Implications of preoperative arterial stiffness for patients treated with endovascular repair of abdominal aortic aneurysms.

Arterial stiffening is associated with adverse cardiovascular patient outcomes; stiffness may also be associated with postsurgical events and has been suggested to be a fundamental mechanism in the pathogenesis of aortic aneurysms. Although open repair of aneurysms decreases aortic stiffness, implantation of a rigid endograft is associated with increased aortic stiffness after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR). This review provides an overview of aortic wall physiology and the contemporary understanding of aortic stiffness and its implications for patients undergoing abdominal aortic aneurysm repair.

Boosting efficiency in a clinical literature surveillance system with LightGBM.

Given the suboptimal performance of Boolean searching to identify methodologically sound and clinically relevant studies in large bibliographic databases, exploring machine learning (ML) to efficiently classify studies is warranted. To boost the efficiency of a literature surveillance program, we used a large internationally recognized dataset of articles tagged for methodological rigor and applied an automated ML approach to train and test binary classification models to predict the probability of clinical research articles being of high methodologic quality. We trained over 12,000 models on a dataset of titles and abstracts of 97,805 articles indexed in PubMed from 2012-2018 which were manually appraised for rigor by highly trained research associates and rated for clinical relevancy by practicing clinicians.

Numerical analysis of blood flow in a branched modular stent-graft for aneurysms covering all zones of the aortic arch.

Due to the anatomical complexity of the aortic arch for the development of stent-grafts for total repair, this region remains without a validated and routinely used endovascular option. In this work, a modular stent-graft for aneurysms that covers all aortic arch zones, proposed by us and previously structurally evaluated, was evaluated from the point of view of haemodynamics using fluid-structural numerical simulations. Blood was assumed to be non-Newtonian shear-thinning using the Carreau model, and the arterial wall was assumed to be anisotropic hyperelastic using the Holzapfel model.

The McMaster Health Information Research Unit: Over a Quarter-Century of Health Informatics Supporting Evidence-Based Medicine.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) emerged from McMaster University in the 1980-1990s, which emphasizes the integration of the best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values. The Health Information Research Unit (HiRU) was created at McMaster University in 1985 to support EBM. Early on, digital health informatics took the form of teaching clinicians how to search MEDLINE with modems and phone lines.