Objectives: Participation in the Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) provides important resources to surgeons, but the ability to do so is often limited by time and data entry personnel. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT (OpenAI) are examples of generative artificial intelligence (AI) products that may help bridge this gap. Trained on large volumes of data, the models are used for natural language processing (NLP) and text generation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To advance surgical education priorities by using electronic health record (EHR) reporting and data visualization on an Acute Care Surgery (ACS).
Design: Operational data from the EHR for the ACS service was displayed on an ACS dashboard using Tableau software. This data included new ACS consults (reason for consult, consult note author - attending surgeon and resident) and operations generated by those consults (type of operation, primary attending surgeon, and assisting resident).
Importance: Many health systems use electronic consent (eConsent) for surgery, but few have used surgical consent functionality in the patient portal (PP). Incorporating the PP into the consent process could potentially improve efficiency by letting patients independently review and sign their eConsent before the day of surgery.
Objective: To evaluate the association of eConsent delivery via the PP with operational efficiency and patient engagement.
Purpose: Persistent gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms are frequently experienced by colon cancer survivors and may help identify patients with higher utilization of healthcare services. To assess the relationship between GI symptoms and specialty care utilization among colon cancer survivors.
Methods: A prospective longitudinal cohort study at an academic medical center of 126 adults surgically treated for stage I-IV colon cancer between February 2017 and June 2022.
Background: Although access to a professional medical interpreter is federally mandated, surgeons report underutilization during informed consent. Improvement requires understanding the extent of the lapses. Adoption of electronic consent (eConsent) has been associated with improvements in documentation and identification of practice improvement opportunities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Informed consent is a critical component of patient care before invasive procedures, yet it is frequently inadequate. Electronic consent forms have the potential to facilitate patient comprehension if they provide information that is readable, accurate, and complete; it is not known if large language model (LLM)-based chatbots may improve informed consent documentation by generating accurate and complete information that is easily understood by patients.
Objective: To compare the readability, accuracy, and completeness of LLM-based chatbot- vs surgeon-generated information on the risks, benefits, and alternatives (RBAs) of common surgical procedures.
Objective: Daily progress notes are the backbone of all inpatient hospitalizations. Progress notes serve as a lasting record of a patient's diagnoses, condition, and planned interventions and are essential communication tools. We designed a study to identify patterns in progress note filing and use on general surgical services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRobotic proctectomy has become increasingly popular for both benign and malignant indications. The purpose of this study was to determine if the robotic approach has a distinct advantage over laparoscopy in obese patients, which has been suggested by previous subgroup analyses. We performed a retrospective review of 2016-2018 National Surgery Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) data to compare outcomes between patients who underwent robotic versus laparoscopic proctectomy, stratified by Body Mass Index (BMI) subgroups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuronal connectivity is dependent on size and shape of the dendritic arbor. However, mechanisms controlling dendritic arborization, especially in the peripheral nervous system, are not completely understood. Previous studies have shown that bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) are important initiators of dendritic growth in peripheral neurons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Previous studies have reported increased perioperative mortality of nonruptured symptomatic abdominal aortic aneurysms (Sx-AAA) compared with asymptomatic elective AAA (E-AAA) repairs, but no long-term-outcomes have been reported. We sought to compare long-term outcomes of Sx-AAA and E-AAA after repair at a single academic institution.
Methods: Patients receiving AAA repair for Sx-AAA and E-AAA from 1995 through 2015 were included.
Unlabelled: Introduction Great demands have been placed on disaster medicine educators. There is a need to develop innovative methods to educate Emergency Physicians in the ever-expanding body of disaster medicine knowledge. The authors sought to demonstrate that video-based learning (VBL) could be a promising alternative to traditional learning methods for teaching disaster medicine core competencies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: We compared the management of patients with symptomatic, unruptured abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAAs) treated at a tertiary care center between two decades. This 20-year period encapsulated a shift in surgical approach to aortic aneurysms from primarily open to primarily endovascular, and we sought to determine the effect of this shift in the evaluation, treatment, and clinical outcomes of patients with symptomatic AAA.
Methods: We reviewed 1429 consecutive patients with unruptured AAAs treated at a tertiary care hospital by six staff surgeons between 1995 and 2004 (era 1) and between 2005 and 2014 (era 2).
Among untreated HIV-infected pregnant women, the frequency of mother-to-child transmission of HIV is low (5-10%), with most infections occurring at or after birth. Given findings that fetal and adult monocytes are distinct from one another in terms of basal transcriptional profiles, and in phosphorylation of signal transducer and activators of transcription in response to cytokines, we hypothesized that fetal CD14+CD16- monocyte and monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) might, compared to their adult counterparts, express higher levels of transcripts for restriction factors and antiviral factors at baseline and/or after stimulation with cytokines that might be induced upon transmission of HIV in utero, for example, IFNα, IFNγ, and IL-6. We carried out these experiments and noted that a few genes, including APOBEC3B, APOBEC3C, and IFITM2, were expressed to a greater degree in fetal monocytes compared to adults.
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