Angiolipoma: a review of 778 lesions in 344 patients.

BACKGROUND: Angiolipomas are benign subcutaneous nodules that are commonly multifocal and easily overlooked by those not familiar with their appearance. The objective of this study was to identify the spectrum of the clinical and imaging features of this lesion, to include MR, CT, and US features. METHODS: A retrospective review of our institutional pathology database for biopsy-proven cases of angiolipoma between January 1, 2019, through December 31, 2021, was done. We identified 334 patients who underwent surgical resection of 788 individual lesions. MR imaging studies were available in 43 cases, CT in 39 cases, and ultrasound imaging in 72 cases. Clinical features (patient age, gender, surgical indication, number of lesions) were reviewed. Imaging feature analysis included the anatomic location, content of fat, vascularity, and modality-specific imaging features. RESULTS: All 778 angiolipomas were located in the subcutaneous tissues (median size, 2.4 cm, range 0.4-7.7 cm), with over 51% located in the upper extremity. The most common presentation was a symptomatic mass or slowly growing symptomatic mass. Imaging showed a subcutaneous lesion with a lobulated bean shape, which typically abutted the skin. Intralesional fat was identified in 85% of lesions on CT and MRI. Vessels were commonly seen on CT and MR, with enhancement best seen on MR. On US, lesions were heterogeneous and mildly hyperechoic, most often with no identifiable vascularity. CONCLUSION: Angiolipomas typically have characteristic imaging features. Awareness of this diagnosis and the spectrum of its imaging features is important and can facilitate a definitive diagnosis.

PET/CT Imaging of Hemorrhagic Pseudotumor Arising From Treated Plasmacytoma.

ABSTRACT: Hemorrhagic pseudotumor occurs in approximately 1% to 2% of patients with hemophilia. This lesion is exceptionally rare in nonhemophiliac individuals. The authors present a case of treated right ischial plasmacytoma with a progressively enlarging expansile hemorrhagic pseudotumor, documented on 18 F-FDG PET/CT and MRI and confirmed by histology.

Sonography of the Post-Operative Rotator Cuff: Normal Postoperative Findings, Postsurgical Complications and Common Artifacts.

This review sets forth an approach to performing and interpreting shoulder ultrasound in patients with prior rotator cuff repair and presents a comprehensive review of normal expected findings, postsurgical complications and common artifacts encountered in clinical practice.

Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities: A Computational Content Analysis of the r/Dentistry Subreddit.

The current study explores communication expressed by participants in a subreddit surrounding oral health care, moderated by dentists and dental hygienists. The corpus was analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted program used for computational content analyses of large data sets. Users' personal disclosures about ongoing dental concerns, advice about others' self-care, and the role of interpersonal communication with and among health care providers emerged as dominant themes. The findings suggest that online communities may serve an important role that dentists are unable to fill in their limited interactions with individual patients. Such interaction spaces may therefore offer a fertile environment for future interventions to promote beneficial practices and achieve positive health-related outcomes.

Social Media and Suicide: A Validation of Terms to Help Identify Suicide-related Social Media Posts.

BACKGROUND: Communication plays an important role in the prevention of suicide, a leading cause of death in the United States. Prior research suggests people who die by suicide often communicate their intent to more than one member of their social network. The ubiquity of social media in modern society means an individual's social network may be larger than ever before, which has contributed to a proliferation of colloquial terms and phrases to describe suicide. AIMS: The present study collected and validated suicide-related terms from the U.S. English language in 2018-2019. By validating clinical and lay terms with people on the front lines of suicide prevention, the study provides a necessary foundation for lexical analyses of suicide communication on social media. METHOD: 98 terms related to suicide were collected from online, academic, and other sources. Mental health professionals and members of the electronic mailing list of the American Association of Suicidology were asked to validate terms. RESULTS: The survey validated common terms used to communicate about suicide. LIMITATIONS: The lexicon did not capture international phrases. It also did not document less direct language, such as expressions of emotion.

Woven collagen biotextiles enable mechanically functional rotator cuff tendon regeneration during repair of segmental tendon defects in vivo.

Despite advancements in surgical techniques and materials for rotator cuff repair procedures, primary repair failures remain common. This study examines the use of electrochemically aligned collagen (ELAC) threads woven into biotextile scaffolds as grafts to repair critical infraspinatus tendon defects in New Zealand White rabbits. Three surgical treatment groups were evaluated: rabbits undergoing direct repair as operative controls, rabbits receiving ELAC scaffolds alone, and rabbits treated with mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-seeded ELAC scaffolds. In each animal, the intact, contralateral infraspinatus served as an internal positive control. Tendon-bone constructs were harvested after 3 months in vivo and outcome measures included biomechanical testing, histological staining, and immunohistochemical staining. Biomechanical testing revealed that maximum load-bearing capacity was comparable between all groups, while MSC-seeded scaffold repairs exhibited increased stiffness relative to non-seeded scaffold repairs. Histological staining revealed robust collagen deposition around ELAC fibers and increased cellularity within the continuum of woven scaffolds as compared to native tendon. Immunohistochemical staining revealed presence of collagens I and III in all groups, but procollagen I and the tendon-specific marker tenomodulin were only observed in seeded and non-seeded ELAC scaffold repairs. Findings of this pilot study warrant continued investigation of ELAC biotextile scaffolds for repair of critically-sized rotator cuff tendon defects. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Biomed Mater Res Part B: Appl Biomater 107B: 1864-1876, 2019.

Development and Validation of an Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Method for the Concurrent Measurement of Gabapentin, Lamotrigine, Levetiracetam, Monohydroxy Derivative of Oxcarbazepine, and Zonisamide Concentrations in Serum in a Clinical Setting.

BACKGROUND: Therapeutic drug monitoring of antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) is often necessary to prevent associated destructive toxicities. Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) with stable-isotope-labeled internal standards is considered the gold standard for the measurement of AEDs. This study presents the development and validation of a clinical ultra-performance liquid chromatography-MS/MS method for the concurrent measurement of gabapentin, lamotrigine, levetiracetam, monohydroxy derivative of oxcarbazepine, and zonisamide in human serum. METHODS: To determine the optimal assay analyte range, one year of AED therapeutic drug monitoring results (n = 1825) were evaluated. Simple protein precipitation with acetonitrile containing isotopically labeled internal standards was used. Reverse-phase ultra-performance liquid chromatography chromatographic separation was used, having a total run time of 3 minutes. Quantification of analytes was accomplished using electrospray ionization in positive ion mode and collision-induced dissociation MS. Assay parameters were evaluated per Food and Drug Administration bioanalytical guidelines. RESULTS: After evaluating internal patient data, the analytical measuring range (AMR) of the assay was established as 0.1-100 mcg/mL. All AEDs were linear across the AMR, with R values ranging from 0.9988 to 0.9999. Imprecision (% coefficient of variation) and inaccuracy (% difference) were calculated to be <20% for the lower limit of quantitation and <15% for the low, mid, and high levels of quality controls across the AMR. All AEDs demonstrated acceptable assay parameters for carryover, stability under relevant storage conditions, matrix effects, recovery, and extraction and processing efficiency. In addition, the assay displayed acceptable concordance to results obtained from a national reference laboratory, with Deming regression R of 0.99 and slope values ranging from 0.89 to 1.17. CONCLUSIONS: A simple, cost-effective, and robust ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method for monitoring multiple AEDs was developed and validated to address the clinical needs of patients at our institution.

Tracking employment shocks using mobile phone data.

Can data from mobile phones be used to observe economic shocks and their consequences at multiple scales? Here we present novel methods to detect mass layoffs, identify individuals affected by them and predict changes in aggregate unemployment rates using call detail records (CDRs) from mobile phones. Using the closure of a large manufacturing plant as a case study, we first describe a structural break model to correctly detect the date of a mass layoff and estimate its size. We then use a Bayesian classification model to identify affected individuals by observing changes in calling behaviour following the plant's closure. For these affected individuals, we observe significant declines in social behaviour and mobility following job loss. Using the features identified at the micro level, we show that the same changes in these calling behaviours, aggregated at the regional level, can improve forecasts of macro unemployment rates. These methods and results highlight promise of new data resources to measure microeconomic behaviour and improve estimates of critical economic indicators.

Coupling human mobility and social ties.

Studies using massive, passively collected data from communication technologies have revealed many ubiquitous aspects of social networks, helping us understand and model social media, information diffusion and organizational dynamics. More recently, these data have come tagged with geographical information, enabling studies of human mobility patterns and the science of cities. We combine these two pursuits and uncover reproducible mobility patterns among social contacts. First, we introduce measures of mobility similarity and predictability and measure them for populations of users in three large urban areas. We find individuals' visitations patterns are far more similar to and predictable by social contacts than strangers and that these measures are positively correlated with tie strength. Unsupervised clustering of hourly variations in mobility similarity identifies three categories of social ties and suggests geography is an important feature to contextualize social relationships. We find that the composition of a user's ego network in terms of the type of contacts they keep is correlated with mobility behaviour. Finally, we extend a popular mobility model to include movement choices based on social contacts and compare its ability to reproduce empirical measurements with two additional models of mobility.

The continued emergence of hantaviruses: isolation of a Seoul virus implicated in human disease, United Kingdom, October 2012.

Following a suspected case of hantavirus in a patientsuffering from acute kidney injury, rodents fromthe patient's property in Yorkshire and the Humber,United Kingdom (UK) were screened for hantaviruses.Hantavirus RNA was detected via RT-PCR in two Rattusnorvegicus. Complete sequencing and phylogeneticanalysis established the virus as a Seoul hantavirus,which we have provisionally designated as strainHumber. This is the first hantavirus isolated from wildrodents in the UK and confirms the presence of a pathogenicSeoul virus in Europe.

Modeling the adoption of innovations in the presence of geographic and media influences.

While there is a large body of work examining the effects of social network structure on innovation adoption, models to date have lacked considerations of real geography or mass media. In this article, we show these features are crucial to making more accurate predictions of a social contagion and technology adoption at a city-to-city scale. Using data from the adoption of the popular micro-blogging platform, Twitter, we present a model of adoption on a network that places friendships in real geographic space and exposes individuals to mass media influence. We show that homophily both among individuals with similar propensities to adopt a technology and geographic location is critical to reproducing features of real spatiotemporal adoption. Furthermore, we estimate that mass media was responsible for increasing Twitter's user base two to four fold. To reflect this strength, we extend traditional contagion models to include an endogenous mass media agent that responds to those adopting an innovation as well as influencing agents to adopt themselves.

First detection of spotted fever group rickettsiae in Ixodes ricinus and Dermacentor reticulatus ticks in the UK.

A preliminary study was conducted to determine the presence of spotted fever rickettsiae in two species of British tick (Ixodes ricinus and Dermacentor reticulatus). The 16S rRNA gene of Rickettsia spp. was detected in 39/401 (9·7%) of ticks tested, including 22/338 (6·5%) I. ricinus and 17/63 (27%) D. reticulatus. Some positive I. ricinus samples showed 100% homology with Rickettsia helvetica (10/22), and most positive D. reticulatus showed 100% homology with R. raoultii (13/17). Five other Rickettsia spp. were detected exhibiting 96-99% homology. Ticks positive for rickettsiae were collected from various hosts and from vegetation from eight counties across Great Britain. The distribution of R. helvetica in various engorged and unfed stages of I. ricinus suggests that R. helvetica is widespread. R. raoultii was found in questing adult D. reticulatus in Wales and England. This is the first evidence of potentially pathogenic spotted fever rickettsiae in British ticks.

Preliminary evaluation of exotic tick species and exotic pathogens imported on migratory birds into the British Isles.

Field studies were carried out to determine whether ticks are being imported into the British Isles on migratory birds. During spring and autumn migration 2004, ticks were collected from ringed birds at 11 bird observatories and 3 inland Riparia riparia colonies. A total of 38 ticks of 4 species (Ixodes ricinus, I. frontalis, I. lividus, I. arboricola) were collected from 12 species of bird. Ticks were tested for viruses in the Flavivirus and Nairovirus genera, with no positives found. This data demonstrates that ticks are being imported into the British Isles on migratory birds with future work recommended to determine the quantity of ticks imported and to detect low prevalence pathogens.

Development and implementation of novel community outreach methods in women's health issues: the National Centers of Excellence in Women's Health.

Numerous outreach efforts have been employed to educate both lay and professional communities about many medical issues. As part of our contracts with the Public Health Service, Office of Women's Health, Department of Health and Human Services, the National Centers of Excellence (CoEs) in Women's Health have been charged with creating innovative and effective methods of educating these audiences about the major issues involved in women's health. This mission is particularly critical in the arena of women's health, as women are responsible for approximately 75% of the healthcare decisions made by and for American families, and past efforts to provide them with good, evidence-based information have been fraught with difficulties ranging from financial to cultural. We report herein some of our successful novel outreach efforts. A common thread throughout this account is that among the most successful of the outreach activities are those that involve or incorporate existing community groups committed to women's health.

Interchangeability of a semiadjustable articulator.

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the interchangeability of new Hanau semiadjustable articulators fulfills the manufacturer's criterion (102 microns) in the mediolateral direction and the defined 166-micron criterion three dimensionally and whether the articulators maintain the same interchangeability as new articulators after a period of function. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The spatial deviations in three dimensions of ten new, ten 18-month-old, and ten 30-month-old Hanau articulators were measured with a field-inspection gauge and compared to those of a master articulator. RESULTS: Compared to the master articulator, nine of 10 new articulators met the manufacturer's criterion of articulator interchangeability in the mediolateral direction. However, only four of the 10 articulators fulfilled the criterion for three-dimensional interchangeability. The articulators were found to be interchangeable among the groups when the spatial deviations of test articulators from the master articulator at the position of the lingual cusp of the right maxillary first premolar were compared. However, using the geometric mean deviations of test articulators, the 30-month group was not interchangeable with the new and the 18-month articulator groups. CONCLUSION: This limited study revealed that most of the articulators tested met the manufacturer's criterion of articulator interchangeability, but most did not pass the three-dimensional interchangeability test. Clinicians should be aware of the amount of occlusal error in the range of 0.2 mm that may result from interchanging dental casts on the articulator system. The articulator system might be able to maintain the same level of interchangeability for up to 18 months of routine use.

Overcoming social and cultural barriers to care for patients with diabetes.

We attempted to develop a culturally sensitive alternative approach to diabetes management in a multiethnic, socially disadvantaged community (Waianae, Hawaii). The aims of this 3.5-year demonstration project were to establish regular community-based medical contact with diabetic patients who had a history of nonadherence to treatment regimens and to determine whether this strategy would lead to better health care (particularly improved self-management) in these patients. This community-based, culturally sensitive outreach system of medical follow up dramatically improved the amount and quality of medical care provided to this high-risk subpopulation of patients with diabetes.

A comparison of the marginal fit of In-Ceram, IPS Empress, and Procera crowns.

The in vitro marginal fit of three all-ceramic crown systems (In-Ceram, Procera, and IPS Empress) was compared. All crown systems were significantly different from each other at P = 0.05. In-Ceram exhibited the greatest marginal discrepancy (161 microns), followed by Procera (83 microns), and IPS Empress (63 microns). There were no significant differences among the various stages of the crown fabrication: core fabrication, porcelain veneering, and glazing. The facial and lingual margins exhibited significantly larger marginal discrepancies than the mesial and distal margins.