleneck in review production involves dual screening of citations with titles and abstracts to find eligible studies. For this research, we tested the effect of various kinds of textual information (features) on performance of a machine learning classifier. Based on our findings, we propose an automated system to reduce screeing burden, as well as offer quality assurance. Methods: We built a database of citations from 5 systematic reviews that varied with respect to domain, topic, and sponsor. Consensus judgments regarding eligibility were inferred from published reports. We extracted 5 feature sets from citations: alphabetic, alphanumeric +, indexing, features mapped to concepts in systematic reviews, and topic models. To simulate a two-person team, we divided the data into random halves. We optimized the parameters of a Bayesian classifier, then trained and tested models on alternate data halves. Overall, we conducted 50 independent tests. Results: All tests of summary performance (mean F3) surpassed the corresponding baseline, P<0.0001. The ranks for mean F3, precision, and classification error were statistically different across feature sets averaged over reviews; P-values for Friedman's test were .045, .002, and .002, respectively. Differences in ranks for mean recall were not statistically significant. Alphanumeric+ features were associated with best performance; mean reduction in screening burden for this feature type ranged from 88% to 98% for the second pass through citations and from 38% to 48% overall. Conclusions: A computer-assisted, decision support system based on our methods could substantially reduce the burden of screening citations for systematic review teams and solo reviewers. Additionally, such a system could deliver quality assurance both by confirming concordant decisions and by naming studies associated with discordant decisions for further consideration. © 2014 Bekhuis et al

Impact of renal impairment on atrial fibrillation: ESC-EHRA EORP-AF Long-Term General Registry

Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) and renal impairment share a bidirectional relationship with important pathophysiological interactions. We evaluated the impact of renal impairment in a contemporary cohort of patients with AF. Methods: We utilised the ESC-EHRA EORP-AF Long-Term General Registry. Outcomes were analysed according to renal function by CKD-EPI equation. The primary endpoint was a composite of thromboembolism, major bleeding, acute coronary syndrome and all-cause death. Secondary endpoints were each of these separately including ischaemic stroke, haemorrhagic event, intracranial haemorrhage, cardiovascular death and hospital admission. Results: A total of 9306 patients were included. The distribution of patients with no, mild, moderate and severe renal impairment at baseline were 16.9%, 49.3%, 30% and 3.8%, respectively. AF patients with impaired renal function were older, more likely to be females, had worse cardiac imaging parameters and multiple comorbidities. Among patients with an indication for anticoagulation, prescription of these agents was reduced in those with severe renal impairment, p&nbsp;&lt;.001. Over 24&nbsp;months, impaired renal function was associated with significantly greater incidence of the primary composite outcome and all secondary outcomes. Multivariable Cox regression analysis demonstrated an inverse relationship between eGFR and the primary outcome (HR 1.07 [95% CI, 1.01–1.14] per 10&nbsp;ml/min/1.73&nbsp;m2 decrease), that was most notable in patients with eGFR &lt;30&nbsp;ml/min/1.73&nbsp;m2 (HR 2.21 [95% CI, 1.23–3.99] compared to eGFR ≥90&nbsp;ml/min/1.73&nbsp;m2). Conclusion: A significant proportion of patients with AF suffer from concomitant renal impairment which impacts their overall management. Furthermore, renal impairment is an independent predictor of major adverse events including thromboembolism, major bleeding, acute coronary syndrome and all-cause death in patients with AF

Clinical complexity and impact of the ABC (Atrial fibrillation Better Care) pathway in patients with atrial fibrillation: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF General Long-Term Registry

Background: Clinical complexity is increasingly prevalent among patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). The ‘Atrial fibrillation Better Care’ (ABC) pathway approach has been proposed to streamline a more holistic and integrated approach to AF care; however, there are limited data on its usefulness among clinically complex patients. We aim to determine the impact of ABC pathway in a contemporary cohort of clinically complex AF patients. Methods: From the ESC-EHRA EORP-AF General Long-Term Registry, we analysed clinically complex AF patients, defined as the presence of frailty, multimorbidity and/or polypharmacy. A K-medoids cluster analysis was performed to identify different groups of clinical complexity. The impact of an ABC-adherent approach on major outcomes was analysed through Cox-regression analyses and delay of event (DoE) analyses. Results: Among 9966 AF patients included, 8289 (83.1%) were clinically complex. Adherence to the ABC pathway in the clinically complex group reduced the risk of all-cause death (adjusted HR [aHR]: 0.72, 95%CI 0.58–0.91), major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs; aHR: 0.68, 95%CI 0.52–0.87) and composite outcome (aHR: 0.70, 95%CI: 0.58–0.85). Adherence to the ABC pathway was associated with a significant reduction in the risk of death (aHR: 0.74, 95%CI 0.56–0.98) and composite outcome (aHR: 0.76, 95%CI 0.60–0.96) also in the high-complexity cluster; similar trends were observed for MACEs. In DoE analyses, an ABC-adherent approach resulted in significant gains in event-free survival for all the outcomes investigated in clinically complex patients. Based on absolute risk reduction at 1 year of follow-up, the number needed to treat for ABC pathway adherence was 24 for all-cause death, 31 for MACEs and 20 for the composite outcome. Conclusions: An ABC-adherent approach reduces the risk of major outcomes in clinically complex AF patients. Ensuring adherence to the ABC pathway is essential to improve clinical outcomes among clinically complex AF patients

Impact of clinical phenotypes on management and outcomes in European atrial fibrillation patients: a report from the ESC-EHRA EURObservational Research Programme in AF (EORP-AF) General Long-Term Registry

Background: Epidemiological studies in atrial fibrillation (AF) illustrate that clinical complexity increase the risk of major adverse outcomes. We aimed to describe European AF patients\u2019 clinical phenotypes and analyse the differential clinical course. Methods: We performed a hierarchical cluster analysis based on Ward\u2019s Method and Squared Euclidean Distance using 22 clinical binary variables, identifying the optimal number of clusters. We investigated differences in clinical management, use of healthcare resources and outcomes in a cohort of European AF patients from a Europe-wide observational registry. Results: A total of 9363 were available for this analysis. We identified three clusters: Cluster 1 (n = 3634; 38.8%) characterized by older patients and prevalent non-cardiac comorbidities; Cluster 2 (n = 2774; 29.6%) characterized by younger patients with low prevalence of comorbidities; Cluster 3 (n = 2955;31.6%) characterized by patients\u2019 prevalent cardiovascular risk factors/comorbidities. Over a mean follow-up of 22.5 months, Cluster 3 had the highest rate of cardiovascular events, all-cause death, and the composite outcome (combining the previous two) compared to Cluster 1 and Cluster 2 (all P &lt;.001). An adjusted Cox regression showed that compared to Cluster 2, Cluster 3 (hazard ratio (HR) 2.87, 95% confidence interval (CI) 2.27\u20133.62; HR 3.42, 95%CI 2.72\u20134.31; HR 2.79, 95%CI 2.32\u20133.35), and Cluster 1 (HR 1.88, 95%CI 1.48\u20132.38; HR 2.50, 95%CI 1.98\u20133.15; HR 2.09, 95%CI 1.74\u20132.51) reported a higher risk for the three outcomes respectively. Conclusions: In European AF patients, three main clusters were identified, differentiated by differential presence of comorbidities. Both non-cardiac and cardiac comorbidities clusters were found to be associated with an increased risk of major adverse outcomes

Neonatalacute kidney injury: diagnistic and predictive value of serum cystatin C

Studies concerning the local and systemic use of ozonotherapy confirm its effectiveness compared to other physical methods. Therapeutic ozone concentrations (in a physiological solution from 1 mg/l to 6 mg/l, on average 3-4 mg/l with a single dose of 1.2-1.6 mg) activate the immunomodulatory function of the body. When administering ozone on the membranes of phagocytic cells (leukocytes, monocytes, macrophages) hydrophilic compounds are adsorbed. Ozonides stimulate cytokines, which, in their turn, promote activation of cellular and humoral immunity, and increases the rate of body’s nonspecific protection system. However, the effect of ozone on pyoinflammatory state of the soft tissues, depending on the administered dose and severity of the process [1-3,8,10], have not been adequately evaluated in patients with diabetes mellitus