Publications by authors named "Marco A F Pimentel"

The widespread administration of COVID-19 vaccines has prompted a need to understand their safety profile. This investigation focuses on the safety of inactivated and mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, particularly concerning potential cardiovascular and haematological adverse events. A retrospective cohort study was conducted for 1.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on improving patient monitoring after discharge from Intensive Care Units (ICUs) by developing an enhanced scoring system that predicts adverse events using ongoing vital signs and an initial risk score from ICU discharge.
  • A modified Delphi process helped identify relevant variables from electronic records, and a logistic regression model estimated the risk of complications, combining static and dynamic scoring to provide continuous updates on patient risk.
  • Validation of the scoring system demonstrated its effectiveness in predicting ICU readmissions or in-hospital deaths within 24 hours, outperforming existing scoring systems like the National Early Warning Score (EWS).
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  • The COVID-19 pandemic challenged the UK's National Health Service, prompting rapid updates to infection control protocols in hospitals, particularly in isolation wards for COVID-19 patients.
  • The study showcases a wearable ambulatory monitoring system (AMS) that incorporates a chest patch and finger-worn pulse oximeter to continuously track vital signs like heart rate, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation, thereby minimizing infection risk for nursing staff.
  • The system utilized a secure web-based platform to relay data in real-time to nurses, allowing for efficient monitoring and integration of patient data, with significant uptake during the peak of COVID-19 cases in the UK.
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Late recognition of patient deterioration in hospital is associated with worse outcomes, including higher mortality. Despite the widespread introduction of early warning score (EWS) systems and electronic health records, deterioration still goes unrecognized. To develop and externally validate a Hospital- wide Alerting via Electronic Noticeboard (HAVEN) system to identify hospitalized patients at risk of reversible deterioration.

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Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), is rapidly spreading across the globe. The clinical spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia requires early detection and monitoring, within a clinical environment for critical cases and remotely for mild cases, with a large spectrum of symptoms. The fear of contamination in clinical environments has led to a dramatic reduction in on-site referrals for routine care.

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Background: The global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has placed a huge strain on UK hospitals. Early studies suggest that patients can deteriorate quickly after admission to hospital. The aim of this study was to model changes in vital signs for patients hospitalised with COVID-19.

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Objectives: National guidelines for identifying physiological deterioration and sepsis in hospitals depend on thresholds for blood pressure that do not account for age or sex. In populations outside hospital, differences in blood pressure are known to occur with both variables. Whether these differences remain in the hospitalised population is unknown.

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Introduction: Automated continuous ambulatory monitoring may provide an alternative to intermittent manual vital signs monitoring. This has the potential to improve frequency of measurements, timely escalation of care and patient safety. However, a major barrier to the implementation of these wearable devices in the ward environment is their uncertain reliability, efficiency and data fidelity.

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Objectives: To calculate fractional inspired oxygen concentration (FiO) thresholds in ward patients and add these to the National Early Warning Score (NEWS). To evaluate the performance of NEWS-FiO against NEWS when predicting in-hospital death and unplanned intensive care unit (ICU) admission.

Methods: A multi-centre, retrospective, observational cohort study was carried out in five hospitals from two UK NHS Trusts.

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Aims: To compare the ability of the National Early Warning Score (NEWS) and the National Early Warning Score 2 (NEWS2) to identify patients at risk of in-hospital mortality and other adverse outcomes.

Methods: We undertook a multi-centre retrospective observational study at five acute hospitals from two UK NHS Trusts. Data were obtained from completed adult admissions who were not fit enough to be discharged alive on the day of admission.

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Aim: The National Early Warning System (NEWS) is based on vital signs; the Laboratory Decision Tree Early Warning Score (LDT-EWS) on laboratory test results. We aimed to develop and validate a new EWS (the LDTEWS:NEWS risk index) by combining the two and evaluating the discrimination of the primary outcome of unanticipated intensive care unit (ICU) admission or in-hospital mortality, within 24 h.

Methods: We studied emergency medical admissions, aged 16 years or over, admitted to Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) and Portsmouth Hospitals (PH).

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Background: Data smoothing of vital signs has been reported in the anesthesia literature, suggesting that clinical staff are biased toward measurements of normal physiology. However, these findings may be partially explained by clinicians interpolating spurious values from noisy signals and by the undersampling of physiological changes by infrequent manual observations. We explored the phenomenon of data smoothing using a method robust to these effects in a large postoperative dataset including respiratory rate, heart rate, and oxygen saturation (SpO2).

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The role of sensing technologies, such as wearables, in delivering precision care is becoming widely acceptable. Given the very large quantities of sensor data that rapidly accumulate, there is a need to employ automated algorithms to label biosignal sensor data. In many real-life clinical applications, no such expert labels are available, and algorithms for processing sensor data must be relied upon, without access to the "ground truth.

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Breathing rate (BR) is a key physiological parameter used in a range of clinical settings. Despite its diagnostic and prognostic value, it is still widely measured by counting breaths manually. A plethora of algorithms have been proposed to estimate BR from the electrocardiogram (ECG) and pulse oximetry (photoplethysmogram, PPG) signals.

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Objective: Respiratory rate (RR) estimation algorithms based on the photoplethymogram (PPG) and electrocardiogram (ECG) lack clinical robustness. This is because the PPG and ECG respiratory modulations are dependent on patient physiology, regardless of general signal quality. The present work describes an RR estimation algorithm using respiratory quality indices (RQIs) that assess the presence or absence of the PPG- and ECG-derived respiratory modulations.

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Aims Of Study: To develop and validate a centile-based early warning score using manually-recorded data (mCEWS). To compare mCEWS performance with a centile-based early warning score derived from continuously-acquired data (from bedside monitors, cCEWS), and with other published early warning scores.

Materials And Methods: We used an unsupervised approach to investigate the statistical properties of vital signs in an in-hospital patient population and construct an early-warning score from a "development" dataset.

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Article Synopsis
  • The step-down unit (SDU) is where patients go after the ICU but about 14% may worsen and need to go back to the ICU, facing higher risk and longer recovery times.
  • Gaussian process regression (GPR) models aim to improve patient monitoring by accurately forecasting heart rate data and detecting issues early in the SDU.
  • Testing on a dataset from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center shows that GPR methods give better warnings of patient deterioration than traditional monitoring techniques, enhancing overall patient safety.
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Respiratory rate (RR) is one of the most informative indicators of a patient's health status. However, automated, non-invasive measurements of RR are insufficiently robust for use in clinical practice. A number of methods have been described in the literature to estimate RR from both photo-plethysmography (PPG) and electrocardiography (ECG) based on three physiological modulations of respiration: amplitude modulation (AM), frequency modulation (FM), and baseline wander (BW).

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Goal: Current methods for estimating respiratory rate (RR) from the photoplethysmogram (PPG) typically fail to distinguish between periods of high- and low-quality input data, and fail to perform well on independent "validation" datasets. The lack of robustness of existing methods directly results in a lack of penetration of such systems into clinical practice. The present work proposes an alternative method to improve the robustness of the estimation of RR from the PPG.

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Previous work has been demonstrated that tracking features describing the dynamic and time-varying patterns in brain monitoring signals provide additional predictive information beyond that derived from static features based on snapshot measurements. To achieve more accurate predictions of outcomes of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), we proposed a statistical framework to extract dynamic features from brain monitoring signals based on the framework of Gaussian processes (GPs). GPs provide an explicit probabilistic, nonparametric Bayesian approach to metric regression problems.

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Respiratory rate (RR) is a key vital sign that is monitored to assess the health of patients. With the increase of the availability of wearable devices, it is important that RR is extracted in a robust and noninvasive manner from the photoplethysmogram (PPG) acquired from pulse oximeters and similar devices. However, existing methods of noninvasive RR estimation suffer from a lack of robustness, resulting in the fact that they are not used in clinical practice.

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Accurate heart beat detection in signals acquired from intensive care unit (ICU) patients is necessary for establishing both normality and detecting abnormal events. Detection is normally performed by analysing the electrocardiogram (ECG) signal, and alarms are triggered when parameters derived from this signal exceed preset or variable thresholds. However, due to noisy and missing data, these alarms are frequently deemed to be false positives, and therefore ignored by clinical staff.

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