Prior to 2020, library orientation for first-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine took the form of an on-site treasure hunt competition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the orientation for ...the MD class of 2024 was shifted to an all-virtual format. This shift mandated a full redesign of the library orientation.
The Samuel J. Wood Library sought to preserve the excitement and fun of the treasure hunt in the new virtual format. The competition was redesigned as a Zoom meeting using breakout rooms, with library faculty and staff serving as team facilitators. Tasks were rewritten, shifting the focus from the library's physical spaces to its virtual services and online resources. The redesigned orientation was evaluated using two data sources: a postsession survey of student participants and a debriefing of the library employees who participated. Student evaluations were positive, while the faculty and staff provided numerous suggestions for improving future virtual orientations.
A successful virtual library orientation requires careful preparation, including testing the competition tasks, full rehearsal with library facilitators, and a thoughtful approach to technology and logistics. We have chosen to share the materials we developed for other academic health sciences libraries that may wish to take a similar approach to their own virtual orientations.
The Weill Cornell Medicine, Samuel J. Wood Library's Systematic Review (SR) service began in 2011, with 2021 marking a decade of service. This paper will describe how the service policies have grown ...and will break down our service quantitatively over the past 11 years to examine SR timelines and trends.
We evaluated 11 years (2011-2021) of SR request data from our in-house documentation. In the years assessed, there have been 319 SR requests from 20 clinical departments, leading to 101 publications with at least one librarian collaborator listed as co-author. The average review took 642 days to publication, with the longest at 1408 days, and the shortest at 94 days. On average, librarians spent 14.7 hours in total on each review. SR projects were most likely to be abandoned at the title/abstract screening phase. Several policies have been put into place over the years in order to accommodate workflows and demand for our service.
The SR service has seen several changes since its inception in 2011. Based on the findings and emerging trends discussed here, our service will inevitably evolve further to adapt to these changes, such as machine learning-assisted technology.
Activation of photocatalytic titania by ultraviolet-A (UVA) radiation has been proposed as a good approach for combating bacteria. Titania powder, in solution or immobilized on a surface, has ...excellent UVA-assisted killing properties on several microorganisms. However, these properties could not be demonstrated in biofilms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a resistant opportunistic human pathogen that can cause severe complications in patients who are immunocompromised or have burn wounds or cystic fibrosis. P. aeruginosa biofilms have detrimental effects on health and industry, causing serious economic damage. In this study, the effect of titania photocatalysis for controlling P. aeruginosa biofilms was investigated by employing different coatings obtained through sol-gel and evaporation-induced self-assembly. Biofilms were grown on non-mesoporous and mesoporous titania surfaces with different pore sizes, which were achieved based on the use of surfactants Brij-58 and Pluronics-F127. In addition, two structural forms of titania were assayed: amorphous and anatase. As well as inhibiting biofilm formation, these coatings significantly enhanced the bactericidal effect of UVA on P. aeruginosa biofilms. The most efficient surface with regard to total antibacterial effect was the mesoporous Brij-58-templated anatase film, which, compared to control biofilms, decreased the number of viable bacteria by about 5 orders, demonstrating the efficacy of this methodology as a disinfection system.
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•Mesoporous titania films obtained by sol-gel inhibit biofilm growth of P. aeruginosa.•UVA exposed mesoporous coatings efficiently killed P. aeruginosa biofilms.•Titania coatings can be used as versatile photocatalytic disinfection systems.
Institutional repositories are platforms for presenting and publicizing scholarly output that might not be suitable to publish in a peer-reviewed journal or that must meet open access requirements. ...However, there are many challenges associated with their launch and up-keep. The objective of this systematic review was to define the impacts of institutional repositories (IRs) on an academic institution, thus justifying their implementation and/or maintenance.
A comprehensive literature search was performed in the following databases: Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, the Cochrane Library (Wiley), ERIC (ProQuest), Web of Science (Core Collection), Scopus (Elsevier), and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (EBSCO). A total of 6,593 citations were screened against predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Thirteen included studies were divided into 3 areas of impact: citation count, exposure or presence, and administrative impact. Those focusing on citation count (n=5) and exposure or presence (n=7) demonstrated positive impacts of IRs on institutions and researchers. One study focusing on administrative benefit demonstrated the utility of IRs in automated population of ORCID profiles.
Based on the available literature, IRs appear to have a positive impact on citation count, exposure or presence, and administrative burden. To draw stronger conclusions, more and higher-quality studies are needed.
Background
Gadolinium enhancement on high‐resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been proposed as a marker of inflammation and instability in intracranial atherosclerotic plaque. We ...performed a systematic review and meta‐analysis to summarize the association between intracranial atherosclerotic plaque enhancement and acute ischemic stroke.
Methods and Results
We searched the medical literature to identify studies of patients undergoing intracranial vessel wall MRI for evaluation of intracranial atherosclerotic plaque. We recorded study data and assessed study quality, with disagreements in data extraction resolved by a third reader. A random‐effects odds ratio was used to assess whether, in any given patient, cerebral infarction was more likely in the vascular territory supplied by an artery with MRI‐detected plaque enhancement as compared to territory supplied by an artery without enhancement. We calculated between‐study heterogeneity using the Cochrane Q test and publication bias using the Begg‐Mazumdar test. Eight articles published between 2011 and 2015 met inclusion criteria. These studies provided information about plaque enhancement characteristics from 295 arteries in 330 patients. We found a significant positive relationship between MRI enhancement and cerebral infarction in the same vascular territory, with a random effects odds ratio of 10.8 (95% CI 4.1–28.1, P<0.001). No significant heterogeneity (Q=11.08, P=0.14) or publication bias (P=0.80) was present.
Conclusions
Intracranial plaque enhancement on high‐resolution vessel wall MRI is strongly associated with ischemic stroke. Evaluation for plaque enhancement on MRI may be a useful test to improve diagnostic yield in patients with ischemic strokes of undetermined etiology.
Predicting the invasive potential of introduced species remains an ongoing challenge due to the multiple interacting regional and global processes that facilitate the introduction and proliferation ...of alien species. This may be particularly true in regions where native species are increasingly reported as expanding and impacting ecosystems in ways indistinguishable from alien ones. Current approaches to assess the invasive potential of plants may be limited by the choice of traits used and the exclusion of native species. To overcome these limitations, we develop a novel approach that focuses on all species—native and alien—within a functional group of plants to predict their proliferation status. Our approach relied on the development of an extensive database of extrinsic and intrinsic traits for Puerto Rican vines with the goal of generating a predictive model of vine proliferation status. We test three hypotheses linking origin, extrinsic and intrinsic traits, and proliferation status. We found that the origin of proliferating vines was associated with only one out of seven traits, namely plant use. We also found that proliferation status was associated with all but two traits, namely life span and climbing mechanism. Finally, a classification tree analysis identified five variables as good predictors of proliferation status and used them to split the species into six groups characterized by a unique suite of traits, three of them included proliferating species. The development of tools to identify potential proliferating species is critical for management and conservation purposes. Tools that can minimize biases and make predictions based on trait data easily obtainable are particularly needed in regions with a high taxonomic and functional diversity, and with limited ecological knowledge of individual species. In addition, these tools should be capable of incorporating native species since an increasing number of native species are behaving like invasive aliens.
Current approaches to assess the invasive potential of plants are limited by their bias against species with undesirable traits and the exclusion of native species as potential proliferating species. In this study, we developed an approach that overcomes these limitations and used it to predict the proliferation status of vine species from multiple traits.
The roles of the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) and lightning during genesis of Tropical Depression (TD) 8 (2006) and TD 12 (2010) were investigated in relation to the interaction of the dust outbreaks with ...each system and their surrounding environment. This study applied data collected from the 2006 NASA African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis and 2010 Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes projects. Satellite observations from METEOSAT and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)—Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) were also employed for the study of the dust content. Lightning activity data from the Met Office Arrival Time Difference (ATD) system were used as another parameter to correlate moist convective overturning and a sign of cyclone formation. The AOD and lightning analysis for TD 8 demonstrated the time-lag connection through their positive contribution to TC-genesis. TD 12 developed without strong dust outbreak, but with lower wind shear (2 m s
−1
) and an organized Mesoscale Convective System (MCS). Overall, the results from the combination of various data analyses in this study support the fact that both systems developed under either strong or weak dust conditions. From these two cases, the location (i.e., the target area) of strong versus weak dust outbreaks, in association with lightning, were essential interactions that impacted TC-genesis. While our dust footprints hypothesis applied under strong dust conditions (i.e., TD 8), other factors (e.g., vertical wind shear, pre-existing vortex and trough location, thermodynamics) need to be evaluated as well. The results from this study suggest that the SAL is not a determining factor that affects the formation of tropical cyclones (i.e., TD 8 and TD 12).
Evidence suggests that high-quality health education and effective communication within the framework of social support hold significant potential in preventing postpartum depression. Yet, developing ...trustworthy and engaging health education and communication materials requires extensive expertise and substantial resources. In light of this, we propose an innovative approach that involves leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to classify publicly accessible lay articles based on their relevance and subject matter to pregnancy and mental health.
We manually reviewed online lay articles from credible and medically validated sources to create a gold standard corpus. This manual review process categorized the articles based on their pertinence to pregnancy and related subtopics. To streamline and expand the classification procedure for relevance and topics, we employed advanced NLP models such as Random Forest, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and Generative Pre-trained Transformer model (gpt-3.5-turbo).
The gold standard corpus included 392 pregnancy-related articles. Our manual review process categorized the reading materials according to lifestyle factors associated with postpartum depression:
, and
. A BERT-based model performed best (F1 = 0.974) in an end-to-end classification of relevance and topics. In a two-step approach, given articles already classified as pregnancy-related, gpt-3.5-turbo performed best (F1 = 0.972) in classifying the above topics.
Utilizing NLP, we can guide patients to high-quality lay reading materials as cost-effective, readily available health education and communication sources. This approach allows us to scale the information delivery specifically to individuals, enhancing the relevance and impact of the materials provided.
This study examines if the blocking effect paradigm predicts causal judgments when consequences of events vary in valence and magnitude. The procedure consists on presenting participants with reports ...describing the positive or negative effects produced by different substances, when these are consumed either separately or simultaneously with others. Two groups of participants were exposed to high and low magnitude consequences, respectively. The extent to which behavior with respect to causal judgments is consistent with the predictions of the blocking effect was evaluated in in both groups using two types of questions. One of them asked whether or not substance X produced the effect, while the other one asked about the probability of substance X producing the effect. Differences in causal judgments as a product of logical or intuitive reasoning were examined. Even though the blocking effect was not observed, a significant interaction was obtained between the factors valence and experimental condition (blocking and control). Findings are discussed in terms of the differences between associative learning in humans and in non-human animals, and in terms of the theoretical differences between evaluative conditioning and predictive or causal conditioning.
Background and Purpose- The clinical utility of positron emission tomography (PET) imaging in evaluating carotid artery plaque vulnerability remains unclear. Two tracers of recent interest for ...carotid plaque imaging are
F-fluorodeoxyglucose (
F-FDG) and
F-sodium fluoride (
F-NaF). We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis evaluating the association between carotid artery
F-FDG or
F-NaF uptake and recent or future cerebral ischemic events. Methods- A systematic review of Ovid MEDLINE, Ovid EMBASE, and the Cochrane library was conducted from inception to December 2017 for articles evaluating PET tracer uptake in recently symptomatic versus asymptomatic carotid arteries, and articles evaluating carotid uptake in relation to future ischemic events. Cerebral ischemic events were defined as ipsilateral strokes, transient ischemic attacks, or amaurosis fugax. We quantitatively pooled studies by a random-effects model when 3 or more studies were amenable for analysis. We assessed the standardized mean difference between tracer uptake in the symptomatic versus asymptomatic carotid artery using Cohen's d metric. Results- After screening 4144 unique articles, 13 prospective cohort studies assessing carotid artery
F-FDG uptake in patients with recent cerebral ischemia were eligible for review. Eleven cohorts of 290 subjects scanned with
F-FDG were eligible for meta-analysis. We found that carotid arteries ipsilateral to recent ischemic events had significantly higher
F-FDG uptake than asymptomatic arteries (Cohen's d =0.492; CI=0.130-0.855; P=0.008) as well as significant heterogeneity (Cochran's Q =31.5; P=0.0005; I
=68.3%). Meta-regression was not performed due to the limited number of studies in the analysis. Only 2 studies investigating
F-NaF PET imaging, and another 2 articles investigating ischemic event recurrence were found. Conclusions- Recent ipsilateral cerebral ischemia may be associated with increased carotid
F-FDG uptake on PET imaging regardless of degree of carotid stenosis, although significant heterogeneity was found, and these results should be interpreted with caution. Emerging evidence suggests a similar association may be present with
F-NaF plaque uptake. More studies are warranted to provide definitive conclusions on the utility of
F-FDG or
F-NaF in carotid plaque evaluation before investigating carotid PET as a diagnostic tool for cerebral ischemic events.
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