BioMed research international
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This paper presents the final results of a cross-sectional study started in 2010. It compares the perceived efficacy of different types of tobacco health warning (texts versus shocking pictures) to quit or reduce tobacco use. ⋯ This study suggests that pictorial warnings on cigarette packages are more likely to be noticed and rated as effective by Italian smokers. Female and younger smokers appear to be more involved by shock images. The jarring warnings also appear to be supporting those who want to quit smoking. This type of supportive information in Italy may become increasingly important for helping smokers to change their behavior.
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
May Renal Resistive Index be an early predictive tool of postoperative complications in major surgery? Preliminary results.
Patients who undergo high-risk surgery represent a large amount of post-operative ICU-admissions. These patients are at high risk of experiencing postoperative complications. Renal Resistive Index was found to be related with renal dysfunction, hypertension, and posttraumatic hemorrhagic shock, probably due to vasoconstriction. We explored whether Renal Resistive Index (RRI), measured after awakening from general anesthesia, could have any relationship with postoperative complications. ⋯ 205 patients were enrolled: 60 (29.3%) showed RRI > 0.70. The total rate of adverse event was 27 (18.6%) in RRI ≤ 0.7 group and 19 (31.7%) in RRI > 0.7 group (P = 0.042). Significant correlation between RRI > 0.70 and complications resulted in pneumonia (P = 0.016), septic shock (P = 0.003), and acute renal failure (P = 0.001) subgroups. Patients with RRI > 0.7 showed longer ICU stay (P = 0.001) and lasting of mechanical ventilation (P = 0.004). These results were confirmed in cardiothoracic surgery subgroup. RRI > 0.7 duplicates triplicates the risk of complications, both in general (OR 2.03 93 95% CI 1.02-4.02, P = 0.044) and in cardiothoracic (OR 2.62 95% CI 1.11-6.16, P = 0.027) population. Furthermore, we found RRI > 0.70 was associated with a triplicate risk of postoperative septic shock (OR 3.04, CI 95% 1.5-7.01; P = 0.002).
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Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Comparison of the effect of lidocaine adding dexketoprofen and paracetamol in intravenous regional anesthesia.
Comparison of dexketoprofen and paracetamol added to the lidocaine in Regional Intravenous Anesthesia in terms of hemodynamic effects, motor and sensorial block onset times, intraoperative VAS values, and analgesia requirements. ⋯ We concluded that the addition of 3 mg/kg paracetamol and 50 mg dexketoprofen to lidocaine as adjuvant in Regional Intravenous Anesthesia applied for hand and/or forearm surgery created a significant difference clinically.
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From the viewpoint of prehospital emergency medicine, a greater proportion of pelvic fractures not of a life-threatening status but combined with other injuries need more comprehensive recognition. ⋯ The incidence of hospitalized pelvic fractures in Taiwan was low and the case-fatality rate was lower than those of other countries. Concurrently, coexistence of major combined injuries with pelvic fractures was easily treated at medical centers.
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The aim of this paper was to develop a computer assisted tissue classification (granulation, necrotic, and slough) scheme for chronic wound (CW) evaluation using medical image processing and statistical machine learning techniques. The red-green-blue (RGB) wound images grabbed by normal digital camera were first transformed into HSI (hue, saturation, and intensity) color space and subsequently the "S" component of HSI color channels was selected as it provided higher contrast. Wound areas from 6 different types of CW were segmented from whole images using fuzzy divergence based thresholding by minimizing edge ambiguity. ⋯ The performance of the wound area segmentation protocol was further validated by ground truth images labeled by clinical experts. It was observed that SVM with 3rd order polynomial kernel provided the highest accuracies, that is, 86.94%, 90.47%, and 75.53%, for classifying granulation, slough, and necrotic tissues, respectively. The proposed automated tissue classification technique achieved the highest overall accuracy, that is, 87.61%, with highest kappa statistic value (0.793).