Extravascular lipoma over the subclavian vein.

A rare instance of extravascular lipomas located over the subclavian vein in a woman in her early 60s presented unique diagnostic and therapeutic challenges due to their close proximity to critical structures. Lipomas, which are the most commonly occurring benign soft tissue tumours, are typically composed of mature adipocytes. Although lipomas can develop in any region of the body, they are most commonly found in the subcutaneous tissues of the trunk and proximal limbs. Extravascular lipomas, especially those near major blood vessels like the subclavian vein, are extremely uncommon.In this particular case, the tumour was extensively in contact with the right subclavian vein, though there was no intravascular involvement. The lipomatous tumour was successfully excised during surgery, with the subclavian vein and surrounding structures being preserved. Histopathological analysis confirmed the diagnosis of a benign lipoma. This case highlights the significance of early diagnosis, meticulous surgical planning and multidisciplinary collaboration to achieve the best possible outcomes.

Primary Extrapelvic Umbilical Endometriosis Presenting With Cyclical Umbilical Bleeding: A Case Report.

Primary extrapelvic endometriosis is the presence of endometrial tissue in sites outside the uterine cavity in an individual who has had no prior abdominal surgeries. Various theories have been postulated to describe the etiology of endometriosis. Our case study involves a multiparous patient in her late 40s with no prior abdominal surgeries who presented with bleeding from her umbilicus associated with swelling and pain corresponding to her menstrual cycle. A computed tomography scan of the abdomen detected a homogenous granuloma-like umbilical soft tissue mass. The umbilical nodule and the umbilicus were excised, and the specimen was sent for histopathological examination that validated the diagnosis of an umbilical endometrioma by revealing endometrial glands with stroma involving the dermis. Postoperatively, the patient was symptomatically better and was discharged. Primary umbilical endometriosis can mimic conditions like omphalitis, umbilical granuloma, and umbilical hernia; hence, it is important to understand how to differentiate this case from other diagnoses. This case contextualizes that the likelihood of primary umbilical endometriosis in such unusual presentations must always be considered.

A flexible symbolic regression method for constructing interpretable clinical prediction models.

Machine learning (ML) models trained for triggering clinical decision support (CDS) are typically either accurate or interpretable but not both. Scaling CDS to the panoply of clinical use cases while mitigating risks to patients will require many ML models be intuitively interpretable for clinicians. To this end, we adapted a symbolic regression method, coined the feature engineering automation tool (FEAT), to train concise and accurate models from high-dimensional electronic health record (EHR) data. We first present an in-depth application of FEAT to classify hypertension, hypertension with unexplained hypokalemia, and apparent treatment-resistant hypertension (aTRH) using EHR data for 1200 subjects receiving longitudinal care in a large healthcare system. FEAT models trained to predict phenotypes adjudicated by chart review had equivalent or higher discriminative performance (p < 0.001) and were at least three times smaller (p < 1 × 10-6) than other potentially interpretable models. For aTRH, FEAT generated a six-feature, highly discriminative (positive predictive value = 0.70, sensitivity = 0.62), and clinically intuitive model. To assess the generalizability of the approach, we tested FEAT on 25 benchmark clinical phenotyping tasks using the MIMIC-III critical care database. Under comparable dimensionality constraints, FEAT's models exhibited higher area under the receiver-operating curve scores than penalized linear models across tasks (p < 6 × 10-6). In summary, FEAT can train EHR prediction models that are both intuitively interpretable and accurate, which should facilitate safe and effective scaling of ML-triggered CDS to the panoply of potential clinical use cases and healthcare practices.

A maximum likelihood approach to electronic health record phenotyping using positive and unlabeled patients.

OBJECTIVE: Phenotyping patients using electronic health record (EHR) data conventionally requires labeled cases and controls. Assigning labels requires manual medical chart review and therefore is labor intensive. For some phenotypes, identifying gold-standard controls is prohibitive. We developed an accurate EHR phenotyping approach that does not require labeled controls. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our framework relies on a random subset of cases, which can be specified using an anchor variable that has excellent positive predictive value and sensitivity independent of predictors. We proposed a maximum likelihood approach that efficiently leverages data from the specified cases and unlabeled patients to develop logistic regression phenotyping models, and compare model performance with existing algorithms. RESULTS: Our method outperformed the existing algorithms on predictive accuracy in Monte Carlo simulation studies, application to identify hypertension patients with hypokalemia requiring oral supplementation using a simulated anchor, and application to identify primary aldosteronism patients using real-world cases and anchor variables. Our method additionally generated consistent estimates of 2 important parameters, phenotype prevalence and the proportion of true cases that are labeled. DISCUSSION: Upon identification of an anchor variable that is scalable and transferable to different practices, our approach should facilitate development of scalable, transferable, and practice-specific phenotyping models. CONCLUSIONS: Our proposed approach enables accurate semiautomated EHR phenotyping with minimal manual labeling and therefore should greatly facilitate EHR clinical decision support and research.