Trends in shoulder surgery patient-reported outcome measures.

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are a vital part of the toolkit for the current practice of orthopedic surgery. We are witnessing the expansion of the use of PROMs in clinical practice and in research; the ultimate direction of this expansion is unclear. The purpose of this systematic review was to identify the trends in the use of PROMs in major upper limb publications over a 7-year period. We retrospectively reviewed all articles published in 6 of the most influential upper limb orthopedic journals based on impact factor from January 2013 to January 2020. PubMed, Medline, and Embase were used to access the abstracts for all articles published for this period. We included all articles related to shoulder arthroplasty, shoulder instability, rotator cuff surgery, and involving the use of PROMs. There were 4175 articles identified from the selected journals over the chosen time period, of which 607 were eligible for inclusion in the study. The number of articles reporting PROMs increased from 57 in 2013 to 115 in 2019, which was a 102% increase. The total number of PROM usages recorded was 1593 which was comprised of 63 different scoring systems, with each article using a median of 3 different PROMs. The most commonly used score in articles originating from North America was the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons score (216 uses in 273 articles; 78.1%), from Europe it was the Constant-Murley Score (129 uses in 183 articles; 70.4%), and from Asia it was the American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons score (80 uses in 126 articles; 63.4%). The use of PROMs is evolving with an increasing prevalence of and diversity of PROMs being used in upper limb surgery. There is geographical variation in the use of PROMs, and a variety of systems used, with only 3 of the top 10 most used PROMs reporting on patient satisfaction or wellbeing. Given that a diverse range of PROMs study a diverse range of conditions and procedures, there may not be a need for a consensus on the best overall use of PROMs, but there may be ideal PROMs suited to answer specific questions.

Applying Formal Concept Analysis for the Recognition of Infant Mortality Patterns.

Infant mortality (IM), an index that corresponds to the number of deaths among children up to one year, is an important social indicator of a region. It generally reflects the conditions of socioeconomic development - in addition, the access and quality of resources available for maternal and child health care. Monitoring its magnitude, thus, can help in the definition of public policies for its confrontation. The main causes of IM can be also associated with biological, behavioral, and public health issues. In this work, implication and association rules based on Formal Concept Analysis are used to recognize patterns in births occurring in the state of Amapá (located in the Brazilian Amazon), where the index of infant mortality is more severe.

Characterizing Infant Mortality Using Data Mining - A Case Study in Two Brazilian States - Santa Catarina and Amapá.

Infant mortality is characterized by the death of young children under the age of one, and it is an issue affecting millions of children in the world. The objective of this article is to employ concepts of knowledge discovery in databases, specifically of machine learning in the data mining phase, to characterize infant mortality in two states of Brazil: Santa Catarina, with the lowest infant mortality rate of the country's states, and Amapá, with the highest. The classifiers C4.5, JRip, Random Forest, SVM, and Multilayer Perceptron were used, and a brief comparison of the results obtained by the classifiers in both states is made. In addition, the dataset preprocessing is detailed, which includes attribute selection and class balancing. The results show that the features APGAR5, WEIGHT, and CONGENITAL ANOMALY stood out the most from the rules generated by the tree-based classifiers.

Interpreting the Human Longevity Profile Through Triadic Rules - A Case Study Based on the ELSA-UK Longitudinal Study.

Human aging is a complex process with several factors interacting. One of the ways to identify patterns about human aging is longitudinal population studies. In this work, we identified longevity profiles through a process of knowledge discovery. After identifying the profiles, we apply triadic rules which allow extracting rules of implication with conditions. These rules can be used to identify related factors, in the various waves, of longitudinal studies, which can better explain the conditions that favor longevity profiles.The results show that the triadic analysis is efficient to allow the analysis of the temporal evolution of clinical or environmental conditions that favor certain profiles when databases of longitudinal studies are considered.

Noninvasive quantification of bowel inflammation through positron emission tomography imaging of 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose-labeled white blood cells.

Treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) generally relies on long-term use of anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive agents. The adverse effects of those drugs make it important to prescribe the minimal regimen that is effective. An objective method for noninvasively quantifying severity of bowel inflammation would thus be valuable in guiding inflammatory bowel disease therapy. Using positron emission tomography (PET), we show that white blood cells (WBCs) labeled with 2-deoxy-2-[18F]fluoro-D-glucose (FDG) can serve as a quantitative marker for identifying the presence and severity of intestinal inflammation. In both murine and human subjects, PET images of FDG-labeled WBCs demonstrated little tracer uptake in healthy gastrointestinal and urinary tracts, where physiologic distribution of FDG images of glucose metabolism often compromises abdominopelvic PET imaging of intestinal pathology. Intestinal foci of FDG-labeled WBCs were confirmed to represent inflamed bowel through histopathologic or colonoscopic analysis, and intensity of foci measured in PET images correlated well with histopathologic measures of degree of inflammation. FDG-labeled WBC's, in conjunction with PET, can be used to provide quantitative assessment of bowel inflammation noninvasively, accurately, and rapidly.