Medications

With the outbreak of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV2, many countries have faced problems because of their available hospital capacity. Health systems must be prepared to restructure their facilities and meet the requirements of the pandemic while keeping their services and specialties active. This process, known as hospital reconversion, contributes to minimizing the risk of contagion between hospital staff and patients and optimizing the efficient treatment and disposal of healthcare wastes that represent a risk of nosocomial infection contagion...

BACKGROUND: : During the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, health care workers (HCWs) have faced a heightened risk of infection. Preventative measures are critical to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and protect HCWs. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been recommended to prevent and treat COVID-19 in China. We conducted this survey to investigate the use of infection control behaviors, preventative and therapeutic interventions, and outcomes among HCWs during the surge of Omicron variant infections to explore the association of preventative measures with outcomes and to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of TCM as a preventative measure...

STUDY DESIGN: Interrupted time series analysis of a retrospective, electronic health record cohort. OBJECTIVE: To determine the association between the implementation of Medicare's sepsis reporting measure (SEP-1) and sepsis diagnosis rates as assessed in clinical documentation. BACKGROUND: The role of health policy in the effort to improve sepsis diagnosis remains unclear. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Adult patients hospitalized with suspected infection and organ dysfunction within 6 hours of presentation to the emergency department, admitted to one of 11 hospitals in a multi-hospital health system from January 2013 to December 2017...

Around the world, several lung diseases such as pneumonia, cardiomegaly, and tuberculosis (TB) contribute to severe illness, hospitalization or even death, particularly for elderly and medically vulnerable patients. In the last few decades, several new types of lung-related diseases have taken the lives of millions of people, and COVID-19 has taken almost 6.27 million lives. To fight against lung diseases, timely and correct diagnosis with appropriate treatment is crucial in the current COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, an intelligent recognition system for seven lung diseases has been proposed based on machine learning (ML) techniques to aid the medical experts...

BACKGROUND: Humans have always referred to religion in History to explain disasters, and epidemics, especially when science could not explain them. Religion has often been invoked as a mean of protection. The Covid outbreak in 2020 and the initial medical impotence brought up old fears, reminiscent of the plague for some people. Unable to rely on science only, some turned back to religion. METHODOLOGY: A narrative review was conducted to compare the role of religion during the Great Plague of Marseille versus the early stages of Covid-19 pandemic...

The global impact of COVID-19 has led to the development of numerous mathematical models to understand and control the pandemic. However, these models have not fully captured how the disease's dynamics are influenced by both within-host and between-host factors. To address this, a new mathematical model is proposed that links these dynamics and incorporates immune response. The model is compartmentalized with a fractional derivative in the sense of Caputo-Fabrizio, and its properties are studied to show a unique solution...

OBJECTIVES: Patients with suspected COVID-19 remain at risk for clinical deterioration after discharge and may benefit from home oxygen saturation (SpO2 ) monitoring using portable pulse oximeter devices. Our study aims to evaluate patient engagement and compliance with a home SpO2 monitoring program. METHODS: This is a single center, prospective pilot study of patients being discharged from the ED or urgent care after evaluation of symptoms consistent with COVID-19...

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Acitretin, commonly used for severe psoriasis and keratinocyte carcinoma chemoprevention in high-risk patients, is contraindicated in patients with end stage renal disease on hemodialysis. However, these patients often lack medication choices and in certain clinical scenarios, the benefits of acitretin may outweigh the potential risks. We identified 24 end stage renal disease patients on HD taking acitretin from Duke and Vanderbilt University Medical Centers. While adverse effects were common, patients did not frequently discontinue the medication due to them...

PURPOSE: To investigate and characterize the performance of a novel orthogonal dual-layer alpha multileaf collimator (αMLC) mounted on the LinaTech VenusX linac. METHODS: We evaluated leaf positioning accuracy and reproducibility using an electronic portal imaging device through the picket fence test. The average, interleaf, intraleaf, and leaf tip transmissions of the single and dual layers were measured using an ionization chamber. Square and rhombus fields were used to evaluate the leaf penumbra of αMLC...

BACKGROUND Close observation, statins, fibrate treatment, and lifestyle changes can safely manage asymptomatic individuals with severe hypertriglyceridemia (HTG) and minimal risk of symptom development. However, the risk of medication-induced liver injury in patients taking statin-fibrate makes management more challenging, and may require hospital admission and close monitoring with follow-up. CASE REPORT We present a rare case of a 43-year-old man with asymptomatic severe HTG exceeding 11.370 mg/dL with mixed hyperlipidemia, managed initially with high-intensity statins and fibrate...

PURPOSE: In 2019, a formal review and update of the current training program for medical physics residents/registrars in Australasia was conducted. The purpose of this was to ensure the program met current local clinical and technological requirements, to improve standardization of training across Australia and New Zealand and generate a dynamic curriculum and programmatic assessment model. METHODS: A four-phase project was initiated, including a consultant desktop review of the current program and stakeholder consultation...

PURPOSE: This article aims to describe the presentation of Plummer disease and its evolution after radioiodine treatment and determine factors that may influence treatment efficacy. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The sample included retrospective medical records of 165 adult patients with toxic nodular goiter treated with radioiodine between 1997 and 2017, followed up at a single thyroid center. RESULTS: The efficacy of treatment with a single dose of radioiodine was higher than 90%...

OBJECTIVE: Real-time measurement of biological joint moment could enhance clinical assessments and generalize exoskeleton control. Accessing joint moments outside clinical and laboratory settings requires harnessing non-invasive wearable sensor data for indirect estimation. Previous approaches have been primarily validated during cyclic tasks, such as walking, but these methods are likely limited when translating to non-cyclic tasks where the mapping from kinematics to moments is not unique...

AutoDock Vina (Vina) stands out among numerous molecular docking tools due to its precision and comparatively high speed, playing a key role in the drug discovery process. Hardware acceleration of Vina on FPGA platforms offers a high energy-efficiency approach to speed up the docking process. However, previous FPGA-based Vina accelerators exhibit several shortcomings: 1) Simple uniform quantization results in inevitable accuracy drop; 2) Due to Vina's complex computing process, the evaluation and optimization phase for hardware design becomes extended; 3) The iterative computations in Vina constrain the potential for further parallelization...

Most operant conditioning circuits predominantly focus on simple feedback process, few studies consider the intricacies of feedback outcomes and the uncertainty of feedback time. This paper proposes a neuromorphic circuit based on operant conditioning with addictiveness and time memory for automatic learning. The circuit is mainly composed of hunger output module, neuron module, excitement output module, memristor-based decision module, and memory and feedback generation module. In the circuit, the process of output excitement and addiction in stochastic feedback is achieved...

In certain neurological disorders such as stroke, the impairment of upper limb function significantly impacts daily life quality and necessitates enhanced neurological control. This poses a formidable challenge in the realm of rehabilitation due to its intricate nature. Moreover, the plasticity of muscle synergy proves advantageous in assessing the enhancement of motor function among stroke patients pre and post rehabilitation training intervention, owing to the modular control strategy of central nervous system...

Affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) have garnered widespread applications, with remarkable advancements in utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) technology for emotion recognition. However, the time-consuming process of annotating EEG data, inherent individual differences, non-stationary characteristics of EEG data, and noise artifacts in EEG data collection pose formidable challenges in developing subject-specific cross-session emotion recognition models. To simultaneously address these challenges, we propose a unified pre-training framework based on multi-scale masked autoencoders (MSMAE), which utilizes large-scale unlabeled EEG signals from multiple subjects and sessions to extract noise-robust, subject-invariant, and temporal-invariant features...

The Most Advanced diagnostic technologies may be amazing, but they often do not make it to resource-limited settings, including those places where particularly dangerous pathogens are more prevalent, crowded conditions make outbreaks more likely, or medical facilities are less available.

The area of drug delivery systems has witnessed significant advancements in recent years, with a particular focus on improving efficacy, stability, and patient compliance. Transdermal drug delivery offers numerous benefits compared to conventional methods of drug administration through the skin. It helps in avoiding gastric irritation, hepatic first-pass metabolism, and gastric degradation of the drug. It bypasses the gastrointestinal tract, eliminating the risk of first-pass metabolism and allowing drugs to be administered without being affected by pH, enzymes, or intestinal bacteria...