Publications by authors named "Clifton D"

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have been proposed for the prediction of social behaviors that could be reasonably understood from patient-reported information. This raises novel ethical concerns about respect, privacy, and control over patient data. Ethical concerns surrounding clinical AI systems for social behavior verification can be divided into two main categories: (1) the potential for inaccuracies/biases within such systems, and (2) the impact on trust in patient-provider relationships with the introduction of automated AI systems for "fact-checking", particularly in cases where the data/models may contradict the patient.

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Background: Awake prone positioning (APP) may be beneficial in patients with respiratory failure who are not receiving mechanical ventilation. Randomized controlled trials of APP have been performed during peak COVID-19 periods in unvaccinated populations, with limited data on compliance or patient acceptability. We aimed to evaluate the efficacy and acceptability of APP in a lower-middle income country in an open-label randomized controlled trial using a dedicated APP implementation team and wearable continuous-monitoring devices.

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Increasing the diversity of bio-based polymers is needed to address the combined problems of plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of the problems necessitates rapid discovery of new materials; however, identification of appropriate chemistries maybe slow using current iterative methods. Machine learning (ML) methods could significantly expedite new material discovery and property identification.

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Specialised pre-trained language models are becoming more frequent in Natural language Processing (NLP) since they can potentially outperform models trained on generic texts. BioBERT (Sanh et al., Distilbert, a distilled version of bert: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter.

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Background: Accurately predicting hospital discharge events could help improve patient flow and the efficiency of healthcare delivery. However, using machine learning and diverse electronic health record (EHR) data for this task remains incompletely explored.

Methods: We used EHR data from February-2017 to January-2020 from Oxfordshire, UK to predict hospital discharges in the next 24 h.

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Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those similar to ChatGPT, have significantly influenced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While these models excel in general language tasks, their performance in domain-specific downstream tasks such as biomedical and clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Medical Natural Language Inference (NLI) is still evolving. In this context, our study investigates the potential of instruction tuning for biomedical language processing, applying this technique to two general LLMs of substantial scale.

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Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important metric in cardiovascular health monitoring. Spectral analysis of HRV provides essential insights into the functioning of the cardiac autonomic nervous system. However, data artefacts could degrade signal quality, potentially leading to unreliable assessments of cardiac activities.

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This research introduces the Variational Graph Attention Dynamics (VarGATDyn), addressing the complexities of dynamic graph representation learning, where existing models, tailored for static graphs, prove inadequate. VarGATDyn melds attention mechanisms with a Markovian assumption to surpass the challenges of maintaining temporal consistency and the extensive dataset requirements typical of RNN-based frameworks. It harnesses the strengths of the Variational Graph Auto-Encoder (VGAE) framework, Graph Attention Networks (GAT), and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) to adeptly navigate the temporal and structural intricacies of dynamic graphs.

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The entry of large language models (LLMs) into research and commercial spaces has led to a trend of ever-larger models, with initial promises of generalisability. This was followed by a widespread desire to downsize and create specialised models without the need for complete fine-tuning, using Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. We present an investigation into the suitability of different PEFT methods to clinical decision-making tasks, across a range of model sizes, including extremely small models with as few as 25 million parameters.

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Article Synopsis
  • Robust data privacy regulations can limit the sharing of healthcare data, which is essential for gaining global insights and creating generalized clinical models.
  • Federated learning (FL) offers a solution by enabling the training of global models using diverse datasets while maintaining patient privacy, but challenges arise from inconsistencies in electronic health records (EHRs).
  • The paper presents a new FL framework that uses knowledge abstraction and filtering to manage these data discrepancies, allowing for effective global model training without needing manual data alignment or losing information.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have been proposed for the prediction of social behaviors which could be reasonably understood from patient-reported information. This raises novel ethical concerns about respect, privacy, and control over patient data. Ethical concerns surrounding clinical AI systems for social behavior verification can be divided into two main categories: (1) the potential for inaccuracies/biases within such systems, and (2) the impact on trust in patient-provider relationships with the introduction of automated AI systems for "fact-checking", particularly in cases where the data/models may contradict the patient.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to predict antimicrobial resistance (AMR) at the hospital level in England using machine learning techniques, specifically focusing on historical data of AMR and antimicrobial usage over multiple years.
  • The research employs an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model and compares its predictive capability against other methods, finding XGBoost to offer the best performance, particularly in hospitals experiencing significant changes in AMR prevalence.
  • The results highlight that year-to-year AMR variability is generally low, but specific hospital groups with larger fluctuations can benefit from advanced predictive modeling, aiding in targeted interventions for AMR management.
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Importance: Higher physical activity levels have been suggested as a potential modifiable risk factor for lowering the risk of incident Parkinson's disease (PD). This study uses objective measures of physical activity to investigate the role of reverse causation in the observed association.

Objective: To investigate the association between accelerometer-derived daily step count and incident PD, and to assess the impact of reverse causation on this association.

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Article Synopsis
  • * LMICs face challenges like limited funding, outdated tech, and lack of expertise, making it difficult to apply AI models developed in HICs without adaptation.
  • * The study assesses the use of UK-developed AI models in Vietnam, highlighting the need for personalized approaches to improve performance and address local healthcare challenges effectively.
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  • The study aims to identify predictors of atrial fibrillation after cardiac surgery (AFACS) to develop better prediction models as part of the PARADISE project.
  • It used a two-stage Delphi consensus process involving 15 international experts from various cardiac and nursing fields to generate and refine a list of candidate predictors.
  • The final list includes 72 predictors categorized into demographics, comorbidities, vital signs, intraoperative factors, postoperative investigations, and interventions, highlighting both patient-related and surgical factors.
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Recent studies on contrastive learning have achieved remarkable performance solely by leveraging few labels in the context of medical image segmentation. Existing methods mainly focus on instance discrimination and invariant mapping (i.e.

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Article Synopsis
  • Lower extremity chronic exertional compartment syndrome (LE-CECS) is a condition that affects physical activity, notably in military personnel, and fasciotomy (a surgical treatment) may influence military service separations.
  • A study of over 1 million active-duty service members from 2011 to 2017 found that LE-CECS significantly increases the risk of medical and nonmedical separations, especially in men and women undergoing certain surgical procedures.
  • The results suggest that while LE-CECS leads to higher discharge risks, fasciotomy does not appear to improve long-term military careers, highlighting the need for further research on this issue.
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Electronic Health Records (EHRs) play a crucial role in shaping predictive are models, yet they encounter challenges such as significant data gaps and class imbalances. Traditional Graph Neural Network (GNN) approaches have limitations in fully leveraging neighbourhood data or demanding intensive computational requirements for regularisation. To address this challenge, we introduce CliqueFluxNet, a novel framework that innovatively constructs a patient similarity graph to maximise cliques, thereby highlighting strong inter-patient connections.

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Background: Stigma within the healthcare environment limits access to treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), even as OUD results in significant morbidity and mortality. Language in clinical documentation affects patient experience and future care through the transmission of stigma or positive regard. With the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act, patients have full access to their medical records online.

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The analysis of extensive electronic health records (EHR) datasets often calls for automated solutions, with machine learning (ML) techniques, including deep learning (DL), taking a lead role. One common task involves categorizing EHR data into predefined groups. However, the vulnerability of EHRs to noise and errors stemming from data collection processes, as well as potential human labeling errors, poses a significant risk.

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Collaborative efforts in artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly common between high-income countries (HICs) and low- to middle-income countries (LMICs). Given the resource limitations often encountered by LMICs, collaboration becomes crucial for pooling resources, expertise, and knowledge. Despite the apparent advantages, ensuring the fairness and equity of these collaborative models is essential, especially considering the distinct differences between LMIC and HIC hospitals.

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Article Synopsis
  • The paper discusses ARCO, a new semi-supervised contrastive learning framework designed to improve medical image segmentation by enhancing the distinction between similar and dissimilar anatomical features without relying heavily on ground truth labels.
  • ARCO employs variance-reduction techniques to tackle challenges like misclassification of minority classes in pixel/voxel-level tasks, aiming to mitigate model collapse and demonstrate that the sampling methods used are effective universally for variance reduction.
  • Through extensive experiments across eight benchmarks, the proposed methods consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods, highlighting the importance of ARCO in advancing semi-supervised segmentation in safety-critical medical applications.
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Aims: Electrocardiogram (ECG) is widely considered the primary test for evaluating cardiovascular diseases. However, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance these medical practices and learn new clinical insights from ECGs remains largely unexplored. We hypothesize that AI models with a specific design can provide fine-grained interpretation of ECGs to advance cardiovascular diagnosis, stratify mortality risks, and identify new clinically useful information.

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Introduction: Injuries are the leading cause of medical encounters with over 2 million medical encounters for musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions and over 700,000 acute injuries per year. Musculoskeletal injuries (MSKIs) are by far the leading health and readiness problem of the U.S.

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