Semantic Feature Extraction Using SBERT for Dementia Detection.

Dementia is a neurodegenerative disease that leads to the development of cognitive deficits, such as aphasia, apraxia, and agnosia. It is currently considered one of the most significant major medical problems worldwide, primarily affecting the elderly. This condition gradually impairs the patient's cognition, eventually leading to the inability to perform everyday tasks without assistance. Since dementia is an incurable disease, early detection plays an important role in delaying its progression. Because of this, tools and methods have been developed to help accurately diagnose patients in their early stages. State-of-the-art methods have shown that the use of syntactic-type linguistic features provides a sensitive and noninvasive tool for detecting dementia in its early stages. However, these methods lack relevant semantic information. In this work, we propose a novel methodology, based on the semantic features approach, by using sentence embeddings computed by Siamese BERT networks (SBERT), along with support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), random forest, and an artificial neural network (ANN) as classifiers. Our methodology extracted 17 features that provide demographic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic information from 550 oral production samples of elderly controls and people with Alzheimer's disease, provided by the DementiaBank Pitt Corpus database. To quantify the relevance of the extracted features for the dementia classification task, we calculated the mutual information score, which demonstrates a dependence between our features and the MMSE score. The experimental classification performance metrics, such as the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score (77, 80, 80, and 80%, respectively), validate that our methodology performs better than syntax-based methods and the BERT approach when only the linguistic features are used.

Nutrition in medical education in Latin America: Results of a cross-sectional survey.

RATIONALE: The gap between the nutrition education provided to medical students and the nutrition competences and attitudes needed for doctors to provide effective nutrition care is a global concern. The goal of this study was to investigate the curricular content on nutrition education in Latin American medical schools and to evaluate the self-perceived knowledge, attitudes, and barriers to nutrition practice of final-year medical students. METHODS: Eighty-five public and private medical schools from 17 Latin American countries were invited to participate in the study. Two close-ended online questionnaires consisting of 25 and 43 questions were sent to medical school directors. Quantitative variables were expressed as frequencies, percentages, mean ± standard deviation, medians, and ranges. RESULTS: A total of 22 (26%) medical school directors responded, of which 11 schools (50%) offered stand-alone mandatory nutrition courses in preclinical and 8 (36%) in clinical years. The mean hours dedicated to nutrition education was 47 (range: 0-150). A total of 1530 of 1630 (94%) students from 12 countries responded. Students' average age was 25 ± 3 years, and 59% were female. Most students agreed that improving patients' health through nutrition (91%) is important and that nutrition counseling and assessment should be part of routine care provided by all physicians (89%), but they lack the level of education and training required to address nutrition-related issues. CONCLUSIONS: Positive attitude and interest in nutrition among final-year medical students is high, but nutrition education is not perceived as sufficient to adequately prepare doctors in the field of nutrition.

Effect of electrode geometry on the electrolyte resistance measurement over the surface of a skin phantom in a noninvasive manner.

We analyzed the electrode geometry to obtain the potential (E) and current density (J) distributions at the surface of a skin phantom (SP), in this case a planar surface. Two electrode geometries were tested: a circular electrode (CiE) and a rectangular electrode (ReE). First, by a finite element simulation, we calculated the E and J distributions at the surface of the SP. Second, we determined the resistivity properties as a function of the electrochemical impedance. Three- and four-electrode configurations were used to measure the E versus distance between the reference electrodes (d). For the ReE, the electrolyte resistance (Re) measurements show a linear behavior with respect to "d" if the zone of the linear distribution of E and the homogeneous current density (JH) is considered. In contrast, the CiE shows nonlinear behavior due to the absence of that zone of the linear distribution of E and JH in the entire range. For ReE, we deduced that the behavior of Re versus "d" is related to the material resistivity. Consequently, the ReE geometry improves the Re measurements on the surface and shows us a way to control the behavior of this element in planar samples such as skin.

Endoftalmitis: análisis de casos en el hospital Arzobispo Loayza 1990-2000 / Analysis of cases in the hospital Loayza Archbishop 1990-2000 Endoftalmitis

La endoftalmitis es una inflamación intraocular severa que, siendo poco frecuente, resulta muchas veces en consecuencias devastadoras para el globo ocular a pesar de un tratamiento adecuado. En nuestro medio los trabajos respecto a esta entidad son muy escasos. A través del Servicio de Estadística e Informática del Hospital Arzobispo Loayza se colectaron las historias clínicas de los pacientes con diagnóstico al alta de endoftalmitis, que fueron atendido entre enero de 1990 y abril del 2000. Se excluyó a los pacientes sin evaluación por el Servicio de Oftalmología y con estancia hospitalaria menor de 24 horas. Se hallaron 17 pacientes con diagnóstico de endoftalmitis, dos casos fueron excluidos y dos historias clínicas no fueron encontradas. El grupo de estudio constó de 13 pacientes. Los casos postquirúrgicos fueron 7 de los 11 pacientes. Ulcera corneal fue la causante en 3 de los casos. La edad media de los pacientes fue de 65,5 años, siete eran mayores de 70 años. El tiempo de enfermedad tuvo una media de 15 días en los casos postoperatorios y 4,8 meses en los de úlceras corneales. Los síntomas más referidos fueron dolor ocular (92 por ciento), ojo rojo (77 por ciento) y disminución de la visión (69 por ciento). Los signos más frecuentes fueron agudeza visual disminuida (100 por ciento), hiperemia (92 por ciento), hipopion y reacción vítrea (ambos con 85 por ciento). Se aislaron gram-negativos (2 casos), variedades de streptococos (2 casos) y un hongo. Cinco de los pacientes eran diabéticos. La agudeza visual al inicio fue de NPL en 8 casos, PL en 2 casos, MM en un caso, CD en otro y 20/200 en el restante. Cuatro casos fueron catalogados como endoftalmitis avanzada. Siete pacientes recibieron tratamiento intravítreo. Todos recibieron antibióticos sistémicos...