Anesthesiology
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Multicenter Study Observational Study
Lung Ultrasound Score on Postoperative Day One is predictive of the occurrence of Pulmonary Complications After Major Abdominal Surgery: A Multi-Center Prospective Observational Study.
Postoperative pulmonary complications after major abdominal surgery are frequent and carry high morbidity and mortality. Early identification of patients at risk of pulmonary complications by lung ultrasound may allow the implementation of preemptive strategies. The authors hypothesized that lung ultrasound score would be associated with pulmonary postoperative complications. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the performance of lung ultrasound score on postoperative day 1 in predicting pulmonary complications after major abdominal surgery. Secondary objectives included the evaluation of other related measures for their potential prediction accuracy. ⋯ An elevated lung ultrasound score on postoperative day 1 is associated with the occurrence of pulmonary complications within the first 10 days after major abdominal surgery.
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The major goal of translational research is to evaluate the efficacy and effectiveness of treatments and interventions that have emerged from exhaustive preclinical evidence. In 2007, a major clinical trial was started to investigate the impact of paravertebral analgesia on breast cancer recurrence. The trial was based on preclinical evidence demonstrating that spinal anesthesia suppressed metastatic dissemination by inhibiting surgical stress, boosting the immunological response, avoiding volatile anesthetics, and reducing opioid use. ⋯ An obvious question is why there was an almost complete disconnect between the copious preclinical investigations suggesting benefit and robust clinical trials showing no benefit? The answer is complex but may result from preclinical research being mechanistically driven and based on reductionist models. Both basic scientists and clinical investigators underestimated the limitations of various preclinical models, leading to the apparently incorrect hypothesis that regional anesthesia reduces cancer recurrence. This article reviews factors that contributed to the discordance between the laboratory science, suggesting that regional analgesia might reduce cancer recurrence and clinical trials showing that it does not-and what can be learned from the disconnect.
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Prone position is a key component to treat hypoxemia in patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome. However, most studies evaluating it exclude patients with brain injuries without any medical evidence. ⋯ Brain-injured patients are largely excluded from studies evaluating prone position in acute respiratory distress syndrome. However, cerebral blood flow seems not to be altered considering increasing of mean arterial pressure during the session. Systematic exclusion of brain-injured patients appears to be unfounded, and prone position, while at risk in brain-injured patients, should be evaluated on these patients to review recommendations, considering close monitoring of neurologic and hemodynamic parameters.
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Recent advances in neural networks have given rise to generative artificial intelligence, systems able to produce fluent responses to natural questions or attractive and even photorealistic images from text prompts. These systems were developed through new network architectures that permit massive computational resources to be applied efficiently to enormous data sets. ⋯ Second, this article examines the transformer architecture in the interpretation and generation of natural language, as it will be useful in producing automated summarization of medical records or performing initial patient screening. The author also applies the GPT-3.5 algorithm to example questions from the American Board of Anesthesiologists Basic Examination and find that, under surprisingly reasonable conditions, it correctly answers more than half the questions.