Prolonged mechanical ventilation (PMV) is associated with increase in mortality and resource utilisation as well as hospitalisation costs. This study evaluates the risk factors of PMV. A retrospective study was conducted involving 890 paediatric patients comprising 237 neonates, 306 infants, 223 of pre-school age and 124 who are of school going age. The data mining decision trees algorithms and logistic regression was employed to develop predictive models for each age category. The independent variables were classified into four categories, that is, demographic data, admission factors, medical factors and score factors. The dependent variable is the duration of ventilation where it is categorized 0 denoting non-PMV and 1 denoting PMV. The performances of three decision tree models (CHAID, CART and C5.0) and logistic regression were compared to determine the best model. The results indicated that the decision tree outperformed the logistic regression model for all age categories, given its good accuracy rate for testing dataset. Decision trees results identified length of stay and inotropes as significant risk factors in all age categories. PRISM 12 hours and principal diagnosis were identified as significant risk factors for infants.
The purpose of this study was to analyze people's attitudes to disasters by investigating how people feel, behave and think during disasters. We focused on disasters induced by humans, such as terrorist attacks. Two types of textual information were collected - from Internet blogs and from research papers. The analysis enabled forecasting of attitudes for the design of proactive disaster advisory scheme. Text was analyzed using a text mining tool, Leximancer. The outcome of this analysis revealed core themes and concepts in the text concerning people's attitudes. The themes and concepts were sorted into three broad categories: Affect, Behaviour, and Cognition (ABC), and the data was visualized in semantic maps. The maps reveal several knowledge pathways of ABC for developing attitudinal ontologies, which describe the relations between affect, behaviour and cognition, and the sequence in which they develop. Clearly, terrorist attacks induced trauma and people became highly vulnerable.
Effective management of patients with diabetic foot infection is a crucial concern. A delay in prescribing appropriate antimicrobial agent can lead to amputation or life threatening complications. Thus, this electronic nose (e-nose) technique will provide a diagnostic tool that will allow for rapid and accurate identification of a pathogen.
The supraoptic nucleus (SON) is a group of neurons in the hypothalamus responsible for the synthesis and secretion of the peptide hormones vasopressin and oxytocin. Following physiological cues, such as dehydration, salt-loading and lactation, the SON undergoes a function related plasticity that we have previously described in the rat at the transcriptome level. Using the unsupervised graphical lasso (Glasso) algorithm, we reconstructed a putative network from 500 plastic SON genes in which genes are the nodes and the edges are the inferred interactions. The most active nodal gene identified within the network was Caprin2. Caprin2 encodes an RNA-binding protein that we have previously shown to be vital for the functioning of osmoregulatory neuroendocrine neurons in the SON of the rat hypothalamus. To test the validity of the Glasso network, we either overexpressed or knocked down Caprin2 transcripts in differentiated rat pheochromocytoma PC12 cells and showed that these manipulations had significant opposite effects on the levels of putative target mRNAs. These studies suggest that the predicative power of the Glasso algorithm within an in vivo system is accurate, and identifies biological targets that may be important to the functional plasticity of the SON.