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Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is increasingly used to study brain function in infants, but the development and standardization of analysis techniques for use with infant fNIRS data have not paced other technical advances. Here we quantify and compare the effects of different methods of analysis of infant fNIRS data on two independent fNIRS datasets involving 6-9-month-old infants and a third simulated infant fNIRS dataset. With each, we contrast results from a traditional, fixed-array analysis with several functional channel of interest (fCOI) analysis approaches. In addition, we tested the effects of varying the number and anatomical location of potential data channels to be included in the fCOI definition. Over three studies we find that fCOI approaches are more sensitive than fixed-array analyses, especially when channels of interests were defined within-subjects. Applying anatomical restriction and/or including multiple channels in the fCOI definition does not decrease and in some cases increases sensitivity of fCOI methods. Based on these results, we recommend that researchers consider employing fCOI approaches to the analysis of infant fNIRS data and provide some guidelines for choosing between particular fCOI approaches and settings for the study of infant brain function and development., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest We declare no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The aim of this study was to understand the experiences of family caregivers in the process of diagnosing hereditary angioedema. An interpretive and qualitative research methodology based on Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics was carried out. Data collection took place between May 2015 and August 2016 and included a focus group and in-depth interviews with 16 family caregivers. Two themes define the experiences of family caregivers: "Family life focuses on identifying the problem" and "Discovering and coping with a complex diagnosis." The process of diagnosis generates fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and incomprehension. Family caregivers are the main support for patients diagnosed with hereditary angioedema. As they share in the patients' suffering, they need a diagnosis to be established to be able to cope with the disease and offer support. Family health nurses can contribute to improving the coping process in this phase of the disease.

Introduction: The European Union receives one third of the world's migrant population who cross the Mediterranean Sea in small boats and arrive illegally in Europe. Irregular migrants (IMs) are persons who do not have legal permission, documentation, or refugee status and are not authorized to enter or stay in a given country. More than half a million IMs arrive in the European Union by sea creating serious public health issues in Greece, Italy, and Spain, thereby needing emergency care. The purpose of this study was to describe and understand the experiences of IMs who arrive in Spain by small boats in terms of cultural issues surrounding the provision of emergency care., Method: A qualitative study based on Gadamer's phenomenology was used. Data were collected between 2015 and 2018 using 12 in-depth interviews of IMs., Results: Three main themes arose: "IMs driven by a culture of emigration in countries of origin," "Facing risk in search of a better life," and "The need for cultural adaptation in emergency care.", Discussion: Biopsychosocial and cultural needs must be addressed when providing emergency care to IMs who arrive in Europe by small boat., Implications: Nurses can help adapt and restructure cultural practices in the emergency care provided to IMs.

This paper presents an ensemble based classification proposal for predicting neurological outcome of severely traumatized patients. The study comprises both the whole group of patients and a subgroup containing those patients suffering traumatic brain injury (TBI). Data was gathered from patients hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the University Hospital in Salamanca. Predictive models were induced from both epidemiologic and clinical variables taken at the emergency room and along the stay in the ICU. The large number of variables leads to a low accuracy in the classifiers even when feature selection methods are used. In addition, the presence of a much larger number of instances of one of the classes in the subgroup of TBI patients produces a significantly lesser precision for the minority class. Usual ways of dealing with the last problem is to use undersampling and oversampling strategies, which can lead to the loss of valuable data and overfitting problems respectively. Our proposal for dealing with these problems is based in the use of ensemble multiclassifiers as well as in the use of an ensemble playing the role of base classifier in multiclassifiers. The proposed strategy gave the best values of the selected quality measures (accuracy, precision, sensitivity, specificity, F-measure and area under the Receiver Operator Characteristic curve) as well as the closest values of precision for the two classes under study in the case of the classification from imbalanced data.

Objectives: This paper addresses the problem of decision-making in relation to the administration of noninvasive mechanical ventilation (NIMV) in intensive care units., Methods: Data mining methods were employed to find out the factors influencing the success/failure of NIMV and to predict its results in future patients. These artificial intelligence-based methods have not been applied in this field in spite of the good results obtained in other medical areas., Results: Feature selection methods provided the most influential variables in the success/failure of NIMV, such as NIMV hours, PaCO2 at the start, PaO2 / FiO2 ratio at the start, hematocrit at the start or PaO2 / FiO2 ratio after two hours. These methods were also used in the preprocessing step with the aim of improving the results of the classifiers. The algorithms provided the best results when the dataset used as input was the one containing the attributes selected with the CFS method., Conclusions: Data mining methods can be successfully applied to determine the most influential factors in the success/failure of NIMV and also to predict NIMV results in future patients. The results provided by classifiers can be improved by preprocessing the data with feature selection techniques.

The in vitro activity of levofloxacin, moxifloxacin, gatifloxacin, erythromycin, telithromycin, linezolid, synercid and vancomycin was measured against 36 genetically defined, gyrA/grlA double mutant MRSA clinical strains with an MIC to ciprofloxacin > or = 8 mg/l. The three newer fluoroquinolones tested were more active than ciprofloxacin. Resistance rates for levofloxacin and gatifloxacin were high (44.5 and 36.1%, respectively). All the strains were moxifloxacin-susceptible, though most of them had MICs close to the break point. All the strains were intermediate or resistant to erythromycin and most were also resistant to telithromycin. No strains were resistant to linezolid, synercid or vancomycin (MIC(90): 2, 1 and 2 mg/l, respectively).