149 research outputs found
Sort by
Evaluation of the artherogenic potential of homocysteine and its cytotoxic effect on HUVECs
Get PDFBackground: In recent decades, several studies have shown that hyperhomocysteinemia is an independent risk factor for atherosclerosis. The objective of this work is, first, to assess the atherogenic potential of homocysteine in rats and and appraise its effect on endothelial cells: the main components of the blood vessel.
Methods: In the in vivo study, hyperhomocysteinemia is induced in rats by a diet supplemented with L-methionine (1 g/kg/day). After 21 days of treatment, a blood sample is performed for biochemical study (total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, LDL cholesterol, ALT, AST, CRP, and total protein) and a removal of organs (aorta, liver, and heart) for the assay MDA and histological study. For the in vitro study, HUVECs were cultured for 24 h then exposed to various concentrations of homocysteine (2 mM, 4 mM, 8 mM). After 24 hours, we confirm the cellular phenotype and its number.
Results: The angiotoxic dose of methionine induces a significant increase for all biochemical parameters (except HDL-C, which is diminished). In addition, an alteration of the histological structure of the aorta (appearance of foam cells) of the liver (steatosis) and of the heart. The in vitro study revealed a senescent phenotype of HUVECs and an inhibition of cell proliferation.
Conclusion: Our results suggest that homocysteine is involved in the genesis of atherosclerosis by affecting directly the endothelial cells
Classification of methods for generating pseudo-CT from MRI images for MRI-alone RT
Get PDFBackground: Since the last decades, research have been oriented towards an MRI-alone radiation treatment planning (RTP), where MRI is used as the primary modality for imaging, delineation and dose calculation by assigning to it the needed electron density (ED) information. The idea is to create a computed tomography (CT) image or so-called pseudo-CT from MRI data. In this paper, we review and classify methods for creating pseudo-CT images from MRI data. Each class of methods is explained and a group of works in the literature is presented in detail with statistical performance. We discuss the advantages, drawbacks and limitations of each class of methods.
Methods: We classified most recent works in deriving a pseudo-CT from MR images into four classes: segmentation-based, intensity-based, atlas-based and hybrid methods. We based the classification on the general technique applied in the approach.
Results: Most of research focused on the brain and the pelvis regions. The mean absolute error (MAE) ranged from 80 HU to 137 HU and from 36.4 HU to 74 HU for the brain and pelvis, respectively. In addition, an interest in the Dixon MR sequence is increasing since it has the advantage of producing multiple contrast images with a single acquisition.
Conclusion: Radiation therapy field is emerging towards the generalization of MRI-only RT thanks to the advances in techniques for generation of pseudo-CT images. However, a benchmark is needed to set in common performance metrics to assess the quality of the generated pseudo-CT and judge on the efficiency of a certain method
ASSESS THE READINESS OF THE OUTPATIENT TREATMENT CENTERS OF SOCIAL SECURITY TO RUN SMART HEALTH CARD
Get PDFIntroduction: Smart card, microprocessor chip, facilitate providing e-health services in health center. Design and implementation of smart cards in the Social Security Organization as one of the health centers reduce costs, prevent abuses of medical insurance, increase productivity and accelerate response time. In this study, readiness of the outpatient treatment centers of social security to implement health smart card assessed.
Methods: this practical and descriptive study was conducted in nine outpatient treatment center of Khorasan Razavi Social Security center in 2016-2017. Total proposed number of outpatient treatment center was reduced to 9 center because other centers did not take part in this review .A questionnaire with three areas of technical readiness, organizational culture and leadership and management was used. The data were analyzed using spss 19 software
Results: Finding showed Average scores of technical and leadership and cultural organization readiness were ordinary in all centers. Leadership and cultural organization readiness in 4 center were more than others. Average scores of technical were more than of leadership and cultural organization readiness .Technical readiness had significant difference between the studied centers.
Conclusion: Finding showed appropriate technical readiness in Social Security, therefore we suggest to implement smart cards, educating staff to enhance technology skills and to promote its use culture. Readiness of management and leadership scope is impressive in designing and implementing smart cards; So implementing smart cards should be organization`s strategy and the road map should be determined, and its benefits should be clearly explain for social security center managers
Modeling collaborative learning: case of clinical reasoning
Get PDFBackground: Collaborative learning is an important pedagogical strategy which gained a huge interest in critical domains such as the medical field. However, to ensure the quality of this learning method, it is necessary to focus intention not only on the cognitive aspect but also on the social activities that represent an essential issue during collaborative learning sessions. Our objective in this study is to highlight the collaborative aspect in the group learning method of clinical reasoning.
Methods: In this work, we have focused on cognitive studies that are interested in the clinical reasoning processes, while proposing a model dedicated to the design of collaborative clinical reasoning learning environment in synchronous mode. This model is primarily interested in social activities that have a strong influence on the collaborative learning effectiveness, and they are generally treated implicitly by basing on the improvisation and spontaneity of the learners group.
Results: The research idea was embodied through a collaborative learning clinical reasoning environment based on Web 2.0 technologies. We chose this technology to benefit from its ease of use and from its technical performances that can significantly contribute to the development of the cognitive and social aspects in the collaborative learning environment.
Conclusion: Our first contact with medical students showed us that they are appreciating this learning method. Indeed, to evaluate objectively our choices reliability, we plan to accomplish this research with a quantitative study based on real experiences with clinicians and medical students. The suggested study will allow us to collect the necessary lessons to work in depth on the relevant questions concerning the cognitive and social activities in the collaborative clinical reasoning learning
Extracting hidden rules from Brucellosis patients data in Razavi Khorasan province using association rule mining technique
Get PDFBrucellosis is a transmissible disease between humans and animals through infected animals and their products. The disease exists in most parts of the world especially in developing countries. Because of the serious impact of the disease in public health and socio-economical status, controlling the disease is very important in developing countries. The purpose of this article is to identify hidden patterns and relations between brucellosis patients which can be beneficial for physicians in diagnosis process. This study is a retrospective study of data collected from brucellosis patients of Razavi Khorasan province recorded at the health center, have been used. Due to differences in format and number of features collected during different years, before processing operations carried out in several stages to the same data. Fields associated with different methods and with expert opinion was converted into discrete fields and fields lost was estimated using the EM algorithm. APPIORI algorithm analysis was performed using the hidden relationships between data found that significant relationships were infected with expert opinion. Among the 163 relationship with over 7.0 Confidence rate which Weka software was discovered, by the application in consultation with an infectious disease expert, 10 clinically significant relationships were reported. Diagnosing brucellosis is really difficult to physicians because of its vague nature and symptoms. Because many unknown relationships between risk factors and demographic characteristics of the patients, the use of data mining concepts, especially in the medical data is beneficial because usually high volume assumptions are available. Further studies can test the validity of these rules like Randomize Control Trial studies
Determining attitude and readiness of Medical students in Kerman University of Medical Sciences concerning acceptance of Decision Support Systems for Electronic Prescription in 2017
Get PDFIntroduction: Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) are any computer program designed to assist health care professionals in making clinical decisions, especially at the moment of action. These information systems are flexible and interactive, helping people by making use of models and rules of a comprehensive database, or on the basis of clinical guidelines, to make applicable decisions, especially solving difficult problems with common scientific methods. Therefore, these systems support complex medical decisions, increase their effectiveness, and can lead to a reduction in the types of medical errors, such as medication errors. However, knowledge and attitude of the future physicians in the country about these systems is unclear. The purpose of this study was Determining attitude and readiness of Medical students concerning acceptance of Decision Support Systems for Electronic Prescription.
Methods: This research is descriptive-analytic. The research population included general medical students of Kerman University of Medical Sciences in 2017. Out of these students, a sample of 226 people was selected by proportional sampling. Data collection was done using a standard questionnaire. The questionnaire was first translated into Persian and then its validity was confirmed by three medical informatics specialists. Data analysis was done descriptively-analytically using SPSS 19.
Results: The findings of this study showed that 17% of students (n=36) knew about this system and how to use it, and 83% of them (n=177) were willing to learn and use this system to practice their profession in the future. More than half of them (n=121) believed that using this system would Reduce errors in prescribing. 80% of them (n=170) lacked a strategic plan to implement a decision support system for electronic prescription and a lack of standard and acceptable software, and about 60% (n=128) lack of financial incentives and lack of sufficient evidence Concerned about the usefulness of using it as a potential obstacle to the implementation of this system. There was no significant difference between the age, sex and term of the students with their familiarity with this system (P>0.05).
Conclusion: The results of this study showed that while many students lack sufficient knowledge about the clinical decision support system, they are interested in learning and using it, especially in the field of prescribing drugs. This result indicates that the system is likely to be admitted if it is implemented and educated to medical students and doctors
Aspects of User Profiling in Computer-based Health Information Tailoring Systems: A Narrative Review
Get PDFIntroduction:
The recent shift from the conventional physician-centered approach to the more polpular approach that with the focuse on patient as the center of healthcare, emphaizes on the critical role of informing and educating patients. Studies shown that tailoring health information to the needs of individuals is more effective than generic materials. Recent improvements in the fields of computer science and Information Communication Technology have made it possible to computerize such an adaptation process. Information tailoring systems use an internal representation of user conditions and needs, which is referred to as a “user model” or “user profile.”
A user profile represents the system’s beliefs about the user. Hence, it may simply contain demographic information or sophisticated factors such as the state of the disease, user’s attitude, interest, preference, and knowledge. The user profile is known as the basis for designing other system components and has a great impact on the acceptance of the system by the user and the quality of the tailored information.
To the best of our knowledge, no studies have been conducted so far to analyze and classify user profile aspects and characteristics. In this systematic narrative review, we aim to provide aspects of profiling in health information tailoring systems based on literature from different disciplines.
Methods:
comprehensive searches of the PubMed and Scopus databases have been conducted. We searched among English papers with publishing dates ranging from 1990 onward; since that is when computer-tailoring first appeared within the literature. we have devised a list of terms pertinent to the main concepts of computer-tailoring and used a qualitative–interpretive approach for data extraction.
Results:
Analyzing the data from 32 eligible studies, we found three aspects in designing a tailoring user profile. Each aspect with its characteristics are provided below:
1-Identifying common factors used in profiles and classifying these factors thematically, which has three attributes:
The number of factors used to design the user profile and their diversity (e.g. demographic,clinical,behavioral information, learning style and so forth)
The approaches used to Identify effective factors in tailoring (e.g. evidence-based, avalible data sources)
Attributes of the factors (e.g. long-term/short-term, static/dynamic)
2-Data collection tools and methods, which has two attributes:
Data collection methods (e.g. explicit, implicit, mixed)
Assessment tool (e.g. questionnaire, patient record)
3-Data interpretation that demonstrates to what extent the collected data needs to be analyzed to use in tailoring.
we have also identified two main approaches regarding tailoring: public health and computational tailoring. Public Health communication researcher has relied greatly on health behavior models but generally has used simpler technological approaches, whereas computer science employed more advanced technological approaches but integrated behavior theory to a lesser extent. These two approaches complete each other to provide the necessary requirements for designing a practical tailoring system in future studies.
Conclusion: In this study we investigate different aspects of designing a user profile in health information tailoring systems. The proposed model is a valuable guide for new researchers in the field. Results from this review provide a comprehensive overview of the field and will help researchers to combine effective methods from across the disciplines in future research
Contextual hybrid-based recommendation of Pubmed articles
Get PDFBackground: The amount of information in the medical field has been growing day by day. Also new medical articles about the preoccupied disease are published each day and the updated information is very required by physicians. The appropriate information in the appropriate moment is the goal of this research work.
Methods: Our goal is to recommend documents deemed relevant to doctors regarding the context of using a management application for electronic medical records. The principle is to extract the context of this usage: illness, Age ..., searching in the contents of documents and taking into account the rate of vote documents. For experiment and evaluation, we have used 100 articles randomly selected from pubmed about cardiology. In addition, we have developed a system that extracts the context of medical record system at the moment of exploration. The extracted context is used with users rating by the recommender system to select and rank the recommended articles for physicians in the same moment of use.
Results: The first result of this research work is the smart interaction between users and the software system by introducing the context of use. In addition, another important result is the reuse of user’s appreciation for more dynamicity and intelligibility.
Conclusion: The developed system offers the physician an appropriate recommendation of selected pubmed articles. The developed system augments the relevancy of the recommendation by analyzing the contents of articles and introducing a collaborative method
Development of new antibacterial agents
Get PDFBackground: Antibiotics, as miraculous drugs, have been used extensively to confront fatal infection, even without prescriptions. However, the inappropriate and disproportionate use of antibiotics have led to the emergence of new drug-resistant bacteria1, which causes a high risk of serious diseases and dramatically aggravates the clinical complications in hospitals.
Methods: By using the peptide coupling protocol, a simple straightforward synthesis of functionalized aziridines has been developed. By means of this synthetic strategy from readily available N-phtaloyl acide and 2-methylbenzosulfonate aziridine using DCC as coupling agent, new tosylates aziridines could be obtained. The coupling reactions occurred without a ring opening of the three membered ring.
Results: This work describes new results of our ongoing research targeting new derivatives of biological interests. All the compounds were screened for their antibacterial activity; they all showed comparable moderate to good growth inhibitory activity with reference to tetracyclin and gentamicin.
Conclusion: In conclusion, we reported the synthesis and a preliminary antibacterial evaluation of novel functionalized tosylaziridines. The synthetic strategy relies on the coupling reactions between tosylaziridines and amino acids. Moreover, and besides showing interesting antibacterial activities, the series of novel compounds can be further improved to serve as potential drug against nosocomial diseases
Toxicological risks of water and human health, contribution to the biological treatments in the dam of Ain Zada
Get PDFBackground: Freshwater fish play a role in detoxification of certain germs and pathogens of bacteria. Variation of the content of pathogenic bacteria are, mainly, total coliform, fecal coliform, and fecal streptococci in the study sites of the sampling period. The objective of this study is inventoried purifying species of dam of Ain Zada.
Methods: The isolation of fecal coliform (CF) and total coliform (CT) was conducted by incorporation in agar of the five shot test (0,4 mL; 1 mL et 3 x 2 mL). The culture medium is the selective agar Mac Conkey (HIMEDIA, M083) coliforms. The enumeration of the colonies is done after 24 of incubation at 37°C for total coliforms and 44°C for fecal coliforms. The isolation of fecal streptococci (SF) is made by the same method but on the culture medium incubated at 37°C for 48 hours. Counting of colonies is done on mailboxes where 100 to 300 colonies are developed. The average of colonies counted is then determined. The boxes do not contain at least 100 colonies, all of the colonies on all boxes are counted, taking into account the total volume inoculated in water. In the second part, there is an inventory of purifying fish at the Ain Zada dam level.
Results: The result indicate that all the fish that play a role in the treatment of dam of Ain Zada (Bordj Bou Arreridj) who use these germs and bacteria as a food source. We registered the presence of a single family, with five (05) genera divided into seven (07) species, including the majority of alien species are Cyprinid fish: Sander lucioperca L., Ctenopharyngodon idella, Clarias gariepinus, Cyprinus carpio, Hypophthalmichthys molitrix and Hypophtalmichthys nobilis.
Conclusion: The Bousselam and Ouricia valleys feature heavily poor microbiological quality; exploitation of these waters could constitute a health hazard on dam Ain Zada. According to this study, the fish play a role of biological control