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The article discusses the global and Australian costs of unaddressed hearing loss, emphasizing the importance of hearing health across all stages of life. It highlights the barriers to accessing cochlear implantation (CI) services in New South Wales, Australia, such as rural, regional, and socio-economic disparities. The authors propose using the access framework to address these barriers, focusing on approachability, acceptability, availability, affordability, and appropriateness of CI services. The article suggests developing national guidelines for CI to improve access and outcomes for patients with severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. [Extracted from the article]

Diabetic retinopathy is governed by abnormal apoptosis, increased capillary pressure, and other linked pathology that needs an efficient treatment by multitargeted approaches. Thus, the current study aimed to explore the potential of inhibition of targeted enzymes (DPP4, ACE‐2, and aldose reductase) and free radical scavenging capabilities of selected compounds (nafronyl or naftidrofuryl) through in silico and in vivo investigations. Significant binding energies were observed in complexes of aldolase reductase, angiotensin type 1 receptor, and DPP4 against the nafronyl and sitagliptin more than −7.5 kcal/mol. Further validation of free energy was confirmed by calculations of molecular mechanics Poisson–Boltzmann surface area (MMPBSA), and configurational stabilities examined by PCA (principal component analysis). Additionally, drug‐likeness was examined by the Swiss ADME web tool, which showed significant findings. Consequently, in vivo experimentations showed significant inflammation and alterations in retinal layers of inner plexiform (inner limiting membrane, nerve fibers, and ganglionic cells), inner nuclear layer (bipolar cells and horizontal cells), and photoreceptors cells. Whereas the treatments (nafronyl and sitagliptin) caused significant improvements in the histoarchitecture of the retina. Additionally, the HOMA indices (IR‐insulin resistance, sensitivity, and β cells functioning) and levels of free radicals were significantly altered in the diabetic control group in comparison to intact control. Nafronyl administration showed significant ameliorations in HOMA indices as well as antioxidant levels. Based on the results, it can be concluded that nafronyl efficiently interacts with target enzymes, which may result in potent inhibition and ameliorations in retinal histology as well as glucose homeostasis and antioxidants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper aims to test the effectiveness of communication platforms in conveying the importance of sustainability messages focusing on electronic waste (e-waste) recycling. While corporate communication has been explored well, this research explores the influence of communication medium on the shift in attitude and behavioural intention of higher education students. Design/methodology/approach: An experimental design approach was used with quantitative data analysis to address the research questions. Findings: The results revealed that the text form of communication was more effective in conveying the e-waste recycling message. Students demonstrated a significant shift in attitude and call for action when they read the sustainability article instead of watching a video with the same message. Practical implications: With several universities trying to integrate sustainability in their curriculum, this research provides guidelines on effective communication methods for students. It also sheds light on the choice of platforms that can be used by organisations to reach out to their employees to convey sustainability-related messages. Originality/value: The paper addresses sustainability communication in a university by exploring the best method of communication. The results open up new conversations on the media richness theory in the context of sustainability.

Objective: Venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) is a resource-intensive approach for the management of refractory cardiogenic shock. Within this population exists a substantial cohort of patients with peripheral artery disease (PAD), which independently increases the risk of complications and all-cause mortality. We studied 10-year national trends of the impact of PAD among VA-ECMO recipients to better understand the prevalence of PAD and implications on outcomes in this vulnerable population. Methods: This 10-year retrospective, propensity score-matched study identified all adult patients (≥18) who underwent VA-ECMO between 2009 and 2018, from a large US database (National Inpatient Sample). Patients with an ICD diagnosis of PAD were identified. The primary endpoints of in-hospital mortality, bleeding complications and major limb loss (above- or below-knee amputation) were compared between patients with PAD to those without. Results: A total of 6768 patients were identified, of which 342 (5.3%) had PAD. The median age at admission was significantly higher in PAD patients [64 years vs. 55 years; p <.01], as was male gender [71% vs. 64%; p <.01]. Patients with PAD had higher rates of smoking (38.9% vs. 23.3%), hypertension (71.1% vs. 50%), diabetes (37.4% vs. 27.0%), chronic kidney disease (30.1% vs. 18.0%), coronary artery disease (76.0% vs. 35.0%) and dyslipidemia (76.0% vs. 35.0); all p <.01. After propensity-matching 2:1 for comorbidities, PAD patients were found to have significantly greater overall complications, including in-hospital mortality, bleeding, surgical wound infections, pseudoaneurysms, and major adverse limb events [71.9% vs. 63.9%; p <.01]. Subgroup analysis revealed greater in-hospital mortality [62.2% vs. 55.3%; p <.05], major amputations [4.1% vs. 0.3%; p <.01] and blood transfusions [32.2% vs. 26.2%; p <.05] in PAD patients. Over 2014–2018, the non-PAD group demonstrated statistically discernable trends in a 51.1% decrease in overall complications and a 28.1% increase in survival to discharge (all p <.01). Over the same time period the PAD cohort experienced a modest, nonsignificant, decrease in complications [7.0%, p =.40] and a decrease in those surviving to discharge [47.1% vs. 40.5%, p =.91]. Conclusion: Patients with PAD on VA-ECMO are sicker at baseline and experience significantly greater major amputations and higher in-hospital mortality. They have not benefitted from the considerable decrease in complication rates and increase in survival to discharge over time as compared to their non-PAD counterparts. These findings demonstrate the substantial frailty of the PAD population within an already high-risk cohort, and highlight the need for better procedural approaches and innovative technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation Dysregulation of a gene's function, either due to mutations or impairments in regulatory networks, often triggers pathological states in the affected tissue. Comprehensive mapping of these apparent gene–pathology relationships is an ever-daunting task, primarily due to genetic pleiotropy and lack of suitable computational approaches. With the advent of high throughput genomics platforms and community scale initiatives such as the Human Cell Landscape project, researchers have been able to create gene expression portraits of healthy tissues resolved at the level of single cells. However, a similar wealth of knowledge is currently not at our finger-tip when it comes to diseases. This is because the genetic manifestation of a disease is often quite diverse and is confounded by several clinical and demographic covariates. Results To circumvent this, we mined ∼18 million PubMed abstracts published till May 2019 and automatically selected ∼4.5 million of them that describe roles of particular genes in disease pathogenesis. Further, we fine-tuned the pretrained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) for language modeling from the domain of natural language processing to learn vector representation of entities such as genes, diseases, tissues, cell-types, etc. in a way such that their relationship is preserved in a vector space. The repurposed BERT predicted disease–gene associations that are not cited in the training data, thereby highlighting the feasibility of in silico synthesis of hypotheses linking different biological entities such as genes and conditions. Availability and implementation PathoBERT pretrained model: https://github.com/Priyadarshini-Rai/Pathomap-Model. BioSentVec-based abstract classification model: https://github.com/Priyadarshini-Rai/Pathomap-Model. Pathomap R package: https://github.com/Priyadarshini-Rai/Pathomap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exponential scaling of quantum states results in greater processing costs, making it impossible to simulate complex quantum systems on conventional supercomputers. In order to overcome this obstacle, quantum computers simulate one quantum system using another quantum system. In the current study, a method for simulating basic molecules like LiH that uses the Variational Quantum Technique, a far less computationally expensive algorithm, is used. By selecting a suitable trial function in this case, we also theoretically verify the results and present everything in a very straightforward way. Until we transcend the NISQ constraint of fault-tolerant quantum computers, this approach uses extremely shallow circuits to determine the minimal energy eigenvalue of a molecule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Comprehensive session summaries enable effective continuity in mental health counseling, facilitating informed therapy planning. However, manual summarization presents a significant challenge, diverting experts' attention from the core counseling process. Leveraging advances in automatic summarization to streamline the summarization process addresses this issue because this enables mental health professionals to access concise summaries of lengthy therapy sessions, thereby increasing their efficiency. However, existing approaches often overlook the nuanced intricacies inherent in counseling interactions. Objective: This study evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) in selectively summarizing various components of therapy sessions through aspect-based summarization, aiming to benchmark their performance. Methods: We first created Mental Health Counseling-Component--Guided Dialogue Summaries, a benchmarking data set that consists of 191 counseling sessions with summaries focused on 3 distinct counseling components (also known as counseling aspects). Next, we assessed the capabilities of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs in addressing the task of counseling-component--guided summarization. The generated summaries were evaluated quantitatively using standard summarization metrics and verified qualitatively by mental health professionals. Results: Our findings demonstrated the superior performance of task-specific LLMs such as MentalLlama, Mistral, and MentalBART evaluated using standard quantitative metrics such as Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE)-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Score across all aspects of the counseling components. Furthermore, expert evaluation revealed that Mistral superseded both MentalLlama and MentalBART across 6 parameters: affective attitude, burden, ethicality, coherence, opportunity costs, and perceived effectiveness. However, these models exhibit a common weakness in terms of room for improvement in the opportunity costs and perceived effectiveness metrics. Conclusions: While LLMs fine-tuned specifically on mental health domain data display better performance based on automatic evaluation scores, expert assessments indicate that these models are not yet reliable for clinical application. Further refinement and validation are necessary before their implementation in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) demonstrates superior soft tissue contrast and is increasingly being used in radiotherapy planning. This study evaluated the impact of an education workshop in minimising interobserver variation (IOV) for nasopharyngeal organs at risk (OAR) delineation on MRI. Methods: Ten observers delineated 14 OARs on 4 retrospective nasopharyngeal MRI data sets. Standard contouring guidelines were provided pre-workshop. Following an education workshop on MRI OAR delineation, observers blinded to their original contours repeated the 14 OAR delineations. For comparison, reference volumes were delineated by two head and neck radiation oncologists. IOV was evaluated using dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance (HD) and relative volume. Location of largest deviations was evaluated with centroid values. Observer confidence pre- and post-workshop was also recorded using a 6-point Likert scale. The workshop was deemed beneficial for an OAR if =50% of observers mean scores improved in any metric and =50% of observers' confidence improved. Results: All OARs had =50% of observers improve in at least one metric. Base of tongue, larynx, spinal cord and right temporal lobe were the only OARs achieving a mean DSC score of =0.7. Base of tongue, left and right lacrimal glands, larynx, left optic nerve and right parotid gland all exhibited statistically significant HD improvements post-workshop (P < 0.05). Brainstem and left and right temporal lobes all had statistically significant relative volume improvements post-workshop (P < 0.05). Post-workshop observer confidence improvement was observed for all OARs (P < 0.001). Conclusions: The educational workshop reduced IOV and improved observers' confidence when delineating nasopharyngeal OARs on MRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarcasm detection and humor classification are inherently subtle problems, primarily due to their dependence on the contextual and non-verbal information. Furthermore, existing studies in these two topics are usually constrained in non-English languages such as Hindi, due to the unavailability of qualitative annotated datasets. In this work, we make two major contributions considering the above limitations: (1) we develop a Hindi-English code-mixed dataset, MaSaC,1 for the multi-modal sarcasm detection and humor classification in conversational dialog, which to our knowledge is the first dataset of its kind; (2) we propose MSH-COMICS,2 a novel attention-rich neural architecture for the utterance classification. We learn efficient utterance representation utilizing a hierarchical attention mechanism that attends to a small portion of the input sentence at a time. Further, we incorporate dialog-level contextual attention mechanism to leverage the dialog history for the multi-modal classification. We perform extensive experiments for both the tasks by varying multi-modal inputs and various submodules of MSH-COMICS. We also conduct comparative analysis against existing approaches. We observe that MSH-COMICS attains superior performance over the existing models by $>$ > 1 F1-score point for the sarcasm detection and 10 F1-score points in humor classification. We diagnose our model and perform thorough analysis of the results to understand the superiority and pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Despite progress of women in science and medicine, women remain underrepresented in academic publication. The aim of this study was to evaluate potential gender differences in women authorship in the Journal of Medical Imaging and Radiation Oncology (JMIRO). Methods: Gender of the first and senior author of all articles published in JMIRO between 2012 and 2021 were examined. Changes over time and differences among groups were compared using the chi‐square test. Results: In total, 1,138 articles were assessed. Women were first and senior authors on 34% and 25% of all articles respectively. The proportion of women as first author was 30%, 41% and 36% for medical imaging (MI), radiation oncology (RO) and combined MI/RO articles respectively. Similarly, the proportion of women as senior author was lower than men at 22%, 32% and 23% for MI, RO and MI/RO articles respectively. Women first authorship over the study period remained stable from 2014 (36%) to 2020 (38%); however, it decreased dramatically in 2021 to 28%. There was a trend of increasing women senior authorship from 2013 (15%) to 2017 (35%) but decreased to 23% in 2021. Conclusion: Over the past 10 years of publications, one in three first authors were women and only one in four senior authors were women. The acknowledgement of this imbalance is the first step to pave the way towards addressing underlying systemic issues related to academic publication and disparities in gender and other inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a simple scheme to demonstrate experimentally the process of entanglement swapping over two different quantum stages. In this process, the entangled states are generated and distributed among two photons. This is achieved by the process of two cascaded photonic entanglement swapping. I have also studied entanglement diversion of entangled state and find that nearly perfect entanglement diversion may be achieved by separating the vacuum state from even states of photons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, entanglement swapping is done on two pairs of nonorthogonal entangled coherent states (NECS) of varied intensities I conclude that the variation in photon densities results to branch out into two different cases with different fidelities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Head and neck cancer (HNC) patients are at risk of weight change, due to inadequate nutrition intake or dehydration, when receiving radiotherapy (RT). This study aimed to develop methodology to measure water content changes on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the head and neck region over the course of RT. Methods: Retrospective datasets of 54 patients were analysed. Eligible patients had been treated for HNC with cisplatin chemoradiation (CRT) or RT alone and underwent a minimum of 2 MRI scans from weeks 0, 3 and 6 of their treatment. Anatomical regions consisting of ≥90% water, on T2‐weighted DIXON MRI sequences, were contoured. Water volume changes of all patients were evaluated, within an anatomically standardised external volume, by comparing the absolute water fraction volume (cc) (VEx90WF) and relative water fraction volume (%) (RelVEx90WF) at weeks 0 and 6 of RT. Results: There was a statistically significant difference between the RelVEx90WF at weeks 0 and 6 (P = 0.005). However, no statistically significant difference was identified between weeks 0 and 6 VEx90WF (P = 0.064). There were no statistically significant differences identified between patients who received CRT versus RT alone. Conclusion: This study developed a novel method for measuring changes in water fraction volumes over time, using T2‐weighted DIXON MRIs. The methodology created in this study requires further validation through phantom imaging, with known fat and water values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The aim of this study is to compare outcomes between octogenarians and non-octogenarians undergoing thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR). Methods: Using the National Inpatient Sample database, we identified octogenarians (≥80 years) and non-octogenarians (<80 years) who had undergone thoracic endovascular aortic repair between 2012 and 2017. We compared patients' demographic, socioeconomic, comorbidity data between the two groups as well as the procedure indications and perioperative outcomes. A multivariable logistic regression analysis was conducted to evaluate the impact of advanced age (≥80 years) on the in-hospital mortality rates in patients who underwent TEVAR. This analysis was also performed for a separate cohort which included only patients who underwent TEVAR for ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm. Results: A total of 4108 patients were included in our study; 3432 (83.5%) patients were <80 years (37.9% female; median age, 64 years; 34.3% non-white) and 676 (16.5%) patients were ≥80 years (50.7% female; median age, 83 years; 20.4% non-white). Non-ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm was the most common indication for TEVAR in older patients (61.4%), whereas type B aortic dissection was the most common indication in younger patients (36.4%). In-hospital complications were comparable between the two groups except for respiratory complications that were higher in the younger patients (21.2% vs. 15.2%; P <.001). The multivariable analysis demonstrated that advanced age had no association with increased in-hospital mortality rates (adjusted odds ratio [aOR], 1.41; 95% confidence interval [CI],.97-2.05), However, in ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm cohort, octogenarians had higher in-hospital mortality rates (aOR, 1.86; 95% CI, 1.04-3.32). Conclusions: Octogenarians have acceptable rates of perioperative morbidity and mortality compared to the younger group and should be considered for TEVAR. Octogenarians are at higher risk for in-hospital mortality in the setting of ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm, supporting the appropriateness of elective TEVAR in selected Octogenarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work proposes a scheme to teleport a tripartite coherent state using an unparalleled four-component state as a quantum channel. The scheme involves linear optical devices like beam splitters and phase shifters. It is shown that, even by taking an uncompromising quantum model, almost a complete teleportation can be achieved with an impressive number of photons. It is also shown that the teleportation fails only if zero photons are found in all the three output modes or zero in two output modes and a nonzero even/odd photon in one mode. However, the probability of getting these output modes is almost negligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]