Improving Patient Selection and Prioritization for Hospital at Home Through Predictive Modeling.

Hospital at home is designed to offer patients hospital level care in the comfort of their own home. The process by which clinicians select eligible patients that are clinically and socially appropriate for this model of care requires labor-intensive manual chart reviews. We addressed this problem by providing a predictive model, web application, and data pipeline that produces an eligibility score based on a set of clinical and social factors that influence patients' success in the program.

High Satisfaction With a Virtual Assistant for Plastic Surgery Frequently Asked Questions.

Background: Most of a surgeon's office time is dedicated to patient education, preventing an appropriate patient-physician relationship. Telephone-accessed artificial intelligent virtual assistants (AIVAs) that simulate a human conversation and answer preoperative frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be effective solutions to this matter. An AIVA capable of answering preoperative plastic surgery-related FAQs has previously been described by the authors.

Methods of Blood Pressure Measurement to Predict Hypertension-Related Cardiovascular Morbidity and Mortality.

Purpose Of Review: As the evidence on different blood pressure phenotypes and their cardiovascular risks evolve, it is imperative to evaluate the reliability of office blood pressure (OBP), ambulatory blood pressure (ABP), and home blood pressure (HBP) measurements and their associations with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality.

Recent Findings: HBP is more reliable in diagnosis of hypertension than OBP or ABP. HBP correlates better with left ventricular mass index (LVMI).

Improving the delivery of palliative care through predictive modeling and healthcare informatics.

Objective: Access to palliative care (PC) is important for many patients with uncontrolled symptom burden from serious or complex illness. However, many patients who could benefit from PC do not receive it early enough or at all. We sought to address this problem by building a predictive model into a comprehensive clinical framework with the aims to (i) identify in-hospital patients likely to benefit from a PC consult, and (ii) intervene on such patients by contacting their care team.

The Original Cushing Society: A Historical Review of the Senior Society's First 6 Meetings.

The Society of Neurological Surgeons (SNS), founded in 1920, is one of the oldest neurosurgical society in the world. The founding members were prominent surgeons that met with the idea of furthering the field of neurosurgery. Initial meetings were forums to observe and discuss new surgeries.

Evaluating Medical Students' Clinical Reasoning in Psychiatry Using Clinical and Basic Science Concepts Presented in Session-level Integration Sessions.

Objective: The objective of this study was to evaluate improvement in clinical reasoning by preclinical medical students following participation in a clinical presentation curriculum that included both course and session-level integration of psychiatric and basic science concepts. A Script Concordance Test (SCT) for psychiatry was developed to assess differences in clinical reasoning in the students.

Methods: Pre- and post-integration session tests were used to evaluate clinical reasoning among second-year medical students (MSII) who attended three integration sessions.

A Simulation-Based Workshop to Improve Residents' Collaborative Clinical Practice.

Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education expects residents to attain competency in systems-based practice by advocating for quality patient care, working in interprofessional teams, and implementing system solutions to prevent errors. Diabetes in pregnancy was identified as an area for improvement through comprehensive interdisciplinary and interprofessional care.

Objective: An interdisciplinary and interprofessional workshop was created by 3 regional academic institutions to improve collaborative practice, clinical knowledge, and clinical judgment of residents.

Deploying Predictive Models In A Healthcare Environment - An Open Source Approach.

Despite dramatic progress in the application of predictive modeling and data mining techniques to problems in modern medicine, a major challenge facing technical practitioners is that of delivering models to clinicians. We have developed an easily implementable framework for publishing predictive models written in R or Python in a way that allows them to be consumed by practically any downstream clinical application, as well as allowing them to be reused in a wide variety of environments without modification. The approach makes models available as web services embedded in containers and uses only open source technology.

Comparison of Whole-Genome Sequencing Methods for Analysis of Three Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Outbreaks.

Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) can provide excellent resolution in global and local epidemiological investigations of outbreaks. A variety of sequencing approaches and analytical tools have been used; it is not clear which is ideal. We compared two WGS strategies and two analytical approaches to the standard method of SmaI restriction digestion pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) for typing Forty-two isolates from three outbreaks and 12 reference isolates were studied.

Energy output and in vitro biologic effects of an ionic toothbrush.

Unlabelled: The Soladey™ toothbrush has a moisture-permeable titanium dioxide (TiO2) resin core in the replacement brush end of a handle activated by light conversion power cells. Purported to have an antibacterial effect and remove more plaque than an ordinary toothbrush, this study was undertaken to establish output measurements of the dry and wet TiO₂ core of the toothbrush during typical illumination of the handle, then quantify lipid peroxidation in three distinct lipid-containing solutions, and bactericidal effects in a live bacterial suspension grown from suctioned oral secretions.

Methods: Within a range of illumination of the power cells in the handle, corresponding flow of electrons emitted from dry and wetted TiO2 cores was measured.

Draft Genome Sequences of Nine Pseudomonas aeruginosa Strains, Including Eight Clinical Isolates.

We report on nine draft genomes of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates, assembled using a hybrid paired-end and Nextera mate-pair library approach. Eight are of clinical origin, and one is the ATCC 27853 strain. We also report their multilocus sequence types.

Randomized controlled trial of a TiO2 Semiconductor toothbrush on mild-to-moderate periodontitis.

Unlabelled: The Soladey toothbrush (Shiken Corp., Osaka, Japan) is based on the principle that electrical induction will cause a wetted titanium dioxide semiconductor to emit electrons. The manufacturer claims that in addition to the established mechanical benefits of brushing, the flow of electrons from the brush head may disrupt ionic bonding of plaque, neutralize bacterial organic acids, and thus confer an advantage over a conventional toothbrush.

VCF-Miner: GUI-based application for mining variants and annotations stored in VCF files.

Next-generation sequencing platforms are widely used to discover variants associated with disease. The processing of sequencing data involves read alignment, variant calling, variant annotation and variant filtering. The standard file format to hold variant calls is the variant call format (VCF) file.

Pertussis outbreak, southeastern Minnesota, 2012.

Objective: To describe clinical and laboratory findings from the 2012 southeastern Minnesota pertussis outbreak.

Patients And Methods: Patients were selected for 2 parts of the study. In the first part, nasopharyngeal swabs from a convenience sample of 265 unique patients were used for both the clinician-requested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test and culture.

The Biological Reference Repository (BioR): a rapid and flexible system for genomics annotation.

Motivation: The Biological Reference Repository (BioR) is a toolkit for annotating variants. BioR stores public and user-specific annotation sources in indexed JSON-encoded flat files (catalogs). The BioR toolkit provides the functionality to combine and retrieve annotation from these catalogs via the command-line interface.

The fast changing landscape of sequencing technologies and their impact on microbial genome assemblies and annotation.

Background: The emergence of next generation sequencing (NGS) has provided the means for rapid and high throughput sequencing and data generation at low cost, while concomitantly creating a new set of challenges. The number of available assembled microbial genomes continues to grow rapidly and their quality reflects the quality of the sequencing technology used, but also of the analysis software employed for assembly and annotation.

Methodology/principal Findings: In this work, we have explored the quality of the microbial draft genomes across various sequencing technologies.

Scenario driven data modelling: a method for integrating diverse sources of data and data streams.

Background: Biology is rapidly becoming a data intensive, data-driven science. It is essential that data is represented and connected in ways that best represent its full conceptual content and allows both automated integration and data driven decision-making. Recent advancements in distributed multi-relational directed graphs, implemented in the form of the Semantic Web make it possible to deal with complicated heterogeneous data in new and interesting ways.

Next generation models for storage and representation of microbial biological annotation.

Background: Traditional genome annotation systems were developed in a very different computing era, one where the World Wide Web was just emerging. Consequently, these systems are built as centralized black boxes focused on generating high quality annotation submissions to GenBank/EMBL supported by expert manual curation. The exponential growth of sequence data drives a growing need for increasingly higher quality and automatically generated annotation.

Simulation in neurosurgery: a review of computer-based simulation environments and their surgical applications.

Background: Computer-based surgical simulators create a no-risk virtual environment where surgeons can develop and refine skills through harmless repetition. These applications may be of particular benefit to neurosurgeons, as the vulnerability of nervous tissue limits the margin for error. The rapid progression of computer-processing capabilities in recent years has led to the development of more sophisticated and realistic neurosurgery simulators.

Discussing side effects of over-the-counter medicines: impact of adding percentage data.

Objectives: Discussing side effects with patients continues to be a difficult area of practice. Questions arise as to how many should be mentioned and which ones. The way such information is presented can affect drug-taking decisions.

The Motif Tool Assessment Platform (MTAP) for sequence-based transcription factor binding site prediction tools.

Predicting transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) from sequence is one of the most challenging problems in computational biology. The development of (semi-)automated computer-assisted prediction methods is needed to find TFBS over an entire genome, which is a first step in reconstructing mechanisms that control gene activity. Bioinformatics journals continue to publish diverse methods for predicting TFBS on a monthly basis.

The centennial of the Neurological Institute of New York and its department of neurological surgery, 1909-2009: a commemorative pictorial essay.

This presentation is a succinct pictorial essay reviewing the history of the Neurological Institute of New York through the succession of its Chairmen of Neurosurgery over the past 100 years.

Prevalence and duration of exercise induced albuminuria in healthy people.

Purpose: Vigorous exercise increases urine protein excretion. However, whether exercise increases urine albumin enough to reach the threshold for microalbuminuria (2.8 and 2.