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OBJECTIVES: The purpose of this study was to assess image quality and radiation dose of lower extremity CT angiography (CTA) with 70 kVp, high pitch acquisition and sinogram-affirmed iterative reconstruction (SAFIRE). METHODS: Lower extremity CTAs were performed on 44 patients: 22 patients were examined using protocol A (120 kVp, pitch of 0.85 and 120 ml of contrast agent on a first-generation dual-source CT) (120 kVp group) and 22 patients were evaluated with protocol B (70 kVp, pitch of 2.2 and 80 ml of contrast agent on a second-generation dual-source CT) (70 kVp group). Images from the 120 kVp group were reconstructed with filtered back projection (FBP) and images from the 70 kVp group with SAFIRE. The attenuation, image noise, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) were calculated. Two radiologists subjectively assessed image quality of lower extremity arteries, plantar arterial enhancement and venous contamination of all patients. Radiation dose was compared between the two groups. RESULTS: Higher mean intravascular attenuation was obtained in the 70 kVp group (70 vs. 120 kVp group, 555.4 ± 83.4 HU vs. 300.9 ± 81.4 HU, P0.05). The venous contamination score was 1.5 ± 0.8 for 120 kVp group while no venous contamination was found in 70 kVp group. The inter-observer agreement was moderate to good for both groups (0.515∼1, P

While intermittent hypoxic training (IHT) has been reported to evoke cellular responses via hypoxia inducible factors (HIFs) but without substantial performance benefits in endurance athletes, we hypothesized that repeated sprint training in hypoxia could enhance repeated sprint ability (RSA) performed in normoxia via improved glycolysis and O(2) utilization. 40 trained subjects completed 8 cycling repeated sprint sessions in hypoxia (RSH, 3000 m) or normoxia (RSN, 485 m). Before (Pre-) and after (Post-) training, muscular levels of selected mRNAs were analyzed from resting muscle biopsies and RSA tested until exhaustion (10-s sprint, work-to-rest ratio 1:2) with muscle perfusion assessed by near-infrared spectroscopy. From Pre- to Post-, the average power output of all sprints in RSA was increased (p

Background: There is a significant gap in research exploring changes in postoperative health-related quality of life (HRQoL) among patients aged 65 years and older undergoing hip or knee arthroplasty., Objectives: To investigate the variations in HRQoL improvement, as evaluated by patient-reported outcome measures following total hip arthroplasty, total knee arthroplasty, and partial knee arthroplasty between the young-old and old-old adults., Methods/design: We searched six online databases (including MEDLINE, Embase) from their inception dates to May 15, 2023. We included studies using a validated HRQoL assessment tool to evaluate changes in HRQoL in patients aged ≥65 years undergoing hip or knee arthroplasty. These include the EuroQol five-dimension (EQ-5D), Short Form 36 (SF-36) and Short Form 12 (SF-12). The primary outcomes were postoperative HRQoL changes between young-old (65-74 years) and old-old groups (≥75 years). The secondary outcomes included complications, length of stay, and mortality., Results: The search yielded 12,229 articles; twelve studies (n = 103,613) were included. Studies using EQ-5D found no significant differences between young-old and old-old patients after hip and knee arthroplasty. Analyses of SF-36 and SF-12 scales showed no significant age-related differences in postoperative improvements in physical and mental health. Our review of four studies that included multivariable analyses revealed inconsistent associations between age and EQ-5D. Comparisons between the young-old and old-old age groups in postoperative complications, hospital length of stay, and mortality revealed no associated age-related changes in HRQoL., Conclusions: The young-old and old-old patients exhibited comparable improvement in HRQoL following hip or knee arthroplasty. The older patients did not have higher postoperative complications rates, longer hospital length of stay, and increased mortality. While chronological age should be considered when planning hip and knee arthroplasty, greater emphasis should be placed on assessing the comorbidities and functional status of patients., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: FC reports research support from the Ontario Ministry of Health Innovation Grant, ResMed Foundation, University Health Network Foundation, Consultant to Takeda, and STOP-Bang Questionnaire proprietary to University Health Network. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials., (Copyright: © 2024 Chen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background: The Mini-Cog is a rapid screening tool that can be administered to older adults to detect cognitive impairment (CI); however, the accuracy of the Mini-Cog to detect CI for older patients in various healthcare settings is unclear., Objectives: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of the Mini-Cog to screen for cognitive impairment in older patients across different healthcare settings., Methods/design: We searched nine electronic databases (including MEDLINE, Embase) from inception to January 2023. We included studies with patients ≥60 years old undergoing screening for cognitive impairment using the Mini-Cog across all healthcare settings. A cut-off of ≤ 2/5 was used to classify dementia, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and cognitive impairment (defined as either MCI or dementia) across various settings. The diagnostic accuracy of the Mini-Cog was assessed against gold standard references such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). A bivariate random-effects model was used to estimate accuracy and diagnostic ability. The risk of bias was assessed using QUADAS-2 criteria., Results: The systematic search resulted in 4,265 articles and 14 studies were included for analysis. To detect dementia (six studies, n = 4772), the Mini-Cog showed 76% sensitivity and 83% specificity. To detect MCI (two studies, n = 270), it showed 84% sensitivity and 79% specificity. To detect CI (eight studies, n = 2152), it had 67% sensitivity and 83% specificity. In the primary care setting, to detect either MCI, dementia, or CI (eight studies, n = 5620), the Mini-Cog demonstrated 73% sensitivity and 84% specificity. Within the secondary care setting (seven studies, n = 1499), the Mini-Cog to detect MCI, dementia or CI demonstrated 73% sensitivity and 76% specificity. A high or unclear risk of bias persisted in the patient selection and timing domain., Conclusions: The Mini-Cog is a quick and freely available screening tool and has high sensitivity and specificity to screen for CI in older adults across various healthcare settings. It is a practical screening tool for use in time-sensitive and resource-limited healthcare settings., Competing Interests: We have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: Frances Chung reports research support from the Ontario Ministry of Health Innovation Grant, ResMed Foundation, University Health Network Foundation, Consultant to Takeda, and STOP-Bang Questionnaire proprietary to University Health Network. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials., (Copyright: © 2024 Abayomi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Background: The Ascertain Dementia 8-item Questionnaire (AD8) is a screening tool for cognitive impairment that can be administered to older persons and/or their informants., Objectives: To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy and compare the predictive parameters of the informant and participant-completed Ascertain Dementia 8-item Questionnaire (iAD8 and pAD8, respectively) in older adults with cognitive impairment., Methods/design: We searched ten electronic databases (including MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase) from tool inception to March 2022. We included studies with patients ≥60 years old that were screened for cognitive impairment using AD8 in any healthcare setting. Predictive parameters were assessed against reference standards to estimate accuracy and diagnostic ability using bivariate random-effects meta-analyses. We used QUADAS-2 criteria to assess risk of bias., Results: A cut-off of ≥2/8 was used to classify mild cognitive impairment (MCI), dementia, and cognitive impairment (MCI or dementia). Seven studies using the iAD8 (n = 794) showed a sensitivity of 80% and specificity of 79% to detect MCI. Nine studies using the iAD8 (n = 2393) established 91% sensitivity and 64% specificity to detect dementia. To detect MCI using the pAD8, four studies (n = 836) showed 57% sensitivity and 71% specificity. To detect dementia using the pAD8, four studies (n = 3015) demonstrated 82% sensitivity and 75% specificity. Recurring high or unclear risk of bias was noted in the domains of "Index test" and "reference standard"., Conclusions: The diagnostic accuracy of iAD8 is superior to that of pAD8 when screening for cognitive impairment. The AD8 may be an acceptable alternative to screen for cognitive impairment in older adults when there are limitations to formal testing., Competing Interests: I have read the journal’s policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests. Frances Chung reports research support from the Ontario Ministry of Health Innovation Grant, ResMed Foundation, University Health Network Foundation, Consultant to Takeda, and STOP-Bang Questionnaire proprietary to University Health Network. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials., (Copyright: © 2023 Tanwani et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Importance: The rapid proliferation of COVID-19 has left governments scrambling, and several data aggregators are now assisting in the reporting of county cases and deaths. The different variables affecting reporting (e.g., time delays in reporting) necessitates a well-documented reliability study examining the data methods and discussion of possible causes of differences between aggregators., Objective: To statistically evaluate the reliability of COVID-19 data across aggregators using case fatality rate (CFR) estimates and reliability statistics., Design, Setting, and Participants: Cases and deaths were collected daily by volunteers via state and local health departments, as primary sources and newspaper reports, as secondary sources. In an effort to begin comparison for reliability statistical analysis, BroadStreet collected data from other COVID-19 aggregator sources, including USAFacts, Johns Hopkins University, New York Times, The COVID Tracking Project., Main Outcomes and Measures: COVID-19 cases and death counts at the county and state levels., Results: Lower levels of inter-rater agreement were observed across aggregators associated with the number of deaths, which manifested itself in state level Bayesian estimates of COVID-19 fatality rates., Conclusions and Relevance: A national, publicly available data set is needed for current and future disease outbreaks and improved reliability in reporting., Competing Interests: The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

This paper empirically studies the effect of Open Access on journal CiteScores. We have found that the general effect is positive but not uniform across different types of journals. In particular, we investigate two types of heterogeneous treatment effect: (1) the differential treatment effect among journals grouped by academic field, publisher, and tier; and (2) differential treatment effects of Open Access as a function of propensity to be treated. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks and falsification tests. Our findings shed new light on Open Access effect on journals and can help stakeholders of journals in the decision of adopting the Open Access policy., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Publication metadata help deliver rich analyses of scholarly communication. However, research concepts and ideas are more effectively expressed through unstructured fields such as full texts. Thus, the goals of this paper are to employ a full-text enabled method to extract terms relevant to disciplinary vocabularies, and through them, to understand the relationships between disciplines. This paper uses an efficient, domain-independent term extraction method to extract disciplinary vocabularies from a large multidisciplinary corpus of PLoS ONE publications. It finds a power-law pattern in the frequency distributions of terms present in each discipline, indicating a semantic richness potentially sufficient for further study and advanced analysis. The salient relationships amongst these vocabularies become apparent in application of a principal component analysis. For example, Mathematics and Computer and Information Sciences were found to have similar vocabulary use patterns along with Engineering and Physics; while Chemistry and the Social Sciences were found to exhibit contrasting vocabulary use patterns along with the Earth Sciences and Chemistry. These results have implications to studies of scholarly communication as scholars attempt to identify the epistemological cultures of disciplines, and as a full text-based methodology could lead to machine learning applications in the automated classification of scholarly work according to disciplinary vocabularies.

In biomedicine, scientific literature is a valuable source for knowledge discovery. Mining knowledge from textual data has become an ever important task as the volume of scientific literature is growing unprecedentedly. In this paper, we propose a framework for examining a certain disease based on existing information provided by scientific literature. Disease-related entities that include diseases, drugs, and genes are systematically extracted and analyzed using a three-level network-based approach. A paper-entity network and an entity co-occurrence network (macro-level) are explored and used to construct six entity specific networks (meso-level). Important diseases, drugs, and genes as well as salient entity relations (micro-level) are identified from these networks. Results obtained from the literature-based literature mining can serve to assist clinical applications.

This paper proposes entitymetrics to measure the impact of knowledge units. Entitymetrics highlight the importance of entities embedded in scientific literature for further knowledge discovery. In this paper, we use Metformin, a drug for diabetes, as an example to form an entity-entity citation network based on literature related to Metformin. We then calculate the network features and compare the centrality ranks of biological entities with results from Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD). The comparison demonstrates the usefulness of entitymetrics to detect most of the outstanding interactions manually curated in CTD.