An Examination of Providers’ Awareness, Knowledge of Screening and Treatment, and Perceived Barriers Associated with Intimate Partner Violence-related Traumatic Brain Injury

Introduction: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 10 million men and women are physically abused by an intimate partner. Injuries to the head, neck, and face (HNF) occur at a high rate with survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). HNF injuries have the potential to result in traumatic brain injury (TBI) which may lead to chronic and negative physical (headaches, chronic pain, persistent vertigo) and mental health outcomes (post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression) if left untreated. Providers’ awareness of IPV-related TBI, screening tools and resources, and perceived barriers are important factors when examining IPV-related TBI. Methods: A mixed methods approach was used for data collection. The sample included providers from a variety of domains, including social work, healthcare, legal, and mental health. Three focus groups and two one-on-one interviews with providers were conducted and recorded. Prior to the focus groups and interviews, demographic data were collected via a survey. In the focus groups and interviews, providers were asked a series of open-ended questions and all audio files were transcribed and coded. Results: Several providers noted that the connection between TBI and IVP is valid and that they are more likely to screen for possible TBI in their clients following their participation in the study. Overall, providers were not aware of screening tools for TBI although some were able to name local facilities and resources. Providers noted that symptoms of TBI overlap significantly with other health conditions, which can make identification difficult. Providers discussed reservations, such as a lack of proper training, knowledge, and skills to accurately identify, diagnose and treat IPV-related TBI. Conclusion: The literature regarding IPV-related TBI is in its infancy and many aspects of this condition are still poorly understood. The results of our study support the need for an education-based intervention regarding IPV-related TBI, screening tools and available resources. Future research should examine the perceptions of TBI providers on IPV and IPV-related TBI, address the overlap of TBI symptoms with other health conditions, the efficacy of education-based interventions, and mandatory screening to increase the identification rate of IPV-related TBI

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

Resting State Functional Connectivity between Dorsal Attentional Network and Right Inferior Frontal Gyrus in Concussed and Control Adolescents

Concussion among adolescents continues to be a public health concern. Yet, the differences in brain function between adolescents with a recent concussion and adolescents with no history of concussion are not well understood. Although resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be a useful tool in examining these differences, few studies have used this technique to examine concussion in adolescents. Here, we investigate the differences in the resting state functional connectivity of 52 adolescents, 38 with a concussion in the previous 10 days (mean age = 15.6; female = 36.8%), and 14 controls with no concussion history (mean age = 15.1; female = 57.1%). Independent component analysis and dual regression revealed that control adolescents had significantly greater functional connectivity between the dorsal attention network (DAN) and right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) compared to concussed adolescents (p-corrected < 0.001). Specifically, there was a positive DAN-RIFG connectivity in control, but not concussed, adolescents. Our findings indicate that concussion is associated with disrupted DAN-RIFG connectivity, which may reflect a general, nonspecific response to injury

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 science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press