Publications by authors named "Belinda Kwok"

Article Synopsis
  • The ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potential (oVEMP) measures how well the otolith organs function, primarily focusing on muscle responses elicited by sound stimuli.
  • The study examined the characteristics and pathways of late peaks in oVEMPs across different groups: healthy individuals, and patients with various levels of hearing and vestibular loss, using both bone and air-conducted stimuli.
  • Findings revealed that in healthy subjects, the initial waves were largest and predominantly contralateral, while patients with vestibular function could still produce late peaks, suggesting they originate from a different mechanism unrelated to hearing status.
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Objective: To examine the origin of cervical vestibular evoked myogenic potential (cVEMP) late waves (n34-p44) elicited with air-conducted click stimuli.

Design: Using a retrospective design, cVEMPs from normal volunteers were compared to those obtained from patients with vestibular and auditory pathologies.

Study Sample: (1) Normal volunteers (n = 56); (2) severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) with normal vestibular function (n = 21); (3) peripheral vestibular impairment with preserved hearing (n = 16); (4) total vestibulocochlear deficit (n = 23).

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to analyze nystagmus and balance characteristics in patients experiencing vertigo after cochlear implantation.
  • Twenty-one patients were recruited for both retrospective and prospective examinations, involving video recordings during vertigo attacks and vestibular function tests.
  • Main findings included high-velocity nystagmus linked to vertigo, with a significant portion diagnosed with conditions like secondary endolymphatic hydrops and Ménière's disease, indicating potential underlying vestibular issues after cochlear implantation.
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Objective: To examine the relationship between widely used otolith function tests: the Subjective Visual Horizontal (SVH) and Vestibular Evoked Myogenic Potentials (VEMP).

Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on 301 patients who underwent SVH, ocular and cervical VEMP (oVEMP and cVEMP) tests on the same day. Correlations between the mean SVH tilt and amplitude asymmetry ratios for bone-conducted (BC) oVEMP and air-conducted (AC) cVEMP were examined.

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Object: Vestibular evoked myogenic potentials (VEMPs) and the subjective visual horizontal (SVH) (or vertical [SVV]) have both been considered tests of otolith function: ocular-VEMPs (oVEMPs) utricular function, cervical VEMPs (cVEMPs) saccular function. Some studies have reported association between decreased oVEMPs and SVH, whereas others have not.

Design: A retrospective study of test results.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to differentiate between posterior-circulation stroke (PCS) and vestibular-neuritis (VN) using quantitative vestibular tests conducted on patients within 72 hours of their hospital visit.
  • A total of 128 PCS and 134 VN patients were analyzed, revealing key differences in test results such as nystagmus patterns and severities, which were more pronounced in VN than in PCS.
  • The findings demonstrated that specific vestibular tests could reliably distinguish VN from PCS, achieving high sensitivity (92.9%) and specificity (89.8%), especially when combined with standard bedside assessments.
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Objective: Menière's disease (MD) is characterized by recurrent vertigo and fluctuating aural symptoms. Diagnosis is straightforward in typical presentations, but a proportion of patients present with atypical symptoms. Our aim is to profile the array of symptoms patients may initially present with and to analyze the vestibular and audiological test results of patients with a diagnosis of MD.

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Objective: To quantify the impact of cochlear implantation (CI) on all five vestibular end-organs and on subjective ratings of post-CI dizziness.

Methods: Seventy-two patients undergoing unilateral CI were recruited for the study. All participants completed pre- and post-CI three-dimensional video head-impulse tests (3D vHITs) to assess semicircular-canal (SC) function, air- and bone-conducted (AC and BC) cervical and ocular vestibular-evoked myogenic potentials (cVEMPs and oVEMPs) to assess otolith-function and the dizziness handicap inventory (DHI) to measure self-perceived disability.

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A sensitive test for Superior Semicircular Canal Dehiscence (SCD) is the air-conducted, ocular vestibular evoked myogenic potential (AC oVEMP). However, not all patients with large AC oVEMPs have SCD. This retrospective study sought to identify alternate diagnoses also producing enlarged AC oVEMPs and investigated bone-conducted (BC) oVEMP outcome measures that would help differentiate between these, and cases of SCD.

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Medication errors often occurred due to the breach of medication rights that are the right patient, the right drug, the right time, the right dose and the right route. The aim of this study was to develop a medication-rights detection system using natural language processing and deep neural networks to automate medication-incident identification using free-text incident reports. We assessed the performance of deep neural network models in classifying the Advanced Incident Reporting System reports and compared the models' performance with that of other common classification methods (including logistic regression, support vector machines and the decision-tree method).

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Higher-order conditioning phenomena, including context conditioning and blocking, occur when conditioning to one set of stimuli interacts with conditioning to a second set of stimuli to modulate the strength of the resultant memories. Here we analyze higher-order conditioning in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, demonstrating for the first time the presence of blocking in this animal, and dissociating it from context conditioning. We present an initial genetic dissection of these phenomena in a model benzaldehyde/NHCl aversive learning system, and suggest that blocking may involve an alteration of memory retrieval rather than storage.

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