Circle of Care

Background: The rising trend of antibiotic resistance imposes a heavy burden on healthcare both clinically and economically (US$55 billion), with 23,000 estimated annual deaths in the United States as well as increased length of stay and morbidity. Machine-learning–based methods have, of late, been used for leveraging patient’s clinical history and demographic information to predict antimicrobial resistance. We developed a machine-learning model ensemble that maximizes the accuracy of such a drug-sensitivity versus resistivity classification system compared to the existing best-practice methods. Methods: We first performed a comprehensive analysis of the association between infecting bacterial species and patient factors, including patient demographics, comorbidities, and certain healthcare-specific features. We leveraged the predictable nature of these complex associations to infer patient-specific antibiotic sensitivities. Various base-learners, including k-NN (k-nearest neighbors) and gradient boosting machine (GBM), were used to train an ensemble model for confident prediction of antimicrobial susceptibilities. Base learner selection and model performance evaluation was performed carefully using a variety of standard metrics, namely accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and Cohen κ. Results: For validating the performance on MIMIC-III database harboring deidentified clinical data of 53,423 distinct patient admissions between 2001 and 2012, in the intensive care units (ICUs) of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. From ~11,000 positive cultures, we used 4 major specimen types namely urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab for evaluation of the model performance. Figure 1 shows the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves obtained for bloodstream infection cases upon model building and prediction on 70:30 split of the data. We received area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.88, 0.92, 0.92, and 0.94 for urine, sputum, blood, and pus swab samples, respectively. Figure 2 shows the comparative performance of our proposed method as well as some off-the-shelf classification algorithms. Conclusions: Highly accurate, patient-specific predictive antibiogram (PSPA) data can aid clinicians significantly in antibiotic recommendation in ICU, thereby accelerating patient recovery and curbing antimicrobial resistance.Funding: This study was supported by Circle of Life Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.Disclosures: None

Although conventional bariatric surgery results in weight loss, it does so with potential short-term and long-term morbidity. To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of intermittent, reversible vagal nerve blockade therapy for obesity treatment. A randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled clinical trial involving 239 participants who had a body mass index of 40 to 45 or 35 to 40 and 1 or more obesity-related condition was conducted at 10 sites in the United States and Australia between May and December 2011. The 12-month blinded portion of the 5-year study was completed in January 2013. One hundred sixty-two patients received an active vagal nerve block device and 77 received a sham device. All participants received weight management education. The coprimary efficacy objectives were to determine whether the vagal nerve block was superior in mean percentage excess weight loss to sham by a 10-point margin with at least 55% of patients in the vagal block group achieving a 20% loss and 45% achieving a 25% loss. The primary safety objective was to determine whether the rate of serious adverse events related to device, procedure, or therapy in the vagal block group was less than 15%. In the intent-to-treat analysis, the vagal nerve block group had a mean 24.4% excess weight loss (9.2% of their initial body weight loss) vs 15.9% excess weight loss (6.0% initial body weight loss) in the sham group. The mean difference in the percentage of the excess weight loss between groups was 8.5 percentage points (95% CI, 3.1-13.9), which did not meet the 10-point target (P = .71), although weight loss was statistically greater in the vagal nerve block group (P = .002 for treatment difference in a post hoc analysis). At 12 months, 52% of patients in the vagal nerve block group achieved 20% or more excess weight loss and 38% achieved 25% or more excess weight loss vs 32% in the sham group who achieved 20% or more loss and 23% who achieved 25% or more loss. The device, procedure, or therapy-related serious adverse event rate in the vagal nerve block group was 3.7% (95% CI, 1.4%-7.9%), significantly lower than the 15% goal. The adverse events more frequent in the vagal nerve block group were heartburn or dyspepsia and abdominal pain attributed to therapy; all were reported as mild or moderate in severity. Among patients with morbid obesity, the use of vagal nerve block therapy compared with a sham control device did not meet either of the prespecified coprimary efficacy objectives, although weight loss in the vagal block group was statistically greater than in the sham device group. The treatment was well tolerated, having met the primary safety objective. clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT01327976.

This article investigates the possible backgrounds in Jewish pseudepigraphical literature of the notion expressed in Mk 12.25 that the age of resurrection life will be without sexual relations. It identifies the potential for such a view to develop on the basis of presuppositions present in Jubilees of paradise as a temple, then turns to a discussion of depictions of resurrected life in Jewish literature, which normally envisages resurrected life as a transformed state corresponding to present realities and so including both sacred space and other space where marriage and sexual relations belong, often producing abundant progeny. It then considers eschatologies which envisage both an earthly messianic reign and, following it, a more heavenly state, before returning to Mark and related early Christian eschatologies. It concludes that Mk 12.25 most likely reflects notions of resurrected life being in holy space, perhaps linked to ideas of the transformed state as rendering sexual relations also unimportant.