Publications by authors named "Colin Gross"

Background: Health care professionals must learn continuously as a core part of their work. As the rate of knowledge production in biomedicine increases, better support for health care professionals' continuous learning is needed. In health systems, feedback is pervasive and is widely considered to be essential for learning that drives improvement.

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Background: To assess the impact of the lung cancer screening protocol recommended by the European Society of Thoracic Imaging (ESTI) on nodule diameter, volume, and density throughout different computed tomography (CT) scanners.

Methods: An anthropomorphic chest phantom containing fourteen different-sized (range 3-12 mm) and CT-attenuated (100 HU, -630 HU and -800 HU, termed as solid, GG1 and GG2) pulmonary nodules was imaged on five CT scanners with institute-specific standard protocols (P) and the lung cancer screening protocol recommended by ESTI (ESTI protocol, P). Images were reconstructed with filtered back projection (FBP) and iterative reconstruction (REC).

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Background: Visual displays such as charts and tables may significantly moderate the effects of audit and feedback interventions, but the systematic study of these intervention components will likely remain limited without a method for isolating the information content of a visual display from its form elements. The objective of this study is to introduce such a method based on an application of visualization frameworks to enable a systematic approach to answer the question, "What was visualized?" in studies of audit and feedback.

Methods: The proposed method uses 3 steps to systematically identify and describe the content of visual displays in feedback interventions: 1) identify displays, 2) classify content, and 3) identify elements.

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The Knowledge Grid (KGrid) is a research and development program toward infrastructure capable of greatly decreasing latency between the publication of new biomedical knowledge and its widespread uptake into practice. KGrid comprises digital knowledge objects, an online Library to store them, and an Activator that uses them to provide Knowledge-as-a-Service (KaaS). KGrid's Activator enables computable biomedical knowledge, held in knowledge objects, to be rapidly deployed at Internet-scale in cloud computing environments for improved health.

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Purpose: Cancer immunotherapy with adoptive transfer of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) represents an effective treatment for patients with metastatic melanoma, with the objective regressions in up to 72% of patients in three clinical trials. However, the antigen targets recognized by these effective TILs remain largely unclear.

Experimental Design: Melanoma patients 2359 and 2591 both experienced durable complete regressions of metastases ongoing beyond five years following adoptive TIL transfer.

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Purpose: Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) with autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) and high-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) administered to lymphodepleted patients with melanoma can cause durable tumor regressions. The optimal TIL product for ACT is unknown.

Patients And Methods: Patients with metastatic melanoma were prospectively assigned to receive unselected young TILs versus CD8(+)-enriched TILs.

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Substantial regressions of metastatic lesions have been observed in up to 70% of patients with melanoma who received adoptively transferred autologous tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) in phase 2 clinical trials. In addition, 40% of patients treated in a recent trial experienced complete regressions of all measurable lesions for at least 5 years following TIL treatment. To evaluate the potential association between the ability of TILs to mediate durable regressions and their ability to recognize potent antigens that presumably include mutated gene products, we developed a new screening approach involving mining whole-exome sequence data to identify mutated proteins expressed in patient tumors.

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Adoptive cell therapy using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) can mediate objective and durable tumor regressions in patients with metastatic melanoma. CD8+ tumor-reactive TIL are well studied in humans and animals, yet the function of tumor-infiltrating CD4+ T lymphocytes in patient treatments remains controversial. We recently demonstrated that CD4+ TILs are not necessary for objective responses in patients.

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Purpose: Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) and interleukin (IL)-2 administered following lymphodepletion can cause the durable complete regression of bulky metastatic melanoma in patients refractory to approved treatments. However, the generation of a unique tumor-reactive TIL culture for each patient may be prohibitively difficult. We therefore investigated the clinical and immunologic impact of unscreened, CD8+ enriched "young" TIL.

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Quantitative microscopy and digital image analysis are underutilized in microbial ecology largely because of the laborious task to segment foreground object pixels from background, especially in complex color micrographs of environmental samples. In this paper, we describe an improved computing technology developed to alleviate this limitation. The system's uniqueness is its ability to edit digital images accurately when presented with the difficult yet commonplace challenge of removing background pixels whose three-dimensional color space overlaps the range that defines foreground objects.

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