The Importance of Use of the On-line Databases as a Source for Systematic Review of Toxoplasmosis Screening During Pregnancy.

BACKGROUND: Infection with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii is a common infection in animals and humans worldwide. This infection can occur after ingestion of water or food contaminated with cat oocytes, ingestion of tissue cysts in mammalian and avian meat and congenitally. The prenatal infection can lead to Congenital Toxoplasmosis with miscarriage or stillbirth. After infection, laboratory tests are positive within 2-3 weeks and remain positive throughout life. However, testing for Toxoplasma infection during pregnancy is necessary in some countries, while in others it is not a mandatory "screening" test. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to review systematically the screening of toxoplasmosis in pregnancy in different countries worldwide. METHODS: Cohorts, retrospective and cross-sectional studies were incorporated in our review, finally including 11 articles from an initial pool of 1532 related papers. RESULTS: The seroprevalence of pregnant women varies from countries with low prevalence to regions with high prevalence and screening policies also differ. Most countries worldwide have control policies, while Germany and Mexico that do not have systematic screening for Toxoplasma during the prenatal period. CONCLUSION: Our results show that Congenital Toxoplasmosis is very rare in some countries and it is very difficult to find a balance between potential risk and benefit of a screening program. For this reason, some countries are limited to prenatal counseling to reduce CT. In addition, the reduction of major sources of contamination especially in developing countries is the most important prevention measure.

Congenital Zika Infection and the Risk of Neurodevelopmental, Neurological, and Urinary Track Disorders in Early Childhood. A Systematic Review.

It was late 2015 when Northeast Brazil noticed a worrying increase in neonates born with microcephaly and other congenital malformations. These abnormalities, characterized by an abnormally small head and often neurological impairment and later termed Congenital Zika Syndrome, describe the severity of neurodevelopmental and nephrological outcomes in early childhood, and the implication of microcephaly at birth. The purpose of the study was to describe the neurodevelopmental outcomes in children exposed to Zika virus during fetal life, with and without microcephaly at birth. The systematic review included research studies about the neurodevelopmental outcomes with and without microcephaly, as well as nephrological outcomes in early childhood. We searched PubMed, Crossref, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar publications and selected 19 research articles published from 2018 to 2021. Most studies have linked the severity of microcephaly in childbirth to the neurodevelopmental and urinary outcomes in early childhood. However, most children without microcephaly at birth develop typically, while others may be at risk for language impairment.

A general framework for learning rules from data.

With the aim of getting understandable symbolic rules to explain a given phenomenon, we split the task of learning these rules from sensory data in two phases: a multilayer perceptron maps features into propositional variables and a set of subsequent layers operated by a PAC-like algorithm learns Boolean expressions on these variables. The special features of this procedure are that: i) the neural network is trained to produce a Boolean output having the principal task of discriminating between classes of inputs; ii) the symbolic part is directed to compute rules within a family that is not known a priori; iii) the welding point between the two learning systems is represented by a feedback based on a suitability evaluation of the computed rules. The procedure we propose is based on a computational learning paradigm set up recently in some papers in the fields of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive systems. The present article focuses on information management aspects of the procedure. We deal with the lack of prior information about the rules through learning strategies that affect both the meaning of the variables and the description length of the rules into which they combine. The paper uses the task of learning to formally discriminate among several emotional states as both a working example and a test bench for a comparison with previous symbolic and subsymbolic methods in the field.