Many human-targeted medications have been found to impact the composition of patients’ gastrointestinal microbiomes, which has been proposed as an unrecognized source of drug side effects, comorbidities, and reduced treatment efficiencies. However, current methods to detect such drug effects on the microbiome largely rely on patient sample analysis or in vitro high-throughput screening – which…
Differences in CT-based body composition (BC) have been observed by race. We sought to investigate whether indices reporting census block group-level disadvantage, area deprivation index (ADI) and social vulnerability index (SVI), age, sex, and/or clinical factors could explain race-based differences in body composition. Methods The first abdominal CT exams for patients in Durham County at…
The Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) cluster of challenges has significantly advanced brain tumor image analysis by providing large, curated datasets and addressing clinically relevant tasks. However, despite its success and popularity, algorithms and models developed through BraTS have seen limited adoption in both scientific and clinical communities. To accelerate their dissemination, we introduce BraTS orchestrator,…
Large language models (LLMs) have performed well across various clinical natural language processing tasks, despite not being directly trained on electronic health record (EHR) data. In this work, we examine how popular open-source LLMs learn clinical information from large mined corpora through two crucial but understudied lenses: (1) their interpretation of clinical jargon, a foundational…
OBJECTIVES: To develop the first core Critical Care Data Dictionary (C2D2) with common data elements (CDEs) to characterize critical illness and injuries. DESIGN: Group consensus process using modified Delphi approach. SETTING: Electronic surveys and in-person meetings. SUBJECTS: A multidisciplinary workgroup of clinicians and researchers with expertise in the care of the critically ill and injured….
Diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) allows label-free, non-invasive investigation of microvascular dynamics deep within tissue, such as cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in DCS limits its effective cerebral sensitivity in adults, in which the depth to the brain, through the scalp and skull, is substantially larger than in infants.Therefore, we aim to…
Jessilyn Dunn gathers biometric data from smartwatches to study and predict health changes. Read the article
Monitoring disease development in arteries, which supply oxygen and nutrients to the body, is crucial and can be assessed using hemodynamic metrics. Hemodynamic metrics can be calculated via computational fluid dynamic simulation of patient-specific geometries. These simulations are known to be heavily influenced by boundary conditions, such as time-dependent inlet flow. However, the effects of…
Virtual planning tools that provide intuitive user interaction and immediate hemodynamic feedback are crucial for cardiologists to effectively treat coronary artery disease. Current FDA-approved tools for coronary intervention planning require days of preliminary processing and rely on conventional 2D displays for hemodynamic evaluation. Immersion offered by extended reality (XR) has been found to benefit intervention…
In mammalian cells, the cohesin protein complex is believed to translocate along chromatin during interphase to form dynamic loops through a process called active loop extrusion. Chromosome conformation capture and imaging experiments have suggested that chromatin adopts a compact structure with limited interpenetration between chromosomes and between chromosomal sections. We developed a theory demonstrating that…