Publications by authors named "J C Heemelaar"

Background: Cancer and cancer treatment may accelerate the development of cardiovascular disease. With the improved prognosis of cancer survivors, cardiovascular events are increasing in this patient group. However, it is unknown whether the prevalence of coronary atherosclerosis is increased in patients with a history of cancer.

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Purpose: Medical reports, governed by HIPAA regulations, contain personal health information (PHI), restricting secondary data use. Utilizing natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLM), we sought to employ publicly available methods to automatically anonymize PHI in free-text radiology reports.

Materials And Methods: We compared two publicly available rule-based NLP models (spaCy; NLP, accuracy-optimized; NLP, speed-optimized; iteratively improved on 400 free-text CT-reports (test set)) and one offline LLM approach (LLM-model, LLaMa-2, Meta-AI) for PHI-anonymization.

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Background And Aims: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) revolutionized cancer treatment. However, ICIs may increase the immune response to non-tumor cells, possibly resulting in increased arterial inflammation, raising the risk of atherosclerotic events. Nevertheless, malignancies may induce a pro-inflammatory state and the association between ICIs and arterial inflammation remains to be clarified.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study explores how aging affects the structure and function of coronary microvessels in patients with stable angina, without significant blockage in their main coronary arteries.
  • - Researchers analyzed data from 165 vessels, finding that older patients (ages 67-77) exhibited lower hyperemic flow velocity, diminished diastolic microvascular conductance (DMVC), and reduced backward expansion wave (BEW) intensity compared to younger groups.
  • - Results indicate that aging leads to structural changes in coronary microcirculation, increasing the prevalence of coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD) among older individuals, which is crucial for understanding heart issues in elderly patients.
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Article Synopsis
  • Current methods for identifying immune-related adverse events (irAEs) in patients undergoing immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy are not very effective, but large language models (LLMs) show promise in improving this process.
  • In a study, LLMs were compared to manual reviews and ICD codes for detecting common irAEs in hospitalized patients, demonstrating significantly higher sensitivity especially for conditions like hepatitis and myocarditis.
  • The LLM was faster in analysis—averaging 9.53 seconds per chart compared to 15 minutes for manual adjudication—indicating that LLMs could be a valuable tool in clinical settings for accurately identifying irAEs.
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