Underrepresentation of African Americans in Plastic Surgery: Examining Demographics, Specialty Factors, and Medical School Experiences.

Background: Racial representation among medical trainees translates into physicians that are able to communicate with diverse patient populations and are perceptive to health disparities. This is important within plastic surgery where an optimal physicianpatient relationship is essential to health outcomes.

Objective: The purpose of this study is to address underrepresentation of African Americans (AA) in plastic surgery through improving understanding of factors that may contribute to AA medical student interest in plastic surgery.

Quantifying Hand Strength and Isometric Pinch Individuation Using a Flexible Pressure Sensor Grid.

Modulating force between the thumb and another digit, or isometric pinch individuation, is critical for daily tasks and can be impaired due to central or peripheral nervous system injury. Because surgical and rehabilitative efforts often focus on regaining this dexterous ability, we need to be able to consistently quantify pinch individuation across time and facilities. Currently, a standardized metric for such an assessment does not exist.

Quantitative assessments of finger individuation with an instrumented glove.

Background: In clinical and research settings, hand dexterity is often assessed as finger individuation, or the ability to move one finger at a time. Despite its clinical importance, there is currently no standardized, sufficiently sensitive, or fully objective platform for these evaluations.

Methods: Here we developed two novel individuation scores and tested them against a previously developed score using a commercially available instrumented glove and data collected from 20 healthy adults.

Synchronization of kinetic and kinematic hand tasks with electrocorticography and cortical stimulation during awake craniotomies.

Awake craniotomies provide unique and invaluable scientific opportunities for neurophysiological experimentation in consenting human subjects. While such experimentation carries a long history, rigorous reporting of methodologies focusing on synchronizing data across multiple platforms is not universally reported and often not translatable to across operating rooms, facilities, or behavioral tasks. Therefore, here we detail an intraoperative data synchronization methodology designed to work across multiple commercially available platforms to collect behavioral and surgical field videos, electrocorticography, brain stimulation timing, continuous finger joint angles, and continuous finger force production.

Heart Disease, Advanced Age, Minority Race, and Hispanic Ethnicity Are Associated With Mortality in COVID-19 Patients.

Background: The objective of this study was to determine the associations between heart disease, obesity, and demographic factors and increased COVID-19 mortality.

Methods: We extracted deidentified patient-level data from the Froedtert Health System and Children's Hospital of Wisconsin and used descriptive statistics and multivariable logistic regression to characterize relationships between heart disease, obesity, age group, sex, race and ethnicity and mortality following COVID-19 diagnosis.

Results: We found heart disease (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] 2.