Publications by authors named "Jeremy A Balch"

Article Synopsis
  • The algorithmic patient preference predictor (PPP) aims to help make decisions for incapacitated patients when there are no advanced directives, highlighting both ethical challenges and practical issues in personalizing predictions.
  • A review of studies found 68 using machine learning to predict patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), with orthopedic and spinal surgeries being the most common focus; however, overall predictive performance was generally poor to moderate.
  • Pre-event PROMs emerged as key predictors of post-event outcomes, indicating the need to integrate patient preferences into developing personalized PPP models, which currently lack adequate fairness assessments.
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Importance: Machine learning tools are increasingly deployed for risk prediction and clinical decision support in surgery. Class imbalance adversely impacts predictive performance, especially for low-incidence complications.

Objective: To evaluate risk-prediction model performance when trained on risk-specific cohorts.

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The degree to which artificial intelligence healthcare research is informed by data and stakeholders from community settings has not been previously described. As communities are the principal location of healthcare delivery, engaging them could represent an important opportunity to improve scientific quality. This scoping review systematically maps what is known and unknown about community-engaged artificial intelligence research and identifies opportunities to optimize the generalizability of these applications through involvement of community stakeholders and data throughout model development, validation, and implementation.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in incorporating patient values during critical medical decision-making for patients who can't make decisions due to incapacitation.
  • Researchers simulated scenarios for 50 patients needing urgent medical decisions and assessed how well LLMs could extract treatment options and provide recommendations based on the patients' values.
  • Results showed that LLMs accurately extracted treatment information 88% of the time and received good scores for their recommendations in terms of medical plausibility and alignment with patient values, especially when values were expressed in free-text narratives.
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Objective: To determine whether certain patients are vulnerable to errant triage decisions immediately after major surgery and whether there are unique sociodemographic phenotypes within overtriaged and undertriaged cohorts.

Background: In a fair system, overtriage of low-acuity patients to intensive care units (ICUs) and undertriage of high-acuity patients to general wards would affect all sociodemographic subgroups equally.

Methods: This multicenter, longitudinal cohort study of hospital admissions immediately after major surgery compared hospital mortality and value of care (risk-adjusted mortality/total costs) across 4 cohorts: overtriage (N = 660), risk-matched overtriage controls admitted to general wards (N = 3077), undertriage (N = 2335), and risk-matched undertriage controls admitted to ICUs (N = 4774).

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Background: Previous research has highlighted concerns among trainees and attendings that general surgery training and fellowship are inadequately preparing trainees for practice. Providing trainees with supervision that matches their proficiency may help bridge this gap. We sought to benchmark operative performance and supervision levels among senior surgery residents (post-graduate year 4 or 5) and fellows performing general surgical oncology procedures.

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Postsepsis early mortality is being replaced by survivors who experience either a rapid recovery and favorable hospital discharge or the development of chronic critical illness with suboptimal outcomes. The underlying immunological response that determines these clinical trajectories remains poorly defined at the transcriptomic level. As classical and nonclassical monocytes are key leukocytes in both the innate and adaptive immune systems, we sought to delineate the transcriptomic response of these cell types.

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Objective: Patients and clinicians rarely experience healthcare decisions as snapshots in time, but clinical decision support (CDS) systems often represent decisions as snapshots. This scoping review systematically maps challenges and facilitators to longitudinal CDS that are applied at two or more timepoints for the same decision made by the same patient or clinician.

Methods: We searched Embase, PubMed, and Medline databases for articles describing development, validation, or implementation of patient- or clinician-facing longitudinal CDS.

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Background: Variability in operating room supply cost is a modifiable cause of suboptimal resource use and low value of care (outcomes vs cost). This study describes implementation of a quality improvement intervention to decrease operating room supply costs.

Study Design: An automated electronic health record data pipeline harmonized operating room supply cost data with patient and case characteristics and outcomes.

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Introduction: Severe trauma disrupts bone marrow function and is associated with persistent anemia and altered hematopoiesis. Previously, plasma-derived exosomes isolated after trauma have been shown to suppress in vitro bone marrow function. However, the cargo contained in these vesicles has not been examined.

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Background: Machine learning-enabled clinical information systems (ML-CISs) have the potential to drive health care delivery and research. The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) data standard has been increasingly applied in developing these systems. However, methods for applying FHIR to ML-CISs are variable.

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Background: Sepsis is a heterogenous syndrome with limited therapeutic options. Identifying immunological endotypes through gene expression patterns in septic patients may lead to targeted interventions. We investigated whether patients admitted to a surgical intensive care unit (ICU) with sepsis and with high risk of mortality express similar endotypes to non-septic, but still critically ill patients using two multiplex transcriptomic metrics obtained both on admission to a surgical ICU and at set intervals.

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Background: Operating rooms contribute up to 70% of total hospital waste. Although multiple studies have demonstrated reduced waste through targeted interventions, few examine processes. This scoping review highlights methods of study design, outcome assessment, and sustainability practices of operating room waste reduction strategies employed by surgeons.

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Sepsis is a heterogenous syndrome with limited therapeutic options. Identifying characteristic gene expression patterns, or endotypes, in septic patients may lead to targeted interventions. We investigated whether patients admitted to a surgical ICU with sepsis and with high risk of mortality express similar endotypes to non-septic, but still critically ill patients using two multiplex transcriptomic metrics obtained both on admission to a surgical intensive care unit (ICU) and at set intervals.

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Clinical prediction models based on artificial intelligence algorithms can potentially improve patient care, reduce errors, and add value to the health care system. However, their adoption is hindered by legitimate economic, practical, professional, and intellectual concerns. This article explores these barriers and highlights well-studied instruments that can be used to overcome them.

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Background: Intraoperative cholangiography may allow for earlier identification of common bile duct injury and choledocholithiasis. The role of intraoperative cholangiography in decreasing resource use related to biliary pathology remains unclear. This study tests the null hypothesis that there is no difference in resource use for patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy with versus without intraoperative cholangiography.

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Background: Outcomes following aortic occlusion for trauma and hemorrhagic shock are poor, leading some to question the clinical utility of aortic occlusion in this setting. This study evaluates neurologically intact survival following resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta (REBOA) versus resuscitative thoracotomy at a center with a dedicated trauma hybrid operating room with angiographic capabilities.

Methods: This retrospective cohort analysis compared patients who underwent zone 1 aortic occlusion via resuscitative thoracotomy (n = 13) versus REBOA (n = 13) for blunt or non-thoracic, penetrating trauma and refractory hemorrhagic shock (systolic blood pressure less than 90 mmHg despite volume resuscitation) at a level 1 trauma center with a dedicated trauma hybrid operating room.

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Objective: To summarize state-of-the-art artificial intelligence-enabled decision support in surgery and to quantify deficiencies in scientific rigor and reporting.

Background: To positively affect surgical care, decision-support models must exceed current reporting guideline requirements by performing external and real-time validation, enrolling adequate sample sizes, reporting model precision, assessing performance across vulnerable populations, and achieving clinical implementation; the degree to which published models meet these criteria is unknown.

Methods: Embase, PubMed, and MEDLINE databases were searched from their inception to September 21, 2022 for articles describing artificial intelligence-enabled decision support in surgery that uses preoperative or intraoperative data elements to predict complications within 90 days of surgery.

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Background: Common bile duct exploration (CBDE) is safe and effective for managing choledocholithiasis, but most US general surgeons have limited experience with CBDE and are uncomfortable performing this procedure in practice. Surgical trainee exposure to CBDE is limited, and their learning curve for achieving autonomous, practice-ready performance has not been previously described. This study tests the hypothesis that receipt of one or more prior CBDE operative performance assessments, combined with formative feedback, is associated with greater resident operative performance and autonomy.

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Background: In traumatic hemorrhage, hybrid operating rooms offer near simultaneous performance of endovascular and open techniques, with correlations to earlier hemorrhage control, fewer transfusions, and possible decreased mortality. However, hybrid operating rooms are resource intensive. This study quantifies and describes a single-center experience with the complications, cost-utility, and value of a dedicated trauma hybrid operating room.

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Outcomes following aortic occlusion for trauma and hemorrhagic shock are poor, leading some to question the clinical utility of aortic occlusion in this setting. This study evaluates neurologically intact survival following resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta (REBOA) vs. resuscitative thoracotomy at a center with a dedicated trauma hybrid operating room with angiographic capabilities.

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. In 2019, the University of Florida College of Medicine launched thealgorithm to predict eight major post-operative complications using automatically extracted data from the electronic health record..

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