ABSTRACT
Objective: The current study aimed to observe hypertension educational intervention's effect on general physicians (GPs) to improve blood pressure control and patient outcomes indirectly. Methods: This randomized control trial includes 42 GPs divided into 2 groups. GPs in group 1 receive face-to-face education with structured educational material on hypertension management strategies by a senior cardiologist. GPs in group 2 receive the print version of education material. The data was collected from six major cities in Pakistan. GPs with at least three years of experience in the broad primary care disciplines, with ages above 18 years, were included in the study. Results: A total of 42 physicians (21 from each group) completed questionnaires, while out of 420 hypertension patients, 105 newly diagnosed and already diagnosed patients enrolled under physicians of both groups. The educational material did just as well at informing clinicians as the face-to-face group intervention did and both the interventions had a significant effect on knowledge and BP control. Conclusion: After the 3-month follow-up, both interventions, including face-to-face and educational approaches, demonstrated significant effectiveness in improving knowledge and blood pressure control. Innovation: The study shows that hypertension educational intervention's effect on general physicians indirectly improves blood pressure control and patient outcomes. And emphasize for developing a hypertension educational program targeted at general physicians.
ABSTRACT
Fusobacterium, a gram-negative non-spore-forming anaerobe, is a common inhabitant of the oral cavity; however, it is not typically found in other organ systems. The occurrence of a hepatic abscess associated with this organism is rare. We present a patient with recurrent diverticulitis with left upper quadrant abdominal pain, and abdominal imaging revealed a hepatic abscess in addition to sigmoid diverticulitis. Further investigations led to an unusual culprit; Fusobacterium nucleatum.
ABSTRACT
Background Hypothyroidism can be a cause of sinus bradycardia. However, thyroid laboratory evaluation is often performed routinely in patients with complete heart block (CHB) though there is little data to support this practice. This study aimed to assess the frequency of thyroid dysfunction in patients presenting with CHB without clinical features of hypothyroidism. Methodology All patients referred for permanent pacemaker implantation for CHB were included in this cross-sectional study. Patients with known thyroid disorder or clinical features of thyroid disorder were excluded. Demographic, electrocardiography (EKG), and routine thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) screening results were recorded. Results A total of 102 patients with complete atrioventricular (AV) block were enrolled in the study of which 50.0% (51) were male. The mean age was 61.09 ± 11.74. Co-morbidities included diabetes mellitus 44.1% (45), smoking 36.3% (37), and hypertension 55.9% (57). Mean EKG atrial rate was 82.97 ± 31.31 mmHg with a mean ventricular escape rate of 36.17 ± 5.93. Permanent pacemakers were implanted in all of the patients. Only one patient had an abnormal TSH. Conclusions We found a very low prevalence of thyroid dysfunction among patients without clinical features of thyroid dysfunction presenting with third-degree AV block. This calls for cautious prescription of thyroid testing in clinically euthyroid patients.
ABSTRACT
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a powerful medical imaging technique that provides essential clinical information about the human body. One major limitation of MRI is its long scan time. Implementation of advance MRI algorithms on a parallel architecture (to exploit inherent parallelism) has a great potential to reduce the scan time. Sensitivity Encoding (SENSE) is a Parallel Magnetic Resonance Imaging (pMRI) algorithm that utilizes receiver coil sensitivities to reconstruct MR images from the acquired under-sampled k-space data. At the heart of SENSE lies inversion of a rectangular encoding matrix. This work presents a novel implementation of GPU based SENSE algorithm, which employs QR decomposition for the inversion of the rectangular encoding matrix. For a fair comparison, the performance of the proposed GPU based SENSE reconstruction is evaluated against single and multicore CPU using openMP. Several experiments against various acceleration factors (AFs) are performed using multichannel (8, 12 and 30) phantom and in-vivo human head and cardiac datasets. Experimental results show that GPU significantly reduces the computation time of SENSE reconstruction as compared to multi-core CPU (approximately 12x speedup) and single-core CPU (approximately 53x speedup) without any degradation in the quality of the reconstructed images.
