Tag: nevin manimala

JMIR Serious Games. 2025 Nov 27;13:e71593. doi: 10.2196/71593.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Staff working in residential care homes (RCHs) have played a significant role in preventing the spread of infection among residents, visitors, and staff. Providing continuous professional training to the staff is essential. Current infection control training mostly rests on short educational talks or one-to-one reminders in the RCHs. A blended mode of online interactive games and face-to-face consultations was now proposed as a new way to conduct infection control training in the RCHs.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to assess the efficacy of the Blended Gaming COVID-19 Training System (BGCTS) on infection control practices and self-reported knowledge, attitude, and practices of standard precautions among health care workers in RCHs.

METHODS: A 2-arm, single-blinded, parallel cluster randomized controlled trial was designed, and 30 RCHs were recruited and randomized into an intervention group to receive the BGCTS and a control group to receive usual care on infection control training. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and infected cases in the homes, 17 RCHs refused or delayed the on-site observations. The BGCTS intervention, developed based on “The COVID-19 Risk Communication Package for Healthcare Facilities” of the World Health Organization, consists of two parts: (1) an eHealth mode of a 120-minute web-based training system covering 8 topics, delivered in short-clip videos and games, and (2) two 30-minute face-to-face interactive sessions for concept clarification. The 2 infection control practices, “use of gloves and personal protective equipment (PPE) and performing respiratory hygiene” and “hand rub,” were assessed by on-site unobtrusive observations, and self-reported infection control practices and knowledge and attitude toward infection control were measured via online survey post intervention.

RESULTS: A total of 212 staff from 13 RCHs were involved in the analysis, with 7 RCHs from the intervention group (n=114) and 6 RCHs from the control group (n=98). A significantly greater increase in the proportions of proper use of gloves and PPE and respiratory hygiene performance (β=.195, 95% CI 0.046-0.344; P=.02) and properly performed hand rub (β=.068, 95% CI 0.005-0.132; P=.04) was observed in the intervention group. The changes in the self-reported outcomes were not statistically significant.

CONCLUSIONS: BGCTS improved RCH staff’s performance in 2 infection control practices by objective measurement, “gloves and PPE use and performance in respiratory hygiene” and “hand rub.” BGCTS was shown to be an effective training, although it was a 2-week intervention. The BGCTS did not perform better than infection control briefing sessions in self-reported infection control knowledge, attitude, and practices. This electronic-based infection control training with 2 intensive interactive sessions has good potential to be adopted as regular training in RCHs.

TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT04783025; http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04783025.

PMID:41308187 | DOI:10.2196/71593

Percept Mot Skills. 2025 Nov 27:315125251395108. doi: 10.1177/00315125251395108. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Visual perception is crucial for successfully executing motor skills in interceptive sports like baseball. Understanding the contribution of visual skills (VS) to baseball performance is essential for talent selection and development. Some evidence suggests that performance on visual tests is predictive of batting performance, though these findings are not consistently replicated across studies. Therefore, the aim of this study is to associate a broad spectrum of visual performance indicators with a set of batting performance variables in highly trained baseball players by combining different methodological approaches used in previous studies. Forty-five highly trained male baseball players from the same club, aged between 15 and 19 years old (mean = 17.25), underwent a thorough battery of visual tests under standardized conditions. Twenty-one variables of VS were collected and associated with ten performance indicators, including game statistics, players’ ranking, age, years of practice, and position. Frequentist correlations and t-tests revealed that 17 out of the 210 associations (8.09%) reached our unadjusted threshold level and thus indicated a positive and statistically significant association. Bayesian analyses identified 34 associations (16.19%) that supported a positive association between VS and performance indicators, but only two of them (0.95%) revealed a moderate level of evidence in favor of the positive association. Therefore, this study provides limited support to the hypothesis that performance on visual tests predicts batting performance. The homogeneity of the sample and potential non-linear relations between visual and batting performance may account for these findings.

PMID:41308178 | DOI:10.1177/00315125251395108

Interdiscip Cardiovasc Thorac Surg. 2025 Nov 27:ivaf281. doi: 10.1093/icvts/ivaf281. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: Increased aortic angulation (AA) is anatomically challenging during transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) and may affect procedural outcomes. This study evaluates the clinical and procedural impact of aortic angulation in contemporary TAVI procedures.

METHODS: This retrospective single-center observational study included 509 consecutive patients undergoing transfemoral TAVI between January 2021 and December 2024. Primary end-point was device success according to VARC-3 criteria. Secondary end-points included technical success, early safety at 30 days, procedural time, fluoroscopy time, contrast volume, paravalvular regurgitation (PVR) and permanent pacemaker implantation (PPI). Multivariable logistic and linear regression models were used to assess the association between aortic angulation (in degrees) and clinical outcomes. ROC and spline regression analyses were used to evaluate potential threshold effects.

RESULTS: Device success at discharge was achieved in 89.4% (455/509) of patients, technical success in 96.3% (490/509), and early safety at 30 days in 75.6% (385/509). Aortic angulation did not significantly influence device success (aOR: 0.974, 95% CI: 0.938-1.012, p = 0.175), technical success (aOR 1.034; 95% CI 0.980-1.091; P = 0.22), or early safety (aOR: 0.994, 95% CI: 0.968-1.020, p = 0.633). Similarly, no association was observed between aortic angulation and PPI (aOR 1.016; 95% CI 0.984-1.050; P = 0.34) and PVR. However, aortic angulation significantly correlated with increased fluoroscopy times (coefficient: 0.073, SE: 0.026; P = 0.006) and greater contrast usage (coefficient: 0.406, SE: 0.194; P = 0.037).

CONCLUSIONS: While higher aortic angulation increased procedural imaging demand, it did not adversely affect device performance or clinical safety outcomes after TAVI. Importantly, outcomes remained consistent across prosthesis types.

PMID:41308164 | DOI:10.1093/icvts/ivaf281

Science. 2025 Nov 27;390(6776):883-884. doi: 10.1126/science.aec7388. Epub 2025 Nov 27.

ABSTRACT

Changing algorithms with artificial intelligence tools can influence partisan animosity.

PMID:41308160 | DOI:10.1126/science.aec7388

Brief Bioinform. 2025 Nov 1;26(6):bbaf633. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbaf633.

ABSTRACT

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a hereditary and chronic inflammatory condition affecting the gastrointestinal tract, with two main subphenotypes: Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Most IBD-related genetic associations are limited to independent subphenotypes and ancestral populations, and the heritability remains largely unexplained, prompting us to conduct the large-scale multi-trait genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis that incorporates both subphenotypes and diverse ancestral populations to reveal novel susceptibility loci through the substantially enhanced genetic discovery power. We initially identified IBD statistical association signals at 84 (12 novels) independent index loci by two-stage multi-trait analysis of GWAS and increased the number to 165 (29 novels) in cross-ancestry meta-analysis. Subtype-specific analysis revealed distinct genetic architectures for CD and UC. Leveraging multi-omics datasets, we performed a comprehensive functional post-GWAS annotation. Several therapeutic targets were identified by a multi-stage prioritization strategy, including JAK2, STAT3, IL18R1, IFNG, and CCL2, highlighting systemic immune regulation in IBD treatment. In the inflammatory injury model, we determined that increased GNA12 expression may disrupt the intestinal barrier. Cross-trait analyses and multi-omics Mendelian randomization showed potential causalities with immune-mediated diseases, cytokines, cell traits, and microorganisms. This study yields novel insights into the molecular etiology of IBD and reveals potential immunotherapy targets and pathways for medication.

PMID:41308126 | DOI:10.1093/bib/bbaf633

Health Promot Int. 2025 Oct 30;40(6):daaf206. doi: 10.1093/heapro/daaf206.

ABSTRACT

Given that news media play key roles in shaping public and policy responses to food poverty and insecurity, this study analysed how newspapers frame these issues across the island of Ireland, comparing coverage between jurisdictions (Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) and newspaper types (national versus regional/local). Using LexisNexis and Irish Newspaper Archives, we searched for articles containing ‘food poverty’ or ‘food insecurity’ published between January 2018 and January 2023. We used Entman’s framing theory to code articles for problem definitions, causal interpretations, solutions, moral evaluations, and social actors. Analysis of 80 articles from 14 newspapers revealed coverage peaked during school holiday periods (December and Summer), reinforcing episodic attention to ‘holiday hunger’. Although structural causes appeared in 66% of articles-including inadequate income, living costs, and welfare failures-proposed solutions were predominantly charitable (79%) rather than structural (39%), with food banks cited most frequently. National newspapers more frequently discussed structural causes and policy solutions, while regional publications focused on charitable responses. Articles predominantly featured voices from charities (88%) and government officials (50%), while only 10% incorporated voices from those experiencing food poverty and insecurity. This disconnect between acknowledged structural causes and proposed charitable solutions perpetuates normalization of food poverty and insecurity, obscuring state responsibility for ensuring the right to adequate food. Such framing impedes recognition that this issue in wealthy nations results from political choices requiring systemic reform, not charitable intervention.

PMID:41308116 | DOI:10.1093/heapro/daaf206

IEEE Trans Image Process. 2025 Nov 27;PP. doi: 10.1109/TIP.2025.3635025. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Deep neural networks pre-trained on ImageNet have demonstrated remarkable transferability for developing effective full-reference image quality assessment (FR-IQA) models. However, existing approaches typically demand pixel-level alignment between reference and distorted images-a requirement that poses significant challenges in practical scenarios involving natural photography and texture similarity evaluation. To address this limitation, we propose a novel FR-IQA model leveraging deep statistical similarity derived from pre-trained features without relying on spatial co-location of these features or requiring fine-tuning with mean opinion scores. Specifically, we employ distance correlation, a potent yet relatively underexplored statistical measure, to quantify similarity between reference and distorted images within a deep feature space. The distance correlation is computed via the ratio of the distance covariance to the product of their respective distance standard deviations, for which we derive a closed-form solution using the inner product of deep double-centered distance matrices. Extensive experimental evaluations across diverse IQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority and robustness of the proposed model. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of our model for optimizing texture synthesis and neural style transfer tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in both quantitative measures and qualitative assessments. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/h4nwei/DeepDC.

PMID:41308106 | DOI:10.1109/TIP.2025.3635025

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2025 Nov 27;PP. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2025.3637752. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

A recurrent challenge in medical image processing using deep learning is the need for large labeled datasets to solve clinically relevant tasks. Such data is difficult to obtain because it often requires a high level of professional specialization and significant time investment. Self-supervised learning (SSL) allows models to learn task-agnostic feature representations from unlabeled data prior to the use of task-specific labeled samples to solve downstream tasks. In this work, we focus on the tasks of craniopharyngioma recognition (CPGR) and detection of hypothalamic involvement (DHI). We compare the results obtained by a 2D convolutional network in these tasks using supervised learning, to those obtained using SSL plus fine-tuning. Three SSL methods are tested: SimCLR, Decoupled Contrastive Learning (DCL), and Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg), using slices from structural brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We also introduce Slice-Wise Regularization (SWR), a novel auxiliary learning task designed to prevent the model from decorrelating representations of contiguous slices when solving tasks using brain MRI datasets. A relevant aspect of the proposed auxiliary method is that it does not require any extra human-made annotations, and it leverages intrinsic structural properties of MRI. We compare the performances of different configurations of our proposed method using SSL and SWR on both downstream tasks with those obtained using supervised learning. We obtained statistically significant improvements with our method (SSL + SWR), achieving F1-scores of 80.3 $pm$ 2.4 for CPGR and 82.8 $pm$ 5.0 for DHI, in comparison to 74.4 $pm$ 4.9 for CPGR and 65.4 $pm$ 6.5 for DHI, when using supervised learning.

PMID:41308094 | DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2025.3637752

Stat Methods Med Res. 2025 Nov 27:9622802251399914. doi: 10.1177/09622802251399914. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

A parallel randomized trial is frequently used to investigate the treatment effectiveness as compared to the gold standard. In early phase trials, a group sequential design has the potential to reduce the expected sample size as compared to the traditional one-stage design, and protect participants when a new treatment is not as effective as expected. When the outcome is binary, a group sequential design based on exact binomial distribution is preferable as compared to the asymptotic limiting distribution. To improve the design efficiency, we propose to develop new parallel two-stage adaptive design and promising zone design allowing sample size adjustment in the second stage based on the outcome from the first stage. The conditional probability is guaranteed in the proposed designs when a trial proceeds to the second stage. All these designs control the type I error rate, but only the proposed two designs guarantee the conditional probability constraint. We used a real example from a completed cancer trial to illustrate the application of the proposed designs. The adaptive design substantially increases unconditional power but requires a large sample size as compared to the group sequential design. The promising zone design achieves a good balance between statistical power and the expected sample size.

PMID:41308079 | DOI:10.1177/09622802251399914

Cancer Control. 2025 Jan-Dec;32:10732748251401264. doi: 10.1177/10732748251401264. Epub 2025 Nov 27.

ABSTRACT

IntroductionThe national epidemiology of lung cancer (LC) in Finland, subdivided by histology and regional data, has not yet been studied in detail. This study examines the incidence, mortality, and mortality-to-incidence ratios (MIR) of LC and its subtypes in men and women during 2000-2019 in different regions of Finland.MethodsAn observational register-based study was conducted using nationwide data from the Finnish Cancer Registry (FCR). The cases were classified into adenocarcinoma (ADC), squamous cell carcinoma (SQC), small cell lung carcinoma (SCLC), and other and unknown histological types. The incidence and mortality were explored nationwide and separately in the 5 collaborative areas for healthcare and social welfare. MIR were used to estimate survival.ResultsThe incidence and mortality of LC declined in men (78.6 to 25.9/100 000) but increased in women (5.0 to 15.1). The incidence of ADC increased from 4.4 to 7.2, while SQC and SCLC decreased from 5.0 to 3.6 and 3.5 to 3.0. The incidence of ADC increased in men and women, surpassing SQC as the most common histology with varying regional pace. The incidence of SQC and SCLC decreased in men but increased in women. MIR showed similar regional improvements to LC survival for ADC and SQC, but not for SCLC.ConclusionThe Finnish LC rates changed slowly from a predominantly SQC and SCLC histology to ADC being the most common LC type. Sex-specific LC rates are converging nationwide. This study reports detailed Finnish LC data to inform future research and public health efforts.

PMID:41308077 | DOI:10.1177/10732748251401264