Tag: nevin manimala

PLoS One. 2022 Nov 1;17(11):e0265799. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265799. eCollection 2022.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Understanding the perspectives of the key players in the community regarding female genital cutting (FGC) is very important for directing preventive programs. Religious leaders help shape community behaviors, which is highly pertinent in the case of FGC as it is frequently perceived to be a religious requirement. This study assesses religious leaders’ knowledge, attitudes, and positions towards FGC in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It included a purposive sample of 147 local religious leaders (khateebs) representing the three governorates of Erbil, Sulaimaniyah, and Duhok. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data about the religious leaders’ knowledge, attitude, and position towards FGC.

RESULTS: The participants identified reduction of the sexual desire of women as the main benefit (37%) and risk (24%) of FGC. Cultural tradition and religious requirements were the main reported reasons for practicing FGC. About 59% of the religious leaders stated that people ask for their advice on FGC. Around 14% of the participants supported performing FGC, compared to 39.1% who opposed it. Religious (73.9%) and cultural (26.1%) rationales were the main reasons given for supporting FGC. Being a cultural practice with harmful effects (53.5%) and lack of clear religious evidence (46.6%) were the main reasons for being against FGC. Around 52% of the participants recommended banning FGC by law, while 43.5% did not support banning it. A statistically significant association (P = 0.015) was found between religious leaders’ residence and their position on performing FGC. More than 46% of those residing in Duhok were against performing FGC, compared to lower proportions in Erbil (38.8%) and Sulaimaniyah (30%).

CONCLUSION: Religious leaders believed that cultural tradition was the main reason behind practicing FGC and they believed that FGC is not common in KRI, and even that it is decreasing. The religious leaders in our study reported that they could have an influential role in the FGC issue due to their position in the community. There was no statistically significant association between religious leaders’ age, education level, or work experience and their position on performing FGC. However, a statistically significant association was found between religious leaders’ residence and their position on performing FGC. A conclusive decision concerning the prohibition of FGC needs to be made by religious authorities. Health awareness activities incorporating FGC risks should be carried out to inform religious leaders at different levels of religious positions. Further research exploring perspectives of religious authorities concerning religious leaders’ inconclusive judgment about FGC is deemed necessary.

PMID:36318575 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0265799

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2022 Nov 1;PP. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2022.3218662. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Non-rigid registration between 3D surfaces is an important but notorious problem in medical imaging, because finding correspondences between non-isometric instances is mathematically non-trivial. We propose a novel self-supervised method to learn shape correspondences directly from a group of bone surfaces segmented from CT scans, without any supervision from time-consuming and error-prone manual annotations. Relying on a Siamese architecture, DiffusionNet as the feature extractor is jointly trained with a pair of randomly rotated and scaled copies of the same shape. The learned embeddings are aligned in spectral domain using eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami Operator. Additional normalization and regularization losses are incorporated to guide the learned embeddings towards a similar uniform representation over spectrum, which promotes the embeddings to encode multiscale features and advocates sparsity and diagonality of the inferred functional maps. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results among the unsupervised methods on several benchmarks, and presents greater robustness and efficacy in registering moderately deformed shapes. A hybrid refinement strategy is proposed to retrieve smooth and close-to-conformal point-to-point correspondences from the inferred functional map. Our method is orientation and discretization-invariant. Given a pair of near-isometric surfaces, our method automatically computes registration in high accuracy, and outputs anatomically meaningful correspondences. In this study, we show that it is possible to use neural networks to learn general embeddings from 3D shapes in a self-supervised way. The learned features are multiscale, informative, and discriminative, which might potentially benefit almost all types of morphology-related downstream tasks, such as diagnostics, data screening and statistical shape analysis in future.

PMID:36318555 | DOI:10.1109/TMI.2022.3218662

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2022 Nov 1;PP. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3218293. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Cervical squamous intra-epithelial lesions (SIL) are precursor cancer lesions and their diagnosis is important because patients have a chance to be cured before cancer develops. In the diagnosis of the disease, pathologists decide by considering the cell distribution from the basal to the upper membrane. The idea, inspired by the pathologists’ point of view, is based on the fact that cell amounts differ in the basal, central, and upper regions of tissue according to the level of Cervical Intraep- ithelial Neoplasia (CIN). Therefore, histogram information can be used for tissue classification so that the model can be explainable. In this study, two different classification schemes are proposed to show that the local histogram is a useful feature for the classification of cervical tissues. The first classifier is Kullback Leibler divergence-based, and the second one is the classification of the histogram by combining the embedding feature vector from morpho- metric features. These algorithms have been tested on a public dataset.¹ The method we propose in the study achieved an accuracy performance of 78.69% in a data set where morphology-based methods were 69.07% and Convo- lutional Neural Network (CNN) patch-based algorithms were 75.77%. The proposed statistical features are robust for tackling real-life problems as they operate independently of the lesions manifold.

PMID:36318553 | DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2022.3218293

IEEE J Biomed Health Inform. 2022 Nov 1;PP. doi: 10.1109/JBHI.2022.3218585. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

To exploit large-scale biomedical data, the application of common data models and the establishment of data networks are being actively carried out worldwide. However, due to the privacy issues, it is difficult to share data distributed among institutions. In this study, we developed and evaluated weight-based integrated Cox model (WICOX) as a privacy-protecting method without sharing patient-level information across institutions. WICOX generates a weight for each institutional model and builds an integrated model of multi-institutional data based on these weights. WICOX does not require iterative communication until the centralized parameter converges. We performed experiments to show the weight characteristic of our algorithm based on 10 hospitals (2910 intensive care unit (ICU) stays in total) from the electronic intensive care unit Collaborative Research Database to predict time to ICU mortality with eight risk factors. Compared with the centralized Cox model, WICOX showed biases from 0 to 0.68E-2, from 0.00E-2 to 4.98E-2, and from 0.74E-2 to 1.7E-2 for time-dependent AUC, log hazard ratio, and survival rate, respectively. In addition, through simulation results using real 10 hospitals, WICOX showed robust results in accuracy under any composition of hospitals. The results of the experiments highlight that WICOX has robust characteristics and provides predictive performance and statistical inference results nearly the same as those of the centralized model. WICOX is a non-iterative method using the weight of institutional model for implementing the Cox model across multiple institutions in a privacy-preserving manner.

PMID:36318551 | DOI:10.1109/JBHI.2022.3218585

Nucleic Acids Res. 2022 Nov 1:gkac944. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkac944. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) has been among the most fascinating interdisciplinary fields for decades, which aims to elucidate the origin and evolution of diverse developmental processes. The rapid accumulation of omics data provides unprecedented opportunities to answer many interesting but unresolved evo-devo questions. However, the access and utilization of these resources are hindered by challenges particularly in non-model animals. Here, we establish a comparative multi-omics database for animal evo-devo (EDomics, http://edomics.qnlm.ac) containing comprehensive genomes, bulk transcriptomes, and single-cell data across 40 representative species, many of which are generally used as model organisms for animal evo-devo study. EDomics provides a systematic view of genomic/transcriptomic information from various aspects, including genome assembly statistics, gene features and families, transcription factors, transposable elements, and gene expressional profiles/networks. It also exhibits spatiotemporal gene expression profiles at a single-cell level, such as cell atlas, cell markers, and spatial-map information. Moreover, EDomics provides highly valuable, customized datasets/resources for evo-devo research, including gene family expansion/contraction, inferred core gene repertoires, macrosynteny analysis for karyotype evolution, and cell type evolution analysis. EDomics presents a comprehensive and comparative multi-omics platform for animal evo-devo community to decipher the whole history of developmental evolution across the tree of life.

PMID:36318263 | DOI:10.1093/nar/gkac944

Phytopathology. 2022 Nov 1. doi: 10.1094/PHYTO-09-22-0340-FI. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

The apoplast is the first hub of plant-pathogen communication where pathogen effectors are recognized by plant defensive proteins and cell receptors, thus activating signal transduction pathways. As a result of this first contact, the host triggers a defence response that involves the modulation of extra and intracellular proteins. In grapevine-pathogen interactions, little is known about the trafficking between extra and intracellular spaces. Grapevine is an economically important crop that relies on heavy fungicide use to control several diseases, a deeper knowledge on the activation of its immune response is crucial to define new control strategies. In this study, we focused on the first 6 hours post inoculation with Plasmopara viticola to evaluate grapevine proteome modulation in the apoplast. The P. viticola proteome in planta, was also assessed enabling a deeper understanding of plant-pathogen communication. Our results showed that several plant mechanisms are triggered in the tolerant grapevine cultivar ‘Regent’ after inoculation, like oomycete recognition, plant cell wall modifications, ROS signalling and secretion of proteins to disrupt oomycete structures. On the other hand, P. viticola proteins related to development and virulence were the most predominant. This pioneer study highlights the early dynamics of cellular communication in grapevine defence that leads to the successful establishment of an incompatible interaction.

PMID:36318254 | DOI:10.1094/PHYTO-09-22-0340-FI

JMIR Res Protoc. 2022 Nov 1;11(11):e42338. doi: 10.2196/42338.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Burnout syndrome is a chronic response to stressors in the workplace. It is characterized by emotional exhaustion and physical and mental burnout and may lead to high employee turnover, work absenteeism, and increased occupational accidents. Most studies use the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) to identify burnout and implement preventive actions and treatments.

OBJECTIVE: This study presents a scoping review protocol to identify and map studies that used MBI to assess burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public health services.

METHODS: This scoping review protocol follows the Joanna Briggs Institute reviewers’ manual, and this protocol consists of 6 stages: identifying the research question, identifying relevant studies, study selection, data extraction and coding, analysis and interpretation of results, and consultation with stakeholders. We will conduct searches in Embase, LILACS, PubMed/MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Scopus, Web of Science databases, and gray literature. The main research question is as follows: how is MBI used to identify burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public health services? Inclusion criteria will comprise qualitative and quantitative studies using MBI to identify burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public health services and no restrictions in language and publication dates. Data will be extracted using a spreadsheet adapted from the Joanna Briggs Institute model. Quantitative and qualitative data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis, respectively. The consultation with stakeholders will be essential for increasing the knowledge about MBI, identifying new evidence, and developing future strategies to guide public policies preventing burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public services.

RESULTS: This protocol will guide a scoping review to identify and map studies that used MBI to identify burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public health services. The results of this review may be useful to public health care professionals, managers, policymakers, and the general population because these findings will help understand the validated, translated, and adapted versions of MBI and domains, number of items, Likert scales, and cutoff points or the latent profile analysis most used in the literature. Furthermore, possible research gaps may be identified to guide future studies. All information regarding the stages of the scoping review favor its transparency and allow it to be methodologically replicated according to the principles of open science, thereby reducing the risk of bias and data duplication.

CONCLUSIONS: This study may reveal the multiplicity of scales described in the literature and the different forms of assessing burnout syndrome in health care professionals. This study may help to standardize the assessment of burnout syndrome in health care professionals working in public health services and contribute to the discussion and knowledge dissemination about burnout syndrome and mental health in this population.

INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): DERR1-10.2196/42338.

PMID:36318252 | DOI:10.2196/42338

JMIR Med Inform. 2022 Nov 1;10(11):e36711. doi: 10.2196/36711.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Often missing from or uncertain in a biomedical data warehouse (BDW), vital status after discharge is central to the value of a BDW in medical research. The French National Mortality Database (FNMD) offers open-source nominative records of every death. Matching large-scale BDWs records with the FNMD combines multiple challenges: absence of unique common identifiers between the 2 databases, names changing over life, clerical errors, and the exponential growth of the number of comparisons to compute.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop a new algorithm for matching BDW records to the FNMD and evaluated its performance.

METHODS: We developed a deterministic algorithm based on advanced data cleaning and knowledge of the naming system and the Damerau-Levenshtein distance (DLD). The algorithm’s performance was independently assessed using BDW data of 3 university hospitals: Lille, Nantes, and Rennes. Specificity was evaluated with living patients on January 1, 2016 (ie, patients with at least 1 hospital encounter before and after this date). Sensitivity was evaluated with patients recorded as deceased between January 1, 2001, and December 31, 2020. The DLD-based algorithm was compared to a direct matching algorithm with minimal data cleaning as a reference.

RESULTS: All centers combined, sensitivity was 11% higher for the DLD-based algorithm (93.3%, 95% CI 92.8-93.9) than for the direct algorithm (82.7%, 95% CI 81.8-83.6; P<.001). Sensitivity was superior for men at 2 centers (Nantes: 87%, 95% CI 85.1-89 vs 83.6%, 95% CI 81.4-85.8; P=.006; Rennes: 98.6%, 95% CI 98.1-99.2 vs 96%, 95% CI 94.9-97.1; P<.001) and for patients born in France at all centers (Nantes: 85.8%, 95% CI 84.3-87.3 vs 74.9%, 95% CI 72.8-77.0; P<.001). The DLD-based algorithm revealed significant differences in sensitivity among centers (Nantes, 85.3% vs Lille and Rennes, 97.3%, P<.001). Specificity was >98% in all subgroups. Our algorithm matched tens of millions of death records from BDWs, with parallel computing capabilities and low RAM requirements. We used the Inseehop open-source R script for this measurement.

CONCLUSIONS: Overall, sensitivity/recall was 11% higher using the DLD-based algorithm than that using the direct algorithm. This shows the importance of advanced data cleaning and knowledge of a naming system through DLD use. Statistically significant differences in sensitivity between groups could be found and must be considered when performing an analysis to avoid differential biases. Our algorithm, originally conceived for linking a BDW with the FNMD, can be used to match any large-scale databases. While matching operations using names are considered sensitive computational operations, the Inseehop package released here is easy to run on premises, thereby facilitating compliance with cybersecurity local framework. The use of an advanced deterministic matching algorithm such as the DLD-based algorithm is an insightful example of combining open-source external data to improve the usage value of BDWs.

PMID:36318244 | DOI:10.2196/36711

JMIR Ment Health. 2022 Nov 1;9(11):e36496. doi: 10.2196/36496.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Internet-delivered psychosocial interventions can overcome barriers to face-to-face psychosocial care, but limited evidence supports their cost-effectiveness for people with bipolar disorders (BDs).

OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to conduct within-trial cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analyses of an internet-based intervention for people with BD, MoodSwings 2.0, from an Australian health sector perspective.

METHODS: MoodSwings 2.0 included an economic evaluation alongside an international, parallel, and individually stratified randomized controlled trial comparing an internet-based discussion forum (control; group 1), a discussion forum plus internet-based psychoeducation (group 2), and a discussion forum plus psychoeducation and cognitive behavioral tools (group 3). The trial enrolled adults (aged 21 to 65 years) with a diagnosis of BD assessed by telephone using a structured clinical interview. Health sector costs included intervention delivery and additional health care resources used by participants over the 12-month trial follow-up. Outcomes included depression symptoms measured by the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS; the trial primary outcome) and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) calculated using the short-form 6-dimension instrument derived from the 12-item version of the short-form health survey. Average incremental cost-effectiveness (cost per MADRS score) and cost-utility (cost per QALY) ratios were calculated using estimated mean differences between intervention and control groups from linear mixed effects models in the base case.

RESULTS: In total, 304 participants were randomized. Average health sector cost was lowest for group 2 (Aus $9431, SD Aus $8540; Aus $1=US $0.7058) compared with the control group (Aus $15,175, SD Aus $17,206) and group 3 (Aus $15,518, SD Aus $30,523), but none was statistically significantly different. The average QALYs were not significantly different among the groups (group 1: 0.627, SD 0.062; group 2: 0.618, SD 0.094; and group 3: 0.622, SD 0.087). The MADRS scores were previously shown to differ significantly between group 2 and the control group at all follow-up time points (P<.05). Group 2 was dominant (lower costs and greater effects) compared with the control group for average incremental cost per point decrease in MADRS score over 12 months (95% CI dominated to Aus $331). Average cost per point change in MADRS score for group 3 versus the control group was dominant (95% CI dominant to Aus $22,585). Group 2 was dominant (95% CI Aus $43,000 to dominant) over the control group based on lower average health sector cost and average QALY benefit of 0.012 (95% CI -0.009 to 0.033). Group 3, compared with the control group, had an average incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of dominant (95% CI dominated to Aus $19,978).

CONCLUSIONS: Web-based psychoeducation through MoodSwings 2.0 has the potential to be a cost-effective intervention for people with BD. Additional research is needed to understand the lack of effectiveness for the addition of cognitive behavioral tools with the group 3 intervention.

PMID:36318243 | DOI:10.2196/36496

J ECT. 2022 Oct 20. doi: 10.1097/YCT.0000000000000887. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: The aims of this study were to compare threshold and suprathreshold ictal electroencephalograms (EEGs) in right unilateral (RUL) ultrabrief (UB) electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and to identify the differences between these EEGs.

METHODS: This study is a retrospective review of 125 pairs EEGs from titration and subsequent sessions across a 2-year period. All EEGs were independently rated for by 2 assessors using a scale based on qualities of an EEG used to guide ECT treatment dose adequacy, for example, midictal amplitude, regularity, interhemispheric coherence, seizure end point, and postictal suppression. The scores of threshold and suprathreshold EEGs were compared within and between groups based on 2 ECT types, that is, RUL UB ECT and RUL brief pulse (BP) ECT.

RESULTS: Paired t tests showed a statistically significant difference in between threshold and suprathreshold EEG scores in RUL UB ECT. There were no statistically significant differences between corresponding scores for RUL UB ECT and RUL BP ECT threshold and suprathreshold EEGs.

CONCLUSIONS: There is a significant difference between the quality of threshold and suprathreshold EEGs in RUL UB ECT when measured with an EEG rating scale. Visual rating of ictal EEGs is as reliable in discriminating between threshold and suprathreshold seizure in RUL UB ECT as it is in RUL BP ECT.

PMID:36318226 | DOI:10.1097/YCT.0000000000000887