SARS-CoV-2 infection in acute pancreatitis increases disease severity and 30-day mortality: COVID PAN collaborative study.

OBJECTIVE: There is emerging evidence that the pancreas may be a target organ of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This aim of this study was to investigate the outcome of patients with acute pancreatitis (AP) and coexistent SARS-CoV-2 infection. DESIGN: A prospective international multicentre cohort study including consecutive patients admitted with AP during the current pandemic was undertaken. Primary outcome measure was severity of AP. Secondary outcome measures were aetiology of AP, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, length of hospital stay, local complications, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), persistent organ failure and 30-day mortality. Multilevel logistic regression was used to compare the two groups. RESULTS: 1777 patients with AP were included during the study period from 1 March to 23 July 2020. 149 patients (8.3%) had concomitant SARS-CoV-2 infection. Overall, SARS-CoV-2-positive patients were older male patients and more likely to develop severe AP and ARDS (p<0.001). Unadjusted analysis showed that SARS-CoV-2-positive patients with AP were more likely to require ICU admission (OR 5.21, p<0.001), local complications (OR 2.91, p<0.001), persistent organ failure (OR 7.32, p<0.001), prolonged hospital stay (OR 1.89, p<0.001) and a higher 30-day mortality (OR 6.56, p<0.001). Adjusted analysis showed length of stay (OR 1.32, p<0.001), persistent organ failure (OR 2.77, p<0.003) and 30-day mortality (OR 2.41, p<0.04) were significantly higher in SARS-CoV-2 co-infection. CONCLUSION: Patients with AP and coexistent SARS-CoV-2 infection are at increased risk of severe AP, worse clinical outcomes, prolonged length of hospital stay and high 30-day mortality.

Does time of surgery influence the rate of false-negative appendectomies? A retrospective observational study of 274 patients.

BACKGROUND: Multiple disciplines have described an "after-hours effect" relating to worsened mortality and morbidity outside regular working hours. This retrospective observational study aimed to evaluate whether diagnostic accuracy of a common surgical condition worsened after regular hours. METHODS: Electronic operative records for all non-infant patients (age > 4 years) operated on at a single centre for presumed acute appendicitis were retrospectively reviewed over a 56-month period (06/17/2012-02/01/2017). The primary outcome measure of unknown diagnosis was compared between those performed in regular hours (08:00-17:00) or off hours (17:01-07:59). Pre-clinical biochemistry and pre-morbid status were recorded to determine case heterogeneity between the two groups, along with secondary outcomes of length of stay and complication rate. RESULTS: Out of 289 procedures, 274 cases were deemed eligible for inclusion. Of the 133 performed in regular hours, 79% were appendicitis, compared to 74% of the 141 procedures performed off hours. The percentage of patients with an unknown diagnosis was 6% in regular hours compared to 15% off hours (RR 2.48; 95% CI 1.14-5.39). This was accompanied by increased numbers of registrars (residents in training) leading procedures off hours (37% compared to 24% in regular hours). Pre-morbid status, biochemistry, length of stay and post-operative complication rate showed no significant difference. CONCLUSIONS: This retrospective study suggests that the rate of unknown diagnoses for acute appendicitis increases overnight, potentially reflecting increased numbers of unnecessary procedures being performed off hours due to poorer diagnostic accuracy. Reduced levels of staffing, availability of diagnostic modalities and changes to workforce training may explain this, but further prospective work is required. Potential solutions may include protocolizing the management of common acute surgical conditions and making more use of non-resident on call senior colleagues.

A multispecialty study of determining the possibility of pregnancy and the documentation of pregnancy status in surgical patients: a cause for concern?

BACKGROUND: Determining the possibility of pregnancy and the documentation of pregnancy status are important considerations in the assessment of females of reproductive age when admitted to hospital. OBJECTIVES: Our aim was to determine the adequacy of the documentation of pregnancy status and possibility of pregnancy across multiple surgical specialties. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A prospective audit of surgical specialties (general, orthopaedics, urology, vascular, maxillofacial, ENT, gynaecology and neurosurgery) within NHS Tayside, in May 2015. RESULTS: A total of 129 females of reproductive age were admitted; 69 (53.5%) elective and 60 (46.5%) emergencies. Eighty-four patients (65%) were asked 'Is there any possibility of pregnancy?' Pregnancy status was documented in 74% of patients. Eleven (8.5%) patients were not asked about possibility of pregnancy and did not have a documented pregnancy status. Documentation of the use of contraception, sexual activity and date of last menstrual period was noted in 53 (41.1%), 31 (24.0%) and 66 (51.2%) patients, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: There is a wide variation in the documentation of pregnancy status and possibility of pregnancy amongst surgical specialties. This was not an issue in gynaecology but is an issue in ENT, maxillofacial, neurosurgery, vascular and general surgery. The reasons are unclear. Documentation of pregnancy status using ßhCG assays should be the gold standard, and national guidelines are required.

Discriminating dysplasia: Optical tomographic texture analysis of colorectal polyps.

Optical projection tomography enables 3-D imaging of colorectal polyps at resolutions of 5-10 µm. This paper investigates the ability of image analysis based on 3-D texture features to discriminate diagnostic levels of dysplastic change from such images, specifically, low-grade dysplasia, high-grade dysplasia and invasive cancer. We build a patch-based recognition system and evaluate both multi-class classification and ordinal regression formulations on a 90 polyp dataset. 3-D texture representations computed with a hand-crafted feature extractor, random projection, and unsupervised image filter learning are compared using a bag-of-words framework. We measure performance in terms of error rates, F-measures, and ROC surfaces. Results demonstrate that randomly projected features are effective. Discrimination was improved by carefully manipulating various important aspects of the system, including class balancing, output calibration and approximation of non-linear kernels.

Cholecystectomy and the risk of alimentary tract cancers: a systematic review.

AIM: To investigate the association between cholecystectomy and gastro-intestinal tract (GIT) cancers. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review according to the PRISMA guidelines. A MEDLINE search was performed with predefined search criteria for English Language articles on the association between cholecystectomy and GIT cancers. Additional articles were retrieved by manual search of references. All relevant articles were accessed in full text. Data on study type; cases; controls; country; effect estimate; adjustments for confounders and quality of publication were extracted. The quality of the publications were scored by adherence to the STROBE checklist. The data for each part of the GIT were presented in separate tables. RESULTS: Seventy-five studies and 5 meta-analyses satisfied the predefined criteria for inclusion and were included in this review. There were inconsistent reports and no strong evidence of an association between cholecystectomy and cancers of the oesophagus (Adenocarcinoma), pancreas, small bowel and right-sided colon cancers. In squamous cancer of the oesophagus, cancers of the stomach, liver, bile ducts, small bowel and left sided colon cancers, good quality studies suggested a lack of association with cholecystectomy. Equally, distal colon and rectal cancers were found not to be associated with cholecystectomy. Several mechanisms for carcinogenesis/promotion of carcinogensis have been proposed. These have focused on a role for bile salts in carcinogenesis with several potential mutagenic molecular events and gut metabolic hormones signaling cell proliferation or initiation of carcinogenesis. CONCLUSION: This is a comprehensive review of the association between GIT cancers and cholecystectomy. This review found no clear association between cholecystectomy and GIT cancers.

Learning from partially annotated OPT images by contextual relevance ranking.

Annotations delineating regions of interest can provide valuable information for training medical image classification and segmentation methods. However the process of obtaining annotations is tedious and time-consuming, especially for high-resolution volumetric images. In this paper we present a novel learning framework to reduce the requirement of manual annotations while achieving competitive classification performance. The approach is evaluated on a dataset with 59 3D optical projection tomography images of colorectal polyps. The results show that the proposed method can robustly infer patterns from partially annotated images with low computational cost.