Episiotomies and obstetric anal sphincter injuries following a restrictive episiotomy policy in France: An analysis of the 2010, 2016, and 2021 National Perinatal Surveys.

Background: The French guidelines have recommended a restrictive policy of episiotomy since 2005. We aimed to assess variations in the prevalence of both episiotomy and obstetric anal sphincter injury (OASI) from the 2010, 2016, and 2021 National Perinatal Surveys.

Methods And Findings: A total of 29,750 women who had given birth to a live infant by vaginal delivery were included.

Frailty and comorbidity in older adults with and without diabetes and chronic leg ulcer: A cross-sectional study.

This descriptive, cross-sectional study aimed to identify whether having a chronic leg ulcer (CLU), in addition to diabetes, contributed to frailty in individuals ≥65 years old. It also explored the associations between frailty, pre-frailty and other factors. 125 participants aged ≥65 attending outpatient clinics in Ireland were categorised into three groups: (1) diabetes-only and no CLU, (2) CLU-only and no diabetes, and (3) diabetes and CLU.

Loss of Insight in Syndromes Associated with Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration: Clinical and Imaging Features.

Objectives: The present study aims to assess the prevalence, associated clinical symptoms, longitudinal changes, and imaging correlates of Loss of Insight (LOI), which is still unexplored in syndromes associated with Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD).

Design: Retrospective longitudinal cohort study, from Oct 2009 to Feb 2023.

Setting: Tertiary Frontotemporal Dementia research clinic.

Effect of Depth Band Replacement on Red, Green and Blue Image for Deep Learning Weed Detection.

Automated agricultural robots are becoming more common with the decreased cost of sensor devices and increased computational capabilities of single-board computers. Weeding is one of the mundane and repetitive tasks that robots could be used to perform. The detection of weeds in crops is now common, and commercial solutions are entering the market rapidly.

Valorization of Rosehip ( L.) Pomace Using Unconventional Carbohydrate Carriers for Beverage Obtainment.

Rosehip is of notable scientific interest due to its rich content of bioactives and its wide-ranging applications in nutrition, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. The valorization of rosehip by-products, such as pomace, is highly significant for promoting sustainability. This study investigates the development of rosehip-based powders and beverage prototypes derived from both juice and pomace to evaluate the potential use of pomace in instant beverage design and compare it with juice-based formulations.

Immobilization of Paenibacillus polymyxa with biopolymers to enhance the production of 2,3-butanediol.

Background: Paenibacillus polymyxa, is a Gram-positive, plant growth promoting bacterium, known for producing 98% optically pure 2,3-butanediol, an industrially valuable chemical for solvents, plasticizers and resins. Immobilization of Paenibacillus polymyxa has been proposed to improve the cell stability and efficiency of the fermentation process, reduce contamination and provide easy separation of butanediol in the culture broth as compared to conventional bioprocesses. This research aimed to explore the potential of Paenibacillus polymyxa with immobilization technique to produce 2,3-butanediol.

Synchronous Home-Based Telerehabilitation of the Upper Extremity Following Stroke-A Pyramid Review.

Background: Stroke is a leading cause of long-term disability, often resulting in upper extremity impairment. Telerehabilitation offers a promising approach to deliver therapy in home settings. This review aimed to evaluate the effects of home-based telerehabilitation interventions delivered to address upper extremity function in stroke patients.

A Transformer-Based Pipeline for German Clinical Document De-Identification.

Objective:  Commercially available large language models such as Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) cannot be applied to real patient data for data protection reasons. At the same time, de-identification of clinical unstructured data is a tedious and time-consuming task when done manually. Since transformer models can efficiently process and analyze large amounts of text data, our study aims to explore the impact of a large training dataset on the performance of this task.

Maternal Prepregnancy Obesity and Offspring Intelligence Quotient at 5 Years: A Multicohort Analysis.

Background: The relationship between maternal obesity and childhood cognitive development remains unclear. Prior studies did not adjust for important confounders, and preterm infants are a developmentally distinct group that remains scarcely examined.

Objectives: To determine whether maternal prepregnancy body mass index (BMI) is associated with offspring intelligence quotient (IQ) up to 5 years and whether this relationship varies with gestational age.

Think-Aloud Testing of a Companion App for Colonoscopy Exams: Usability Study.

Background: Colonoscopies, are vital for initial screening, follow-ups, surveillance of neoplasia, and assessing symptoms like rectal bleeding. Successful colonoscopies require thorough colon preparation, but up to 25% fail due to poor preparation. This can lead to longer procedures, repeat colonoscopies, inconvenience, poorer health outcomes, and higher costs.

Effects of Different Weak Small Organic Acids on Clofazimine Solubility in Aqueous Media.

Background/objectives: Clofazimine (CFZ) is a Biopharmaceutics Classification System (BCS) II drug introduced in the US market in 1986 for the treatment of leprosy. However, CFZ was later withdrawn from the market due to its extremely low aqueous solubility and low absorption. In the literature, the intrinsic solubility of CFZ has been estimated to be <0.

Exploring Emerging Challenges: Survey on Phlebotomine Sand Flies and at the Northern Endemic Border in Europe.

Although Switzerland is currently not endemic for canine leishmaniosis (CanL), imported cases of this emerging zoonosis are regularly detected. Also, phlebotomine sand flies, vectors of the causative agent , are present in the southern part of the country, in Canton Ticino, and endemic foci of CanL have been recently described in neighboring Italian municipalities. In 2022 and 2023, we evaluated the distribution of phlebotomine sand flies and the presence of antibodies against in domestic dogs and cats in Ticino and Mesolcina (Canton of Grisons).

SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Amplifies the Immunogenicity of Healthy Renal Epithelium in the Presence of Renal Cell Carcinoma.

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the most common form of kidney cancer, known for its immune evasion and resistance to chemotherapy. Evidence indicates that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may worsen outcomes for RCC patients, as well as patients with diminished renal function. Evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may exacerbate outcomes in RCC patients and those with impaired renal function.

XModNN: Explainable Modular Neural Network to Identify Clinical Parameters and Disease Biomarkers in Transcriptomic Datasets.

The Explainable Modular Neural Network (XModNN) enables the identification of biomarkers, facilitating the classification of diseases and clinical parameters in transcriptomic datasets. The modules within XModNN represent specific pathways or genes of a functional hierarchy. The incorporation of biological insights into the architectural design reduced the number of parameters.

Higher vulnerability to poor circadian light hygiene in individuals with a history of COVID-19.

Seven-day actigraphy was performed within 1 month in 122 community-dwelling adults (mean age 24.40 y, 31 (25.4%) men) in the same city of Tyumen, Russia.

Satiety-enhancing placebo intervention decreases selective attention to food cues.

Background: As placebo interventions could influence appetite and satiety in first studies, they are a promising tool for the future treatment of obesity. Furthermore, individuals with heightened body weight show increased selective attention for food cues. This study aimed to investigate whether placebo induced changes of appetite and satiety can affect attention allocation and to examine correlating factors.

Reliability and validity of the hand-held dynamometer "NOD": a new instrument for assessment of isometric grip strength.

Introduction: Hand grip strength (HGS) is an important measure in a physiotherapy assessment and for this purpose it is necessary to have valid and reliable instruments to measure it. In this study we aimed at investigating the reliability, validity, and agreement of the new hand-held dynamometer NOD (OT-Bioelettronica, To-Italy) compared to Jamar® hydraulic dynamometer (JD), the gold standard.

Methods: Fifty healthy subjects were selected; 9 trials for the dominant hand and 9 trials for the non-dominant hand were administrated to each of them: 3 trials of HGS with the JD in rung #3, 3 trials with the JD-adapted-grip (like the NOD one), and 3 trials with NOD.

Ligand-Induced Activation of Single-Atom Palladium Heterogeneous Catalysts for Cross-Coupling Reactions.

Single-atom heterogeneous catalysts (SACs) are potential, recoverable alternatives to soluble organometallic complexes for cross-coupling reactions in fine-chemical synthesis. When developing SACs for these applications, it is often expected that the need for ligands, which are essential for organometallic catalysts, can be bypassed. Contrary to that, ligands remain almost always required for palladium atoms stabilized on commonly used functionalized carbon and carbon nitride supports, as the catalysts otherwise show limited activity.

Association between the EAT-Lancet Diet, Incidence of Cardiovascular Events, and All-cause Mortality: Results from a Swiss Cohort.

Background: An unhealthy diet is a major contributor to several noncommunicable diseases, including cardiovascular diseases (CVD), the leading cause of death worldwide. Additionally, our food system has significant impacts on the environment. The EAT-Lancet Commission has recommended a healthy diet that preserves global environmental resources.

Automatic detection and multi-component segmentation of brain metastases in longitudinal MRI.

Manual segmentation of lesions, required for radiotherapy planning and follow-up, is time-consuming and error-prone. Automatic detection and segmentation can assist radiologists in these tasks. This work explores the automated detection and segmentation of brain metastases (BMs) in longitudinal MRIs.

Effectiveness of an online food shopping intervention to reduce salt purchases among individuals with hypertension - findings of the SaltSwitch Online Grocery Shopping (OGS) randomised trial.

Background: Online grocery shopping is a growing source of food purchases in many countries. We investigated the effect of nudging consumers towards purchases of lower sodium products using a web browser extension.

Methods: This trial was conducted among individuals with hypertension who shopped for their groceries online in Australia.

Comparison analysis between standard polysomnographic data and in-ear-electroencephalography signals: a preliminary study.

Study Objectives: Polysomnography (PSG) currently serves as the benchmark for evaluating sleep disorders. Its discomfort makes long-term monitoring unfeasible, leading to bias in sleep quality assessment. Hence, less invasive, cost-effective, and portable alternatives need to be explored.

- a large-scale dataset of 3D medical shapes for computer vision.

Objectives: The shape is commonly used to describe the objects. State-of-the-art algorithms in medical imaging are predominantly diverging from computer vision, where voxel grids, meshes, point clouds, and implicit surface models are used. This is seen from the growing popularity of ShapeNet (51,300 models) and Princeton ModelNet (127,915 models).

Nurses' Clinical Practice in Nursing Homes: Depressive Symptoms and Fall Risk Assessment.

Background: Depression and falls are highly prevalent, interrelated concerns for nursing home (NH) residents. Relationships between depression and falls should guide nurses towards developing evidence-based practices for assessing these conditions together. This study aimed to ascertain NH nurses' clinical practices and perceptions regarding the assessment of depression and fall risk.