Pilot randomized controlled trial of restricted versus liberal crystalloid fluid management in pediatric post-operative and trauma patients.

Background: Intravenous (IV) fluid therapy is essential in the treatment of critically ill pediatric surgery and trauma patients. Recent studies have suggested that aggressive fluids may be detrimental to patients. Prospective studies are needed to compare liberal to restricted fluid management in these patients.

Congenital Heart Disease with Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia: Surgical Decision Making and Outcomes.

Objective: To describe the types of congenital heart disease (CHD) in a congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) cohort in a large volume center and evaluate surgical decision making and outcomes based on complexity of CHD and associated conditions.

Study Design: A retrospective review of patients with CHD and CDH diagnosed by echocardiogram between 01/01/2005 and 07/31/2021. The cohort was divided into 2 groups based on survival at discharge.

Limited disease progression in endocrine surgery patients with treatment delays due to COVID-19.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted the delivery of care and timing of elective surgical procedures. Most endocrine-related operations were considered elective and safe to postpone, providing a unique opportunity to assess clinical outcomes under protracted treatment plans.

Methods: American Association of Endocrine Surgeon members were surveyed for participation.

Representation and Normalization of Complex Interventions for Evidence Computing.

Complex interventions are ubiquitous in healthcare. A lack of computational representations and information extraction solutions for complex interventions hinders accurate and efficient evidence synthesis. In this study, we manually annotated and analyzed 3,447 intervention snippets from 261 randomized clinical trial (RCT) abstracts and developed a compositional representation for complex interventions, which captures the spatial, temporal and Boolean relations between intervention components, along with an intervention normalization pipeline that automates three tasks: (i) treatment entity extraction; (ii) intervention component relation extraction; and (iii) attribute extraction and association.

Extending PICO with Observation Normalization for Evidence Computing.

While the PICO framework is widely used by clinicians for clinical question formulation when querying the medical literature, it does not have the expressiveness to explicitly capture medical findings based on any standard. In addition, findings extracted from the literature are represented as free-text, which is not amenable to computation. This research extends the PICO framework with Observation elements, which capture the observed effect that an Intervention has on an Outcome, forming Intervention-Observation-Outcome triplets.

Ethanol ablation for the treatment of benign thyroid nodules.

Background: Ethanol ablation (EA) is a non-surgical option for the treatment of benign cystic thyroid nodules. This study summarizes our preliminary experience with the efficacy and safety of EA.

Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed of patients undergoing EA for symptomatic, benign, cystic and predominantly cystic (≥75%) thyroid nodules.

Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) and its complications in newborns with congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

Background: Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) is offered to patients with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) who are in severe respiratory and cardiac failure. We aim to describe the types of complications among these patients and their impact on survival.

Methods: A single-center, retrospective review of CDH patients cannulated onto ECMO between January 2005 and November 2020 was conducted.

Primary Hyperparathyroidism Is Associated With Shorter QTc Intervals, but Not Arrhythmia.

Context: Primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) is associated with subclinical cardiovascular disease, but data regarding cardiac conduction abnormalities are limited.

Objective And Design: Retrospective cross-sectional comparison of cardiac conduction in patients with PHPT or thyroid disease (TD).

Participants And Setting: Patients ≥40 years old who underwent parathyroidectomy or thyroidectomy at a single tertiary institution from 2013 to 2018.

Long-term outcomes of congenital diaphragmatic hernia: A single institution experience.

Background/purpose: As survival rates for patients with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) increase, long-term sequelae become increasingly prevalent. We present the outcomes of patients who underwent CDH repair at our institution and discuss standardization of follow-up care in our long-term multidisciplinary follow-up clinic.

Methods: A retrospective review of patients followed in multidisciplinary clinic after CDH repair at our institution from January 1, 2005 to December 1, 2020.

Building an OMOP common data model-compliant annotated corpus for COVID-19 clinical trials.

Clinical trials are essential for generating reliable medical evidence, but often suffer from expensive and delayed patient recruitment because the unstructured eligibility criteria description prevents automatic query generation for eligibility screening. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many trials have been created but their information is not computable. We included 700 COVID-19 trials available at the point of study and developed a semi-automatic approach to generate an annotated corpus for COVID-19 clinical trial eligibility criteria called COVIC.

Advancements in the treatment of differentiated thyroid cancer.

Derived from follicular epithelial cells, differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) accounts for the majority of thyroid malignancies. The threefold increase in DTC incidence over the last three decades has been largely attributed to advancements in detection of papillary thyroid microcarcinomas. Efforts to address the issue of overtreatment have notably included the reclassification of encapsulated follicular variant papillary thyroid cancers (EFVPTC) to non-invasive follicular thyroid neoplasm with papillary-like nuclear features (NIFTP).

Towards clinical data-driven eligibility criteria optimization for interventional COVID-19 clinical trials.

Objective: This research aims to evaluate the impact of eligibility criteria on recruitment and observable clinical outcomes of COVID-19 clinical trials using electronic health record (EHR) data.

Materials And Methods: On June 18, 2020, we identified frequently used eligibility criteria from all the interventional COVID-19 trials in ClinicalTrials.gov (n = 288), including age, pregnancy, oxygen saturation, alanine/aspartate aminotransferase, platelets, and estimated glomerular filtration rate.

Mucosal Melanoma: New Insights and Therapeutic Options for a Unique and Aggressive Disease.

Mucosal melanoma is a rare disease that is distinct from melanomas arising at other sites in the body. While melanocytes are most abundant in the skin, they can be found in smaller numbers in the mucous membranes, as well as in the eye. There are epidemiologic, genetic, and other physiologic differences between melanomas arising from melanocytes at these various sites, and these differences have important implications for both disease prognosis and treatment.