Tag: statistics

J Laparoendosc Adv Surg Tech A. 2023 Feb 14. doi: 10.1089/lap.2022.0441. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Laparoscopic pancreaticoduodenectomy (LPD) is gaining wide acceptance within pancreatic surgery. However, longitudinal data are lacking. The aim of this study was to analyze and assess the short-term outcomes and long-term survival of LPD over a duration of 8 years. Methods: Patients who underwent LPD in our institution between November 2013 and September 2021 were included in this study. The perioperative outcomes were statistically analyzed. The long-term survival was studied over a median follow-up duration of 13 months. Results: In total, 653 consecutive patients treated at our institution were included, of which 617 cases underwent standard LPD and 36 cases underwent LPD with vascular resection. The rate of death in hospital, reoperation, postpancreatectomy hemorrhage, postoperative pancreatic fistula, and delayed gastric emptying were 4.4%, 10.3%, 11.9%, 12.9%, and 6.1% respectively. There were statistical differences in the intraoperative blood loss and transfusion, operation time, and the R0 resection rate between the LPD cases and LPD with vascular resection cases. A total of 526 cases were pathologically diagnosed of cancer. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival rates were 49.2%, 17.9%, and 17.9%, respectively, for pancreatic cancer with the median survival time of 12 months. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival rates were 76.9%, 60.8%, and 52.5%, respectively, for bile duct cancer with the median survival time of 35 months. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival rates were 80.2%, 62.2%, and 52.9%, respectively, for duodenal cancer with the median survival time of 53 months. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year survival rates were 72.5%, 54.5%, and 50%, respectively, for ampullary cancer with the median survival time of 55 months. Conclusion: LPD is a feasible and oncologically acceptable procedure with satisfying perioperative outcomes and long-term survival in a high-volume institution.

PMID:36787467 | DOI:10.1089/lap.2022.0441

Swiss Med Wkly. 2023 Feb 8;153:40042. doi: 10.57187/smw.2023.40042.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Older adults are at risk of assisted and self-initiated suicide. The links between prior attempts and assisted suicide in the elderly have not been investigated. Hence, we aimed to investigate and describe the occurrence, timing and determinants of suicide attempts prior to assisted and self-initiated suicide.

METHODS: We developed a retrospective study of all assisted and self-initiated suicides among people over 65 years in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland, for a 10-year period (2010-2019). Cases were identified by cross-referencing hospitals’ routinely collected electronic data and a forensic report database. Cases were characterised in terms of sociodemographic factors, mental health disorders, main comorbidities, temporal sequence, methods of injury, medical complications and disclosure rates of previous attempts. The study used descriptive statistics.

RESULTS: A total of 26 of 497 (5.2%) and 20 of 149 (13.4%) older adults had made previous attempts before assisted and self-initiated suicide, respectively. More than half of them had made a single attempt, mostly by medication poisoning, sometimes more than 10 years before dying. Individuals who made two attempts were significantly more represented among the assisted suicide decedents. One self-initiated suicide decedent and half of the assisted suicide cases had disclosed that they had considered suicide. Individual characteristics were similar, except for assisted suicide decedents, who were eight years older than self-initiated suicide decedents. Almost all the individuals had mental disorders. Depression, anxiety and chronic pain were particularly prevalent among decedents of assisted suicide. The substantial representation of women in both groups may be an indication of their vulnerability, possibly related to chronic pain and life stressors.

CONCLUSIONS: Our results show commonalities between older assisted and self-initiated suicide decedents who made an attempt (s) before suicide. Further research is needed to demonstrate the overlap between the determinants of assisted suicide and other forms of suicidality and to support a suicide prevention strategy applicable to both types of suicide.

PMID:36787459 | DOI:10.57187/smw.2023.40042

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2565. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29617-6.

ABSTRACT

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases showing various symptoms both of physical and cognitive type. In this work, we used attenuated total reflection Fourier transformed infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy to analyze plasma samples for discriminating MS patients from healthy control individuals, and identifying potential spectral biomarkers helping the diagnosis through a quick non-invasive blood test. The cohort of the study consists of 85 subjects, including 45 MS patients and 40 healthy controls. The differences in the spectral features both in the fingerprint region (1800-900 cm^-1) and in the high region (3050-2800 cm^-1) of the infrared spectra were highlighted also with the support of different chemometric methods, to capture the most significant wavenumbers for the differentiation. The results show an increase in the lipid/protein ratio in MS patients, indicating changes in the level (metabolism) of these molecular components in the plasma. Moreover, the multivariate tools provided a promising rate of success in the diagnosis, with 78% sensitivity and 83% specificity obtained through the random forest model in the fingerprint region. The MS diagnostic tools based on biomarkers identification on blood (and blood component, like plasma or serum) are very challenging and the specificity and sensitivity values obtained in this work are very encouraging. Overall, the results obtained suggest that ATR-FTIR spectroscopy on plasma samples, requiring minimal or no manipulation, coupled with statistical multivariate approaches, is a promising analytical tool to support MS diagnosis through the identification of spectral biomarkers.

PMID:36782055 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-29617-6

Nat Med. 2023 Feb 13. doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-02177-4. Online ahead of print.

NO ABSTRACT

PMID:36782028 | DOI:10.1038/s41591-022-02177-4

Hypertens Res. 2023 Feb 13. doi: 10.1038/s41440-023-01215-z. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Cuffless wearable devices are currently being developed for long-term monitoring of blood pressure (BP) in patients with hypertension and in apparently healthy people. This study evaluated the feasibility and measurement stability of smartwatch-based cuffless BP monitoring in real-world conditions. Users of the first smartwatch-based cuffless BP monitor approved in Korea (Samsung Galaxy Watch) were invited to upload their data from using the device for 4 weeks post calibration. A total of 760 participants (mean age 43.7 ± 11.9, 80.3% men) provided 35,797 BP readings (average monitoring 22 ± 4 days [SD]; average readings 47 ± 42 per participant [median 36]). Each participant obtained 1.5 ± 1.3 readings/day and 19.7% of the participants obtained measurements every day. BP showed considerable variability, mainly depending on the day and time of the measurement. There was a trend towards higher BP levels on Mondays than on other days of the week and on workdays than in weekends. BP readings taken between 00:00 and 04:00 tended to be the lowest, whereas those between 12:00 and 16:00 the highest. The average pre-post calibration error for systolic BP (difference in 7-day BP before and after calibration), was 6.8 ± 5.6 mmHg, and was increased with higher systolic BP levels before calibration. Smartwatch-based cuffless BP monitoring is feasible for out-of-office monitoring in the real-world setting. The stability of BP measurement post calibration and the standardization and optimal time interval for recalibration need further investigation.

PMID:36781979 | DOI:10.1038/s41440-023-01215-z

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2513. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29841-0.

ABSTRACT

The limited electrical performance of microelectronic devices caused by low inter-particle connectivity and inferior printing quality is still the greatest hurdle to overcome for Aerosol jet printing (AJP) technology. Despite the incorporation of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and specified solvents into functional inks can improve inter-particle connectivity and ink printability respectively, it is still challenging to consider multiple conflicting properties in mixture design simultaneously. This research proposes a novel hybrid multi-objective optimization method to determine the optimal functional ink composition to achieve low electrical resistivity and high printed line quality. In the proposed approach, silver ink, CNTs ink and ethanol are blended according to mixture design, and two response surface models (ReSMs) are developed based on the Analysis of Variance. Then a desirability function method is employed to identify a 2D optimal operating material window to balance the conflicting responses. Following that, the conflicting objectives are optimized in a more robust manner in the 3D mixture design space through the integration of a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm III (NSGA-III) with the developed ReSMs and the corresponding statistical uncertainty. Experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which extends the methodology of designing materials with multi-component and multi-property in AJP technology.

PMID:36781965 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-29841-0

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2529. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29525-9.

ABSTRACT

Turbulence is a complex phenomenon that has a chaotic nature with multiple spatio-temporal scales, making predictions of turbulent flows a challenging topic. Nowadays, an abundance of high-fidelity databases can be generated by experimental measurements and numerical simulations, but obtaining such accurate data in full-scale applications is currently not possible. This motivates utilising deep learning on subsets of the available data to reduce the required cost of reconstructing the full flow in such full-scale applications. Here, we develop a generative-adversarial-network (GAN)-based model to reconstruct the three-dimensional velocity fields from flow data represented by a cross-plane of unpaired two-dimensional velocity observations. The model could successfully reconstruct the flow fields with accurate flow structures, statistics and spectra. The results indicate that our model can be successfully utilised for reconstructing three-dimensional flows from two-dimensional experimental measurements. Consequently, a remarkable reduction in the complexity of the experimental setup and the storage cost can be achieved.

PMID:36781944 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-29525-9

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2495. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-27707-z.

ABSTRACT

Deceleration is considered a commonly practised means to assess Foetal Heart Rate (FHR) through visual inspection and interpretation of patterns in Cardiotocography (CTG). The precision of deceleration classification relies on the accurate estimation of corresponding event points (EP) from the FHR and the Uterine Contraction Pressure (UCP). This work proposes a deceleration classification pipeline by comparing four machine learning (ML) models, namely, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Simple Logistics Regression. Towards an automated classification of deceleration from EP using the pipeline, it systematically compares three approaches to create feature sets from the detected EP: (1) a novel fuzzy logic (FL)-based approach, (2) expert annotation by clinicians, and (3) calculated using National Institute of Child Health and Human Development guidelines. The classification results were validated using different popular statistical metrics, including receiver operating characteristic curve, intra-class correlation coefficient, Deming regression, and Bland-Altman Plot. The highest classification accuracy (97.94%) was obtained with MLP when the EP was annotated with the proposed FL approach compared to RF, which obtained 63.92% with the clinician-annotated EP. The results indicate that the FL annotated feature set is the optimal one for classifying deceleration from FHR.

PMID:36781920 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-27707-z

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2499. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29262-z.

ABSTRACT

Egypt is the country with the highest known hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence worldwide. The origin of gender differences in HCV prevalence is not usually well understood. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to review and evaluate the gender differences in HCV infection rates amongst Egyptians. Such data would be important to support prevention and control programs aiming to minimize HCV-related morbidity and mortality. PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WOS) were searched for relevant articles published from 1st January 2011 to 13th December 2021, using the search terms (HCV OR “hepatitis C” OR hepacivirus) AND (prevalence OR seroprevalence OR epidemiology OR incidence OR magnitude). At first, retrieved articles were screened, and then relevant data were extracted and analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis. Out of 616 studies from databases, only 30 were included after the full-text screening, with 193,621 included participants: 97,597 male and 96,024 female. The overall seroprevalence of HCV antibodies in all included studies was 0.02 (CI – 0.23 to 0.28), with no significant difference between males and females. However, HCV RNA positivity was significantly more prevalent in males than females in adults and the general population (after excluding high-risk groups). In children, no statistically significant differences between males and females were found in the seroprevalence of HCV antibodies nor in the prevalence of PCR positivity. HCV RNA positivity is significantly higher in males than females in adults, while there are no gender differences in children.

PMID:36781919 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-29262-z

Sci Rep. 2023 Feb 13;13(1):2520. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-29282-9.

ABSTRACT

Impaired gut homeostasis is associated with stroke often presenting with leaky gut syndrome and increased gut, brain, and systemic inflammation that further exacerbates brain damage. We previously reported that intracisternal administration of Tanshinone IIA-loaded nanoparticles (Tan IIA-NPs) and transplantation of induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neural stem cells (iNSCs) led to enhanced neuroprotective and regenerative activity and improved recovery in a pig stroke model. We hypothesized that Tan IIA-NP + iNSC combination therapy-mediated stroke recovery may also have an impact on gut inflammation and integrity in the stroke pigs. Ischemic stroke was induced, and male Yucatan pigs received PBS + PBS (Control, n = 6) or Tan IIA-NP + iNSC (Treatment, n = 6) treatment. The Tan IIA-NP + iNSC treatment reduced expression of jejunal TNF-α, TNF-α receptor1, and phosphorylated IkBα while increasing the expression of jejunal occludin, claudin1, and ZO-1 at 12 weeks post-treatment (PT). Treated pigs had higher fecal short-chain fatty acid (SCFAs) levels than their counterparts throughout the study period, and fecal SCFAs levels were negatively correlated with jejunal inflammation. Interestingly, fecal SCFAs levels were also negatively correlated with brain lesion volume and midline shift at 12 weeks PT. Collectively, the anti-inflammatory and neuroregenerative treatment resulted in increased SCFAs levels, tight junction protein expression, and decreased inflammation in the gut.

PMID:36781906 | DOI:10.1038/s41598-023-29282-9