Critical care medicine
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Critical care medicine · Jan 2024
Meta AnalysisDiagnostic Accuracy of Procalcitonin in Bacterial Infections of the CNS: An Updated Systematic Review, Meta-Analysis, and Meta-Regression.
To evaluate diagnostic accuracy of serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) procalcitonin for diagnosing CNS bacterial infections. ⋯ In children and critical post-neurosurgical patients, CSF procalcitonin gains superior sensitivity and specificity compared with serum procalcitonin. Overall, CSF procalcitonin appears to have a higher pooled positive likelihood ratio compared with serum procalcitonin.
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Critical care medicine · Jan 2024
ReviewNational ICU Registries as Enablers of Clinical Research and Quality Improvement.
Clinical quality registries (CQRs) have been implemented worldwide by several medical specialties aiming to generate a better characterization of epidemiology, treatments, and outcomes of patients. National ICU registries were created almost 3 decades ago to improve the understanding of case-mix, resource use, and outcomes of critically ill patients. This narrative review describes the challenges, proposed solutions, and evidence generated by National ICU registries as facilitators for research and quality improvement. ⋯ ICU registries have provided increased knowledge of case-mix and outcomes of ICU patients based on real-world data and contributed to improve care delivery through quality improvement initiatives and trials. Recent increases in adoption of new technologies (i.e., cloud-based structures, artificial intelligence, machine learning) will ensure a broader and better use of data for epidemiology, healthcare policies, quality improvement, and clinical trials.