Guidance on Conversations About Race and Racism in Pediatric Clinical Settings.

Objective: To develop guidance for pediatric clinicians on how to discuss race and racism in pediatric clinical settings.

Methods: We conducted a modified Delphi study from 2021 to 2022 with a panel of pediatric clinicians, psychologists, parents, and adolescents with expertise in racism and child health through scholarship or lived experience. Panelists responded to an initial survey with open-ended questions about how to talk to youth about race and racism.

Improving Prediction of Survival for Extremely Premature Infants Born at 23 to 29 Weeks Gestational Age in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: Development and Evaluation of Machine Learning Models.

Background: Infants born at extremely preterm gestational ages are typically admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) after initial resuscitation. The subsequent hospital course can be highly variable, and despite counseling aided by available risk calculators, there are significant challenges with shared decision-making regarding life support and transition to end-of-life care. Improving predictive models can help providers and families navigate these unique challenges.

Improving pain communication between limited English-speaking Hmong patients, medical interpreters, and health care providers in primary care: A pilot study.

This pilot study assessed the feasibility of implementing a pain assessment information visualization (InfoViz) tool to address cultural and language barriers among limited English proficiency (LEP) Hmong patients in primary care. We used a static group comparison design to collect data from 20 patient, interpreter, and provider triads under usual care (i.e.

Using a Machine Learning Algorithm to Predict Online Patient Portal Utilization: A Patient Engagement Study.

Objective: There is a low rate of online patient portal utilization in the U.S. This study aimed to utilize a machine learning approach to predict access to online medical records through a patient portal.

Longitudinal K-means approaches to clustering and analyzing EHR opioid use trajectories for clinical subtypes.

Identification of patient subtypes from retrospective Electronic Health Record (EHR) data is fraught with inherent modeling issues, such as missing data and variable length time intervals, and the results obtained are highly dependent on data pre-processing strategies. As we move towards personalized medicine, assessing accurate patient subtypes will be a key factor in creating patient specific treatment plans. Partitioning longitudinal trajectories from irregularly spaced and variable length time intervals is a well-established, but open problem.

A Comparative Retrospective Study of Immunotherapy RANO Standard RANO Criteria in Glioblastoma Patients Receiving Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor Therapy.

Objectives: Real-time assessment of treatment response in glioblastoma (GBM) patients on immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) remains challenging because inflammatory effects of therapy may mimic progressive disease, and the temporal evolution of these inflammatory findings is poorly understood. We compare GBM patient response during ICB as assessed with the Immunotherapy Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (iRANO) and the standard Response Assessment in Neuro-Oncology (RANO) radiological criteria.

Methods: 49 GBM patients (seven newly diagnosed and 42 recurrent) treated with ICBs at a single institution were identified.

Clinical Validation of Automatable Gaussian Normalized CBV in Brain Tumor Analysis: Superior Reproducibility and Slightly Better Association with Survival than Current Standard Manual Normal Appearing White Matter Normalization.

Purpose: To validate Gaussian normalized cerebral blood volume (GN-nCBV) by association with overall survival (OS) in newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients and compare this association with current standard white matter normalized cerebral blood volume (WN-nCBV).

Methods: We retrieved spin-echo echo-planar dynamic susceptibility contrast MRI acquired after maximal resection and prior to radiation therapy between 2006 and 2011 in 51 adult patients (28 male, 23 female; age 23-87 years) with newly diagnosed glioblastoma. Software code was developed in house to perform Gaussian normalization of CBV to the standard deviation of the whole brain CBV.

Normalization of ADC does not improve correlation with overall survival in patients with high-grade glioma (HGG).

Mixed reports leave uncertainty about whether normalization of apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) to a within-subject white matter reference is necessary for assessment of tumor cellularity. We tested whether normalization improves the previously reported correlation of resection margin ADC with 15-month overall survival (OS) in HGG patients. Spin-echo echo-planar DWI was retrieved from 3 T MRI acquired between maximal resection and radiation in 37 adults with new-onset HGG (25 glioblastoma; 12 anaplastic astrocytoma).

Lung cancer mutation testing: a clinical retesting study of agreement between a real-time PCR and a mass spectrometry test.

To investigate the clinical validity and utility of tests for detecting Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor () gene mutations in non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer patients, tumour DNA extracts from 532 patients previously tested by the cobas EGFR Mutation Test (RT-PCR test) were retested by the Sequenom/Agena Biosciences MassArray OncoFocus mass spectrometry test (MS test). Valid results from both tests were available from 470 patients (88%) for agreement analysis. Survival data were obtained for 513 patients (96%) and 77 patients (14%) were treated with EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs).

EGFR Mutation Testing of non-squamous NSCLC: Impact and Uptake during Implementation of Testing Guidelines in a Population-Based Registry Cohort from Northern New Zealand.

Background: Since 2013, clinical practice guidelines recommend EGFR mutation testing of non-squamous NSCLC to select advanced-stage patients for first-line treatment using EGFR-TKIs.

Objective: We aimed to determine population-based trends in the real-world uptake and impact in routine practice of these recently updated testing guidelines.

Patients And Methods: A population-based observational study was conducted of notifications to the New Zealand Cancer Registry of patients eligible for EGFR testing diagnosed in northern New Zealand between January 2010 and April 2014.

Structural remodeling of vagal afferent innervation of aortic arch and nucleus ambiguus (NA) projections to cardiac ganglia in a transgenic mouse model of type 1 diabetes (OVE26).

Diabetes-induced structural changes of vagal aortic afferent and cardiac efferent axons are not well understood. FVB control and OVE26 diabetic mice at different ages received injections of the tracer tetramethylrhodamine dextran (TMR-D) into the nodose ganglion to label vagal aortic afferents (at 3 and 6 months), or DiI injections into the nucleus ambiguus to label vagal cardiac efferents (at 3, 6, and 9 months). The aortic arch and atria were examined by using confocal microscopy.

A study of field independence versus field dependence of school teachers and university students in mathematics.

The Group Embedded Figures Test was administered to 72 secondary school teachers and 54 university students in mathematics to measure their cognitive styles of field independence-dependence. A mean difference was found between the teachers and students as teachers scored more field-independent than the students. There was also a group-by-sex interaction, which indicated that the female teachers scored more field-independent than the male teachers, whereas the male students scored as more field-independent than the female students.