Deep Learning for Predicting Acute Exacerbation and Mortality of Interstitial Lung Disease.

Rationale: Some patients with interstitial lung disease (ILD) have a high mortality rate or experience acute exacerbation of ILD (AE-ILD) that results in increased mortality. Early identification of these high-risk patients and accurate prediction of the onset of these important events is important to determine treatment strategies. Although various factors that affect disease behavior among patients with ILD hinder the accurate prediction of these events, the use of longitudinal information may enable better prediction.

The importance of microvascular invasion in patients with non-functioning pancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasm.

Background/objectives: The oncological importance of lymphatic, microvascular, and perineural invasions and their association with outcomes in patients with non-functioning pancreatic neuroendocrine neoplasm (NF-PanNEN) remains unclear. We aimed to investigate the role of these factors in the prognosis of patients with NF-PanNEN.

Methods: We retrospectively analyzed 115 patients who underwent curative resection and were pathologically and clinically diagnosed with NF-PanNEN.

SAS macro programme for Bang's Blinding Index to assess and visualise the success of blinding in randomised controlled trials.

This paper aims to present a Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) macro %BBIplus, offering estimation and visualisation methods for the Bang's Blinding Index (BBI) for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with various designs. We developed the SAS macro programme %BBIplus to facilitate the implementation of BBI. This user-friendly programme allows for easy and rapid estimation and visualisation of BBI across different scenarios, including pairwise comparison RCTs with two arms, double-dummy design RCTs with three arms and factorial design RCTs with four arms.

An Exploratory Study on the Efficacy of a New Heat and Moisture Exchanger (Provox® LifeTM) for Laryngectomized Patients.

Objective: After a total laryngectomy, patients lose various physiological functions of the upper airway. To address these issues, an artificial nose (heat and moisture exchanger (HME)) has been developed. However, the current HMEs do not provide sufficient physiological upper airway function.