Language development

BACKGROUND: Even prior to the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was ample evidence that loneliness and social isolation negatively impacted physical and mental health, employability, and are a financial burden on the state. In response, there has been significant policy-level attention on tackling loneliness. The objective of this scoping review was to conduct a loneliness policy landscape analysis across 52 countries of the UN European country groups. Our policy analysis sought to highlight commonalities and differences between the different national approaches to manage loneliness, with the goal to provide actionable recommendations for the consideration of policymakers wishing to develop, expand or review existing loneliness policies...

The first 6 years of life are when 90% of brain development occurs, setting the foundation for lifelong neurodevelopment. The field of infant and early childhood neurodevelopment has made marginal advancements since introduced in 1988. There remains a gap in knowledge around early neurodevelopmental domains and trajectories given that there are few established assessment procedures for infants and young children and controversies around reserving assessments until school age. Throughout this systematic review, we (1) identified neurodevelopmental assessment measures employed in the literature by domain and age of assessment, (2) compiled a repository of 608 domain-specific neurodevelopmental assessment measures, and (3) established a preliminary conceptual framework for cross-domain neurodevelopmental assessments across infancy and early childhood...

Existing natural language processing (NLP) methods to convert free-text clinical notes into structured data often require problem-specific annotations and model training. This study aims to evaluate ChatGPT's capacity to extract information from free-text medical notes efficiently and comprehensively. We developed a large language model (LLM)-based workflow, utilizing systems engineering methodology and spiral "prompt engineering" process, leveraging OpenAI's API for batch querying ChatGPT. We evaluated the effectiveness of this method using a dataset of more than 1000 lung cancer pathology reports and a dataset of 191 pediatric osteosarcoma pathology reports, comparing the ChatGPT-3...

Sleep, locomotor and social activities are essential animal behaviors, but their reciprocal relationships and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, we elicit information from a cutting-edge large-language model (LLM), generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) 3.5, which interprets 10.2-13.8% of Drosophila genes known to regulate the 3 behaviors. We develop an instrument for simultaneous video tracking of multiple moving objects, and conduct a genome-wide screen. We have identified 758 fly genes that regulate sleep and activities, including mre11 which regulates sleep only in the presence of conspecifics, and NELF-B which regulates sleep regardless of whether conspecifics are present...

OBJECTIVES: Screening for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is considered in high-risk individuals (HRIs) with established PDAC risk factors, such as family history and germline mutations in PDAC susceptibility genes. Accurate assessment of risk factor status is provider knowledge-dependent and requires extensive manual chart review by experts. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has shown promise in automated data extraction from the electronic health record (EHR). We aimed to use NLP for automated extraction of PDAC risk factors from unstructured clinical notes in the EHR...

BACKGROUND: Argon (Ar) has been proposed as a potential therapeutic agent in multiple clinical conditions, specifically in organ protection. However, conflicting data on pre-clinical models, together with a great variability in Ar administration protocols and outcome assessments, have been reported. The aim of this study was to review evidence on treatment with Ar, with an extensive investigation on its neuroprotective effect, and to summarise all tested administration protocols. METHODS: Using the PubMed database, all existing pre-clinical and clinical studies on the treatment with Ar were systematically reviewed (registration: https://doi...

BACKGROUND: SARS-CoV-2 infection has been associated with multiple short- and long-term complications including depression, and cognitive impairment (CI). However, older adults with CI after COVID-19 have not been fully documented. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate cognitive function in Mexican adults post-recovery from SARS-CoV-2 infection. METHODS: In this prospective observational cohort study, we assess cognitive function (CF) by the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) test with a cut-off less than 26 points, and functional status via telemedicine...

BACKGROUND: The Scenario Test is recognised for its effectiveness in assessing the interactive aspects of functional communication in people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA). AIMS: To develop a Japanese version of the Scenario Test (Scenario Test-JP) and assess its reliability and validity. METHODS & PROCEDURES: Among 66 participants, we selected 61 individuals: 34 PWA and 27 healthy controls (HCs). We modified the Scenario Test-JP based on the UK version and subsequently evaluated its reliability (internal consistency, test-retest and intra-rater and inter-rater reliabilities) and validity (convergent and discriminant) by comparing PWA and HCs...

UNLABELLED: Asthma during pregnancy is associated with a range of adverse perinatal outcomes. It is also linked to increased rates of neurodevelopmental conditions in the offspring. We aimed to assess whether fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FENO )-based asthma management during pregnancy improves child developmental and behavioural outcomes compared to usual care. The Breathing for Life Trial was a randomised controlled trial that compared FENO -based asthma management during pregnancy to usual care...

Exocytosis is a fundamental process used by eukaryotes to regulate the composition of the plasma membrane and facilitate cell-cell communication. To investigate exocytosis in neuronal morphogenesis, previously we developed computational tools with a graphical user interface to enable the automatic detection and analysis of exocytic events from fluorescence timelapse images. Though these tools were useful, we found the code was brittle and not easily adapted to different experimental conditions. Here we developed and validated a robust and versatile toolkit, named pHusion, for the analysis of exocytosis written in ImageTank, a graphical programming language that combines image visualization and numerical methods...

Prior work examined how minimally verbal (MV) children with autism used their gestural communication during social interactions. However, interactions are exchanges between social partners. Examining parent-child social interactions is critically important given the influence of parent responsivity on children's communicative development. Specifically, parent responses that are semantically contingent to the child's communication plays an important role in further shaping children's language learning. This study examines whether MV autistic children's (N = 47; 48-95 months; 10 females) modality and form of communication are associated with parent responsivity during an in-home parent-child interaction (PCI)...

Data curation for a hospital-based cancer registry heavily relies on the labor-intensive manual abstraction process by cancer registrars to identify cancer-related information from free-text electronic health records. To streamline this process, a natural language processing system incorporating a hybrid of deep learning-based and rule-based approaches for identifying lung cancer registry-related concepts, along with a symbolic expert system that generates registry coding based on weighted rules, was developed...

PURPOSE: To assess the capabilities of Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) and Vertex AI in executing code-free preprocessing, training machine learning (ML) models, and analyzing the data. DESIGN: Evaluation of diagnostic test or technology. PARTICIPANTS: ChatGPT and Vetrex AI as publicly available large language model and ML platform, respectively. METHODS: ChatGPT was employed to improve the resolution of fundus photography images from the Methods to Evaluate Segmentation and Indexing Techniques in the field of Retinal Ophthalmology (Messidor-2) open-source dataset using the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) technique by Fiji software...

The prioritization of English language in clinical research is a barrier to translational science. We explored promising practices to advance the inclusion of people who speak languages other than English in research conducted within and supported by NIH Clinical Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs. Key informant interviews were conducted with representatives ( n = 24) from CTSA hubs ( n = 17). Purposive sampling was used to identify CTSA hubs focused on language inclusion. Hubs electing to participate were interviewed via Zoom...

This paper investigates the integration of augmented reality (AR) technology into English translation teaching for college students, emphasizing the pivotal role of innovative teaching methods in enhancing students' translation skills and learning experiences. To address the issue of insufficient interest in English translation teaching, the paper initially assesses the purpose and significance of learning English translation through a questionnaire survey, elucidating challenges encountered in English language acquisition...

BACKGROUND: The integration of real-time data (RTD) in the electronic health records (EHRs) is transforming the healthcare of tomorrow. In this work, the common scenarios of capturing RTD in the healthcare from EHRs are studied and the approaches and tools to implement real-time solutions are investigated. METHODS: Delivering RTD by representational state transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (APIs) is usually accomplished through a Publish-Subscribe approach...

BACKGROUND: Evidence-based mobile health (mHealth) interventions have been successful for an array of physical and mental health conditions. Children with developmental disorders (DD) often have secondary speech and language disorders. The lack of high-quality medical and educational services in low- and middle-income countries limits the opportunities for children with DD to succeed in life. South Africa currently offers limited access to education, social, and health services. METHODS: Twelve caregivers of twelve children with DD between the ages of 3 and 6 years who already received monthly early childhood therapy participated in this study...

This study aims to perform an extensive review of the literature that evaluates various factors that affect the survival rates of patients with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID) after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in developed and developing countries. An extensive search of the literature was made in four different databases (PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science). The search was carried out in December 2022 and updated in July 2023, and the terms such as "hematopoietic stem cell transplantation," "bone marrow transplant," "mortality," "opportunistic infections," and "survival" associated with "severe combined immunodeficiency" were sought based on the MeSH terms...

The development of robust artificial intelligence models for echocardiography has been limited by the availability of annotated clinical data. Here, to address this challenge and improve the performance of cardiac imaging models, we developed EchoCLIP, a vision-language foundation model for echocardiography, that learns the relationship between cardiac ultrasound images and the interpretations of expert cardiologists across a wide range of patients and indications for imaging. After training on 1,032,975 cardiac ultrasound videos and corresponding expert text, EchoCLIP performs well on a diverse range of benchmarks for cardiac image interpretation, despite not having been explicitly trained for individual interpretation tasks...

INTRODUCTION: Latinx, Spanish-speaking (LSS) patients are more likely to experience decisional conflict and regret about healthcare decisions than non-Hispanic, white, English-speaking patients. OBJECTIVE: To adapt the Hypospadias Hub (Hub), a rigorously developed and tested web-based decision aid (DA), for LSS parents. METHODS: Guided by the Ecological Validity Model (EVM), a heuristic framework was followed to culturally adapt the Hub (see Extended Summary Figure)...