Benchmarks for retrospective automated driving system crash rate analysis using police-reported crash data.

Objectives: With fully automated driving systems (ADS; SAE level 4) ride-hailing services expanding in the U.S., we are now approaching an inflection point in the history of vehicle safety assessment.

Comparison of Waymo rider-only crash data to human benchmarks at 7.1 million miles.

Objectives: This article examines the safety performance of the Waymo Driver, an SAE level 4 automated driving system (ADS) used in a rider-only (RO) ride-hailing application without a human driver, either in the vehicle or remotely.

Methods: ADS crash data were derived from NHTSA's Standing General Order (SGO) reporting over 7.14 million RO miles through the end of October 2023 in Phoenix, Arizona, San Francisco, California, and Los Angeles, California, and compared to human benchmarks from the literature.

Small intestine submucosa as a growth factor attractor promotes peripheral nerve regeneration by enhancing syndecan-3/glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor (GDNF) signalling:study.

Peripheral nerve regeneration (PNR) following trauma requires the reconstruction of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and the proper stimulation of growth factors. Decellularised small intestine submucosa (SIS) has been extensively used as an ECM scaffold for tissue repair, but its potential to enhance the effects of exogenous growth factors on PNR is not well understood. In this study, we evaluated the effects of SIS implantation combined with glial cell-derived growth factor (GDNF) treatment on PNR in a rat neurorrhaphy model.

A hierarchical integrative group least absolute shrinkage and selection operator for analyzing environmental mixtures.

Environmental health studies are increasingly measuring multiple pollutants to characterize the joint health effects attributable to exposure mixtures. However, the underlying dose-response relationship between toxicants and health outcomes of interest may be highly nonlinear, with possible nonlinear interaction effects. Existing penalized regression methods that account for exposure interactions either cannot accommodate nonlinear interactions while maintaining strong heredity or are computationally unstable in applications with limited sample size.

Training in clinical genetics and genetic counseling in Asia.

The status of training in clinical genetics and genetic counseling in Asia is at diverse stages of development and maturity. Most of the training programs are in academic training centers where exposure to patients in the clinics or in the hospital is a major component. This setting provides trainees with knowledge and skills to be competent geneticists and genetic counselors in a variety of patient care interactions.

Distributed Lag Interaction Models with Two Pollutants.

Distributed lag models (DLMs) have been widely used in environmental epidemiology to quantify the lagged effects of air pollution on a health outcome of interest such as mortality and morbidity. Most previous DLM approaches only consider one pollutant at a time. In this article, we propose distributed lag interaction model (DLIM) to characterize the joint lagged effect of two pollutants.

Selection of nonlinear interactions by a forward stepwise algorithm: Application to identifying environmental chemical mixtures affecting health outcomes.

In this paper, we propose a stepwise forward selection algorithm for detecting the effects of a set of correlated exposures and their interactions on a health outcome of interest when the underlying relationship could potentially be nonlinear. Though the proposed method is very general, our application in this paper remains to be on analysis of multiple pollutants and their interactions. Simultaneous exposure to multiple environmental pollutants could affect human health in a multitude of complex ways.

A New Variance Component Score Test for Testing Distributed Lag Functions with Applications in Time Series Analysis.

We propose to test a given constrained distributed lag model (DLM) of the form = against an unconstrained alternative using a variance component score test (VCST) and show that VCST is more powerful than the standard likelihood ratio test in a simulation study.

Robust distributed lag models using data adaptive shrinkage.

Distributed lag models (DLMs) have been widely used in environmental epidemiology to quantify the lagged effects of air pollution on an outcome of interest such as mortality or cardiovascular events. Generally speaking, DLMs can be applied to time-series data where the current measure of an independent variable and its lagged measures collectively affect the current measure of a dependent variable. The corresponding distributed lag (DL) function represents the relationship between the lags and the coefficients of the lagged exposure variables.

Incretin-based therapy in type 2 diabetes: An evidence based systematic review and meta-analysis.

Incretin based therapies such as dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors (DPP-4i) and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1Ra) are increasingly used for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes mellitus. In clinical practice and in previously performed clinical trials, these agents are often used in combination with other oral anti-diabetic agents (OADs) and Insulin. Prior meta-analytic reviews however do not adequately address the impact of background therapy and active comparator arms.

Mediation of the Relationship between Maternal Phthalate Exposure and Preterm Birth by Oxidative Stress with Repeated Measurements across Pregnancy.

Background: Mediation analysis is useful for understanding mechanisms and has been used minimally in the study of the environment and disease.

Objective: We examined mediation of the association between phthalate exposure during pregnancy and preterm birth by oxidative stress.

Methods: This nested case-control study of preterm birth ( = 130 cases, 352 controls) included women who delivered in Boston, Massachusestts, from 2006 through 2008.

Urinary phthalate metabolite and bisphenol A associations with ultrasound and delivery indices of fetal growth.

Growth of the fetus is highly sensitive to environmental perturbations, and disruption can lead to problems in pregnancy as well as later in life. This study investigates the relationship between maternal exposure to common plasticizers in pregnancy and fetal growth. Participants from a longitudinal birth cohort in Boston were recruited early in gestation and followed until delivery.

Microsatellite Alterations With Allelic Loss at 9p24.2 Signify Less-Aggressive Colorectal Cancer Metastasis.

Background & Aims: Molecular events that lead to recurrence and/or metastasis after curative treatment of patients with colorectal cancers (CRCs) are poorly understood. Patients with stage II or III primary CRC with elevated microsatellite alterations at selected tetranucleotide repeats and low levels of microsatellite instability (E/L) are more likely to have disease recurrence after treatment. Hypoxia and/or inflammation not only promote metastasis, but also induce elevated microsatellite alterations at selected tetranucleotide repeats by causing deficiency of MSH3 in the cancer cell nucleus.

Utilizing Longitudinal Measures of Fetal Growth to Create a Standard Method to Assess the Impacts of Maternal Disease and Environmental Exposure.

Impaired or suboptimal fetal growth is associated with an increased risk of perinatal morbidity and mortality. By utilizing readily available clinical data on the relative size of the fetus at multiple points in pregnancy, including delivery, future epidemiological research can improve our understanding of the impacts of maternal, fetal, and environmental factors on fetal growth at different windows during pregnancy. This study presents mean and standard deviation ultrasound measurements from a clinically representative US population that can be utilized for creating Z-scores to this end.

Statistical methods for modeling repeated measures of maternal environmental exposure biomarkers during pregnancy in association with preterm birth.

Background: It is of critical importance to evaluate the role of environmental chemical exposures in premature birth. While a number of studies investigate this relationship, most utilize single exposure measurements during pregnancy in association with the outcome. The studies with repeated measures of exposure during pregnancy employ primarily cross-sectional analyses that may not be fully leveraging the power and additional information that the data provide.

Urinary phthalate metabolites and biomarkers of oxidative stress in pregnant women: a repeated measures analysis.

Background: Phthalate exposure occurs readily in the environment and has been associated with an array of health end points, including adverse birth outcomes. Some of these may be mediated by oxidative stress, a proposed mechanism for phthalate action.

Objectives: In the present study, we explored the associations between phthalate metabolites and biomarkers of oxidative stress measured in urine samples from multiple time points during pregnancy.

Repeated measures of urinary oxidative stress biomarkers during pregnancy and preterm birth.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to investigate oxidative stress as a mechanism of preterm birth in human subjects; we examined associations between urinary biomarkers of oxidative stress that were measured at multiple time points during pregnancy and preterm birth.

Study Design: This nested case-control study included 130 mothers who delivered preterm and 352 mothers who delivered term who were originally recruited as part of an ongoing prospective birth cohort at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Two biomarkers that included 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) and 8-isoprostane were measured in urine samples that were collected at up to 4 time points (median 10, 18, 26, and 35 weeks) during gestation.

Longitudinal profiling of inflammatory cytokines and C-reactive protein during uncomplicated and preterm pregnancy.

Problem: Previous studies have investigated the utility of inflammation markers as predictors of preterm birth, but none have compared trends in levels between uncomplicated and preterm pregnancy.

Method Of Study: We explored longitudinal changes in plasma cytokines, including IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10, and TNF-α, as well as C-reactive protein in pregnant women from a nested case-control study.

Results: IL-6 was associated with increased odds of spontaneous preterm birth, defined by presentation of spontaneous preterm labor and/or preterm premature rupture of the membranes.

Massively parallel nonparametric regression, with an application to developmental brain mapping.

We propose a penalized spline approach to performing large numbers of parallel non-parametric analyses of either of two types: restricted likelihood ratio tests of a parametric regression model versus a general smooth alternative, and nonparametric regression. Compared with naïvely performing each analysis in turn, our techniques reduce computation time dramatically. Viewing the large collection of scatterplot smooths produced by our methods as functional data, we develop a clustering approach to summarize and visualize these results.

Joint rare variant association test of the average and individual effects for sequencing studies.

For many complex traits, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) identified from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) only explain a small percentage of heritability. Next generation sequencing technology makes it possible to explore unexplained heritability by identifying rare variants (RVs). Existing tests designed for RVs look for optimal strategies to combine information across multiple variants.