Psychological impact of the COVID-19 outbreak in community pharmacists: A longitudinal study.

Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has negatively affected the mental health of frontline health care workers, including pharmacists.

Objectives: The aim of this longitudinal study was to assess the psychological impact of the COVID-19 outbreak in French owner community pharmacists.

Methods: We conducted a postal-based survey to assess the psychological difficulties of the COVID-19 outbreak in French owner community pharmacists based on 3 psychologically validated self-report questionnaires: Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), Impact of Event Scale-revised (IES-R), and Maslach Burnout Inventory.

The SmartOR: a distributed sensor network to improve operating room efficiency.

Background: Despite the significant expense of OR time, best practice achieves only 70% efficiency. Compounding this problem is a lack of real-time data. Most current OR utilization programs require manual data entry.

Esophageal stent migration: Testing few hypothesis with a simplified mathematical model.

Esophageal stent placement has significantly improved the quality of life in patients with malignant as well as benign esophageal obstructing lesions. Despite its early success and rapid adoption, stent migration still occurs in as many as 30% of cases especially with fully covered stents. To date, few models of interaction between the stent and the esophageal wall have been published and these have only focused on the deployment of the stent or the static mechanical stress distribution of the stent material.

A robust and non-obtrusive automatic event tracking system for operating room management to improve patient care.

Background: Optimization of OR management is a complex problem as each OR has different procedures throughout the day inevitably resulting in scheduling delays, variations in time durations and overall suboptimal performance. There exists a need for a system that automatically tracks procedural progress in real time in the OR. This would allow for efficient monitoring of operating room states and target sources of inefficiency and points of improvement.

Interrogating a multifactorial model of breast conserving therapy with clinical data.

Most women with early stage breast cancer do not require removal of the entire breast to treat their cancer; instead, up to 70% of women can be effectively and safely treated by breast conserving therapy (BCT) with surgical removal of the tumor only (lumpectomy) followed by radiation treatment of the remaining breast tissue. Unfortunately, the final contour and cosmesis of the treated breast is suboptimal in approximately 30% of patients. The ability to accurately predict breast contour after BCT for breast cancer could significantly improve patient decision-making regarding the choice of surgery for breast cancer.

Is obesity an independent prognosis factor in woman breast cancer?

Background: Breast cancer and obesity represent important public health issues in most western countries. A number of studies found a negative prognosis effect of obesity or excess of weight in woman breast cancer. However, to date, this issue remains controversial.