Publications by authors named "Alexander Mertens"

Article Synopsis
  • Acute variceal hemorrhage (AVH) is a common and serious complication in liver cirrhosis, often requiring urgent endoscopic treatment like endoscopic variceal ligation (EVL) or endoscopic sclerotherapy (EST) based on the location of the bleeding.
  • Analysis of 65,357 AVH cases in Germany from 2010 to 2019 revealed an annual incidence rate of 8.9 per 100,000, with a notable in-hospital mortality rate of 18.6%, particularly linked to alcohol-related liver cirrhosis in 60.6% of cases.
  • The study highlighted that different endoscopic treatments had varying outcomes, with EVL having the lowest
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Article Synopsis
  • - The study examines how pupil size and heart rate variability (HRV) can predict operator performance by focusing on mental effort as a connection between physiological measures and task execution.
  • - Fifty participants completed a monitoring task with varying demands while their performance, pupil size, and HRV were measured alongside subjective ratings of mental fatigue and effort.
  • - Results showed that increased pupil size and HRV correlated with better performance, but these links were affected by task demands and time, suggesting that pupil size is a more reliable indicator of mental effort and performance prediction.
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Background: () is a gram-negative gastrointestinal pathogen that colonises the human stomach and is considered a major risk factor for gastric cancer and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma. Furthermore, is a potential trigger of a wide spectrum of extragastric cancer entities, extraintestinal chronic inflammatory processes and autoimmune diseases. In the present study, we evaluated the association between infection and its eradication with the development of subsequent gastrointestinal and non-gastrointestinal cancer.

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The pupil diameter has been shown to provide insight to a person's experienced cognitive strain. Pupillary light responses, however, make this measure unreliable in uncontrolled settings. Two derived indicators-Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA) and Index of Pupillary Activity (IPA)-aim to 'eliminate' lighting influences, changing based only on the perceived cognitive strain.

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Background: Mallory-Weiss syndrome (MWS) is a rare cause of upper gastrointestinal bleeding from gaging or vomiting-induced mucosal lacerations at the gastroesophageal junction. Most cases do not require urgent endoscopic intervention due to the mostly self-limiting course. For more severe cases, different hemostasis techniques have been used.

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Background: Research demonstrates that work interruptions are considered one of the most common work stressors. Understanding the mechanisms of work interruptions is therefore vital to reducing worker stress and maintaining performance.

Objective: The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of the frequency of work interruptions on subjective workload in the context of office work.

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Robust dynamic cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been a long-standing endeavor-as real-time imaging can provide information on the temporal signatures of disease we currently cannot assess-with the past decade seeing remarkable advances in acceleration using compressed sensing (CS) and artificial intelligence (AI). However, substantial limitations to real-time imaging remain and reconstruction quality is not always guaranteed. To improve reconstruction fidelity in dynamic cardiac MRI, we propose a novel predictive signal model that uses a priori statistics to adaptively predict temporal cardiac dynamics.

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Background And Aim: Selective internal radiotherapy (SIRT) is a minimal invasive tumor therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), biliary tract cancer (BTC), and liver metastasis of extrahepatic tumors. Comprehensive data on past and current trends of SIRT as well as outcome parameters such as in-hospital mortality and adverse events in Germany are missing.

Methods: We evaluated current clinical developments and outcomes of SIRT in Germany based on standardized hospital discharge data, provided by the German Federal Statistical Office from 2012 to 2019.

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Acceleration in MRI has garnered much attention from the deep-learning community in recent years, particularly for imaging large anatomical volumes such as the abdomen or moving targets such as the heart. A variety of deep learning approaches have been investigated, with most existing works using convolutional neural network (CNN)-based architectures as the reconstruction backbone, paired with fixed, rather than learned, k-space undersampling patterns. In both image domain and k-space, CNN-based architectures may not be optimal for reconstruction due to its limited ability to capture long-range dependencies.

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In search and rescue missions, teleoperated rovers equipped with sensor technology are deployed into harsh environments to search for targets. To support the search task, unimodal/multimodal cues can be presented via visual, acoustic and/or haptic channels. However, human operators often perform the search task in parallel with the driving task, which can cause interference of attentional resources based on multiple resource theory.

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The prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) patients is determined to a decisive extent by comorbidities. On the other hand, anti-cancer treatments for CRC are associated with relevant toxicities and may therefore cause additional comorbidities. This retrospective cohort study assessed the prevalence of various diseases in patients 12 months before and 12 months after an initial diagnosis of colorectal cancer (ICD-10: C18, C20) in 1274 general practices in Germany between January 2000 and December 2018.

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Article Synopsis
  • Digital platforms are increasingly impacting various sectors, including work in Germany, where platform-based jobs are growing in start-ups and other contexts.
  • An analysis of 31 interviews aimed to uncover major success factors influencing market entry and penetration in relation to occupational safety and health (OSH) and work design, but OSH/work design was not seen as critical for success.
  • Key success factors identified included user orientation, scalability, and niche occupation, highlighting the need for better awareness and structured solutions around OSH/work design within the platform sector.
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Background: Now that patients increasingly get access to their healthcare records, its contents require clarification. The use of patient-friendly terms and definitions can help patients and their significant others understand their medical data. However, it is costly to make patient-friendly descriptions for the myriad of terms used in the medical domain.

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Although the objective assessment of mental workload has been a focus of human factors research, few studies have investigated stakeholders' attitudes towards its implementation in real workplaces. The present study addresses this research gap by surveying N = 702 managers in three European countries (Germany, United Kingdom, Spain) about their expectations and concerns regarding sensor-based monitoring of employee mental workload. The data confirm the relevance of expectations regarding improvements of workplace design and employee well-being, as well as concerns about restrictions of employees' privacy and sovereignty, for the implementation of workload monitoring.

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Introduction: Endoscopic pneumatic pyloric balloon dilation is a treatment option for early postoperative delayed gastric tube emptying following esophageal resection. This study aimed to determine the safety and effectiveness of endoscopic balloon dilation.

Methods: Between 2015 and 2018, patients with delayed gastric emptying 8-10 days after esophageal resection with gastric tube reconstruction due to esophageal carcinoma were considered for inclusion.

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The Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA) was introduced as a promising pupillary workload measure for field investigations since, unlike pupil dilation, it is not affected by illumination. Recent studies have investigated the ICA for task-evoked cognitive workload with contradictory findings. However, few studies investigated the influence of illumination on the ICA.

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Established methods for postural ergonomic risk assessment in occupational practice are mostly time-consuming and need to be conducted by experts. Use of technology could improve postural ergonomic risk assessments with regard to time efficiency and accuracy. A study was conducted to assess the accuracy of a markerless motion capture system (Microsoft Kinect V2) compared to a marker-based motion capture system (Vicon Bonita).

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Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have led to a paradigm shift in cancer therapy, improving outcomes in the treatment of various malignancies. However, not all patients benefit to the same extend from ICI. Reliable tools to predict treatment response and outcome are missing.

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Evaluation and power of seroprevalence studies depend on the performed serological assays. The aim of this study was to assess four commercial serological tests from EUROIMMUN, DiaSorin, Abbott, and Roche as well as an in-house immunofluorescence and neutralization test for their capability to identify SARS-CoV-2 seropositive individuals in a high-prevalence setting. Therefore, 42 social and working contacts of a German super-spreader were tested.

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Background: The need to have and seek information shapes the context of computing systems. When it comes to health, individual coping influences human behavior. Therefore, the relationship between individual coping and the need to have and seek health information plays a crucial role in the development of digital health systems.

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Various researchers have proposed pupillometric indicators to assess a person's cognitive strain. However, to distinguish the variation of pupil light response from psychosensory pupil response in experimental field conditions is a challenge. The Index of Cognitive Activity (ICA) addresses this problem by wavelet separation.

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Objective: Investigate long-term survival, morbidity, mortality, and pathology results in patients following esophagectomy or total gastrectomy for gastroesophageal junction (GEJ) cancer.

Background: Both a total gastrectomy and an esophagectomy may be valid treatment options in patients with GEJ cancer. Which procedure results in the most optimal patient outcome is not well studied.

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