Emergency department utilization patterns for pediatric urinary stone patients in the United States.

Background: The prevalence of pediatric urolithiasis has increased rapidly, leading to more emergency department (ED) visits across the United States.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to determine emergency care practices for children and adolescents with urinary stones and characteristics associated with management.

Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study of the 2021 Nationwide Emergency Department Sample to identify pediatric patients (≤21 years) presenting to an ED in the United States with a primary diagnosis of urinary stone disease.

Chronic conditions among transgender Medicare beneficiaries: Variation by race, ethnicity, and Medicaid dual-enrollment.

Background: Transgender and gender diverse (TGD) adults experience disability at twice the rate of cisgender (non-TGD) adults in the US. TGD people of color and low-income TGD people experience intersecting discrimination that may compound chronic conditions and disability. To our knowledge, no research has focused on chronic conditions among TGD Medicare beneficiaries with disabilities.

Interfacility Transfer of Children With Time-Sensitive Surgical Conditions, 2002-2017.

Importance: Surgical care for children in the United States has become increasingly regionalized among fewer centers over time. The degree to which regionalization may be associated with access to urgent surgical care for time-sensitive conditions is not clear.

Objective: To investigate whether transfers and travel distance have increased for 4 surgical conditions, and whether changes in transfers and travel distance have been more pronounced for rural vs urban children.

Doing Justice: Ethical Considerations Identifying and Researching Transgender and Gender Diverse People in Insurance Claims Data.

Data on the health of transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people are scarce. Researchers are increasingly turning to insurance claims data to investigate disease burden among TGD people. Since claims do not include gender self-identification or modality (i.

A Patient-Prioritized Research Agenda for Clinical Trials in Kidney Stone Disease.

Purpose: To ensure that research on kidney stones provides meaningful impact for the kidney stone community, patients and caregivers should be engaged as stakeholders in clinical trial design, starting at study inception. This project aimed to elicit, refine, and prioritize research ideas from kidney stone stakeholders to develop a patient-centered research agenda for clinical trials.

Materials And Methods: The Kidney Stone Engagement Core, a group of patients, caregivers, advocates, clinicians, and researchers, executed an iterative process of surveys and focus groups to elicit and refine research themes, which were then translated into research questions.

The development of surgical ability during pediatric urology fellowship and its evolution in the early years of practice.

Background: North American Pediatric Urology fellowship programs underwent a structural change in 2021 that allows more flexibility in training. Given this opportunity as well as widespread concern about the development of contemporary surgical trainees, it is prudent to understand in detail the current state of preparedness of pediatric urology fellowship graduates for independent practice.

Objective: The study aimed to determine recent pediatric urology graduates' reported levels of comfort both at graduation and following the start of clinical practice in performing select index procedures.

Genetically and Functionally Distinct Immunoglobulin Heavy Chain Locus Duplication in Bats.

The genetic locus encoding immunoglobulin heavy chains (IgH) is critical for vertebrate humoral immune responses and diverse antibody repertoires. Immunoglobulin and T cell receptor loci of most bat species have not been annotated, despite the recurrent role of bats as viral reservoirs and sources of zoonotic pathogens. We investigated the genetic structure and function of IgH loci across the largest bat family, Vespertilionidae, focusing on big brown bats ).

Brain metabolism after therapeutic hypothermia for murine hypoxia-ischemia using hyperpolarized [1-C] pyruvate magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) is a common neurological syndrome in newborns with high mortality and morbidity. Therapeutic hypothermia (TH), which is standard of care for HIE, mitigates brain injury by suppressing anaerobic metabolism. However, more than 40% of HIE neonates have a poor outcome, even after TH.

Improving the Generalizability of Deep Learning for T2-Lesion Segmentation of Gliomas in the Post-Treatment Setting.

Although fully automated volumetric approaches for monitoring brain tumor response have many advantages, most available deep learning models are optimized for highly curated, multi-contrast MRI from newly diagnosed gliomas, which are not representative of post-treatment cases in the clinic. Improving segmentation for treated patients is critical to accurately tracking changes in response to therapy. We investigated mixing data from newly diagnosed ( = 208) and treated ( = 221) gliomas in training, applying transfer learning (TL) from pre- to post-treatment imaging domains, and incorporating spatial regularization for T2-lesion segmentation using only T2 FLAIR images as input to improve generalization post-treatment.

Surgeon, and Institution Characteristics Associated Surgical Preferences in the Pediatric KIDney Stone Care Improvement Network.

Objective: To reveal barriers and opportunities to implement evidence for the management of pediatric kidney stone disease, we determined surgeon and institutional factors associated with preferences for the type of surgical intervention for kidney and ureteral stones.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study of urologists participating in the Pediatric KIDney Stone Care Improvement Network (PKIDS) trial. Questionnaires ascertained strengths of urologists' preferences for types of surgery as well as characteristics of participating urologists and institutions.

The tricot approach: an agile framework for decentralized on-farm testing supported by citizen science. A retrospective.

Matching crop varieties to their target use context and user preferences is a challenge faced by many plant breeding programs serving smallholder agriculture. Numerous participatory approaches proposed by CGIAR and other research teams over the last four decades have attempted to capture farmers' priorities/preferences and crop variety field performance in representative growing environments through experimental trials with higher external validity. Yet none have overcome the challenges of scalability, data validity and reliability, and difficulties in capturing socio-economic and environmental heterogeneity.

Rabies experts on demand: A cross-sectional study describing the use of a rabies telehealth service.

Background: Rabies expert on demand (REOD) telehealth service is provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to assist public health practitioners, health providers, and the public to interpret national and international rabies prevention guidelines.

Contraceptive Use Among Traditional Medicare And Medicare Advantage Enrollees.

Medicare is the primary source of health insurance coverage for reproductive-age people with Social Security Disability Insurance. However, Medicare does not require contraceptive coverage for pregnancy prevention, and little is known about contraceptive use in traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage. We analyzed Medicare and Optum data to assess variations in contraceptive use and methods used by traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage enrollees, as well as among enrollees with and without noncontraceptive clinical indications.

Estimating the completeness of physician billing claims for diabetes case ascertainment: a multiprovince investigation.

Introduction: Previous research has suggested that how physicians are paid may affect the completeness of billing claims for estimating chronic disease. The purpose of this study is to estimate the completeness of physician billings for diabetes case ascertainment.

Methods: We used administrative data from eight Canadian provinces covering the period 1 April 2014 to 31 March 2016.

Estimate of fetal brain temperature using proton resonance frequency thermometry during 3 Tesla fetal magnetic resonance imaging.

Background: T2-weighted Single Shot Fast Spin Echo (SSFSE) scans at 3 Tesla (3T) are increasingly used to image fetal pathology due to their excellent tissue contrast resolution and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Temperature changes that may occur in response to radio frequency (RF) pulses used for these sequences at 3T have not been studied in human fetal brains. To evaluate the safety of T2-weighted SSFSE for fetal brains at 3T, magnetic resonance (MR) thermometry was used to measure relative temperature changes in a typical clinical fetal brain MR exam.