Multi-organ dysfunction due to bath salts: are we aware of this entity?

Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is a synthetic, cathinone-derivative, central nervous system stimulant taken to produce a cocaine- or methamphetamine-like high. Physical manifestations include tachycardia, hypertension, arrhythmias, hyperthermia, sweating, rhabdomyolysis, hyperkalaemia, disseminated intravascular coagulation, oliguria and seizures. We report a patient who presented with severe metabolic acidosis, multi-organ dysfunction, rhabdomyolysis, hyperkalaemia and seizures.

Breast cancer tumor size assessment with mammography, ultrasonography, and magnetic resonance imaging at a community based multidisciplinary breast center.

Paramount to staging and patient management is accurately measuring the size of invasive breast cancers. We assessed the accuracy of mammography (MG), ultrasonography (US), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at our community-based hospital in which multiple radiologists and imaging machines are used in the care of our patients. We performed a retrospective analysis of a prospectively maintained database of 277 patients seen at our breast center from 2009 to 2010.

Antecedents to cardiac arrests in a hospital equipped with a medical emergency team.

Background: Studies conducted before the conception of medical emergency teams (METs) revealed that cardiac arrests were often preceded by deranged vital signs. METs have been implemented in hospitals to review ward patients whose conditions are deteriorating in order to prevent adverse events, including cardiac arrest. Antecedents to cardiac arrests in a MET-equipped hospital have not been assessed.

Representing multi-database study schemas for reusability.

The need for easy, non-technical interfaces to clinical databases for research preceded translational research activities but is made more important because of them. The utility of such interfaces can be improved by the presence of a persistent, reusable and modifiable structure that holds the decisions made in extraction of data from one or more datasources for a study, including the filtering of records, selection of the fields within those records, renaming of fields, and classification of data. This paper demonstrates use of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a data representation of these decisions which define a study schema.

Nature of packs used in propellant modeling.

In recent years we have constructed closely packed spheres using the Lubachevsky-Stillinger algorithm to generate morphological models of heterogeneous solid propellants. Improvements to the algorithm now allow us to create large polydisperse packs on a laptop computer, and to create monodisperse packs with packing fractions greater than 70% which display significant crystal order. The use of these models in the physical context motivates efforts to examine in some detail the nature of the packs, including certain statistical properties.