Artificial Intelligence and Child Abuse and Neglect: A Systematic Review.

All societies should carefully address the child abuse and neglect phenomenon due to its acute and chronic sequelae. Even if artificial intelligence (AI) implementation in this field could be helpful, the state of the art of this implementation is not known. No studies have comprehensively reviewed the types of AI models that have been developed/validated. Furthermore, no indications about the risk of bias in these studies are available. For these reasons, the authors conducted a systematic review of the PubMed database to answer the following questions: "what is the state of the art about the development and/or validation of AI predictive models useful to contrast child abuse and neglect phenomenon?"; "which is the risk of bias of the included articles?". The inclusion criteria were: articles written in English and dated from January 1985 to 31 March 2023; publications that used a medical and/or protective service dataset to develop and/or validate AI prediction models. The reviewers screened 413 articles. Among them, seven papers were included. Their analysis showed that: the types of input data were heterogeneous; artificial neural networks, convolutional neural networks, and natural language processing were used; the datasets had a median size of 2600 cases; the risk of bias was high for all studies. The results of the review pointed out that the implementation of AI in the child abuse and neglect field lagged compared to other medical fields. Furthermore, the evaluation of the risk of bias suggested that future studies should provide an appropriate choice of sample size, validation, and management of overfitting, optimism, and missing data.

Traumatic hemorrhage of the thyroid as a work-related injury: a case report and review of the literature.

Traumatic hemorrhage of the thyroid gland resulting from blunt injury to the neck is a very rare event. Particular neck positions can expose the thyroid to trauma, especially in motor vehicle collisions, falls, direct blows, or sport activities. Preexisting conditions such as goiters, adenomas, and cysts can increase the risk of bleeding, reducing the force required to rupture the gland and make the thyroid more prone to injury. The authors report the case of a 53-year-old man who was involved in a fire while working on maintenance of a liquid petroleum gas (LPG)-powered car. He subsequently presented to the emergency department with painful swelling of his right anterior neck with a palpable mass. CT scan showed a right thyroid hemorrhagic cyst. The worker reported that he had jumped into the car trunk to extinguish the fire and covered the gas tank nozzle with his own body to prevent dispersal of the accelerant. In this case, the medico-legal evaluation was useful to delineate between natural and traumatic causes of the injury. Medico-legal assessment is key in understanding the dynamics involved in work-related events to identify any legal responsibilities of the worker or the employer.