Category: Nevin Manimala

Int J Gynaecol Obstet. 2022 Oct 28. doi: 10.1002/ijgo.14532. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To study immune response of maternal Covid-19 vaccination and vertical transmission of Anti-SARS-CoV-2, S and N.

STUDY DESIGN: Retrospective study of pregnant women in Bahrain Defense Force Hospital, from March 2021 till September 2021, who were vaccinated, with Sinopharm and Pfizer/Bio NTech. Anti-N and S level from paired samples of maternal and umbilical cord blood was done at the time of delivery with Elecsys Anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunoassay. Immune response to vaccination, association with maternal and fetal factors, and the vertical transmission of antibodies were studied. Analysis was performed using SPSS (version 26.0) and Minitab (version 18) software. P-value of less than 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

RESULTS: The study included 79 pregnant women. The median gestational age for Sinopharm was 28 weeks and Pfizer was 31 weeks. 100% of the vaccinated population generated antibodies and had vertical transmission. The anti-N and S titre, and interval frequencies varied in both vaccinations. The anti-N and S and Transfer ratio are correlated statistically with maternal age, gestational age at delivery, latency period and birth weight of the neonates differently in both vaccines. Also the peak level of antibodies and transfer ratios varied.

CONCLUSION: Though variations are exhibited in both type of vaccination, the vaccinated pregnant population generated a significant level of anti-N and-S, and had vertical transmission as well.

PMID:36306398 | DOI:10.1002/ijgo.14532

Int J Gynaecol Obstet. 2022 Oct 28. doi: 10.1002/ijgo.14529. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To associate sociodemographic characteristics and satisfaction with the support received from companions during labor and delivery.

METHOD: An analytical cross-sectional study was carried out in a maternity hospital in Fortaleza, Brazil, from March to August 2019, with 320 postpartum women. A form containing sociodemographic and obstetric questions, companion-related information, type of support provided, and the Birth Companion Support Questionnaire (BCSQ) were used to assess the frequency of social support behaviors. The Chi-square test and Fisher’s exact test were used for statistical analyses.

RESULTS: Non-pharmacological methods were associated with an unsatisfactory perception of support, but the emotional support provided by companions was positively associated with women’s satisfaction.

CONCLUSION: The study findings concerning women’s perceptions of the support received from their companions may allow improvements in the delivery of care to women in labor toward the humanization of obstetric practices.

PMID:36306395 | DOI:10.1002/ijgo.14529

J Chin Med Assoc. 2022 Oct 29. doi: 10.1097/JCMA.0000000000000833. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: The World Health Organization reported that cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death worldwide. On average, one person dies of heart disease every 26-min worldwide. Deep learning approaches are characterised by the appropriate combination of abnormal features based on numerous annotated images. The constructed CNN model can identify normal states of reversible and irreversible myocardial defects and alert physicians for further diagnosis.

METHODS: Cadmium zinc telluride single-photon emission computed tomography myocardial perfusion resting-state images were collected at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Kaohsiung Medical Center, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and were analysed with a deep learning convolutional neural network to classify myocardial perfusion images for coronary heart diseases.

RESULTS: In these grey-scale images, the heart blood flow distribution was the most crucial feature. The deep learning technique of You Only Look Once was used to determine the myocardial defect area and crop the images. After surrounding noise had been eliminated, a three-dimensional convolutional neural network model was used to identify patients with coronary heart diseases. The prediction area under the curve, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were 90.97%, 87.08%, 86.49%, and 87.41%, respectively.

CONCLUSION: Our prototype system can considerably reduce the time required for image interpretation and improve the quality of medical care. It can assist clinical experts by offering accurate coronary heart disease diagnosis in practice.

PMID:36306391 | DOI:10.1097/JCMA.0000000000000833

Med Teach. 2022 Oct 28:1-7. doi: 10.1080/0142159X.2022.2138741. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND/PURPOSE: Feedback processes in health professions education (HPE) are not always successful. While recommendations to improve feedback provision dominate the literature, studying specific learner attributes that impact feedback uptake may also improve feedback processes. Feedback orientation is a concept from management science involving four dimensions of learner attributes and attitudes that impact their feedback uptake: utility, accountability, social awareness, and feedback self-efficacy. Feedback orientation may represent a valuable concept in HPE. We aimed to understand medical learners’ feedback orientation at different stages in their development.

METHODS: We used the Feedback Orientation Scale, a 20-item survey instrument, for a cross-sectional analysis of feedback orientation in medical students and Internal Medicine residents at one large academic center. We performed descriptive statistics and analysis of variance for data analysis.

RESULTS: We found the same factors (dimensions) to feedback orientation in our population as in management science. Overall feedback orientation scores were high and were largely consistent across trainee levels. Utility was the domain that was highest across learners, whereas feedback self-efficacy was lowest.

CONCLUSIONS: Feedback orientation represents a useful concept to explore medical learners’ attitudes toward feedback’s role in their development. The four domains can help guide further nuanced feedback research and application.[Box: see text].

PMID:36306388 | DOI:10.1080/0142159X.2022.2138741

Sci Adv. 2022 Oct 28;8(43):eabq3981. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abq3981. Epub 2022 Oct 28.

ABSTRACT

Emergent phenomena at heterointerfaces are directly associated with the bonding geometry of adjacent layers. Effective control of accessible parameters, such as the bond length and bonding angles, offers an elegant method to tailor competing energies of the electronic and magnetic ground states. In this study, we construct unit-thick syntactic layers of cobaltites within a strongly tilted octahedral matrix via atomically precise synthesis. The octahedral tilt patterns of adjacent layers propagate into cobaltites, leading to a continuation of octahedral tilting while maintaining substantial misfit tensile strain. These effects induce severe rumpling within an atomic plane of neighboring layers, further triggering the electronic reconstruction between the splitting orbitals. First-principles calculations reveal that the cobalt ions transit to a higher spin state level upon octahedral tilting, resulting in robust ferromagnetism in ultrathin cobaltites. This work demonstrates a design methodology for fine-tuning the lattice and spin degrees of freedom in correlated quantum heterostructures by exploiting epitaxial geometric engineering.

PMID:36306366 | DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abq3981

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2022 Nov;119(44):e2203150119. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2203150119. Epub 2022 Oct 28.

ABSTRACT

This study explores how researchers’ analytical choices affect the reliability of scientific findings. Most discussions of reliability problems in science focus on systematic biases. We broaden the lens to emphasize the idiosyncrasy of conscious and unconscious decisions that researchers make during data analysis. We coordinated 161 researchers in 73 research teams and observed their research decisions as they used the same data to independently test the same prominent social science hypothesis: that greater immigration reduces support for social policies among the public. In this typical case of social science research, research teams reported both widely diverging numerical findings and substantive conclusions despite identical start conditions. Researchers’ expertise, prior beliefs, and expectations barely predict the wide variation in research outcomes. More than 95% of the total variance in numerical results remains unexplained even after qualitative coding of all identifiable decisions in each team’s workflow. This reveals a universe of uncertainty that remains hidden when considering a single study in isolation. The idiosyncratic nature of how researchers’ results and conclusions varied is a previously underappreciated explanation for why many scientific hypotheses remain contested. These results call for greater epistemic humility and clarity in reporting scientific findings.

PMID:36306328 | DOI:10.1073/pnas.2203150119

PLoS One. 2022 Oct 28;17(10):e0276688. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276688. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study is to construct a new distribution known as the weighted Burr-Hatke distribution (WBHD). The PDF and CDF of the WBHD are derived in a closed form. Moments, incomplete moments, and the quantile function of the proposed distribution are derived mathematically. Eleven estimate techniques for estimating the distribution parameters are discussed, and numerical simulations are utilised to evaluate the various approaches using partial and overall rankings. According to the findings of this study, it is recommended that the maximum product of spacing (MPSE) estimator of the WBHD is the best estimator according to overall rank table. The actuarial measurements were derived to the suggested distribution. By contrasting the WBHD with other competitive distributions using two different actual data sets collected from the COVID-19 mortality rates, we show the importance and flexibility of the WBHD.

PMID:36306316 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0276688

PLoS One. 2022 Oct 28;17(10):e0276344. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0276344. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

The interactions between layers of a multiplex network would generate new structural features, the most prominent feature being the existence of link overlaps between layers. How to capture the associations with the network behavior through the structural interaction between the combined layers of the multiplex network is a critical issue. In this paper, a new structure entropy is proposed by combining the overlapping links between the combined layers of a multiplex network. The correlation between layers is evaluated by structure entropy, and the results are consistent with the behaviors exhibited by the network. In addition, the validity and applicability of the proposed method were verified by conducting trials on four sets of real multiplex network data, which included the multiplex social network of a research department at Aarhus, tailor shop multiplex network, C. elegans multiplex network, and the network collected by Vickers from 29 seventh grade students in a school in Victoria.

PMID:36306315 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0276344

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2022 Oct 28;PP. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2022.3218074. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Simultaneously estimating brain source activity and noise has long been a challenging task in electromagnetic brain imaging using magneto- and electroencephalography. The problem is challenging not only in terms of solving the NP-hard inverse problem of reconstructing unknown brain activity across thousands of voxels from a limited number of sensors, but also for the need to simultaneously estimate the noise and interference. We present a generative model with an augmented leadfield matrix to simultaneously estimate brain source activity and sensor noise statistics in electromagnetic brain imaging (EBI). We then derive three Bayesian inference algorithms for this generative model (expectation-maximization (EBI-EM), convex bounding (EBI-Convex) and fixed-point (EBI-Mackay)) to simultaneously estimate the hyperparameters of the prior distribution for brain source activity and sensor noise. A comprehensive performance evaluation for these three algorithms is performed. Simulations consistently show that the performance of EBI-Convex and EBI-Mackay updates is superior to that of EBI-EM. In contrast to the EBI-EM algorithm, both EBI-Convex and EBI-Mackay updates are quite robust to initialization, and are computationally efficient with fast convergence in the presence of both Gaussian and real brain noise. We also demonstrate that EBI-Convex and EBI-Mackay update algorithms can reconstruct complex brain activity with only a few trials of sensor data, and for resting-state data, achieving significant improvement in source reconstruction and noise learning for electromagnetic brain imaging.

PMID:36306311 | DOI:10.1109/TMI.2022.3218074

J Neurotrauma. 2022 Oct 28. doi: 10.1089/neu.2022.0206. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Despite enormous research interest in diffusion tensor and kurtosis imaging (DTI; DKI) following mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI), it remains unknown how diffusion in white matter evolves post-injury and relates to acute MTBI characteristics. This prospective cohort study aimed to characterize diffusion changes in white matter the first year after MTBI. Patients with MTBI (n=193) and matched controls (n=83) underwent 3T MRI within 72 hours and 3- and 12-months post-injury. Diffusion data were analyzed in three steps: (1) voxel-wise comparisons between the MTBI- and control group were performed with tract-based spatial statistics at each time point; (2) clusters of significant voxels identified in (1) were evaluated longitudinally with mixed effect models; (3) the MTBI group was divided into (A) complicated (with macrostructural findings on MRI) and uncomplicated MTBI, (B) long (1-24 hours) and short (< 1 hour) post-traumatic amnesia (PTA), and (C) other and no other concurrent injuries, to investigate if findings in (1) were driven mainly by aberrant diffusion in patients with a more severe injury. At 72 hours, voxel-wise comparisons revealed significantly lower fractional anisotropy (FA) in one tract and significantly lower mean kurtosis (Kmean) in 11 tracts in the MTBI- compared to control group. At 3 months, the MTBI group had significantly higher mean diffusivity in 8 tracts compared to controls. At 12 months, FA was significantly lower in 4 tracts and Kmean in 10 tracts in patients with MTBI compared to controls. There was considerable overlap in affected tracts across time, including the corpus callosum, corona radiata, internal and external capsule, and cerebellar peduncles. Longitudinal analyses revealed that the diffusion metrics remained relatively stable throughout the first year after MTBI. The significant group*time interactions identified were driven by changes in the control- rather than the MTBI group. Further, differences identified in step 1 did not result from greater diffusion abnormalities in patients with complicated MTBI, long PTA, or other concurrent injuries, as standardized mean differences in diffusion metrics between the groups were small (0.07±0.11) and non-significant. However, follow-up voxel-wise analyses revealed that other concurrent injuries had effects on diffusion metrics, but predominantly in other metrics, and at other time points, than the effects observed in the MTBI versus control group analysis. In conclusion, patients with MTBI differed from controls in white matter integrity already 72 hours after injury. Diffusion metrics remained relatively stable throughout the first year after MTBI and were not driven by deviating diffusion in patients with a more severe MTBI.

PMID:36305387 | DOI:10.1089/neu.2022.0206