Dental bitewing radiographs segmentation using deep learning-based convolutional neural network algorithms.

OBJECTIVES: Dental radiographs, particularly bitewing radiographs, are widely used in dental diagnosis and treatment Dental image segmentation is difficult for various reasons, such as intricate structures, low contrast, noise, roughness, and unclear borders, resulting in poor image quality. Recent developments in deep learning models have improved performance in analyzing dental images. In this research, our primary objective is to determine the most effective segmentation technique for bitewing radiographs based on different metrics: accuracy, training time, and the number of training parameters as a reflection of architectural cost. METHODS: In this research, we employ several deep learning models, namely Resnet-18, Resnet-50, Xception, Inception Resnet v2, and Mobilenetv2, to segment bitewing radiographs. The process begins by importing the radiographs into MATLAB®(MathWorks Inc), where the images are first improved, then segmented using the graph cut method based on regions to produce a binary mask that distinguishes the background from the original X-ray. RESULTS: The deep learning models were trained on 298 and 99 radiograph training and validation sets and were evaluated using 99 images from the testing set. We also compare the segmentation model using several criteria, including accuracy, speed, and size, to determine which network is superior. Furthermore, we compare our findings with prior research to provide a comprehensive understanding of the advancements made in dental image segmentation. The accurate segmentation achieved was 93.67% and 94.42% by the Resnet-18 and Resnet-50 models, respectively. CONCLUSION: This research advances dental image analysis and facilitates more accurate diagnoses and treatment planning by determining the best segmentation technique. The outcomes of this study can guide researchers and practitioners in selecting appropriate segmentation methods for practical dental image analysis.

Terminology focused on design and retention methods used for anterior resin-bonded fixed partial dentures in English literature: A scoping review.

Purpose: Novel terms describing several designs of resin-bonded fixed partial dentures (RBFPDs) continue to appear. Indeed, a variety of terms are used in the English scientific literature The use of a standard terminology is important for a fair and efficient understanding. This study aimed to investigate if the terminology used to describe designs and retention methods for anterior RBFPDs is standard. Methods: An electronic search in the English literature was conducted in PubMed/Medline to identify all publications reporting RBFPDs in the anterior region until August 2022. This search was completed by hand searching. Terms indicating different designs of RBFPDs were listed and then classified. Percentages of their use were calculated to determine the commonly used terms. Analysis of the use of these terms was performed based on the standards determined by the latest edition of the Glossary of Prosthodontic Terms (GPT). The impacts of the MeSH Thesaurus and GPT on the nomenclature used for RBFPDs was assessed. Results: A total of 125 articles were eligible for this review. In the retained articles, 86 terms were found. Among them, thirty-nine terms were classified into three groups. Only six terms were defined in the latest edition of GPT (GPT-9). Several classified terms that are commonly used were not identified in the GPT-9. Conversely to the GPT-9 which impact was insignificant, the MeSH Thesaurus had an important impact on the nomenclature used for RBFPDs. Conclusion: The terminology used to describe designs and retention methods for anterior RBFPDs was non-standard. The GPT-9, constituting an important reference, defined a limited number of terms related to RBFPDs and had no significant impact on the standardization of the terminology used for RBFPDs. Efforts should therefore be continued to standardize the terminology. A specialized mini-glossary grouping and defining all the terms found in this study will helpful in clarifying the terminology used for the anterior RBFPDs.

Development and validation of search filters to retrieve medication discontinuation articles in Medline and Embase.

BACKGROUND: Medication discontinuation studies explore the outcomes of stopping a medication compared to continuing it. Comprehensively identifying medication discontinuation articles in bibliographic databases remains challenging due to variability in terminology. OBJECTIVES: To develop and validate search filters to retrieve medication discontinuation articles in Medline and Embase. METHODS: We identified medication discontinuation articles in a convenience sample of systematic reviews. We used primary articles to create two reference sets for Medline and Embase, respectively. The reference sets were equally divided by randomization in development sets and validation sets. Terms relevant for discontinuation were identified by term frequency analysis in development sets and combined to develop two search filters that maximized relative recalls. The filters were validated against validation sets. Relative recalls were calculated with their 95% confidences intervals (95% CI). RESULTS: We included 316 articles for Medline and 407 articles for Embase, from 15 systematic reviews. The Medline optimized search filter combined 7 terms. The Embase optimized search filter combined 8 terms. The relative recalls were respectively 92% (95% CI: 87-96) and 91% (95% CI: 86-94). CONCLUSIONS: We developed two search filters for retrieving medication discontinuation articles in Medline and Embase. Further research is needed to estimate precision and specificity of the filters.

Producción científica europea sobre los cuidados de salud a domicilio indizada en la base de datos bibliográfica Scopus / European scientific production on home health care indexed in the Scopus bibliographic database

Objetivo: Analizar, mediante técnicas bibliomé-tricas, la producción científica europea sobre cuidados de salud a domicilio (HaD) indizada en la base de datos bibliográfica Scopus.Método: Estudio descriptivo transversal. Los datos se obtuvieron de la base de datos Sco-pus, interrogando con el término “Home Care”los campos de registro de título, resumen y pa-labras clave; fecha final de búsqueda septiem-bre 2023.Resultados: Se obtuvo un total de 90830 refe-rencias a nivel mundial, teniendo 27251 (30,0%) de ellas filiación europea. La relación anual del número de publicaciones mostró un modelo de regresión lineal directo (R2 = 0,6; p < 0,001). La tipología documental más frecuente fue el artículo original con 20225 (74,2%) referencias, siendo el índice de productividad de 4,3. El se-miperiodo de Burton-Kebler fue de 53,5 años, con máximo de 110 y mínimo de 0 años, con índice de Price (IP) del 4,6%. Se identificaron trabajos publicados en 32 distintos idiomas, siendo el inglés la lengua predominante en las publicaciones sobre HaD con 22391 (82,2%) trabajos.Conclusiones: Se observó un incremento progresivo, no exponencial, de la producción científica sobre HaD, siendo el artículo original la tipología documental principal, si bien la ob-solescencia mostró resultados superiores a lo esperado. Existió predominio del idioma inglés y de la filiación anglosajona. La temática publi-cada estuvo en consonancia con el área de las ciencias de la salud y el campo de HaD. (AU)

Objective: To analize by means of bibliometric technics the European scientific production on home health care (HaD) indexed in Scopus bib-liographical database.Method: Cross-sectional descriptive study. Data were obtained from Scopus database. The term “Home Care” was used to interrogate the fields of title, abstract and keywords. Search fi-nal date September 2023.Results: A total of 90830 references were ob-tained worldwide. 27251 (30%) of the referenc-es had European affiliation. The annual relation of the number of publications showed a direct linear regression model (R2 = 0,6; p < 0,001). The original article was the most frequent docu-mentary typology founded with 20225 (74.2%) references. The productivity index was 4.3 and the Burton-Kebler index was 53.5 years with a máximum of 110 and a mínimum of 0 years. The Price index was 4.6%. Articles published in 32 different languages were identified being Eng-lish the predominant language in publications on HaD with 22391 (82.2%) works.Conclusions: A progressive, non-exponential increase in scientific production on HaD was observed with the original article being the main documentary typology, although obsolescence showed results higher than expected. There was a predominance of the English language and Anglo-Saxon affiliation. Topics were in line with the area of health sciences and the field of HaD. (AU)

Large-scale investigation of weakly-supervised deep learning for the fine-grained semantic indexing of biomedical literature.

OBJECTIVE: Semantic indexing of biomedical literature is usually done at the level of MeSH descriptors with several related but distinct biomedical concepts often grouped together and treated as a single topic. This study proposes a new method for the automated refinement of subject annotations at the level of MeSH concepts. METHODS: Lacking labelled data, we rely on weak supervision based on concept occurrence in the abstract of an article, which is also enhanced by dictionary-based heuristics. In addition, we investigate deep learning approaches, making design choices to tackle the particular challenges of this task. The new method is evaluated on a large-scale retrospective scenario, based on concepts that have been promoted to descriptors. RESULTS: In our experiments concept occurrence was the strongest heuristic achieving a macro-F1 score of about 0.63 across several labels. The proposed method improved it further by more than 4pp. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that concept occurrence is a strong heuristic for refining the coarse-grained labels at the level of MeSH concepts and the proposed method improves it further.

Magnitude of undernutrition and its association with dietary diversity among older persons in Ethiopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis, 2023.

Undernutrition in elders remains under-detected, under-treated, and under-resourced and leads to further weight loss, increased infections, and delay in recovery from illness as well as increased hospital admissions and length of stay. The reports of the findings were fragmented and inconsistent in Ethiopia. Therefore, the main objective of this meta-analysis was to estimate the pooled prevalence of undernutrition and its association with dietary diversity among older persons in Ethiopia. Online databases (Medline, PubMed, Scopus, and Science Direct), Google, Google Scholar, and other grey literature were used to search articles until the date of publication. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guideline was followed. The random effect model was used to estimate the pooled prevalence; whereas subgroup analysis and meta-regression were performed to identify the probable source of heterogeneity using Stata version 14.0 software. Out of 522 studies accessed, 14 met our criteria and were included in the study. A total of 7218 older people (aged above 60 years old) were included in the study. The pooled proportion of undernutrition among older persons in Ethiopia was 20⋅6 % (95 % CI 17⋅3, 23⋅8). Elders who consumed low dietary diversity scores were strongly associated with undernutrition among older persons. Therefore, promoting appropriate intervention strategies for elders to improve dietary diversity practices and nutritional status is crucial.

Sleep disturbance and fatigue in multiple sclerosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Sleep disturbance is common in people with multiple sclerosis and may worsen fatigue; however, the assessment of sleep-fatigue relationships varies across studies. To better understand sleep-fatigue relationships in this population, we conducted a systematic review and random effects meta-analyses for the associations between fatigue and 10 sleep variables: Sleep-disordered breathing, daytime sleepiness, sleep quality, insomnia, restless legs, number of awakenings, sleep efficiency, sleep latency, sleep duration, and wake after sleep onset. Of the 1062 studies screened, 46 met inclusion criteria and provided sufficient data for calculating Hedges' g. Study quality was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. Sample characteristics did not differ between the 10 analyses. Results indicated that sleep quality and insomnia (assessed via self-report or diagnostic criteria) were strongly associated with fatigue (all gs ≥ 0.80 and all ps < .001). In contrast, the number of awakenings and sleep duration (assessed objectively) were not significantly associated with fatigue. Remaining sleep variables yielded moderate, significant effects. Most effects did not vary based on study quality or sample demographics. Results highlight that insomnia and perceptions of poor sleep have a stronger link than objective sleep duration to fatigue in multiple sclerosis and may represent a more effective target for intervention.

Writing strategies for improving the access of medical literature.

When conducting a literature review, medical authors typically search for relevant keywords in bibliographic databases or on search engines like Google. After selecting the most pertinent article based on the title's relevance and the abstract's content, they download or purchase the article and cite it in their manuscript. Three major elements influence whether an article will be cited in future manuscripts: the keywords, the title, and the abstract. This indicates that these elements are the "key dissemination tools" for research papers. If these three elements are not determined judiciously by authors, it may adversely affect the manuscript's retrievability, readability, and citation index, which can negatively impact both the author and the journal. In this article, we share our informed perspective on writing strategies to enhance the searchability and citation of medical articles. These strategies are adopted from the principles of search engine optimization, but they do not aim to cheat or manipulate the search engine. Instead, they adopt a reader-centric content writing methodology that targets well-researched keywords to the readers who are searching for them. Reputable journals, such as Nature and the British Medical Journal, emphasize "online searchability" in their author guidelines. We hope that this article will encourage medical authors to approach manuscript drafting from the perspective of "looking inside-out." In other words, they should not only draft manuscripts around what they want to convey to fellow researchers but also integrate what the readers want to discover. It is a call-to-action to better understand and engage search engine algorithms, so they yield information in a desired and self-learning manner because the "Cloud" is the new stakeholder.

WeakMeSH: Leveraging provenance information for weakly supervised classification of biomedical articles with emerging MeSH descriptors.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a hierarchically structured thesaurus created by the National Library of Medicine of USA. Each year the vocabulary gets revised, bringing forth different types of changes. Those of particular interest are the ones that introduce new descriptors in the vocabulary either brand new or those who come up as a product of a complex change. These new descriptors often lack ground truth articles and rendering learning models that require supervision not applicable. Furthermore, this problem is characterized by its multi label nature and the fine-grained character of the descriptors that play the role of classes, requiring expert supervision and a lot of human resources. In this work, we alleviate these issues through retrieving insights from provenance information about those descriptors present in MeSH to create a weakly labeled train set for them. At the same time, we make use of a similarity mechanism to further filter the weak labels obtained through the descriptor information mentioned earlier. Our method, called WeakMeSH, was applied on a large-scale subset of the BioASQ 2018 data set consisting of 900 thousand biomedical articles. The performance of our method was evaluated on BioASQ 2020 against several other approaches that had given competitive results in similar problems in the past, or apply alternative transformations against the proposed one, as well as some variants that showcase the importance of each different component of our proposed approach. Finally, an analysis was performed on the different MeSH descriptors each year to assess the applicability of our method on the thesaurus.

A Digital Health Initiative (COVIDsmart) for Remote Data Collection and Study of COVID-19's Impact on the State of Virginia: Prospective Cohort Study.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected people's lives beyond severe and long-term physical health symptoms. Social distancing and quarantine have led to adverse mental health outcomes. COVID-19-induced economic setbacks have also likely exacerbated the psychological distress affecting broader aspects of physical and mental well-being. Remote digital health studies can provide information about the pandemic's socioeconomic, mental, and physical impact. COVIDsmart was a collaborative effort to deploy a complex digital health research study to understand the impact of the pandemic on diverse populations. We describe how digital tools were used to capture the effects of the pandemic on the overall well-being of diverse communities across large geographical areas within the state of Virginia. OBJECTIVE: The aim is to describe the digital recruitment strategies and data collection tools applied in the COVIDsmart study and share the preliminary study results. METHODS: COVIDsmart conducted digital recruitment, e-Consent, and survey collection through a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act-compliant digital health platform. This is an alternative to the traditional in-person recruitment and onboarding method used for studies. Participants in Virginia were actively recruited over 3 months using widespread digital marketing strategies. Six months of data were collected remotely on participant demographics, COVID-19 clinical parameters, health perceptions, mental and physical health, resilience, vaccination status, education or work functioning, social or family functioning, and economic impact. Data were collected using validated questionnaires or surveys, completed in a cyclical fashion and reviewed by an expert panel. To retain a high level of engagement throughout the study, participants were incentivized to stay enrolled and complete more surveys to further their chances of receiving a monthly gift card and one of multiple grand prizes. RESULTS: Virtual recruitment demonstrated relatively high rates of interest in Virginia (N=3737), and 782 (21.1%) consented to participate in the study. The most successful recruitment technique was the effective use of newsletters or emails (n=326, 41.7%). The primary reason for contributing as a study participant was advancing research (n=625, 79.9%), followed by the need to give back to their community (n=507, 64.8%). Incentives were only reported as a reason among 21% (n=164) of the consented participants. Overall, the primary reason for contributing as a study participant was attributed to altruism at 88.6% (n=693). CONCLUSIONS: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for digital transformation in research. COVIDsmart is a statewide prospective cohort to study the impact of COVID-19 on Virginians' social, physical, and mental health. The study design, project management, and collaborative efforts led to the development of effective digital recruitment, enrollment, and data collection strategies to evaluate the pandemic's effects on a large, diverse population. These findings may inform effective recruitment techniques across diverse communities and participants' interest in remote digital health studies.

Principales tecnologías de indización en las ciencias de la salud que se emplean en Occidente / Main indexing healthcare technologies used in West

En la actualidad, las tecnologías de indización en las ciencias de la salud están aportando mu-chos beneficios para el ámbito biomédico y la estandarización de su correspondiente termino-logía, puesto que esta cuestión es fundamental para lograr un diagnóstico médico más preciso e inequívoco Por esta razón, en este artículo se ha explicado con detalle cómo funcionan estas tecnologías: Terminología Anatómica In-ternacional (TAI), Medical Subject Headings y el Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Cli-nical terminology (SNOMED CT), así como, las razones de la importancia de su uso para los sanitarios y los terminólogos.(AU)

Nowadays, healthcare indexing technologies are profiting the biomedical field and the stand-ardization of its corresponding terminology, since this is essential to achieve a more pre-cise and unequivocal medical diagnosis. Thus, in this article it has been performed a thorough explanation on how these healthcare technolo-gies work: International Anatomical Terminology (TAI), Medical Subject Headings and the Sys-tematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical terminology (SNOMED CT), as well as it was elucidated the reasons of its use for healthcare professionals and terminologists.(AU)

Updated generic search filters for finding studies of adverse drug effects in Ovid medline and Embase may retrieve up to 90% of relevant studies.

BACKGROUND: The most current objectively derived search filters for adverse drug effects are 15 years old and other strategies have not been developed and tested empirically. OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate search filters to retrieve evidence on adverse drug effects from Ovid medline and Ovid Embase. METHODS: We identified systematic reviews of adverse drug effects in Epistemonikos. From these reviews, we collated their included studies which we then randomly divided into three tests and one validation set of records. We constructed a search strategy to maximise relative recall using word frequency analysis with test set one. This search strategy was then refined using test sets two and three and validated on the final set of records. RESULTS: Of 107 systematic reviews which met our inclusion criteria, 1948 unique included studies were available from medline and 1980 from Embase. Generic adverse drug effects searches in medline and Embase achieved 90% and 89% relative recall, respectively. When specific adverse effects terms were added recall was improved. CONCLUSION: We have derived and validated search filters that retrieve around 90% of records with adverse drug effects data in medline and Embase. The addition of specific adverse effects terms is required to achieve higher recall.

Do social media campaigns foster vaccination adherence? A systematic review of prior intervention-based campaigns on social media.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of large-scale campaigns to facilitate vaccination adherence. Social media presents unique opportunities to reach broader audiences and reduces the costs of conducting national or global campaigns aimed at achieving herd immunity. Nonetheless, few studies have reviewed the effectiveness of prior social media campaigns for vaccination adherence, and several prior studies have shown that social media campaigns do not increase uptake rates. Hence, our objective is to conduct a systematic review to examine the effectiveness of social media campaigns and to identify the reasons for the mixed results of prior studies. Our methodology began with a search of seven databases, which resulted in the identification of 92 interventions conducted over digital media. Out of these 92 studies, only 15 adopted social media campaigns for immunization. We analyzed these 15 studies, along with a coding scheme we developed based on reviews of both health interventions and social media campaigns. Multiple coders, who were knowledgeable about social media campaigns and healthcare, analyzed the 15 cases and obtained an acceptable level of inter-coder reliability (> .80). The results from our systematic review show that only a few social media campaigns have succeeded in enhancing vaccination adherence. In addition, few campaigns have utilized known critical success factors of social media to induce vaccination adherence. Based on these findings, we discuss a set of research questions that informatics scholars should consider when identifying opportunities for using social media to resolve one of the most resilient challenges in public health. Finally, we conclude by discussing how the insights drawn from our systematic reviews contribute to advancing theories, such as social influence and the health belief model, into the realm of social media-based health interventions.

Use of 'Pharmaceutical services' Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in articles assessing pharmacists' interventions.

Background: Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus contribute towards efficient searching of biomedical information. However, insufficient coverage of specific fields and inaccuracies in the indexing of articles can lead to bias during literature retrieval. Objectives: This meta-research study aimed to assess the use of 'Pharmaceutical Services' MeSH terms in studies evaluating the effect of pharmacists' interventions. Methods: An updated systematic search (Jan-2022) to gather meta-analyses comparing pharmacists' interventions vs. other forms of care was performed. All MeSH terms allocated to the MEDLINE record of each primary study included in the selected meta-analyses were systematically extracted. Terms from the 'Pharmaceutical Services' branch, including its descendants, as well as other 26 pharmacy-specific MeSH terms were identified. The assignment of these terms as a 'Major MeSH' was also evaluated. Descriptive statistics and social network analyses to evaluate the co-occurrence of the MeSH terms in the articles were conducted. Sensitivity analyses including only meta-analyses with declared objectives mentioning the words 'pharmacist' or 'pharmacy' were performed (SPSS v.24.0). Results: Overall, 138 meta-analyses including 2012 primary articles were evaluated. A median of 15 [IQR 12-18] MeSH terms were assigned per article with a slight positive time-trend (Spearman rho = 0.193; p < 0.001). Only 36.6% (n = 736/2012) and 58.1% (n = 338/1099) of studies were indexed with one MeSH term from the 'Pharmaceutical Services' branch in the overall and sensitivity analyses, respectively. In <20% of cases, these terms were a 'Major MeSH'. The pharmacy-specific term 'Pharmacists' was the most frequently used, yet in only 27.8% and 47.7% of articles in the original and sensitivity analyses, respectively. Social networks showed a weak association between pharmacy-specific and 'Pharmaceutical services' branch MeSH terms. Conclusions: The availability of a 'Pharmaceutical services' branch hierarchic tree and further pharmacy-specific MeSH terms incorporated to the MeSH thesaurus in the past years is not related with accurate indexing of articles.

Prevalence of exposure to pharmacogenetic drugs by the Saudis treated at the health care centers of the Ministry of National Guard.

Background: The drugs impacted by genetic variants are known as pharmacogenetic (PGx) drugs. Patients' responses to these drugs may vary according to the variability in patients' genetic makeup. Hence, exploring the pharmacogenes that affect drug treatment is vital to ensure optimal therapy and patients' safety. This study aimed to describe the usage rate of PGx drugs and the frequency of relevant variants in the Saudi population. Methodology: Prescription patterns over seven years (2015-2021) for Saudi patients on PGx drugs treated at the Ministry of National Guard-Health Affairs (MNG-HA) were investigated. Only registered drugs in the MNG-HA formulary (n = 78) were included. The patients were subgrouped into four age groups: ≤24, 25-44, 45-64, and ≥65 years. Further subgrouping was made according to gender and drugs' therapeutic categories following anatomical therapeutic chemical (ATC) classification.Furthermore, an online searching was carried out to identify the pharmacogenes reported in the literature among healthy Saudis. The search included 45 genes that may affect drug outcomes based on evidence rated by either CPIC (A-B levels) or PharmGKB (1-2 levels). Results: The screened patients were 1,483,905. Patients on PGx drugs accounted for 46.7% (n = 693,077 patients). The analgesic group was the most prescribed drug category (47%), which included ibuprofen (20.5%), celecoxib (6.3%), tramadol (5.8%), and others. Cardiovascular agents were the second-most utilized drug class (24.4%). Omeprazole was the second most commonly used medication (11.1%) but ranked third as a class (gastroenterology). Females used PGx drugs more frequently than males (53.5% versus 46.5%) and a higher usage rate by patients aged 45-64 years (31.3%) was noted. The cytochrome P450 genes (CYP2C9, CYP2C19, and CYP2D6) were estimated to impact responses of 54.3% (n = 1,156,113) of the used drugs (27.2% are possibly affected by CYP2C9, 12.8% by CYP2C19, and 14.3% by CYP2D6). Thirty-five pharmacogenes that characterize Saudi population and their variants' allele frequencies were identified from previous reports. This study presents the largest reported number of genes that may affect drug therapies among Saudis. Conclusion: This study confirmed that a high percentage of Saudi patients use PGx drugs and various genotypes of certain pharmacogenes are inherited by the Saudi population.

Literature-based drug-drug similarity for drug repurposing: impact of Medical Subject Headings term refinement and hierarchical clustering.

Background: We describe herein, an improved procedure for drug repurposing based on refined Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms and hierarchical clustering method. Materials & methods: In the present study, we have employed MeSH data from MEDLINE (2019), 1669 US FDA approved drugs from Open FDA and a refined set of MeSH terms. Refinement of MeSH terms was performed to include terms related to mechanistic information of drugs and diseases. Results and Conclusions: In-depth analysis of the results obtained, demonstrated greater efficiency of the proposed approach, based on refined MeSH terms and hierarchical clustering, in terms of number of selected drug candidates for repurposing. Further, analysis of misclustering and size of noise clusters suggest that the proposed approach is reliable and can be employed in drug repurposing.

Scientometric assessment of scientific documents published in 2020 on herbal medicines used for COVID-19.

Objective: Many studies have suggested herbal medicines as alternatives or adjuvants to modern drugs for COVID-19. Their scientometric analyses can provide a scientific overview of this topic. Materials and methods: Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus were searched for articles on the use of herbal medicines in COVID-19 published until 26 October 2020. Collected data were analyzed for document type, subject area, top journal, citation number, and authors' collaboration network using VOSviewer 1.6.15, ScientoPy 2.0.3, Gephi 0.9.2, and SPSS 15 statistical tools. Results: After screening the 3185 retrieved records, 378 and 849 records, respectively from WOS and Scopus, remained for quantity analysis. Original and review articles were the two main types of papers in both databases. Top subject areas were drug and medicine, respectively in the WOS and Scopus databases. The top three productive countries in the field were China, the US, and India. The most cited article was a practice guideline in both databases. "Journal of Biomolecular Structure Dynamics" in WOS and "Chinese Traditional and Herbal Drugs" in Scopus were the top journals. Top keywords included "COVID-19″ and "Traditional Chinese Medicine". US authors had the highest collaboration with other authors. Conclusions: The current study provides a snapshot of the quantity and characteristics of published scholarly documents in recent months in the intersection of herbal medicines and COVID-19. Our findings help scientists to find the existing gaps, identify the active authors and scientific institutes to collaborate with and use their experience to produce new knowledge in the future.

Usability Evaluation of a Modern Multilingual MeSH Browser.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is one of the most important vocabularies for information retrieval in medical research. It enables fast and reliable retrieval of research on PubMed/MEDLINE, the world's largest body of medical literature. The original English version of the thesaurus can be accessed via a MeSH Browser developed by the NLM. Recently, a multilingual MeSH Browser was proposed to enable usage across languages. To improve upon the original system, a new user interface (UI) was developed using contemporary web design frameworks in combination with principles from cognitive science. It aims to simplify access for medical professionals and increase overall usability. Evaluating such design improvements continually is necessary to quantify the possible positive impact for online systems in medical research. This study therefore directly compares the resulting system to the NLM Browser, using an established online questionnaire. Results show significant improvements in content and navigation as well as overall user satisfaction, while offering feedback for future improvements. This underlines the benefits of employing contemporary web design in terms of usability and user satisfaction.

Associations between partial foot amputation level, gait parameters, and minimum impairment criteria in para-sport: A research study protocol.

Altered biomechanics due to amputation can contribute to substantial limitations, influencing sporting activities. Individuals with lower extremity amputations or congenital lower limb deficiency are encouraged to participate in para-sports. However, to compete in Paralympic sports, the candidate must have an impairment that results in lower extremity loss of function and meets or exceeds the sport's minimum impairment criteria (MIC). This review will focus on the MIC for competitive wheelchair tennis. Limb deficiency is known as one of the MIC used to regulate participation in competitive para-sports since it impacts gait, kinematics, and biomechanics of both the upper and lower body. Notwithstanding, it is questionable whether the MIC concerning limb deficiency is set at the correct level for determining eligibility for participating in Paralympic sports. This study aims to provide an overview of the evidence examining the impact of different partial foot amputation (PFA) levels on gait as a proxy for sporting performance. This scoping review will be based on a 6-step methodological framework and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis, extension for scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Studies will be selected from PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and SPORTDiscus. Two authors will screen the titles/abstracts independently. Selected studies will be scrutinised, and the same authors will extract data. Findings will be relevant to informing the evidence-based development of MIC for lower limb impairment after PFA and may be extrapolated to specific Paralympic sports, including wheelchair tennis. Results will be disseminated through scientific publications and conferences to audiences interested in Paralympic sports.

Assessing the effects of exercise on post-partum fatigue symptoms: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: The level of activity in women who have given birth is very low despite the great benefits of exercise on their physical and mental health. There are some contradictories between the results of several preliminary studies on the effects of exercise on post-partum fatigue reduction. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the effects of exercise on decreasing postpartum fatigue in general and, specifically, in Iran using meta-analysis. Methods: In this study, the articles printed in international and national centres of SID, MagIran, IranMedex, IranDoc, Cochrane, Embase, ScienceDirect, Scopus, PubMed and Web of Science (WoS), were used to find the studies electronically published up to 2021. The studies' heterogeneity was examined using the I2 index, and subsequently, a random-effects model was applied. Data analysis was performed within the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software (version 2). Results: Finally, nine articles met the inclusion criteria in this systematic and meta-analysis review. The included samples were 456 patients in the intervention group and 446 in the control group. The mean score of fatigue after the intervention was 8.1 ± 1.1 lower than before intervention in the experimental group, and this difference was statistically significant (p ≤ 0.001). Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that exercise reduces postpartum fatigue, which can be used for counseling and treatment by gynecologists. Reduce postpartum problems in women and increase the quality of life after childbirth.