What steps are necessary to create written or web-based selected-response assessments?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Morgan M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4309946 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:The Community model for near-PORT applications (C-PORT) is a screening tool with an intended purpose of calculating differences in annual averaged concentration patterns and relative contributions of various source categories over the spatial domain within about 10 km of the port. C-PORT can inform decision-makers and concerned citizens about local air quality due to mobile source emissions related to commercial port activities. It allows users to visualize and evaluate different planning scenarios, helping them identify the best alternatives for making long-term decisions that protect community health and sustainability. The web-based, easy-to-use interface currently includes data from 21 seaports primarily in the Southeastern U.S., and has a map-based interface based on Google Maps. The tool was developed to visualize and assess changes in air quality due to changes in emissions and/or meteorology in order to analyze development scenarios, and is not intended to support or replace any regulatory models or programs.
| S-EPMC5906819 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundUncertainty is integral to evidence-informed decision making and is of particular importance for preference-sensitive decisions. Communicating uncertainty to patients and the public has long been identified as a goal in the informed and shared decision-making movement. Despite this, there is little quantitative research on how uncertainty in health information is perceived by readers.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to examine the impact of different uncertainty descriptions regarding the evidence for a treatment effect in a written research summary for the public.MethodsWe developed 8 versions of a research summary on a fictitious drug for tinnitus with varying degrees (Q1), sources (Q2), and magnitudes of uncertainty (Q3). We recruited 2099 members of the German public from a web-based research panel. Of these, 1727 fulfilled the inclusion criteria and were randomly presented with one of these research summaries. Randomization was conducted by using a centralized computer with a random number generator. Web-based recruitment and data collection were fully automated. Participants were not aware of the purpose of the study and alternative presentations. We measured the following outcomes: perception of the treatment effectiveness (primary), certainty in the judgement of treatment effectiveness, perception of the body of evidence, text quality, and intended decision. The outcomes were self-assessed.ResultsFor the primary outcome, we did not find a global effect for Q1 and Q2 (P=.25 and P=.73), but we found a global effect for Q3 (P=.048). Pairwise comparisons showed a weaker perception of treatment effectiveness for the research summary with 3 sources of uncertainty compared to the version with 2 sources of uncertainty (P=.04). Specifically, the proportion of the participants in the group with 3 sources of uncertainty that perceived the drug as possibly beneficial was 9% lower than that of the participants in the group with 2 sources of uncertainty (92/195, 47.2% vs 111/197, 56.3%, respectively). The proportion of the participants in the group with 3 sources of uncertainty that considered the drug to be of unclear benefit was 8% higher than that of the participants in the group with 2 sources of uncertainty (72/195, 36.9% vs 57/197, 28.9%, respectively). However, there was no significant difference compared to the version with 1 source of uncertainty (P=.31). We did not find any meaningful differences between the research summaries for the secondary outcomes.ConclusionsCommunicating even a large magnitude of uncertainty for a treatment effect had little impact on the perceived effectiveness. Efforts to improve public understanding of research are needed to improve the understanding of evidence-based health information.Trial registrationGerman Clinical Trials Register DRKS00015911, https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00015911.International registered report identifier (irrid)RR2-10.2196/13425.
| S-EPMC7445603 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sleep spindles facilitate memory consolidation in the cortex during mammalian non-rapid eye movement sleep. In rodents, phase-locked firing during spindles may facilitate spike-timing-dependent plasticity by grouping pre-then-post-synaptic cell firing within ~25 ms. Currently, microphysiological evidence in humans for conditions conducive for spike-timing-dependent plasticity during spindles is absent. Here, we analyze field potentials and unit firing from middle/upper layers during spindles from 10 × 10 microelectrode arrays at 400 μm pitch in humans. We report strong tonic and phase-locked increases in firing and co-firing within 25 ms during spindles, especially those co-occurring with down-to-upstate transitions. Co-firing, spindle co-occurrence, and spindle coherence are greatest within ~2 mm, and high co-firing of units on different contacts depends on high spindle coherence between those contacts. Spindles propagate at ~0.28 m/s in distinct patterns, with correlated cell co-firing sequences. Spindles hence organize spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal co-firing in ways that may provide pre-conditions for plasticity during non-rapid eye movement sleep.
| S-EPMC7884835 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Next-generation sequencing (NGS) approaches for measuring RNA and DNA benefit from greatly increased sensitivity, dynamic range and detection of novel transcripts. These technologies are rapidly becoming the standard for molecular assays and represent huge potential value to the practice of oncology. However, many challenges exist in the transition of these technologies from research application to clinical practice. This review discusses the value of NGS in detecting mutations, copy number changes and RNA quantification and their applications in oncology, the challenges for adoption and the relevant steps that are needed for translating this potential to routine practice.
| S-EPMC5528427 | biostudies-other
Project description:This paper aims to describe the wide range of compatibility issues between work in the medical profession and the family. Several topics are intertwined and overlap in some areas. Family friendliness in curative medicine, healthcare, medical studies and the training, specialisation and CPD of doctors is a key theme in the current debate on the future of health and family policies. The rising proportion of women and changes in the medical community characterise the future of medicine. Topics such as working hours and organisation of work, as well as family support and maternity leave, must be discussed further and in particular regarding employees in the health services. This overview will describe where Germany has issues, what is already being done well in the hospitals but could still be improved.
| S-EPMC3339703 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundHigh-frequency patient-reported outcome (PRO) assessments are used to measure patients' symptoms after surgery for surgical research; however, the quality of those longitudinal PRO data has seldom been discussed.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to determine data quality-influencing factors and to profile error trajectories of data longitudinally collected via paper-and-pencil (P&P) or web-based assessment (electronic PRO [ePRO]) after thoracic surgery.MethodsWe extracted longitudinal PRO data with 678 patients scheduled for lung surgery from an observational study (n=512) and a randomized clinical trial (n=166) on the evaluation of different perioperative care strategies. PROs were assessed by the MD Anderson Symptom Inventory Lung Cancer Module and single-item Quality of Life Scale before surgery and then daily after surgery until discharge or up to 14 days of hospitalization. Patient compliance and data error were identified and compared between P&P and ePRO. Generalized estimating equations model and 2-piecewise model were used to describe trajectories of error incidence over time and to identify the risk factors.ResultsAmong 678 patients, 629 with at least 2 PRO assessments, 440 completed 3347 P&P assessments and 189 completed 1291 ePRO assessments. In total, 49.4% of patients had at least one error, including (1) missing items (64.69%, 1070/1654), (2) modifications without signatures (27.99%, 463/1654), (3) selection of multiple options (3.02%, 50/1654), (4) missing patient signatures (2.54%, 42/1654), (5) missing researcher signatures (1.45%, 24/1654), and (6) missing completion dates (0.30%, 5/1654). Patients who completed ePRO had fewer errors than those who completed P&P assessments (ePRO: 30.2% [57/189] vs. P&P: 57.7% [254/440]; P<.001). Compared with ePRO patients, those using P&P were older, less educated, and sicker. Common risk factors of having errors were a lower education level (P&P: odds ratio [OR] 1.39, 95% CI 1.20-1.62; P<.001; ePRO: OR 1.82, 95% CI 1.22-2.72; P=.003), treated in a provincial hospital (P&P: OR 3.34, 95% CI 2.10-5.33; P<.001; ePRO: OR 4.73, 95% CI 2.18-10.25; P<.001), and with severe disease (P&P: OR 1.63, 95% CI 1.33-1.99; P<.001; ePRO: OR 2.70, 95% CI 1.53-4.75; P<.001). Errors peaked on postoperative day (POD) 1 for P&P, and on POD 2 for ePRO.ConclusionsIt is possible to improve data quality of longitudinally collected PRO through ePRO, compared with P&P. However, ePRO-related sampling bias needs to be considered when designing clinical research using longitudinal PROs as major outcomes.
| S-EPMC8663677 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This pretrial study aimed to develop and test the usability of a four-week Internet intervention delivered by a Web-enabled mobile phone to support self-management of chronic widespread pain.The intervention included daily online entries and individualized written feedback, grounded in a mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral approach. The participants registered activities, emotions and pain cognitions three times daily using the mobile device. The therapist had immediate access to this information through a secure Web site. The situational information was used to formulate and send a personalized text message to the participant with the aim of stimulating effective self-management of the current situation. Six women participated and evaluated the experience.The intervention was rated as supportive, meaningful and user-friendly by the majority of the women. The response rate to the daily registration entries was high and technical problems were few.The results indicate a feasible intervention. Web-applications are fast becoming standard features of mobile phones and interventions of this kind can therefore be more available than before.ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01236209.
| S-EPMC3050782 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundUncertainty is integral to evidence-informed decision making and is of particular importance for preference-sensitive decisions. Communicating uncertainty to patients and the public has long been identified as a goal in the informed and shared decision-making movement. Despite this, there is little quantitative research on how uncertainty in health information is perceived by readers.ObjectiveThe objective of this study is to design an experiment to examine how different degrees of uncertainty (Q1) and different types of uncertainty (Q2) impact patients' perception of treatment effectiveness, the body of evidence, text quality, and hypothetical treatment intention. The experiment also examines whether there is an additive effect when multiple sources of uncertainty are communicated (Q3).MethodsWe developed 8 variations of a research summary set in a hypothetical scenario for a treatment decision in the context of tinnitus. These were modified only in the degree of uncertainty relating to the evidence of the presented treatment. We recruited members of the German public from a Web-based research panel and randomized them to one of 8 variations of the research summary to examine the 3 research questions. The trial was only open to the members of the research panel. The outcomes are perception of the effectiveness of the treatment (primary), certainty in the judgement of treatment effectiveness, perception of the body of evidence relating to the treatment, text quality, and decisional intention (secondary). Outcomes were self-assessed. We aimed to recruit 1500 participants to the trial. The recruitment and data collection was fully automated. Ethical approval was waivered by an ethics committee because of the negligible risk to participants.ResultsThis protocol is retrospectively published in its original format. In the meantime, the trial was set up and the data collection was completed. Data collection was conducted in May 2018. A total of 1727 eligible panel members were enrolled.ConclusionsWe aim to publish the results in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of 2019. In addition, results will be presented at conferences and disseminated among developers of guidance for the development of evidence-based health information and decision aids.Trial registrationGerman Clinical Trials Register DRKS00015911; https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do? navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00015911 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/77zyZTGzk).International registered report identifier (irrid)DERR1-10.2196/13425.
| S-EPMC6535974 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Nonribosomal peptides and polyketides are natural products commonly synthesized by microorganisms. They are widely used in medicine, agriculture, environmental protection, and other fields. The structures of natural products are often analyzed by high-resolution tandem mass spectrometry, which becomes more popular with its increasing availability. However, the characterization of nonribosomal peptides and polyketides from tandem mass spectra is a nontrivial task because they are composed of many uncommon building blocks in addition to proteinogenic amino acids. Moreover, many of them have cyclic and branch-cyclic structures. Here, we introduce MassSpecBlocks - an open-source and web-based tool that converts the input chemical structures in SMILES format into sequences of building blocks. The structures can be searched in public databases PubChem, ChemSpider, ChEBI, NP Atlas, COCONUT, and Norine and edited in a user-friendly graphical interface. Although MassSpecBlocks can serve as a stand-alone database, our primary goal was to enable easy construction of custom sequence and building block databases, which can be used to annotate mass spectra in CycloBranch software. CycloBranch is an open-source, cross-platform, and stand-alone tool that we recently released for annotating spectra of linear, cyclic, branched, and branch-cyclic nonribosomal peptides and polyketide siderophores. The sequences and building blocks created in MassSpecBlocks can be easily exported into a plain text format used by CycloBranch. MassSpecBlocks is available online or can be installed entirely offline. It offers a REST API to cooperate with other tools.
| S-EPMC8265115 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Methods for spatially resolved cellular profiling using thinly cut sections have enabled in-depth quantitative tissue mapping to study inter-sample and intra-sample differences in normal human anatomy and disease onset and progression. These methods often profile extremely limited regions, which may impact the evaluation of heterogeneity due to tissue sub-sampling. Here, we applied CODA, a deep learning-based tissue mapping platform, to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) microanatomy of grossly normal and cancer-containing human pancreas biospecimens obtained from individuals who underwent pancreatic resection. To compare inter- and intra-sample heterogeneity, we assessed bulk and spatially resolved tissue composition in a cohort of two-dimensional (2D) whole slide images (WSIs) and a cohort of thick slabs of pancreas tissue that were digitally reconstructed in 3D from serial sections. To demonstrate the marked under sampling of 2D assessments, we simulated the number of WSIs and tissue microarrays (TMAs) necessary to represent the compositional heterogeneity of 3D data within 10% error to reveal that tens of WSIs and hundreds of TMA cores are sometimes needed. We show that spatial correlation of different pancreatic structures decay significantly within a span of microns, demonstrating that 2D histological sections may not be representative of their neighboring tissues. In sum, we demonstrate that 3D assessments are necessary to accurately assess tissue composition in normal and abnormal specimens and in order to accurately determine neoplastic content. These results emphasize the importance of intra-sample heterogeneity in tissue mapping efforts.
| S-EPMC10723352 | biostudies-literature