Publications by authors named "David J Albers"

Background: When coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mitigation efforts waned, viral respiratory infections (VRIs) surged, potentially increasing the risk of postviral invasive bacterial infections (IBIs). We sought to evaluate the change in epidemiology and relationships between specific VRIs and IBIs [complicated pneumonia, complicated sinusitis and invasive group A streptococcus (iGAS)] over time using the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) dataset.

Methods: We performed a secondary analysis of all prospectively collected pediatric (<19 years old) and adult encounters at 58 N3C institutions, stratified by era: pre-pandemic (January 1, 2018, to February 28, 2020) versus pandemic (March 1, 2020, to June 1, 2023).

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Mechanical ventilation (MV) is a necessary lifesaving intervention for patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) but it can cause ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI), which contributes to the high ARDS mortality rate (∼40%). Bedside determination of optimally lung-protective ventilation settings is challenging because the evolution of VILI is not immediately reflected in clinically available, patient-level, data. The goal of this work was therefore to test ventilation waveform-derived parameters that represent the degree of ongoing VILI and can serve as targets for ventilator adjustments.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The text discusses protocols for treating traumatic brain injury (TBI) in neurointensive care, focusing on managing cerebral blood flow (CBF) and oxygenation based on pressure signals, with a reliance on assumed relationships that can be hard to verify.
  • - A new hypothesis-driven method is applied to monitoring data to verify these assumed pressure-flow relationships (PFRs) and reveals a specific behavior pattern where the assumptions may be incorrect, which could affect clinical decision-making.
  • - The findings encourage the use of detailed clinical data to personalize TBI treatment, suggesting that assessing autoregulation through specific indices could improve understanding and care strategies for patients.
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  • Ventilator dyssynchrony (VD) can increase lung injury, and detecting its variability is complex, but machine learning offers potential solutions for automating detection in ventilator waveform data.
  • A systematic framework was developed to quantify features in ventilator signals, which allows for stratifying the severity of dyssynchronous breaths.
  • The study analyzed over 93,000 breaths, achieving a predictive accuracy of over 97% for identifying flow-limited VD breaths, and established a computational approach for understanding the severity and impact of VD in clinical settings.
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Background: The protocols and therapeutic guidance established for treating traumatic brain injuries (TBI) in neurointensive care focus on managing cerebral blood flow (CBF) and brain tissue oxygenation based on pressure signals. The decision support process relies on assumed relationships between cerebral perfusion pressure (CPP) and blood flow, pressure-flow relationships (PFRs), and shares this framework of assumptions with mathematical intracranial hemodynamic models. These foundational assumptions are difficult to verify, and their violation can impact clinical decision-making and model validity.

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  • The Society of Critical Care Medicine Pediatric Sepsis Definition Task Force worked on creating and validating new clinical criteria for identifying pediatric sepsis and septic shock, focusing on organ dysfunction metrics.
  • This research involved a large-scale international study across 10 healthcare systems, collecting data on nearly 3.6 million children over nine years to derive and test the new criteria.
  • The final scoring system, named the Phoenix Sepsis Score, was developed from a 4-organ-system model, demonstrating varying effectiveness in predicting mortality through different performance metrics during validation.
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Importance: Sepsis is a leading cause of death among children worldwide. Current pediatric-specific criteria for sepsis were published in 2005 based on expert opinion. In 2016, the Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Septic Shock (Sepsis-3) defined sepsis as life-threatening organ dysfunction caused by a dysregulated host response to infection, but it excluded children.

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Objectives: Ventilator dyssynchrony may be associated with increased delivered tidal volumes (V t s) and dynamic transpulmonary pressure (ΔP L,dyn ), surrogate markers of lung stress and strain, despite low V t ventilation. However, it is unknown which types of ventilator dyssynchrony are most likely to increase these metrics or if specific ventilation or sedation strategies can mitigate this potential.

Design: A prospective cohort analysis to delineate the association between ten types of breaths and delivered V t , ΔP L,dyn , and transpulmonary mechanical energy.

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Article Synopsis
  • Effective management of mechanically ventilated patients can improve outcomes, but understanding the link between clinical results and ventilator settings is challenging due to complex and varied data sources.* -
  • A new computational pipeline was developed to analyze the evolution of lung-ventilator system (LVS) behaviors, allowing for the creation of simple representations of breathing patterns that can still reveal critical dynamics in patient responses.* -
  • This research analyzed data from 35 patients over multiple days, finding that fewer than 10% of changes in breathing patterns were related to changes in ventilator settings and establishing 16 distinct phenotypic groups based on patients' respiratory behavior.*
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Unlabelled: Invasive mechanical ventilation can worsen lung injury. Ventilator dyssynchrony (VD) may propagate ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI) and is challenging to detect and systematically monitor because each patient takes approximately 25,000 breaths a day yet some types of VD are rare, accounting for less than 1% of all breaths. Therefore, we sought to develop and validate accurate machine learning (ML) algorithms to detect multiple types of VD by leveraging esophageal pressure waveform data to quantify patient effort with airway pressure, flow, and volume data generated during mechanical ventilation, building a computational pipeline to facilitate the study of VD.

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Diabetes is caused by the inability of electrically coupled, functionally heterogeneous β-cells within the pancreatic islet to provide adequate insulin secretion. Functional networks have been used to represent synchronized oscillatory [Ca] dynamics and to study β-cell subpopulations, which play an important role in driving islet function. The mechanism by which highly synchronized β-cell subpopulations drive islet function is unclear.

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Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and acute lung injury have a diverse spectrum of causative factors including sepsis, aspiration of gastric contents, and near drowning. Clinical management of severe lung injury typically includes mechanical ventilation to maintain gas exchange which can lead to ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI). The cause of respiratory failure is acknowledged to affect the degree of lung inflammation, changes in lung structure, and the mechanical function of the injured lung.

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  • Forecasting blood glucose (BG) levels using routinely collected data can enhance glycemic management, but challenges arise due to the complex non-linear nature of BG dynamics and limited data availability.
  • A new approach is proposed, utilizing a linear stochastic differential equation to simplify BG regulation modeling, which allows for better parameter estimation and more accurate forecasts, tailored for individuals with type 2 diabetes or in intensive care settings.
  • The model includes elements representing glucose regulation, nutrition, and insulin effects, providing personalized predictions for BG levels and variations, which could significantly aid in managing blood glucose as part of a control system.
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Objectives: To examine the feasibility of promoting engagement with data-driven self-management of health among individuals from minoritized medically underserved communities by tailoring the design of self-management interventions to individuals' type of motivation and regulation in accordance with the Self-Determination Theory.

Methods: Fifty-three individuals with type 2 diabetes from an impoverished minority community were randomly assigned to four different versions of an mHealth app for data-driven self-management with the focus on nutrition, Platano; each version was tailored to a specific type of motivation and regulation within the SDT self-determination continuum. These versions included financial rewards (external regulation), feedback from expert registered dietitians (RDF, introjected regulation), self-assessment of attainment of one's nutritional goals (SA, identified regulation), and personalized meal-time nutrition decision support with post-meal blood glucose forecasts (FORC, integrated regulation).

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Mechanical ventilation is an essential tool in the management of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), but it exposes patients to the risk of ventilator-induced lung injury (VILI). The human lung-ventilator system (LVS) involves the interaction of complex anatomy with a mechanical apparatus, which limits the ability of process-based models to provide individualized clinical support. This work proposes a hypothesis-driven strategy for LVS modeling in which robust personalization is achieved using a pre-defined parameter basis in a non-physiological model.

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  • Type 2 diabetes in severely obese adolescents leads to faster disease progression and higher health risks compared to adults, necessitating better treatment options like bariatric surgery.
  • However, not all patients achieve significant weight loss or improvement in their diabetes, making it challenging to determine who will benefit from surgery.
  • Researchers developed models using data assimilation and glucose metabolism mechanics to predict which patients will do well post-surgery, successfully distinguishing between different metabolic states with promising accuracy for future glycemic outcomes.
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The insulin secretion rate (ISR) contains information that can provide a personal, quantitative understanding of endocrine function. If the ISR can be reliably inferred from measurements, it could be used for understanding and clinically diagnosing problems with the glucose regulation system. : This study aims to develop a model-based method for inferring a parametrization of the ISR and related physiological information among people with different glycemic conditions in a robust manner.

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  • Self-tracking can enhance chronic condition management by personalizing interventions, but it requires motivation and health literacy.
  • Machine learning, while useful for pattern recognition, faces challenges in providing actionable health suggestions; GlucoGoalie attempts to bridge this gap by translating ML insights into personalized nutrition goals for type 2 diabetes (T2D) patients.
  • In studies, participants found the goal suggestions both understandable and actionable, but issues arose between abstract goals and real-life eating experiences, highlighting the need for more interactive and feedback-oriented systems in self-management interventions.
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Background: It would be useful to be able to assess the utility of predictive models of continuous values before clinical trials are performed.

Objective: The aim of the study is to compare metrics to assess the potential clinical utility of models that produce continuous value forecasts.

Methods: We ran a set of data assimilation forecast algorithms on time series of glucose measurements from neurological intensive care unit patients.

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Motivated by a desire to understand pulmonary physiology, scientists have developed physiological lung models of varying complexity. However, pathophysiology and interactions between human lungs and ventilators, e.g.

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Decision-making related to health is complex. Machine learning (ML) and patient generated data can identify patterns and insights at the individual level, where human cognition falls short, but not all ML-generated information is of equal utility for making health-related decisions. We develop and apply attributable components analysis (ACA), a method inspired by optimal transport theory, to type 2 diabetes self-monitoring data to identify patterns of association between nutrition and blood glucose control.

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Introduction: Self-monitoring technologies produce patient-generated data that could be leveraged to personalize nutritional goal setting to improve population health; however, most computational approaches are limited when applied to individual-level personalization with sparse and irregular self-monitoring data. We applied informatics methods from expert suggestion systems to a challenging clinical problem: generating personalized nutrition goals from patient-generated diet and blood glucose data.

Materials And Methods: We applied qualitative process coding and decision tree modeling to understand how registered dietitians translate patient-generated data into recommendations for dietary self-management of diabetes (i.

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