Search

The problem of scheduling pre-operative assessment clinic (PAC) consists of assigning patients to a day for the exams needed before a surgical procedure, taking into account patients with different priority levels, due dates and operators availability. Realizing a satisfying schedule is of upmost importance for a hospital, since delay in PAC can cause delay in the subsequent phases, thus lowering patients' satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a two-phase solution to the PAC problem: in the first phase, patients are assigned to a day taking into account a default list of exams; then, in the second phase, having the actual list of exams needed by each patient, we use the results of the first phase to assign a starting time to each exam. We first present a mathematical formulation for both problems. Further, we present a solution where modeling and solving are done via answer set programming. We then introduce a rescheduling solution that may come into play when the scheduling solution cannot be applied fully. Experiments employing synthetic benchmarks on both scheduling and rescheduling show that both solutions provide satisfying results in short time. We finally show the implementation and usage of a web application that allows to run our scheduling solution and analyze the results graphically in a transparent way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Answer set programming (ASP) is a popular declarative programming language for solving hard combinatorial problems. Although ASP has gained widespread acceptance in academic and industrial contexts, there are certain user groups who may find it more advantageous to employ a higher-level language that closely resembles natural language when specifying ASP programs. In this paper, we propose a novel tool, called CNL2ASP, for translating English sentences expressed in a controlled natural language (CNL) form into ASP. In particular, we first provide a definition of the type of sentences allowed by our CNL and their translation as ASP rules and then exemplify the usage of the CNL for the specification of both synthetic and real-world combinatorial problems. Finally, we report the results of an experimental analysis conducted on the real-world problems to compare the performance of automatically generated encodings with the ones written by ASP practitioners, showing that our tool can obtain satisfactory performance on these benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the Editor.--We read with interest the article by Schifman et al (1) dealing with the utilization of measurement of free prostate-specific antigen (fPSA). We would like to contribute by [...]

Previous studies reported lipase elevations in serum of COVID-19 patients trying to establish a causal link between SARS-CoV-2 infection and pancreatic damage. However, the degree and prevalence of hyperlipasemia was not uniform across studies. We retrospectively evaluated 1,092 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and at least one available lipase result. The number and frequency of patients with lipase above the upper reference limit (URL), >3 URL, and >6 URL were estimated. Correlations between lipase values and other biomarkers of organ or tissue damage were performed to identify possible extra-pancreatic sources of lipase release. The potential prognostic role of lipase to predict death and intensive care unit (ICU) admission during hospitalization was also evaluated. Lipase was >URL in 344 (31.5%) of COVID-19 patients. Among them, 65 (5.9%) and 25 (2.3%) had a peak lipase >3 URL and >6 URL, respectively. In the latter group, three patients had acute pancreatitis of gallstone or drug-induced etiology. In others, the etiology of lipase elevations appeared multifactorial and could not be directly related to SARS-CoV-2 infection. No correlation was found between lipase and other tested biomarkers of organ and tissue damage. Lipase concentrations were not different between survivors and non-survivors; however, lipase was significantly increased (p<0.001) in patients admitted to the ICU, even if the odds ratio for lipase as predictor of ICU admission was not significant. Lipase was elevated in ∼1/3 of COVID-19 patients, but the clinical significance of this finding is unclear and irrelevant to patient prognosis during hospitalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the authors present their study to assess the effectiveness of the integration of traditional 6-minute walk test into a quick walk test (QWT) in the assessment of pulmonary impairment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients. Also cited are some common symptoms of COVID-19 like fever, cough and dyspnia, and the study's focus on the need for invasive mechanical ventilation (MV) in said patients.