Enhancing Decision-making Systems with Relevant Patient Information by Leveraging Clinical Notes

[Abstract] Hospitalised patients suffering from secondary illnesses that require daily medication typically need personalised treatment. Although clinical guidelines were designed considering those circumstances, existing decision-support features fail in assimilating detailed relevant patient information, which opens up opportunities for systems capable of performing a real-time evaluation of such data against existing knowledge and providing recommendations during clinical treatments. In this paper, we present a proposal for a new feature to integrate with electronic health record (EHR) systems that enriches the health treatment process by automatically extracting information from patient medical notes and aggregating it in clinical protocols. Our goal is to leverage the historical component of the patient trajectory to improve clinical decision support systems performance.EU/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking; 806968NETDIAMOND project; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016385Foundation for Science and Technology; PD/BD/142878/2018Foundation for Science and Technology; SFRH/BD/147837/201

Megameter propagation and correlation of T-waves from Kermadec Trench and Islands

On 18 June 2020 and 4 March 2021, very energetic low-frequency underwater T-wave signals (2 to 25 Hz) were recorded at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) International Monitoring System (IMS) hydrophone stations in the Pacific Ocean (Stations HA11 and HA03) and the South Atlantic Ocean (Station HA10). This work investigates the long-range (megameters) propagation of these T-waves. Their sources were three powerful submarine earthquakes in the Kermadec Trench and Islands, located at approximately 6000, 8800, and 15100 km from Stations HA11, HA03, and HA10, respectively. Arrival time and back azimuth of the recorded T-waves were estimated using the Progressive Multi-Channel Correlation algorithm installed on the CTBT Organization (CTBTO) virtual Data Exploitation Centre (vDEC). Different arrivals within the duration of the earthquake signals were identified, and their correlations were also analyzed. The data analysis at HA03 and HA10 revealed intriguing T-wave propagation paths reflecting, refracting, or even transmitting through continents, as well as T-wave excitation along a chain of seamounts. The analysis also showed much higher transmission loss (TL) in the propagation paths to HA11 than to HA03 and HA10. Moreover, strong discrepancies between expected and measured back azimuths were observed for HA11, and a three-dimensional (3D) parabolic equation model was utilized to identify the cause of these differences. Numerical results revealed the importance of 3D effects induced by the Kermadec Ridge, Fiji archipelago, and Marshall Islands on T-wave propagation to HA11. This analysis can guide future improvements in underwater event localization using the CTBT-IMS hydroacoustic sensor network.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Recommender System to Help Refining Clinical Research Studies

[Abstract] The process of refining the research question in a medical study depends greatly on the current background of the investigated subject. The information found in prior works can directly impact several stages of the study, namely the cohort definition stage. Besides previous published methods, researchers could also leverage on other materials, such as the output of cohort selection tools, to enrich and to accelerate their own work. However, this kind of information is not always captured by search engines. In this paper, we present a methodology, based on a combination of content-based retrieval and text annotation techniques, to identify relevant scientific publications related to a research question and to the selected data sources.This work has received support from the EU/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 806968. JFS and JRA are funded by the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (national funds) under the grants PD/BD/142878/2018 and SFRH/BD/147837/2019 respectively.Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; PD/BD/142878/2018Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; SFRH/BD/147837/201

Iron-Fortified Drinking Water Studies for the Prevention of Children's Anemia in Developing Countries

Anemia and iron deficiency should receive special attention considering their high prevalence and serious consequences. For prevention, globally it is recommended to increase dietary iron intake, iron fortification of industrialized foods, and medical iron supplementation. Food fortification for the prevention of iron deficiency in developing countries should consider carriers locally available and consumed daily, requiring limited infrastructure and technology. Drinking water is the iron carrier we have been working for years for the prevention of iron deficiency and anemia in small children in Brazil. It was shown that studies with iron-fortified drinking water were proved to be effective on children's anemia prevention. Water is found everywhere, consumed daily by everyone may be easily fortified with simple technology, is low priced and was effective on the prevention of children's anemia. Fortification of drinking water with iron was locally implemented with the direct participation of the government and community. Government authorities, health personnel and population were part of the project and responsible for its community implementation. The mayor/municipality permitted and supported the proposal to supply it to children at their day-care centers. To keep the children drinking water iron fortified supply an officially authorized legislation was also approved

Bacillus Calmette-Guérin immunotherapy induces an efficient antitumor response to control murine melanoma depending on MyD88 signaling

Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is the first line treatment for bladder cancer and it is also proposed for melanoma immunotherapy. BCG modulates the tumor microenvironment (TME) inducing an antitumor effective response, but the immune mechanisms involved still poorly understood. The immune profile of B16-F10 murine melanoma cells was assessed by infecting these cells with BCG or stimulating them with agonists for different innate immune pathways such as TLRs, inflammasome, cGAS-STING and type I IFN. B16-F10 did not respond to any of those stimuli, except for type I IFN agonists, contrasting with bone marrow-derived macrophages (BMDMs) that showed high production of proinflammatory cytokines. Additionally, we confirmed that BCG is able to infect B16-F10, which in turn can activate macrophages and spleen cells from mice in co-culture experiments. Furthermore, we established a subcutaneous B16-F10 melanoma model for intratumoral BCG treatment and compared wild type mice to TLR2-/-, TLR3-/-, TLR4-/-, TLR7-/-, TLR3/7/9-/-, caspase 1-/-, caspase 11-/-, IL-1R-/-, cGAS-/-, STING-/-, IFNAR-/-, MyD88-/-deficient animals. These results in vivo demonstrate that MyD88 signaling is important for BCG immunotherapy to control melanoma in mice. Also, BCG fails to induce cytokine production in the co-culture experiments using B16-F10 and BMDMs or spleen cells derived from MyD88-/- compared to wild-type (WT) animals. Immunotherapy with BCG was not able to induce the recruitment of inflammatory cells in the TME from MyD88-/- mice, impairing tumor control and IFN-γ production by T cells. In conclusion, MyD88 impacts on both innate and adaptive responses to BCG leading to an efficient antitumor response against melanoma

Increased responsiveness of murine eosinophils to MIPâ 1β (CCL4) and TCAâ 3 (CCL1) is mediated by their specific receptors, CCR5 and CCR8

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141970/1/jlb1019.pd