METHODS: A total of 41 patients with large SETs (≥3 cm in diameter) located in the cardia were involved in the study. All patients underwent ESD. Data on therapeutic outcomes and follow-up were collected, for analysis of risk factors of complication rates.
RESULTS: The average tumor size was 4.7 ± 1.7 cm. The average procedure time was 69.3 ± 32.7 min and the average postoperative hospital stay was 3.5 ± 1.1 days. A total of 41 tumors were removed successfully, in which 35 were leiomyomas, three were gastrointestinal stromal tumors, two were lipomas, and one was gastritis cystica profunda. The en bloc resection rate was 90.2%, and was significantly higher for tumors with a round or oval shape (100%) than for those with an irregular shape (75.0%) (P
METHODS: We conducted a before-and-after trial with 5008 consecutive ED-treated hospital admissions in the control period and 5146 consecutive admissions in the intervention period. During the control period (18 February 2008 to 17 August 2008), patients received standard i.v. fluids. During the intervention period (18 February 2009 to 17 August 2009), we restricted all chloride-rich fluids. We used the Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) staging to define AKI.
RESULTS: Stage 3 of KDIGO-defined AKI decreased from 54 (1.1%; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.8-1.4) to 30 (0.6%; 95% CI 0.4-0.8) (P = 0.006). The rate of renal replacement therapy did not change, from 13 (0.3%; 95% CI 0.2-0.4) to 8 (0.2%; 95% CI 0.1-0.3) (P = 0.25). After adjustment for relevant covariates, liberal chloride therapy remained associated with a greater risk of KDIGO stage 3 (hazard ratio 1.82; 95% CI 1.13-2.95; P = 0.01). On sensitivity assessment after removing repeat admissions, KDIGO stage 3 remained significantly lower in the intervention period compared with the control period (P = 0.01).
CONCLUSION: In a before-and-after trial, a chloride-restrictive strategy in an ED was associated with a significant decrease in the incidence of stage 3 of KDIGO-defined AKI.
METHODS: A part prospective, part retrospective study of children aged <15 years with culture-confirmed melioidosis was conducted in the 3 major public hospitals in Central Sarawak between 2009 and 2014. We examined epidemiological, clinical and microbiological characteristics.
FINDINGS: Forty-two patients were recruited during the 6-year study period. The overall annual incidence was estimated to be 4.1 per 100,000 children <15 years, with marked variation between districts. No children had pre-existing medical conditions. Twenty-three (55%) had disseminated disease, 10 (43%) of whom died. The commonest site of infection was the lungs, which occurred in 21 (50%) children. Other important sites of infection included lymph nodes, spleen, joints and lacrimal glands. Seven (17%) children had bacteremia with no overt focus of infection. Delays in diagnosis and in melioidosis-appropriate antibiotic treatment were observed in nearly 90% of children. Of the clinical isolates tested, 35/36 (97%) were susceptible to gentamicin. Of these, all 11 isolates that were genotyped were of a single multi-locus sequence type, ST881, and possessed the putative B. pseudomallei virulence determinants bimABp, fhaB3, and the YLF gene cluster.
CONCLUSIONS: Central Sarawak has a very high incidence of pediatric melioidosis, caused predominantly by gentamicin-susceptible B. pseudomallei strains. Children frequently presented with disseminated disease and had an alarmingly high death rate, despite the absence of any apparent predisposing risk factor.
METHODS: The dataset used in this study has been acquired by the Singapore Eye Research Institute (SERI), using CIRRUS TM (Carl Zeiss Meditec, Inc., Dublin, CA, USA) SD-OCT device. The dataset consists of 32 OCT volumes (16 DME and 16 normal cases). Each volume contains 128 B-scans with resolution of 1024 px × 512 px, resulting in more than 3800 images being processed. All SD-OCT volumes are read and assessed by trained graders and identified as normal or DME cases based on evaluation of retinal thickening, hard exudates, intraretinal cystoid space formation, and subretinal fluid. Within the DME sub-set, a large number of lesions has been selected to create a rather complete and diverse DME dataset. This paper presents an automatic classification framework for SD-OCT volumes in order to identify DME versus normal volumes. In this regard, a generic pipeline including pre-processing, feature detection, feature representation, and classification was investigated. More precisely, extraction of histogram of oriented gradients and local binary pattern (LBP) features within a multiresolution approach is used as well as principal component analysis (PCA) and bag of words (BoW) representations.
RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: Besides comparing individual and combined features, different representation approaches and different classifiers are evaluated. The best results are obtained for LBP[Formula: see text] vectors while represented and classified using PCA and a linear-support vector machine (SVM), leading to a sensitivity(SE) and specificity (SP) of 87.5 and 87.5%, respectively.