Extra-Axial Hematoma and Trimethoprim-Sulfamethoxazole Induced Aplastic Anemia: The Role of Hematological Diseases in Subdural and Epidural Hemorrhage

The usefulness of postmortem computed tomography angiography for subdural hematoma caused by rupture of the cortical artery: A report of two autopsy cases and a literature review

Acute subdural hematoma (SDH) occurs following severe head trauma with brain contusion or rupture of bridging veins. Conversely, SDH caused by rupture of a cortical artery without trauma or with minor trauma is also possible. Although over 150 cases of the latter SDH have been reported, they were predominantly diagnosed only during surgery, and therefore, no adequate histological evaluation has been performed. Therefore, essential etiology of this SDH type has remained unclear. In addition, the scarcity of autopsy cases may be attributed to arterial rupture being missed if the macroscopic findings are too minimal to detect during autopsy. Here, we describe two autopsy cases of SDH of cortical artery origin. Extravasation on postmortem computed tomography angiography and arterial leakage on macroscopic observation during autopsy facilitated detection of the ruptured artery and allowed detailed histological evaluation of the ruptured artery and adjacent dura mater. The etiology of arterial rupture is briefly described on the basis of histopathological findings in this study and the available literature.

SMILE: a feature-based temporal abstraction framework for event-interval sequence classification

In this paper, we study the problem of classification of sequences of temporal intervals. Our main contribution is a novel framework, which we call , for extracting relevant features from interval sequences to construct classifiers. introduces the notion of utilizing random temporal abstraction features, we define as , as a means to capture information pertaining to class-discriminatory events which occur across the span of complete interval sequences. Our empirical evaluation is applied to a wide array of benchmark data sets and fourteen novel datasets for adverse drug event detection. We demonstrate how the introduction of simple sequential features, followed by progressively more complex features each improve classification performance. Importantly, this investigation demonstrates that significantly improves AUC performance over the current state-of-the-art. The investigation also reveals that the selection of underlying classification algorithm is important to achieve superior predictive performance, and how the number of features influences the performance of our framework.

Antibiotic Prophylaxis for Melioidosis in Patients Receiving Hemodialysis in the Tropics? One Size Does Not Fit All

Melioidosis has a high case fatality rate and is more common in patients with chronic kidney disease. Some authors recommended trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (TMP/SMX) prophylaxis for all hemodialysis (HD) patients during the wet season in melioidosis-endemic regions. Historical data were reviewed to determine if TMP/SMX prophylaxis was warranted in the HD population of Far North Queensland, Australia. Between 1997 and 2017, there were 242 culture-confirmed cases of melioidosis in the region, three (1.2%) occurred in HD patients; all survived without intensive care support. During the study period, there were 843 HD patients in the region with 3,024 cumulative patient years of risk. Even assuming 100% efficacy, it would have been necessary to prescribe TMP/SMX for 1,008 patient years to prevent one case of melioidosis. Given the significant additional cost and potentially life-threatening side effects of TMP/SMX therapy, clinicians should review the local epidemiology of melioidosis before the implementation of universal TMP/SMX prophylaxis in their HD population.