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Introduction: The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) chat programs has opened two distinct paths, one enhancing interaction and another potentially replacing personal understanding. Ethical and legal concerns arise due to the rapid development of these programs. This paper investigates academic discussions on AI in medicine, analyzing the context, frequency, and reasons behind these conversations. Methods: The study collected data from the Web of Science database on articles containing the keyword "ChatGPT" published from January to September 2023, resulting in 786 medically related journal articles. The inclusion criteria were peer-reviewed articles in English related to medicine. Results: The United States led in publications (38.1%), followed by India (15.5%) and China (7.0%). Keywords such as "patient" (16.7%), "research" (12%), and "performance" (10.6%) were prevalent. The Cureus Journal of Medical Science (11.8%) had the most publications, followed by the Annals of Biomedical Engineering (8.3%). August 2023 had the highest number of publications (29.3%), with significant growth between February to March and April to May. Medical General Internal (21.0%) was the most common category, followed by Surgery (15.4%) and Radiology (7.9%). Discussion: The prominence of India in ChatGPT research, despite lower research funding, indicates the platform's popularity and highlights the importance of monitoring its use for potential medical misinformation. China's interest in ChatGPT research suggests a focus on Natural Language Processing (NLP) AI applications, despite public bans on the platform. Cureus' success in publishing ChatGPT articles can be attributed to its open-access, rapid publication model. The study identifies research trends in plastic surgery, radiology, and obstetric gynecology, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations and reliability assessments in the application of ChatGPT in medical practice. Conclusion: ChatGPT's presence in medical literature is growing rapidly across various specialties, but concerns related to safety, privacy, and accuracy persist. More research is needed to assess its suitability for patient care and implications for non-medical use. Skepticism and thorough review of research are essential, as current studies may face retraction as more information emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, a large urban university-based hospital transitioned to a new two-floor emergency department. Despite the new environment, there were usability and workflow challenges with the space. The authors of this paper created a multidisciplinary, human-centered design collaborative of clinicians, university faculty, and students in an effort to increase emergency department efficiency. After thorough design-research and clinician-focused collaboration, the authors and design team identified the need to improve medical supply retrieval time, which directly impacts patient care and clinician satisfaction. The primary interventions consisted of a redesign that is as follows: (a) created standardized icons related to organ system, (b) increased visibility of supply labels, and (c) reorganized supplies based on usage data. Although a successful project, it was not without several barriers discussed in this article, including design researcher and clinician-level setting and engagement, academic/institutional policies, and conflicting schedules. In addition, the lessons learned from implementing human-centered design concepts into clinical workflow sets forth future research opportunities and inspiration for other institutions to collaborate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of an anniversary issue of Journal of Molecular Evolution, commenting on a paper published on 1999 by the Nobel laureate Frances Arnold and her colleague Kentaro Miyazaki. The paper by Miyazaki and Arnold presented saturation mutagenesis as an alternative method to random mutagenesis for obtaining enzymes with increasing stability. Both techniques were conceived to accomplish directed evolution, an approach honoured by the Nobel Prize of Chemistry 2018. Here, I am commenting on the pros and cons of random and saturation mutagenesis, while also discussing important results from directed evolution. I conclude that molecular evolution is finding new applications in science and it is definitely an integral part of the genomic era's revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on retractment of a paper published in 1998 in the journal 'New England Journal of Medicine,' by its editors. Reasons for retractment; Authors and theme of the paper.

This survey paper attempts to cover a broad range of topics related to computational biomedicine. The field has been attracting great attention due to a number of benefits it can provide the society with. New technological and theoretical advances have made it possible to progress considerably. Traditionally, problems emerging in this field are challenging from many perspectives. In this paper, we considered the influence of big data on the field, problems associated with massive datasets in biomedicine and ways to address these problems. We analyzed the most commonly used machine learning and feature mining tools and several new trends and tendencies such as deep learning and biological networks for computational biomedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unsupervised ensemble, or consensus clustering, consists in finding the optimal combination strategy of individual clusterings that is robust with respect to the selection of an algorithmic clustering pool. Recently an approach was proposed based on the concept of consensus graph that has profound advantages over its predecessors. Despite its robust properties this approach assigns the same weight to the contribution of each clustering to the final solution. In this paper, we propose a weighting policy for this problem that is based on internal clustering quality measures and compare against other popular approaches. Results on publicly available datasets show that weights can significantly improve the accuracy performance while retaining the robust properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are medical classification systems good for? Taking this question as a starting point, this paper argues that different answers have to be given depending on the scope of application of the classification system. While the use of restricted and specialised classification systems can be described rather well with the existing scientific taxonomy account, this account falls short to make sense of the function that systems play that are heterogeneous and imprecise but broadly applied, such as the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Health-Related Problems (ICD). Given that the causal complexity and inter-individual heterogeneity of disease manifestation and progression challenge obtaining unambiguous, universally applicable definitions of the units of classification, this paper aims to introduce a pluralist account that relies on the concept of "epistemic hubs." This epistemic hub account stresses that classification systems used in different settings by a variety of actors can mediate between them and thus provide important opportunities for exchange of information and integration of causal explanations. Therefore, broadly applied classifications have to be connective and compatible with additional use-specific epistemic strategies in order to facilitate interactions between different methodological approaches to diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces methods used to communicate with participants in the 'Biobank Japan Project (BBJP)', which is a disease-focused biobanking project. The methods and their implications are discussed in the context of the ethical conduct of the biobanking project. Informed consent, which ensures the autonomous decisions of participants, is believed to be practically impossible for the biobanking project in general. Consequently, the concept of 'trust', which is 'judgement and action in conditions of less than perfect information', has been suggested to compensate for this limitation. As a means to maintain the trust participants feel for the project, this paper proposes communication with participants after receiving their consent. After describing the limitations of informed consent within the BBJP, based on a survey we conducted, we introduce our attempts to communicate with participants, discussing their implications as a means to compensate for the limitations of informed consent at the biobanking project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a system, a meta-reasoner, to diagnose other systems. This system, called DSKE, performs its diagnosis based upon the knowledge of the structure of the system under diagnosis and based upon previous diagnostic experiences with that system. Since DSKE is based upon first order logic, it has strong deductive powers. Given adequate information, it can diagnose problems quite impressively. Contrary to probabilistic and fuzzy logic approaches, our system is not based upon data which may or may not be available, and which may or may not be reliable. Further, our system makes use of available knowledge. Contrary to model based diagnosis systems, our system can handle uncertainty and incomplete knowledge. The algorithm we provide yields a minimal diagnosis which covers all the abnormal behaviors detected. This paper provides a detailed description of DSKE. The inner workings of the system are carefully and comprehensively analyzed. Examples illustrate the advantages of our system, and demonstrate its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This purpose of this paper is to review the literature on racial/ethnic disparities in the utilization and quality of care and the proposed explanations for these differences. First, the literature on racial/ethnic disparities in medical treatment is reviewed briefly with the goal of providing a sense of the range of procedures and conditions on which these disparities occur. Then, the possible role of physician/provider, patient, and health care system factors in contributing to these disparities is reviewed. Finally, suggestions for new or expanded directions for research in each of these three areas are given. The goal of the paper is to identify factors that might be particularly amenable to the type of research done by health psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction A critical task for health profession educators is to foster student appreciation of patient quality and safety issues. Although instructional methods vary, few focus on the direct communication of the patient experience to students. This qualitative study explores the experiences and learning of health profession students participating in a Safety Module in the Health Mentor Programme. Methods Small interprofessional groups of students were paired with a health mentor, an individual experiencing chronic health challenges. Students followed a 90-minute, semi-structured interview format exploring issues regarding quality care and safety. Following the interviews, students participated in a facilitated asynchronous online discussion and completed a reflective practice paper. An inductive thematic analysis of both of these text-based datasets revealed emerging themes. Results Themes identified in the data included: Patient partnerships as critical to optimal care; consideration of a variety of safety issues; importance of advocacy in promoting safety; improvement of future practice enabled through patient perspectives on clinical error; and embracing of interprofessional communication and collaboration. Conclusions The findings suggest that engagement with the health mentor narratives facilitated students' appreciation of quality and safety issues related to patient care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is devoted to the fault diagnosis of electronic systems by combining logical signals, such as built-in test output, and analog signals, such as voltage, current and temperature. First, the basic inference principles of dependency matrix (D matrix) diagnosis and fuzzy diagnosis are introduced, and the characteristics of their inference operators are summarized. Then, the similarities and differences between the two diagnostic methods are analyzed. Based on the judgement of close degree, a new enhanced inference operator is defined to suit both the D matrix and the fuzzy relation matrix (R matrix). A DR matrix is defined to describe the mixed relationships between faults and the two types of signals. Based on the enhanced inference operator and the DR matrix, a new hybrid diagnostic method is established. Finally, a signal modulating circuit is used to verify the effectiveness of the enhanced inference operator on the D matrix, the R matrix and the DR matrix, which demonstrates the high efficiency of the enhanced inference operator and the feasibility of the new hybrid diagnostic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting function-related amino acids in proteins with unknown function or unknown allosteric binding sites in drug-targeted proteins is a task of paramount importance in molecular biomedicine. In this paper we introduce a simple, light and computationally inexpensive structure-based method to identify catalytic sites in enzymes. Our method, termed cutoff lensing, is a general procedure consisting in letting the cutoff used to build an elastic network model increase to large values. A validation of our method against a large database of annotated enzymes shows that optimal values of the cutoff exist such that three different structure-based indicators allow one to recover a maximum of the known catalytic sites. Interestingly, we find that the larger the structures the greater the predictive power afforded by our method. Possible ways to combine the three indicators into a single figure of merit and into a specific sequential analysis are suggested and discussed with reference to the classic case of HIV-protease. Our method could be used as a complement to other sequence- and/or structure-based methods to narrow the results of large-scale screenings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residues from medicine containers in the collections of the British Museum have been investigated as part of a wider programme of scientific work on Roman surgical instruments. The cylindrical bronze containers are often described as instrument cases, but some contain materia medica, ranging from extensive extant remains of ancient preparations to possible minor deposits on the interior surfaces of the containers. Samples from seven residues have been analysed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify lipid, resin and carbohydrate components and by X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy to characterise inorganic materials. The results have provided evidence for ointments and powders or pills consistent with a medical purpose. The ingredients identified include beeswax, fat, conifer resin and gum-derived sugars, plus elemental carbon and lead and zinc salts. Particularly significant were the varied compositions of residues from four sections of a multi-compartment container. In one of these compartments, the beeswax seems to have been prepared as the 'Punic wax' described by Pliny. Experimental preparation of Punic wax following Pliny's method was undertaken in the laboratory and the product analysed to compare with the ointment residues. This paper discusses the GC-MS results of both the experimental material and the archaeological residues and their significance for the interpretation of the past intended applications of the medicines and the use of the containers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many medical toxicologists are interested in participating in a practice-based, multicenter research and toxicosurveillance network. In 2009, the American College of Medical Toxicology established the Toxicology Investigators Consortium (ToxIC). One facet of ToxIC is a registry that can be used for surveillance of new or old agents, assessment of treatment decisions, and the creation of new research questions. This paper describes the development of and the initial experiences with this registry of toxicology patients. In November 2009, ACMT invited members to participate in a new registry of cases evaluated and cared for by practicing medical toxicologists who provide direct hands-on clinical care. A password-protected, encrypted, online registry data site was created to upload a newly developed electronic case report form (CRF) on registry patients. The CRF includes demographics; encounter circumstances; agent; syndrome, symptoms, and signs; and treatment. A test version at four sites began in January 2010, seven additional sites were added in March 2010 for the beta phase, and the registry was opened to all interested US medical toxicology practices in April 2010. The CRF underwent continuous modifications based upon frequent feedback from and discussion among the participants. Thirty-three toxicology practice sites, encompassing 56 hospitals and clinics, have entered data into the ToxIC Registry. During the first 14 months of data collection, 5,412 patients were entered. The experience thus far demonstrates that the creation of this registry is feasible and constitutes a potentially powerful toxicosurveillance and robust research tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It might seem that racial profiling by doctors raised few of the same concerns as racial profiling by police, immigration, or airport security. This paper argues that the similarities are greater than first appear. The inappropriate use of racial generalizations by doctors may be as harmful and insulting as their use by law enforcement officials. Indeed, the former may be more problematic in compromising an ideal of individualized treatment that is more applicable to doctors than to police. Yet doctors, unlike police, should not attempt to ignore race altogether. Race and ethnicity are associated with the geography of disease, with social and cultural factors relevant to disease, and, to some extent, with genetic predispositions to disease. Moreover, greater attention to the distinctive health conditions of certain racial and ethnic groups is necessary to make up for past neglect. But it will be a tricky business to steer a middle course between a naïve, reckless, or dogmatic color blindness and a stereotype-driven overreliance on race and ethnicity. In trying to steer such a course, the doctor can only hope for the day when a combination of more individualized genomic medicine and greater social equality will make it possible for her to pay less attention to race and ethnicity without detriment to her patients' health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern medicine serves a religious function for modern Americans as a conduit through which science can be applied directly to the human body. The first half of this paper will focus on the theoretical foundations for viewing medicine as a religious practice arguing that just as a hierarchical structured authoritarian church historically mediated access to God, contemporary Western medicine provides a conduit by which the universalizable truths of science can be applied to the human being thereby functioning as a new established religion. I will then illustrate the many parallels between medicine and religion through an analysis of rituals and symbols surrounding and embedded within the modern practice of medicine. This analysis will pay special attention to the primacy placed on secret interior knowledge of the human body. I will end by responding to the hope for a 'secularization of American medicine,' exploring some of the negative consequences of secularization, and arguing that, rather than seeking to secularize, American medicine should strive to use its religious features to offer hope and healing to the sick, in keeping with its historically religious legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a discussion of the concept of medicalisation and medical culture in Anglo-American, French-, and German-speaking historiography the paper argues that medical innovation in Europe from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century should be approached in a different way. Instead of asking from the perspective of a too narrow concept of medicalisation why medical innovations were rejected by the population, (medical) historians should analyse medical culture and ask why people should have changed their health and illness behaviour. This conceptual argument is deduced from four empirical examples: the introduction of smallpox vaccination, "medical police," the problem of medical professionalization, and the questions arising around the relations between the healthy/sick and their practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, researchers have successfully accumulated lots of data pointing to a salutary impact of religious involvement. But progress in the religion and health field has been inhibited by the relative lack of attention to important conceptual and theoretical issues. This paper asserts that until we focus as much on the latter as on the former, this field will remain marginalized and thus ineffective in contributing to understandings of the determinants of health and healing. Careful attention to the how and why of a religion–health connection is imperative for bringing this research into the mainstream of biomedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the entangled histories of animal-human relationship and modem surgery. It starts with the various different roles animals have in surgery - patients, experimental models and organ providers - and analyses where these seemingly contradictory positions of animals come from historically. The analyses is based on the assumption that both the heterogeneous relationships of humans to animals and modern surgery are the results of fundamentally local, contingent and situated developments and not reducible to large-scale social explanations, such as modernization. This change of perspective opens up a new ways of understanding both phenomena as deeply interwoven with the redrawing of the nature-culture divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current veterinary history has not engaged significantly with patient histories. In many historical accounts of veterinary medicine, animal patients are backgrounded or completely invisible. Yet modern veterinary medicine, in its dominant form of companion animal practice, has become increasingly patient-centred. The modern animal patient is accorded something near full subject status in many veterinary clinical interactions. Embracing this raises issues of how to handle animals in veterinary history. Animals are the recipients of veterinary medicine, they exert agency in the clinic and field, yet they have remained problematical for the historian and sociologist, who have remained anthropocentric in orientation. This paper explores different constructions of the veterinary surgical patient in the 20th century in an attempt to begin examination of veterinary history as an animal-patient history "from below." In doing so, a trajectory of the development of British 20th-century veterinary medicine is presented which suggests the value of minding animals in historical accounts. Further interdisciplinary studies of veterinary procedures and practices are needed in order to foreground animals more and evaluate their subject status within historical and contemporary veterinary medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Failed referrals for specialty care are common and often represent medical errors. Technological structures and processes account for many failures. Scheduling appointments for subspecialty evaluation is a first step in outpatient referral and consultation.Objective: We determined whether moving from paper-based referrals to a Web-based system with automated tracking features was associated with greater scheduling of appointments among referred patients.Design: Staggered implementation of a quality-improvement project, with comparison of intervention and control groups.Participants: Patients 21 or more years of age referred from any of 11 primary-care clinics to any of 25 specialty clinics.Interventions: Faxed referrals were replaced by a Web-based application shared by generalists and specialists, with enhanced communications and automated notification to the specialty office.Measurements: We compared scheduling before and after implementation and time from referral to appointment. A logistic regression analysis adjusted for demographics.Main Results: Among 40,487 referrals, 54% led to scheduled specialty visits before intervention, compared to 83% with intervention. The median time to appointment was 168 days without intervention and 78 days with intervention. Scheduling increased more when duplicate referrals were not generated (54% for single orders, 24% for multiple orders). After adjustment, referrals with the intervention were more than twice as likely to have scheduled visits.Conclusions: With a new Web-based referrals system, referrals were more than twice as likely to lead to a scheduled visit. This system improves access to specialty medical services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of the chief resident in internal medicine is examined through the eyes of an organizational psychologist who, over a 3-year period, met with each of 6 groups of chief residents for an average of 1 hour a week over the 12 months of the job. Based on this experience, the chief resident job is conceptualized as a middle management role with 4 distinct types of tasks: up work, down work, lateral work, and internal work. Core challenges facing the chief residents at each stage of the chief resident year are also identified. The paper concludes with a description of "lessons" learned in 5 areas (sliding up or sliding down, losing contact, splitting, scapegoating, and losing sight of the system) for improving the effectiveness of the chief resident role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiobjective Optimization (MO) has many applications in such fields as the Internet, finance, biomedicine, management science, game theory and engineering. However, solving MO problems is not an easy task. Searching for all Pareto optimal solutions is expensive and a time consuming process because there are usually exponentially large (or infinite) Pareto optimal solutions. Even for simple problems determining whether a point belongs to the Pareto set is $\mathcal{NP}$ -hard. In this paper, we discuss recent developments in MO. These include optimality conditions, applications, global optimization techniques, the new concept of epsilon Pareto optimal solution, and heuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: Studies have documented substantial salary disparities between women arid men in academic medicine. While various strategies have been proposed to increase equity, to our knowledge, no interventions have been evaluated. OBJECTIVE: This paper aims to assess the effect of an identity-conscious intervention on salary equity. DESIGN: This study shows comparison of adjusted annual salaries for women and men before and after an intervention. PARTICIPANTS/SETTING: We studied full time faculty employed in FY00 (n=393) and FY04 (n=462) in one College of Medicine. INTERVENTION: Compensation data were obtained from personnel databases for women and men, and adjusted for predictors. Alter verification of data accuracy by departments, comparable individuals within the same department who had different salaries were identified. The Dean discussed apparent disparities with department heads, and salaries were adjusted. MEASUREMENTS: Total adjusted annualized salaries were compared for men and women for the year the project began and the year after the intervention using multivariate models. Female faculty members' salaries were also considered as a percent of male faculty members' salaries. RESULTS: Twenty-one potential salary disparities were identified. Eight women received equity adjustments to their salaries, with the average increase being $17,323. Adjusted salaries for women as a percent of salary for men increased from 89.4% before the intervention to 93.5% after the intervention. Disparities in compensation were no longer significant in FY2004 in basic science departments, where women were paid 97.6% of what men were paid. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that gender disparities in compensation can be reduced through careful documentation, identification of comparable individuals paid different salaries, arid commitment from leadership to hold the appropriate person accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rare earth (RE) elements inhering in low toxicity have been widely used in biomedicine. The RE elements can also improve the hot workability, corrosion resistance and mechanical properties of stainless steels. However, the antibacterial mechanisms of the RE elements are still under discussion and the antibacterial property of RE-bearing stainless steels has not yet been investigated or reported so far. In this paper several Ce-bearing stainless steels were prepared, the microstructure of the steels was examined, and the antibacterial property of Ce-bearing stainless steels was investigated. It was found that Ce-rich zones were precipitated in the Ce-bearing stainless steels and the volume fraction of the Ce-rich zones increased with increasing Ce content. The Ce-bearing stainless steels showed excellent antibacterial property when the amount of Ce added was above a critical value. Compared to the conventional Cu-bearing antibacterial stainless steels, the Ce-bearing stainless steels investigated presently exhibited good antibacterial ability without any thermal aging treatment. The antibacterial mechanism of Ce-bearing stainless steels is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the extent of the interconnection, if any, between religion and the Western culture of biomedicine has received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. However, any phenomenological analysis that begins by positing an essence of religion is, if not doomed, deeply flawed from the outset. This paper employs William Alston’s non-essentialist notion of ‘religion-making characteristics’ to assess the extent of the interconnection. The conclusion is that the culture of biomedicine does share many, if not all of these characteristics, and that both religion and medicine overlap in significant ways on, to use Erwin Goodenough’s metaphor, the painted curtain that separates man from the tremendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a collaborative work situation at a distance, the use of avatars to represent collaborators reduces collaborative effort. Also, animated avatars can help distant users to ground their relationship and facilitate their interaction because they materialise visual clues for the distant collaborators and their current activity. To check the validity of these hypotheses we set up an experiment based on the use of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) synchronised for collective medical decision-making. Several teams of practitioners from different disciplines will be required to deal with liver tumours displayed in Argonaute 3D. In this paper, we provide some evidence from existing studies for the hypotheses and select several measures to estimate the grounding process in CVEs. Next, we briefly describe the setup used to collect observable data with Argonaute 3D and we summarise first observations acquired with practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. health care system is one of the world's most advanced systems. Yet, the health care system suffers from unexplained practice variations, major gaps between evidence and practice, and suboptimal quality. Although information processing, communication, and management are key to health care delivery and considerable evidence links information/communication technology (IT) to improvements in patient safety and quality of care, the health care system has a longstanding gap in its investment. In the Crossing the Quality Chasm and Building a Better Delivery System reports, The Institute of Medicine and National Academy of Engineering identified IT integration as critical to improving health care delivery systems. This paper reviews the state of IT use in the U.S. health care system, its role in facilitating evidence-based practices, and identifies key attributes of an ideal IT infrastructure and issues surrounding IT implementation. We also examine structural, financial, policy-related, cultural, and organizational barriers to IT implementation for evidence-based practice and strategies to overcome them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case for careful consideration of theory in planning to implement evidence-based practices into clinical care. As described, theory should be tightly linked to strategic planning through careful choice or creation of an implementation framework. Strategies should be linked to specific interventions and/or intervention components to be implemented, and the choice of tools should match the interventions and overall strategy, linking back to the original theory and framework. The thesis advanced is that in most studies where there is an attempt to implement planned change in clinical processes, theory is used loosely. An example of linking theory to intervention design is presented from a Mental Health Quality Enhancement Research Initiative effort to increase appropriate use of antipsychotic medication among patients with schizophrenia in the Veterans Health Administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OBJECTIVE:To evaluate evidence in recent authoritative‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ (EBM) reports on surgery for severe obesity.METHODS:Focused review of Index Medicus citations and authors' own databases of publications on surgery for obesity, 1978–2004.RESULTS:EBM criteria for assessment of strength of evidence requiring randomized controlled studies (RCTs) in these reports are inappropriate for evaluating invasive treatments such as surgery, which have robust physiological effects, are difficult to reverse and may have more serious side effects than the drug studies for which the criteria were promulgated. Flaws in these reports include omissions of important studies demonstrating improvements in comorbidity, factual errors in descriptions of operations and faulty analyses of outcomes of laparoscopic approaches. There are misinterpretations of cited papers, and inclusion of obsolete operations as well as a study generated during the‘learning curve’ of an avowed complex procedure.CONCLUSION:EBM analyses of surgical modalities affecting access to care require relevant evaluation criteria, true peer review and expert consultation. Authors' claims of objectivity by invoking use of evidence-based criteria applicable to drug treatment and other easily reversible forms of therapy are questionable. Decisions based on flawed EBM reports may adversely affect access to care for millions of severely obese patients.International Journal of Obesity (2005) 29, 735–745. doi:10.1038/sj.ijo.0802930 Published online 3 May 2005 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review of the authors' publications concerning the development of biosensors based on enzyme field-effect transistors (ENFETs) for direct substrates or inhibitors analysis. Such biosensors were designed by using immobilised enzymes and ion-selective field-effect transistors (ISFETs). Highly specific, sensitive, simple, fast and cheap determination of different substances renders them as promising tools in medicine, biotechnology, environmental control, agriculture and the food industry. The biosensors based on ENFETs and direct enzyme analysis for determination of concentrations of different substrates (glucose, urea, penicillin, formaldehyde, creatinine, etc.) have been developed and their laboratory prototypes were fabricated. Improvement of the analytical characteristics of such biosensors may be achieved by using a differential mode of measurement, working solutions with different buffer concentrations and specific agents, negatively or positively charged additional membranes, or genetically modified enzymes. These approaches allow one to decrease the effect of the buffer capacity influence on the sensor response in an aim to increase the sensitivity of the biosensors and to extend their dynamic ranges. Biosensors for the determination of concentrations of different toxic substances (organophosphorous pesticides, heavy metal ions, hypochlorite, glycoalkaloids, etc.) were designed on the basis of reversible and/or irreversible enzyme inhibition effect(s). The conception of an enzymatic multibiosensor for the determination of different toxic substances based on the enzyme inhibition effect is also described. We will discuss the respective advantages and disadvantages of biosensors based on the ENFETs developed and also demonstrate their practical application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ritual has long been thought to play an important role in the healing processes used by ancient and non-Western healers. In this paper, I suggest that practitioners of Western medicine also interact with patients in a highly ritualized manner. Medical rituals, like religious rituals, serve to alter the meaning of an experience by naming and circumscribing unknown elements of that experience and by enabling patients' belief in a treatment and their expectancy of healing from that treatment. These are all critical elements necessary to mobilize the potent placebo effects reported elsewhere to result from doctor-patient interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hydroxyl radical (·OH) has been implicated in various diseases, and it is therefore important to establish efficient methods to screen hydroxyl radical scavengers for antioxidant therapy. In this paper, a simple chemiluminescence assay was established to evaluate the ·OH-scavenging capacity of phenolic compounds. This assay took advantage of the transient property of the Fenton reaction and the reaction between luminol and the hydroxyl radical, and effectively avoided the pro-oxidant action of some phenolic compounds. Fifteen phenolic compounds were assessed for their antioxidant activity in the Fenton reaction system, and even in the case of "pro-oxidants" that were excluded from the widely used deoxyribose (DR) assay. Since it overcomes the challenges that the traditional DR assay encounters, our method has promising applicative values: it is low-cost, time-saving, and reliable. It would also be more favorable than electron spin resonance (ESR) and radiolysis technology, which are known to be expensive and not commonly available to those specialized in free radical biology and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To allow doctors to monitor the physical parameters of the patient’s body in real time and to understand the changes in the patient’s condition in time, the medical remote monitoring system based on the Internet of Things was studied. From the perspective of practical application of hospital wards, a medical health monitoring system was designed with the help of CC2430 microcontroller, human information sensor, and microelectronic and modern wireless communication technology. In addition, a sensor node circuit and a coordinator node circuit for collecting medical signals were designed. Meanwhile, the software of wireless sensor network was designed. Finally, the online debugging of each system module was combined with hardware and software. The experimental result proved that the network node was reliable and the data transmission was accurate. It is concluded that the medical monitoring system basically meets the design requirements of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Council of Europe’s legal regulation concerning development of biology and medicine undoubtedly form the most interesting, but certainly not perfect, over-national system of protection of human beings in prenatal stages of development. The strength of the mentioned system is that it based on well-known and common acceptable values and rules such as human dignity and its protection. The aim of the paper is to present the reasons behind adopting such a system, as well as the consequences of the latter.The author argues that in such a way a revolution within the human rights system of the Council of Europe took place. This revolution caused a significant expansion of the Council of Europe’s system of human rights’ protection and changed the perspective of the protection from vertical to the horizontal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on various retractions in 2010 related to biomedical data. It says that "The Lancet" pulled back his 1998 paper that first explains the connection of autism with measles, mumps and rubella vaccines in February. It mentions the two papers made by neuroscientist Linda Buck in September on the discussion of how the brain processes odor because of failure to duplicate findings. It adds that Amy Wager retracted a January paper in "Nature" concerning blood stem cells in October.

Tumor proliferative capacity is a major biological correlate of breast tumor metastatic potential. In this paper, we developed a systems approach to investigate associations among gene expression patterns, representative protein-protein interactions, and the potential for clinical metastases, to uncover novel survival-related subnetwork signatures as a function of tumor proliferative potential. Based on the statistical associations between gene expression patterns and patient outcomes, we identified three groups of survival prognostic subnetwork signatures (SPNs) corresponding to three proliferation levels. We discovered 8 SPNs in the high proliferation group, 8 SPNs in the intermediate proliferation group, and 6 SPNs in the low proliferation group. We observed little overlap of SPNs between the three proliferation groups. The enrichment analysis revealed that most SPNs were enriched in distinct signaling pathways and biological processes. The SPNs were validated on other cohorts of patients, and delivered high accuracy in the classification of metastatic vs non-metastatic breast tumors. Our findings indicate that certain biological networks underlying breast cancer metastasis differ in a proliferation-dependent manner. These networks, in combination, may form the basis of highly accurate prognostic classification models and may have clinical utility in guiding therapeutic options for patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the importance of pretzels model as vernacular equipment on the study on urology. He cited that pretzel were an entree into many areas that could not discussed in an open forum, and has been also considered as a permission giving. He acknowledged Marty Resnick's argument over other urologists that the more senior urologists would never understand the on-line review process and would never accept reviewing a paper if it were submitted on-line.

The article present several announcements related to medicine. The Euro Grammer European Spine Journal disclosed that they are already accepting papers related to basic science which will automatically qualifier the author for the award given by the journal in the field of basic science. Meanwhile, AOSpine International coordinates with the Regional AOSpine North America and Europe to conduct a fellowship on clinical sciences. Moreover, a web site for Oswestry Disability Index has been created.

The article comments on the paper by Amy M. Sullivan et al., which was published within the issue demonstrating a training program in palliative care which resulted in significant improvements in self-assessed competencies and behaviors relative to teaching and clinical care. It raises broader questions regarding the relationship between general internal medicine and palliative care.

The article presents several papers and people who gave headlines in the Biomedicine sector in the U.S. Science journalist Simon Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association who wrote for the "Guardian" that questioned practices endorsed by the organization. 20,000 applications were received by the National Health Institute for Challenge Grants. British-born Simone Davis refused to be immunized with Gardasil from Merck & Co. Inc., and threatened with deportation.

The article focuses on the DNA sequence variants that influence gene expression and disease risk in the U.S. It is pointed out that the effects of variations in DNA sequence are often subtle, such as altered levels of gene expression. Moreover, it is said that identifying those DNA sequences that determine levels of expression across individuals could have great medical potential. It also discusses one paper that illustrates the identification of DNA sequences which looks at the two major contractile proteins of the human heart.

Evaluates the medical periodicals 'Cell Cycle' and 'Cancer Biology and Therapy.' Journal format; Sections; Presentation of experimental papers; Periodical layout.

Topping the list of scientists who have published the greatest number of 'hot papers' over the past two years according to the ISI citation index, are Kenji Kangawa and Masayasu Kojima. The ranking system is based on manuscripts that are cited at an unusually high rate for their field. In Kangawa and Kojima's case, it is the discovery of a hormone related to feeding and obesity that has attracted so much attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]