半自动和全自动透析器复用方式对透析器复用效果的影响

目的 探讨半自动和全自动透析器复用方式对透析器复用效果的影响.方法 将1728支可重复使用的透析器随机分为半自动复用组和全自动复用组各864支,观察2组透析器冲洗、检测时间、使用灭菌剂成本及热原反应、透析器破膜发生率、透析器重复检测数.结果 半自动复用组透析器冲洗、血室容积检测和压力测试时间分别为(26.443±3.237),(2.172±0.128),(2.157±0.090)min,灌注3.5%伦拿连灭菌剂成本为(1.698±0.107)元,支,共有499支和243支透析器需重复进行血室容积检测及压力检测,重复检测率达57.755%和28.125%;全自动复用组透析器冲洗、血室容积检测和压力测试时间为(5.793±0.193),(1.257±0.118),(1.110±0.076)min,透析器检测均能1次完成,灭菌剂成本(9.330±0.138)元/支,2组透析器用于血液透析均未见热原反应及透析器破膜发生.结论 半自动复用组在灌注过程中能有效节省灭菌剂成本.但透析器冲洗时间长、缺乏配套检测装置,检测费时、数据不易读取,透析器重复检测率高;而全自动复用组透析器冲洗、检测方便,但消耗灭菌剂成本高,设备投入昂贵,透析中心需配置合理数量才能满足临床需求.     

Use of “off-the-shelf” information extraction algorithms in clinical informatics: A feasibility study of MetaMap annotation of Italian medical notes

Information extraction from narrative clinical notes is useful for patient care, as well as for secondary use of medical data, for research or clinical purposes. Many studies focused on information extraction from English clinical texts, but less dealt with clinical notes in languages other than English.This study tested the feasibility of using “off the shelf” information extraction algorithms to identify medical concepts from Italian clinical notes. Among all the available and well-established information extraction algorithms, we used MetaMap to map medical concepts to the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The study addressed two questions: (Q1) to understand if it would be possible to properly map medical terms found in clinical notes and related to the semantic group of “Disorders” to the Italian UMLS resources; (Q2) to investigate if it would be feasible to use MetaMap as it is to extract these medical concepts from Italian clinical notes.We performed three experiments: in EXP1, we investigated how many medical concepts of the “Disorders” semantic group found in a set of clinical notes written in Italian could be mapped to the UMLS Italian medical sources; in EXP2 we assessed how the different processing steps used by MetaMap, which are English dependent, could be used in Italian texts to map the original clinical notes on the Italian UMLS sources; in EXP3 we automatically translated the clinical notes from Italian to English using Google Translator, and then we used MetaMap to map the translated texts.Results in EXP1 showed that the Italian UMLS Metathesaurus sources covered 91% of the medical terms of the “Disorders” semantic group, as found in the studied dataset. We observed that even if MetaMap was built to analyze texts written in English, most of its processing steps worked properly also with texts written in Italian. MetaMap identified correctly about half of the concepts in the Italian clinical notes. Using MetaMap’s annotation on Italian clinical notes instead of a simple text search improved our results of about 15 percentage points. MetaMap’s annotation of Italian clinical notes showed recall, precision and F-measure equal to 0.53, 0.98 and 0.69, respectively. Most of the failures were due to the impossibility for MetaMap to generate meaningful variants for the Italian language, suggesting that modifying MetaMap to allow generating Italian variants could improve the performance. MetaMap’s performance in annotating automatically translated English clinical notes was in line with findings in the literature, with similar recall (0.75), F-measure (0.83) and even higher precision (0.95). Most of the failures were due to a bad Italian to English translation of medical terms, suggesting that using an automatic translation tool specialized in translating medical concepts might be useful to obtain better performances.In conclusion, performances obtained using MetaMap on the fully automatic translation of the Italian text are good enough to allow to use MetaMap “as it is” in clinical practice.     

辛伐他汀用于结直肠癌治疗的系统综述

“药物再利用”或“药物再定位”是肿瘤学领域热度上升的话题,指寻找某种适应症并非癌症却具有抗癌活性的上市药物,并将其与常规癌症治疗手段相结合以期为患者带来生存获益。辛伐他汀,临床常用于治疗高脂血症、预防心血管疾病,研究发现其用于结直肠癌治疗潜力巨大,已有不少临床研究尝试将辛伐他汀作为辅助用药治疗转移性结直肠癌。     

Decontamination of face masks with steam for mask reuse in fighting the pandemic COVID-19: Experimental supports

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) has claimed many lives worldwide. Wearing medical masks (MMs) or N95 masks ([N95Ms] namely N95 respirators) can slow the virus spread and reduce the infection risk. Reuse of these masks can minimize waste, protect the environment, and help solve the current imminent shortage of masks. Disinfection of used masks is needed for their reuse with safety, but improper decontamination can damage the blocking structure of masks. In this study, we demonstrated using the avian coronavirus of infectious bronchitis virus to mimic SARS-CoV-2 that MMs and N95Ms retained their blocking efficacy even after being steamed on boiling water for 2 hours. We also demonstrated that three brands of MMs blocked over 99% viruses in aerosols. The avian coronavirus was completely inactivated after being steamed for 5 minutes. Altogether, this study suggested that MMs are adequate for use on most social occasions and both MMs and N95Ms can be reused for a few days with steam decontamination between use.     

Valorization of Waste Obtained from Oil Extraction in Moringa Oleifera Seeds: Coagulation of Reactive Dyes in Textile Effluents

Moringa oleifera seeds contain about 40% of highly valued oil due to its wide range of applications, from nutritional issues to cosmetics or biodiesel production. The extraction of Moringa oil generates a waste (65%–75% of seeds weight) which contains a water soluble protein able to be used either in drinking water clarification or wastewater treatment. In this paper, the waste of Moringa oleifera extraction was used as coagulant to remove five reactive dyes from synthetic textile effluents. This waste constitutes a natural coagulant which was demonstrated to be effective for the treatment of industrial reactive dyestuff effluents, characterized by alkaline pH, high NaCl content and hydrolyzed dyes. The coagulation yield increased at high NaCl concentration, whereas the pH did not show any significant effect on dye removal. Moringa oleifera showed better results for dye removal than the conventional treatment of coagulation-flocculation with FeCl₃ and polyelectrolyte. Treated water can be reused in new dyeing processes of cotton fabrics with high quality results.