Plos One
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To examine the potential moderating effects of explicit racial attitudes and implicit racial attitudes on the relationship between percent of Black county residents and COVID-19 cases and deaths. ⋯ Implicit racial attitudes can take on a shared property at the community level and effectively explain racial disparities. COVID-19 cases are highest when both the percent of Black county residents and implicit racial attitudes are high.
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Ecuador has been one of the most affected countries by the Corona Virus Disease 19 (COVID-19) pandemic, by April 2020 this country presented the highest rates of mortality in Latin America. The purpose of the present study was to identify behaviors during confinement and sociodemographic variables associated with the mental health status of confirmed or suspected COVID-19 patients who were part of the epidemiological surveillance program in Ecuador that included mandatory confinement and self-isolation. A cross-sectional study was performed from March 22th to April 18th, 2020 using an online survey. ⋯ Regression analysis indicated that the mentioned behaviors explained approximately 17% of the variance for depression sum scores and 11.8% of the variance for anxiety sum scores while controlling for gender and region. Understanding the association between sociodemographic variables and psychological states in patients with COVID-19 is relevant to tackle future public mental health problems and to implement health policies that are intended to palliate further psychiatric complications. Promotion of modifiable behaviors such as exercising, maintaining daily routines, and keeping informed about the COVID-19 but limiting to less than an hour is recommended.
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Pneumothorax can lead to a life-threatening emergency. The experienced radiologists can offer precise diagnosis according to the chest radiographs. The localization of the pneumothorax lesions will help to quickly diagnose, which will be benefit for the patients in the underdevelopment areas lack of the experienced radiologists. In recent years, with the development of large neural network architectures and medical imaging datasets, deep learning methods have become a methodology of choice for analyzing medical images. The objective of this study was to the construct convolutional neural networks to localize the pneumothorax lesions in chest radiographs. ⋯ In this study, we proposed a deep learning network, called, CheXLocNet, for the automatic segmentation of chest radiographs to detect pneumothorax. Our CheXLocNets generated accurate classification results and high-quality segmentation masks for the pneumothorax at the same time. This technology has the potential to improve healthcare delivery and increase access to chest radiograph expertise for the detection of diseases. Furthermore, the segmentation results can offer comprehensive geometric information of lesions, which can benefit monitoring the sequential development of lesions with high accuracy. Thus, CheXLocNets can be further extended to be a reliable clinical decision support tool. Although we used transfer learning in training CheXLocNet, the parameters of CheXLocNet was still large for the radiograph dataset. Further work is necessary to prune CheXLocNet suitable for the radiograph dataset.
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Global warming is predicted to have a negative effect on plant growth due to the damaging effect of high temperatures. In order to address the effect of high temperature environments on olive oil yield and quality, we compared its effect on the fruit development of five olive cultivars placed in a region noted for its high summer temperatures, with trees of the same cultivars placed in a region of relatively mild summers. We found that the effects of a high temperature environment are genotype dependent and in general, high temperatures during fruit development affected three important traits: fruit weight, oil concentration and oil quality. ⋯ Regarding the quality of oil produced, the 'Souri' cultivar proved more tolerant to a high temperature environment than any other of the cultivars analyzed in this study. These results suggest that different olive cultivars have developed a variety of mechanisms in dealing with high temperatures. Elucidation of the mechanism of each of these responses may open the way to development of a variety of olives broadly adapted to conditions of high temperatures.
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Successive health system reforms have steadily eroded physician autonomy. Escalating accountability demands placed on physicians concurrent with diminishing autonomy plus widespread "cost cutting" endanger clinical work-life quality and, in turn, threaten patient-care quality, safety, and continuity. This has engendered a renewed emphasis on bettering physician work-life to safeguard patient care. Research indicates that autonomy support could be an effective intervention point in this dynamic, and that improving healthcare practitioners' experience of autonomy can promote better patient outcomes. New measures of autonomy support towards physicians during systemic/organizational transformation are thus needed. ⋯ Our data supported the factor structure, construct validity, internal consistency, and reliability of six- and three-item autonomy support scales. These brief tools are easily incorporated into multi-dimensional questionnaires at relatively low cost.