An extensive library of symptom inventories has been developed over time to measure clinical symptoms, but this variety has led to several long standing issues. Most notably, results drawn from ...different settings and studies are not comparable, which limits reproducibility. Here, we present an artificial intelligence (AI) approach using semantic textual similarity (STS) to link symptoms and scores across previously incongruous symptom inventories. We tested the ability of four pre-trained STS models to screen thousands of symptom description pairs for related content - a challenging task typically requiring expert panels. Models were tasked to predict symptom severity across four different inventories for 6,607 participants drawn from 16 international data sources. The STS approach achieved 74.8% accuracy across five tasks, outperforming other models tested. This work suggests that incorporating contextual, semantic information can assist expert decision-making processes, yielding gains for both general and disease-specific clinical assessment.
A 19-year-old man presented with mild respiratory distress and bilateral interstitial infiltrates on chest roentgenogram. Progressive, ultimately fatal, respiratory failure ensued. Although he had ...received adenovirus (ADV) 4 and 7 oral vaccine, the etiology was most likely ADV-7. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of fulminant ADV-7 pneumonitis associated with prior administration of ADV-7 vaccine.
Labor use ratings assigned to instruments by the Workload Recording Method (WRM) do not change with batch size or walk-away time use. The authors evaluated the effect of both on the labor use of the ...analyzers Paramax B6100 (Baxter Paramax, Irvine, CA) and Ektachem 700 (Eastman Kodak, Rochester, NY) by timing all worked and walk-away intervals on both instruments. Extrapolation of the data to a workload of slightly more than 1.1 million tests showed that reapportionment of tests to various batch sizes caused Paramax-Ektachem labor cost differences to fluctuate between $37,254 and $34,995. When the minimum usable walk-away interval length was varied from 1 to 20 minutes, Ektachem savings over Paramax increased from $8,700 to $61,400. The WRM predicted a constant $29,050 labor cost advantage for Ektachem over Paramax. If other instruments show similar labor use characteristics with respect to batch size and walk-away utility, laboratory managers who do not consider these factors may fail to select the most cost-effective instruments for their laboratories.
