Publications by authors named "Ari Ercole"

Background: Mechanical power (MP) serves as a crucial predictive indicator for ventilator-induced lung injury and plays a pivotal role in tailoring the management of mechanical ventilation. However, its application across different diseases and stages remains nuanced.

Methods: Using AmsterdamUMCdb, we conducted a retrospective study to analyze the causal relationship between MP and outcomes of invasive mechanical ventilation, specifically SpO/FiO ratio (P/F) and ventilator-free days at day 28 (VFD28).

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Practices for controlling intracranial pressure (ICP) in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) vary considerably between centres. To help understand the rational basis for such variance in care, this study aims to identify the patient-level predictors of changes in ICP management. We extracted all heterogeneous data (2008 pre-ICU and ICU variables) collected from a prospective cohort (n = 844, 51 ICUs) of ICP-monitored TBI patients in the Collaborative European NeuroTrauma Effectiveness Research in TBI study.

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Background: Entropy quantifies the level of disorder within a system. Low entropy reflects increased rigidity of homeostatic feedback systems possibly reflecting failure of protective physiological mechanisms like cerebral autoregulation. In traumatic brain injury (TBI), low entropy of heart rate and intracranial pressure (ICP) predict unfavorable outcome.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A secondary analysis found that patients in the CPPopt-targeted group had better autoregulation, indicated by a significantly lower median ΔPRx during preserved autoregulation periods compared to the control group.
  • * The study concludes that while there was no noticeable difference in overall PRx averages, targeting CPPopt appears to enhance cerebrovascular reactivity in TBI patients.
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Introduction: Digitisation of patient records, coupled with a moral imperative to use routinely collected data for research, necessitate effective data governance that both facilitates evidence-based research and minimises associated risks. The Generalisable Overview of Study Risk for Lead Investigators Needing Guidance (GOSLING) provides the first quantitative risk-measure for assessing the data-related risks of clinical research projects.

Methods: GOSLING employs a self-assessment designed to standardise risk assessment, considering various domains, including data type, security measures, and public co-production.

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Introduction: Sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. In the updated, 2016 Sepsis-3 criteria, sepsis is defined as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection, where organ dysfunction can be represented by an increase in the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score of 2 points or more. We sought to apply the Sepsis-3 criteria to characterise the septic cohort in the Amsterdam University Medical Centres database (Amsterdam UMCdb).

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Background: Low-normal levels of arterial carbon dioxide (PaCO2) are recommended in the acute phase of traumatic brain injury (TBI) to optimize oxygen and CO2 tension, and to maintain cerebral perfusion. End-tidal CO2 (ETCO2) may be used as a surrogate for PaCO2 when arterial sampling is less readily available. ETCO2 may not be an adequate proxy to guide ventilation and the effects on concomitant injury, time, and the impact of ventilatory strategies on the PaCO2-ETCO2 gradient are not well understood.

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We aimed to investigate the use of sedation in patients with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI), focusing on the choice of sedative agent, dose, duration, and their association with clinical outcomes. Multinational, multicentre, retrospective observational study. 14 trauma centres in Europe, Australia and the United Kingdom.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) in intensive care units (ICUs), aiming to identify clinical variables that predict outcomes after injury.
  • Researchers used data from a large European study (CENTER-TBI) involving patients over 18 years old, gathering various pre- and post-injury characteristics and biomarkers.
  • The analysis involved a new clustering method to find distinct disease trajectories among ICU patients, linking these clusters to recovery outcomes assessed by the Glasgow Outcome Scale.
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Intracranial pressure (ICP) data from traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) cannot be interpreted appropriately without accounting for the effect of administered therapy intensity level (TIL) on ICP. A 15-point scale was originally proposed in 1987 to quantify the hourly intensity of ICP-targeted treatment. This scale was subsequently modified-through expert consensus-during the development of TBI Common Data Elements to address statistical limitations and improve usability.

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Background: Low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV; < 8 mL/kg predicted body weight [PBW]) is a well-established standard of care associated with improved outcomes. This study used data collated in multicenter electronic health record ICU databases from the United Kingdom and the United States to analyze the use of LTVV in routine clinical practice.

Research Question: What factors are associated with adherence to LTVV in the United Kingdom and North America?

Study Design: This was a retrospective, multicenter study across the United Kingdom and United States of patients who were mechanically ventilated.

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Background: The implementation of multimodality monitoring in the clinical management of patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC) results in physiological measurements that can be collected in a continuous and regular fashion or even at waveform resolution. Such data are considered part of the "Big Data" available in intensive care units and are potentially suitable for health care-focused artificial intelligence research. Despite the richness in content of the physiological measurements, and the clinical implications shown by derived metrics based on those measurements, they have been largely neglected from previous attempts in harmonizing data collection and standardizing reporting of results as part of common data elements (CDEs) efforts.

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Intracranial pressure is routinely monitored in most intensive care units caring for patients with severe neurological insults and, together with continuous arterial blood pressure measurement, allows for monitoring of cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP). CPP is the driving pressure of blood flow to the brain and is used to guide therapy. However, there is considerable inconsistency in the literature regarding how CPP is technically measured and, more specifically, the appropriate placement of the arterial pressure transducer.

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Existing methods to characterise the evolving condition of traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) do not capture the context necessary for individualising treatment. Here, we integrate all heterogenous data stored in medical records (1166 pre-ICU and ICU variables) to model the individualised contribution of clinical course to 6-month functional outcome on the Glasgow Outcome Scale -Extended (GOSE). On a prospective cohort (n = 1550, 65 centres) of TBI patients, we train recurrent neural network models to map a token-embedded time series representation of all variables (including missing values) to an ordinal GOSE prognosis every 2 h.

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Background: A previous retrospective single-centre study suggested that the percentage of time spent with cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) below the individual lower limit of reactivity (LLR) is associated with mortality in traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients. We aim to validate this in a large multicentre cohort.

Methods: Recordings from 171 TBI patients from the high-resolution cohort of the CENTER-TBI study were processed with ICM+ software.

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Article Synopsis
  • CPPopt is a special number that helps doctors know how well the brain is getting enough blood, especially for patients with serious brain injuries in the hospital.
  • The team improved an automated computer program that calculates CPPopt to make it easier and safer to use.
  • After testing the new program, they found it worked better at keeping things stable, even though it predicted outcomes a little less effectively than before.
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Introduction: Obsolete bleep/long-range pager equipment remains firmly embedded in the National Health Service (NHS).

Objective: To introduce a secure, chart-integrated messaging system (Epic Secure Chat) in a large NHS tertiary referral centre to replace non-emergency bleeps/long-range pagers.

Methods: The system was socialised in the months before go-live.

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Increased intracranial pressure (ICP) is one of the most important modifiable and immediate threats to critically ill patients suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Two hyperosmolar agents (HOAs), mannitol and hypertonic saline (HTS), are routinely used in clinical practice to treat increased ICP. We aimed to assess whether a preference for mannitol, HTS, or their combined use translated into differences in outcome.

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  • A study used reinforcement learning to find the best way to use corticosteroids in septic patients, based on data from over 3000 ICU admissions.
  • The results showed that the AI's recommended policy was more restrictive than the actual treatment given by clinicians, suggesting corticosteroids should be withheld in more patient scenarios.
  • The findings support a tailored approach to corticosteroid use in sepsis, as it might improve patient survival, but further validation is needed before widespread application.
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Sepsis is a major healthcare problem with substantial mortality and a common reason for admission to the intensive care unit (ICU). For this reason, the management of sepsis is an important area of ICU research. A number of large-scale, freely-accessible ICU databases are available for observational research and the robust identification of septic patients in such data sets is crucial for research purposes, particularly for comparative studies between critical care sub-populations which may vary around the world.

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