Short-term impact of COVID-19 on quality of life,perceived stress,and serious psychological distress in an adult population in the midwest United States

Quality of Life Research - This study aimed to investigate changes over time in quality of life, perceived stress, and serious psychological distress for individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in an...     

Clinical Concept-Based Radiology Reports Classification Pipeline for Lung Carcinoma

Rising incidence and mortality of cancer have led to an incremental amount of research in the field. To learn from preexisting data, it has become important to capture maximum information related to disease type, stage, treatment, and outcomes. Medical imaging reports are rich in this kind of information but are only present as free text. The extraction of information from such unstructured text reports is labor-intensive. The use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to extract information from radiology reports can make it less time-consuming as well as more effective. In this study, we have developed and compared different models for the classification of lung carcinoma reports using clinical concepts. This study was approved by the institutional ethics committee as a retrospective study with a waiver of informed consent. A clinical concept-based classification pipeline for lung carcinoma radiology reports was developed using rule-based as well as machine learning models and compared. The machine learning models used were XGBoost and two more deep learning model architectures with bidirectional long short-term neural networks. A corpus consisting of 1700 radiology reports including computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) reports were used for development and testing. Five hundred one radiology reports from MIMIC-III Clinical Database version 1.4 was used for external validation. The pipeline achieved an overall F1 score of 0.94 on the internal set and 0.74 on external validation with the rule-based algorithm using expert input giving the best performance. Among the machine learning models, the Bi-LSTM_dropout model performed better than the ML model using XGBoost and the Bi-LSTM_simple model on internal set, whereas on external validation, the Bi-LSTM_simple model performed relatively better than other 2. This pipeline can be used for clinical concept-based classification of radiology reports related to lung carcinoma from a huge corpus and also for automated annotation of these reports.

     

Descending thoracic aortitis due to Haemophilus influenzae: a case report and literature review

Aortitis due to Haemophilus influenzae especially involving the descending thoracic aorta is rarely encountered. We present a case and literature review concerning Haemophilus influenzae aortitis. This article serves to enhance the awareness of this extremely rare disease.     

Role of pomegranate and citrus fruit juices in colon cancer prevention

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States.Recent studies prove that though chemotherapeutic agents are being used for the treatment of colon cancer,they become non-effective when the cancer progresses to an invasive stage.Since consumption of certain dietary agents has been linked with various cancers,fruit juices have been investigated for their consistently protective effect against colon cancer.The unique biochemical composition of fruit juices is responsible for their anticancer properties.In this review,the chemo-preventive effect of fruit juices such as pomegranate and citrus juices against colon cancer are discussed.For this purpose,the bioavailability,in vitro and in vivo effects of these fruit juices on colorectal cancer are highlighted.Moreover,there is a scarcity of studies involving human trials to estimate the preventive nature of these juices against colon cancer.This review will support the need for more preclinical tests with these crude juices and their constituents in different colorectal cancer cell lines and also some epidemiological studies in order to have a better understanding and promote pomegranate and citrus juices as crusaders against colon cancer.