Survival and Mortality in 3,701 Pacemaker Patients: Arguments in Favor of Pacemaker Reuse

This study analyzed the results of 3,701 patients implanted with cardiac pacemakers at the Centre Chirurgical du Val d'Or between 1976 and 1981. Two pacemaker populations were compared; those having a new pacemaker and (hose implanted with a reused pacemaker. There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups, either in terms of indications for implantation or in terms of actuarial survival of patients. In addition, there was no significant change in survival of the pulse generator. The reutilization of pacemakers appeared to be in no way detrimental to patients.     

复用滤器对联机血液透析滤过溶质清除率及安全性的影响

目的 研究复用滤器对联机血液透析滤过溶质清除率、安全性及氧化应激指标的影响。方法 8例稳定的维持性透析患者分别接受初用和复用滤器的后稀释联机血液透析滤过治疗。测定透析开始后20 min和整个治疗时间的透析液侧及血液侧溶质清除率。全血培养法测定透前、透后、透析开始后20 min滤器前后细胞因子产生量。高效液相色谱法测定透前、透后血浆及透析液中总抗坏血酸、脱氢抗坏血酸和维生素E含量。结果 两组透析开始后20 min及总治疗时间内透析液侧及血液侧小分子物质清除率相似,但复用组β2-微球蛋白(β2-m)吸附清除率明显低于初用组,透析液侧清除率则显著高于初用组。复用组透析液白蛋白含量明显高于初用组,两组透前、透后维生素E水平无显著改变,但透后总抗坏血酸水平均明显下降,其中复用组透析后脱氢抗坏血酸/总抗坏血酸比例较透前明显下降。全血培养法显示,两组彼此之间及透前、透后及透析开始后20 min滤器前后细胞因子产生量差异均无显著性意义。初用组及复用组透析中临床症状以及透析后体温无明显差异。结论复用滤器不影响联机血液透析滤过的溶质清除率,但可增加白蛋白丢失;虽然复用滤器对血液炎症因子产生细胞的激活程度与初用组相似,但有增加氧化应激的危险。     

再生口腔检查器械取代一次性口腔诊疗盘的可行性临床验证及实施

目的探讨再生口腔检查器械取代一次性口腔诊疗盘的可行性及实用性,以减少使用一次性口腔诊疗盘所导致的资源浪费和环境污染。方法收集相关信息及数据并进行成本核算,从多方面对再生口腔检查器械取代一次性口腔诊疗盘的可行性进行论证。结果再生口腔检查器械成本为1.15元/套。2005年7月—2006年4月共使用再生口腔检查器械37815套,减少医疗垃圾2 366斤,节约垃圾处置等费用6 884元。结论再生口腔检查器械取代一次性口腔诊疗盘可节约成本与资源,减少环境污染,有其可行性与实用性。     

Diagnostic Process From the Data Quality Point of View

The spread of electronic use of data in various areas has put importance of data quality to higher level. Data quality has syntactic and semantic component; the syntactic component is relatively easy to achieve if supported by tools (either off-the-shelf or our own), while semantic component requires more research. In many cases such data come from different sources, are distributed across enterprise and are at different quality levels. Special attention needs to be paid to data upon which critical decisions are met, such as medical data for example. The starting point for research is in our case the risk of the medical area. In the paper we will focus on the semantic component of medical data quality.     

Influence of Reuse and of Reuse Sterilants on the First-Use Syndrome

Over a 4 year period, five of 98 patients at our dialysis unit developed signs and symptoms consistent with first-use syndrome (FUS). Marked improvement was noted after subjecting new dialyzers to automated processing using either formaldehyde or peracetic acid. No episodes of FUS occurred in patients being treated with reused dialyzers. Use of formaldehyde sterilization was associated with development of anti-N-like antibodies in the blood of four (8%) of 50 patients over a follow-up period of 14 months. In two patients on the reuse program, itching during dialysis resolved after changing from formaldehyde-sterilization to a method using peracetic acid. Our results confirm the beneficial effects of reuse with regard to first-use syndrome. However, our data also suggest that use of formaldehyde, the most common reuse sterilant, continues to be associated with undesirable clinical and laboratory side effects.     

Building Blocks for a Clinical Imaging Informatics Environment

Over the past 20 years, imaging informatics has been driven by the widespread adoption of radiology information and picture archiving and communication and speech recognition systems. These three clinical information systems are commonplace and are intuitive to most radiologists as they replicate familiar paper and film workflow. So what is next? There is a surge of innovation in imaging informatics around advanced workflow, search, electronic medical record aggregation, dashboarding, and analytics tools for quality measures (Nance et al., AJR Am J Roentgenol 200:1064–1070, 2013). The challenge lies in not having to rebuild the technological wheel for each of these new applications but instead attempt to share common components through open standards and modern development techniques. The next generation of applications will be built with moving parts that work together to satisfy advanced use cases without replicating databases and without requiring fragile, intense synchronization from clinical systems. The purpose of this paper is to identify building blocks that can position a practice to be able to quickly innovate when addressing clinical, educational, and research-related problems. This paper is the result of identifying common components in the construction of over two dozen clinical informatics projects developed at the University of Maryland Radiology Informatics Research Laboratory. The systems outlined are intended as a mere foundation rather than an exhaustive list of possible extensions.     

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.