Prognostic Value of Coronary CT Angiography-Derived Quantitative Flow Ratio in Suspected Coronary Artery Disease.

Background The prognostic value of coronary CT angiography (CTA)-derived quantitative flow ratio (CT-QFR) remains unknown. Purpose To determine the prognostic value of CT-QFR in predicting the long-term outcomes of patients with suspected coronary artery disease (CAD) in comparison with invasive coronary angiography (ICA)/SPECT and to determine the influence of prior percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) on the prognostic value of CT-QFR. Materials and Methods In this secondary analysis of the prospective international CORE320 study, 379 participants who underwent coronary CTA and SPECT within 60 days before ICA between November 2009 and July 2011 were included for follow-up.

BAYESIAN NESTED LATENT CLASS MODELS FOR CAUSE-OF-DEATH ASSIGNMENT USING VERBAL AUTOPSIES ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS.

Understanding cause-specific mortality rates is crucial for monitoring population health and designing public health interventions. Worldwide, two-thirds of deaths do not have a cause assigned. Verbal autopsy (VA) is a well-established tool to collect information describing deaths outside of hospitals by conducting surveys to caregivers of a deceased person.

Ultra-High-Resolution Photon-Counting Detector CTA of the Head and Neck: Image Quality Assessment and Vascular Kernel Optimization.

Head and neck CTA requires fine detail evaluation, including characterization of potentially very small vessels and intrastent lumens. Blooming artifacts also hinder evaluation. To evaluate image quality of ultra-high-resolution (UHR) photon-counting detector (PCD) CTA of the head and neck and to explore variation of such quality across reconstruction kernels.

Mutational and transcriptional profile predicts the prognosis of stage IV gastric cancer - Prognostic factors for metastatic gastric cancer.

Background And Study Aims: The clinicopathological risk factors in the prognosis of stage IV gastric cancer have been comprehensively studied. However, the influencing factors of stage IV gastric cancer prognosis at genomic and transcriptional levels have not been well defined.

Patients And Methods: The mutational and transcriptional data, along with demographic, clinicopathological and prognostic information of 44 stage IV gastric cancer patients were downloaded from the TCGA database.

Tree-informed Bayesian multi-source domain adaptation: cross-population probabilistic cause-of-death assignment using verbal autopsy.

Determining causes of deaths (CODs) occurred outside of civil registration and vital statistics systems is challenging. A technique called verbal autopsy (VA) is widely adopted to gather information on deaths in practice. A VA consists of interviewing relatives of a deceased person about symptoms of the deceased in the period leading to the death, often resulting in multivariate binary responses.

Agreement between cause of death assignment by computer-coded verbal autopsy methods and physician coding of verbal autopsy interviews in South Africa.

Background: The South African national cause of death validation (NCODV 2017/18) project collected a national sample of verbal autopsies (VA) with cause of death (COD) assignment by physician-coded VA (PCVA) and computer-coded VA (CCVA).

Objective: The performance of three CCVA algorithms (InterVA-5, InSilicoVA and Tariff 2.0) in assigning a COD was compared with PCVA (reference standard).

The openVA Toolkit for Verbal Autopsies.

Verbal autopsy (VA) is a survey-based tool widely used to infer cause of death (COD) in regions without complete-coverage civil registration and vital statistics systems. In such settings, many deaths happen outside of medical facilities and are not officially documented by a medical professional. VA surveys, consisting of signs and symptoms reported by a person close to the decedent, are used to infer the COD for an individual, and to estimate and monitor the COD distribution in the population.

GRIK5 stimulates colon cancer growth and metastasis through cAMP/PKA/CADM3 signaling.

Glutamate receptor, ionotropic, kainate 5 (GRIK5) is a member of glutamate receptors participating, and the kainate receptor family has been proved to regulate cell proliferation and transformation. Our study aimed at exploring the role of GRIK5 in colon tumor progression. Three hundred and ninety eight colon cancer patients in The Cancer Genome Atlas Program (TCGA) data set and 26 clinical colon cancer patients were included for GRIK5 expression and prognosis analysis.

In Situ Transition Layer Design Based on Ti Additive Enabling High-Performance Liquid Metal Batteries.

Liquid metal batteries (LMBs), with the merits of long lifespan and low cost, are deemed as one of the most promising energy storage technologies for large-scale energy storage applications due to the use of liquid metal electrodes and molten salt electrolytes. However, the consequent problem is that the poor wettability between graphite-based collectors and the liquid metal/alloy electrodes leads to large contact resistance, which limits the efficiency and stability of the battery. In this work, a transition layer in situ formed on a graphite-based positive electrode current collector by Ti additive is designed for the first time, which increases the wettability between the positive alloy and the current collector and improves the voltage efficiency of the Li||Sb-Sn cell from 85.

Feasibility of Quantitative Flow Ratio Virtual Stenting for Guidance of Serial Coronary Lesions Intervention.

Background Coronary physiology measurement in serial coronary lesions with multiple stenoses is challenging. Therefore, we evaluated the feasibility of Murray fractal law-based quantitative flow ratio (μQFR) virtual stenting for guidance of serial coronary lesions intervention. Methods and Results Patients who underwent elective coronary angiography and had 2 serial de novo coronary lesions of 30% to 90% diameter stenosis by visual estimation were prospectively enrolled.

Diagnostic accuracy of CCTA-derived versus angiography-derived quantitative flow ratio (CAREER) study: a prospective study protocol.

Introduction: Coronary CT angiography (CCTA)-derived quantitative flow ratio (CT-QFR) is a novel non-invasive technology to assess the physiological significance of coronary stenoses, which enables fast and on-site computation of fractional flow reserve (FFR) from CCTA images. The objective of this investigator-initiated, prospective, single-centre clinical trial is to evaluate the diagnostic performance of CT-QFR with respect to angiography-derived QFR, using FFR as the reference standard.

Methods And Analysis: A total of 216 patients who have at least one lesion with a diameter stenosis of 30%-90% in an artery with ≥2.

Estimating causes of death where there is no medical certification: evolution and state of the art of verbal autopsy.

Over the past 70 years, significant advances have been made in determining the causes of death in populations not served by official medical certification of cause at the time of death using a technique known as Verbal Autopsy (VA). VA involves an interview of the family or caregivers of the deceased after a suitable bereavement interval about the circumstances, signs and symptoms of the deceased in the period leading to death. The VA interview data are then interpreted by physicians or, more recently, computer algorithms, to assign a probable cause of death.

Prevalence and Spectrum of Predisposition Genes With Germline Mutations Among Chinese Patients With Bowel Cancer.

Bowel cancer is the third-most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. Bowel cancer has a substantial hereditary component; however, additional hereditary risk factors involved in bowel cancer pathogenesis have not been systematically defined. A total of 573 patients with bowel cancer were enrolled in the present study, of whom 93.

Impact of close interpersonal contact on COVID-19 incidence: Evidence from 1 year of mobile device data.

Close contact between people is the primary route for transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We quantified interpersonal contact at the population level using mobile device geolocation data. We computed the frequency of contact (within 6 feet) between people in Connecticut during February 2020 to January 2021 and aggregated counts of contact events by area of residence.

Prevalence of current and past COVID-19 in Ohio adults.

Purpose To estimate the prevalence of current and past COVID-19 in Ohio adults. Methods We used stratified, probability-proportionate-to-size cluster sampling. During July 2020, we enrolled 727 randomly-sampled adult English- and Spanish-speaking participants through a household survey.

Examinee-Examiner Network: Weakly Supervised Accurate Coronary Lumen Segmentation Using Centerline Constraint.

Accurate coronary lumen segmentation on coronary-computed tomography angiography (CCTA) images is crucial for quantification of coronary stenosis and the subsequent computation of fractional flow reserve. Many factors including difficulty in labeling coronary lumens, various morphologies in stenotic lesions, thin structures and small volume ratio with respect to the imaging field complicate the task. In this work, we fused the continuity topological information of centerlines which are easily accessible, and proposed a novel weakly supervised model, Examinee-Examiner Network (EE-Net), to overcome the challenges in automatic coronary lumen segmentation.

One year of modeling and forecasting COVID-19 transmission to support policymakers in Connecticut.

To support public health policymakers in Connecticut, we developed a flexible county-structured compartmental SEIR-type model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and COVID-19 disease progression. Our goals were to provide projections of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, and estimates of important features of disease transmission and clinical progression. In this paper, we outline the model design, implementation and calibration, and describe how projections and estimates were used to meet the changing requirements of policymakers and officials in Connecticut from March 2020 to February 2021.

Estimating seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 in Ohio: A Bayesian multilevel poststratification approach with multiple diagnostic tests.

Globally, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has infected more than 59 million people and killed more than 1.39 million. Designing and monitoring interventions to slow and stop the spread of the virus require knowledge of how many people have been and are currently infected, where they live, and how they interact.

Impact of close interpersonal contact on COVID-19 incidence: evidence from one year of mobile device data.

Unlabelled: Close contact between people is the primary route for transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We sought to quantify interpersonal contact at the population-level by using anonymized mobile device geolocation data. We computed the frequency of contact (within six feet) between people in Connecticut during February 2020 - January 2021.

BAYESIAN FACTOR MODELS FOR PROBABILISTIC CAUSE OF DEATH ASSESSMENT WITH VERBAL AUTOPSIES.

The distribution of deaths by cause provides crucial information for public health planning, response and evaluation. About 60% of deaths globally are not registered or given a cause, limiting our ability to understand disease epidemiology. Verbal autopsy (VA) surveys are increasingly used in such settings to collect information on the signs, symptoms and medical history of people who have recently died.

Using Bayesian Latent Gaussian Graphical Models to Infer Symptom Associations in Verbal Autopsies.

Learning dependence relationships among variables of mixed types provides insights in a variety of scientific settings and is a well-studied problem in statistics. Existing methods, however, typically rely on copious, high quality data to accurately learn associations. In this paper, we develop a method for scientific settings where learning dependence structure is essential, but data are sparse and have a high fraction of missing values.

One-step anatomic and function testing by cardiac CT versus second-line functional testing in symptomatic patients with coronary artery stenosis: head-to-head comparison of CT-derived fractional flow reserve and myocardial perfusion imaging.

Background: CT-QFR is a novel coronary computed tomography angiography (CTA)-based method for on-site evaluation of patients with suspected obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD).

Aims: We aimed to compare the diagnostic performance of CT-QFR with myocardial perfusion scintigraphy (MPS) and cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) as second-line tests in patients with suspected obstructive CAD after coronary CTA.

Methods: A paired analysis of CT-QFR and MPS or CMR, with an invasive FFR-based classification as reference standard was carried out.