
Magda BucholcPublic Health Agency
Magda Bucholc
PhD MSc PGCHEP
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119
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Publications (119)
Computerized clinical decision support systems can help to provide objective, standardized, and timely dementia diagnosis. However, current computerized systems are mainly based on group analysis, discrete classification of disease stages, or expensive and not readily accessible biomarkers, while current clinical practice relies relatively heavily...
Introduction
Hearing aid usage has been linked to improvements in cognition, communication, and socialization, but the extent to which it can affect the incidence and progression of dementia is unknown. Such research is vital given the high prevalence of dementia and hearing impairment in older adults, and the fact that both conditions often coexis...
Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) represents a precursor to dementia for many individuals; however, some forms of MCI tend to remain stable over time and do not progress to dementia. In fact, conversion rates vary substantially depending on the diagnostic criteria used and the nature of the analytic sample and clinical setting. To identify personaliz...
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used in dementia research. However, several methodological challenges exist that may limit the insights we can obtain from high‐dimensional data and our ability to translate these findings into improved patient outcomes. To improve reproducibility and replicabi...
Abstract We investigated the association between a wide range of comorbidities and COVID-19 in-hospital mortality and assessed the influence of multi morbidity on the risk of COVID-19-related death using a large, regional cohort of 6036 hospitalized patients. This retrospective cohort study was conducted using Patient Administration System Admissio...
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, has posed unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. Here, we have identified proteomic and genetic signatures for improved prognosis which is vital for COVID-19 research. Methods: We investigated the proteomic and genomic profile of COVID-19-positive pati...
Objective
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become one of the most serious global public health threats. Concerns about AMR resulted in increased monitoring and evaluation of antibiotic prescribing, with primary care responsible for over 80% of these prescriptions. Through this study, we aim to analyse temporal trends and variations in antibiotic...
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has posed unprecedented challenges to healthcare systems worldwide. Here, we have identified proteomic and genetic signatures for improved prognosis which is vital for COVID-19 research. Methods: We investigated the proteomic and genomic profile of COVID-19 positive patie...
Background: The Clinical Dementia Rating Scale Sum of Boxes (CDRSOB) score is known to be highly indicative of cognitive-functional status and is regularly employed for clinical and research purposes.
Objective: Our aim is to determine whether CDRSOB is consistent with clinical diagnosis in evaluating drug class associations with risk of progress...
Introduction
Novelty detection (ND, also known as one-class classification) is a machine learning technique used to identify patterns that are typical of the majority class and can discriminate deviations as novelties. In the context of Alzheimer's disease (AD), ND could be employed to detect abnormal or atypical behavior that may indicate early si...
Background
With the spread of SARS-CoV-2 impacting upon public health directly and socioeconomically, further information was required to inform policy decisions designed to limit virus spread during the pandemic. This study sought to contribute to serosurveillance work within Northern Ireland to track SARS-CoV-2 progression and guide health strate...
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative condition that is characterized by the build-up of amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. While multiple theories explaining the aetiology of the disease have been suggested, the underlying cause of the disease is still unknown. Despite this, several modifiable and non-modifiable fa...
Inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics has been widely recognised as a leading cause of antimicrobial resistance, which in turn has become one of the most significant threats to global health. Given that most antibiotic prescriptions are issued in primary care settings, investigating the associations between primary care prescribing of antibiotic...
INTRODUCTION
A wide range of modifiable risk factors for dementia have been identified. Considerable debate remains about these risk factors, possible interactions between them or with genetic risk, and causality, and how they can help in clinical trial recruitment and drug development. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) may ref...
INTRODUCTION
Experimental models are essential tools in neurodegenerative disease research. However, the translation of insights and drugs discovered in model systems has proven immensely challenging, marred by high failure rates in human clinical trials.
METHODS
Here we review the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (...
Background: With the impact of SARS-CoV-2 upon public health directly and socioeconomically, further information was required to inform policy decisions designed to limit virus spread. This study sought to contribute to serosurveillance work within Northern Ireland to track SARS-CoV-2 progression and guide health strategy.
Methods: Sera/plasma samp...
BACKGROUND
Background - Health organisations and countries around the world have found it difficult to control the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019. To minimise the impact on the NHS and improve patient care, there is a drive for rapid tests capable of detecting individuals who are at high risk of contracting severe COVID-19. Early work focus...
Background
Health organizations and countries around the world have found it difficult to control the spread of COVID-19. To minimize the future impact on the UK National Health Service and improve patient care, there is a pressing need to identify individuals who are at a higher risk of being hospitalized because of severe COVID-19. Early targeted...
Objective
The Covid Response Study (COVRES, NCT05548829) aims to carry out an integrated multi-omic analysis of factors contributing to host susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 among a patient cohort of 1000 people from the geographically isolated island of Ireland.
Background
Health organisations and countries around the world have found it difficult to...
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is a masked-language model often used for natural language processing (NLP) applications such as text classification, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis. Integrating BERT with AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) helps improve the analysis and processing of IT...
Large-scale companies across various sectors maintain substantial IT infrastructure to support their operations and provide quality services for their customers and employees. These IT operations are managed by teams who deal directly with incident reports (i.e., those generated automatically through autonomous systems or human operators). (1) Back...
Background:
Incisional hernias occur after up to 40 per cent of laparotomies. Recent RCTs have demonstrated the role of prophylactic mesh placement in reducing the risk of developing an incisional hernia. An onlay approach is relatively straightforward; however, a variety of techniques have been described for mesh fixation. The biomechanical prope...
Introduction: Machine learning (ML) has been extremely successful in identifying key features from high-dimensional datasets and executing complicated tasks with human expert levels of accuracy or greater. Methods: We summarize and critically evaluate current applications of ML in dementia research and highlight directions for future research. Resu...
Introduction:
Machine learning (ML) has been extremely successful in identifying key features from high-dimensional datasets and executing complicated tasks with human expert levels of accuracy or greater.
Methods:
We summarize and critically evaluate current applications of ML in dementia research and highlight directions for future research....
Progress in dementia research has been limited, with substantial gaps in our knowledge of targets for prevention, mechanisms for disease progression, and disease-modifying treatments. The growing availability of multimodal data sets opens possibilities for the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help answer key quest...
Background:
The increasing availability of large high-dimensional data from experimental medicine, population-based and clinical cohorts, clinical trials, and electronic health records has the potential to transform dementia research. Our ability to make best use of this rich data will depend on utilisation of advanced machine learning and artific...
The increasing availability of large high‐dimensional data from experimental medicine, population‐based and clinical cohorts, clinical trials, and electronic health records has the potential to transform dementia research. Our ability to make best use of this rich data will depend on utilisation of advanced machine learning and artificial intellige...
With the technology industry becoming steadily more and more populated, professionals within the field are finding themselves prone to suffering from different mental health issues. This is accompanied with more willing to share and discuss the issue as well as more resources put available to support sufferers. Bearing the aim to understand better...
Dementia is caused by an acquired, sustained decline in brain function, leading to difficulty with everyday activities. With multiple aetiologies, clinical presentation varies, typically including problems with memory, cognition, and communication. Dementia research aims to identify risk factors, disease mechanisms and treatments. However, progress...
Background
Symptomatic calculus biliary disease is common with associated morbidity and occasional mortality, further confounded when there is concomitant common bile duct (CBD) stones. Choledocholithiasis and clearance of the duct reduces recurrent cholangitis, but the question is whether after clearance of the CBD if there is a need to perform a...
Background
Careful surgical strategy is paramount in balancing the prevention of fascial dehiscence, incisional hernia (IH) and fear of additional mesh-related wound complications post-laparotomy. This study aims to review early outcomes of patients undergoing an emergency laparotomy with prophylactic long-acting resorbable synthetic TIGR® mesh, us...
Aims
Healthcare requires patient feedback to improve outcomes and experience. This study undertook a systematic review of the depth, variability, and digital suitability of current patient reported outcome measures PROMS in laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Methods
A PROSPERO registered (ID: CRD42021261707) systematic review was undertaken of English...
Aims
Clearance of choledocholithiasis reduces recurrent cholangitis, but following clearance of the CBD, cholecystectomy is required. This meta-analysis evaluated outcomes in patients undergoing ERCP with or without sphincterotomy to determine if cholecystectomy post ERCP clearance offers more favourable outcomes than a wait-and-see approach.
Meth...
Background:
Careful surgical strategy is paramount in balancing the prevention of fascial dehiscence, incisional hernia (IH) and fear of additional mesh-related wound complications post-laparotomy. This study aims to review early outcomes of patients undergoing an emergency laparotomy with prophylactic TIGR® mesh, used to reduce early fascial dehi...
Background:
Healthcare requires patient feedback to improve outcomes and experience. This study undertook a systematic review of the depth, variability, and digital suitability of current patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) in patients undergoing laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
Methods:
A PROSPERO-registered (registration number CRD420212617...
Background
Despite the call to enhance accuracy and value of operation records few international recommended minimal standards for operative notes documentation have been described. This study undertook a systematic review of existing operative reporting systems for laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) to fashion a comprehensive, synoptic operative re...
Introduction:
We assessed the association of self-reported hearing impairment and hearing aid use with cognitive decline and progression to mild cognitive impairment (MCI).
Methods:
We used a large referral-based cohort of 4358 participants obtained from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center. The standard covariate-adjusted Cox proportion...
Background
Accumulated electronic data from a wide variety of clinical settings has been processed using a range of informatics methods to determine the sequence of care activities experienced by patients. The “as is” or “de facto” care pathways derived can be analysed together with other data to yield clinical and operational information. It seems...
Accurate computational models for clinical decision support systems require clean and reliable data but, in clinical practice, data are often incomplete. Hence, missing data could arise not only from training datasets but also test datasets which could consist of a single undiagnosed case, an individual. This work addresses the problem of extreme m...
Background: Surgical Site Infections (SSI) are a major source of post-operative complications and potentially affect oncological outcomes. Reducing SSI is multi-factorial, best served by the additive affect of individual wound bundle elements. With changing strategies and novel innovations ongoing meta-analyses are needed to inform current practice...
Antimicrobial resistance has become one of the greatest threats to global health. Over 80% of antibiotics are prescribed in primary care, with many prescriptions considered to be issued inappropriately. The aim of this study was to examine the association between prescribing rates and demographic, practice, geographic, and socioeconomic characteris...
Background
There is growing evidence that alterations in the endocannabinoid system (ECS) co‐occur with dementia pathophysiology. Currently, limited literature is available on components of the peripheral ECS as diagnostic markers for dementia.
Methods
In the present study we analysed the concentrations of the endocannabinoids (eCBs) anandamide (A...
Introduction:
Umbilical hernia repair, despite its perceived simplicity, is associated with recurrence between 2.7 and 27%, in mesh repair and non mesh repair respectively. Many factors are recognized contributors to recurrence however multiple defects in the linea alba, known to occur in up to 30% of patients, appear to have been overlooked by su...
Background: Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDRSOB) scale is known to be highly indicative of cognitive-functional status, but it is unclear whether it is consistent with clinician diagnosis in evaluating drug class associations with risk of progression to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia.
Methods: We employed multivariate logist...
Dementia is one of the major causes of disability and
dependency among older people worldwide. Without treatment
currently available to cure dementia or to alter its progressive
course, one of the principal goals for dementia care set by the
World Health Organisation is the early diagnosis in order to
promote early and optimal management. In recogn...
Background:
Emergency midline laparotomy is the cornerstone of survival in patients with peritonitis. While bundling of care elements has been shown to optimize outcomes, this has focused on elective rather than emergency abdominal surgery. The aim of this study was to undertake a systematic review and meta-analysis of factors affecting the develo...
The increasing prevalence of dementia in older adults warrants attention to the identification of practices that can delay or reduce likelihood of progression to early forms of cognitive impairment, in particular, to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) which is often considered a transitional stage between healthy aging and dementia. In this study, we...
Introduction:
Appendicitis is one of the most common causes of acute abdominal pain requiring surgical intervention, but the variability of diagnosis and management continue to challenge the surgeons. Aim: This study assessed patients undergoing appendectomy to identify opportunities to improve diagnostic accuracy and outcomes.
Methods:
An ethic...
Background:
Machine learning (ML) techniques are expected to tackle the problem of the high prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) we are facing worldwide. However, few studies of novelty detection (ND), a typical ML technique for safety-critical systems especially in healthcare, were engaged for identifying the risk of developing cognitive impairm...
Background
Hearing loss is the third most commonly reported chronic disease in older adults. Its prevalence ranges from 30% in individuals aged 65‐74 years to 40%‐60% in those aged 75 years or older. Evidence suggests that age‐related hearing impairment is strongly and independently associated with the decline in cognitive abilities and that indivi...
Background
Despite some evidence of improved survival with intraoperative cholangiography (IOC) during cholecystectomy, debate has raged about its benefit, due in part to its questionable benefit, time and resources required to complete.
Methods
A PROSPERO-registered (ID CRD42018102154) meta-analysis following PRISMA guidelines using PubMed, Scopu...
Background: Emergency midline laparotomy is a cornerstone to patient survival in patients with peritonitis, optimizing outcomes with the use of bundles needs to be defined.
Much of the international literature and best practice mandates have focused on elective rather than emergency abdominal surgery. The aim of this study was to undertake a system...
Background: Systems Medicine is a novel approach to medicine, i.e. an
interdisciplinary field that considers the human body as a system, composed of
multiple parts and of complex relationships at multiple levels, and further
integrated into an environment. Exploring Systems Medicine implies
understanding and combining concepts coming from diametral...
Introduction: Conflicting results on dementia risk factors have been reported across
studies.We hypothesize that variation in data preparationmethods may partially contribute
to this issue.
Methods: We propose a comprehensive data preparation approach comparing individuals
with stable diagnosis over time to those who progress to mild cognitive
impa...
INTRODUCTION: Hearing aid usage has been linked to improvements in cognition, communication, and socialization, but the extent to which it can affect the incidence and progression of dementia is unknown. Such research is vital given the high prevalence of dementia and hearing impairment in older adults, and the fact that both conditions often coexi...
Dementia is a collection of symptoms associated with impaired cognition and impedes everyday normal functioning. Dementia, with Alzheimer’s disease constituting its most common type, is highly complex in terms of etiology and pathophysiology. A more quantitative or computational attitude towards dementia research, or more generally in neurology, is...
Introduction: Optimizing delivery of care to patients with appendicitis as part of an emergency general surgery care program is important. Appendicitis is one of commonest emergency surgical presentations and has significant potential morbidity and occasional mortality. Meta-analysis of reinterventions following appendicectomy has not been publishe...
Aim
To assess variables contributing to hospital conveyance for people with diabetes and the interactions between them. A secondary aim was to generate hypotheses for further research into interventions that might reduce avoidable hospital admissions.
Methods
A national retrospective data set including 30 999 diabetes‐related callouts from the Sco...
Background: Despite some evidence of improved survival with intraoperative cholangiography during cholecys-tectomy, debate has raged about its benefit, in part because of its questionable benefit, time, and resources required to complete. Methods: An International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews-registered (ID CRD42018102154) meta-analys...
Accurate computational models for clinical decision support systems require clean and reliable data, but in clinical practice, data are often incomplete. Hence, missing data could arise not only from training datasets but also test datasets which could consist of a single undiagnosed case, an individual. Many popular methods of handling missing dat...
Background:
Cancer outcomes are complex, involving prevention, early detection and optimal multidisciplinary care. Postoperative infection and surgical site-infection (SSI) are not only uncomfortable for patients and costly, but may also be associated with poor oncological outcomes. A meta-analysis was undertaken to assess the oncological effects...
Dementia is a collection of symptoms associated with impaired cognition and impedes everyday normal functioning. Dementia, with Alzheimer's disease constituting its most common type, is highly complex in terms of etiology and pathophysiology. A more quantitative or computational attitude towards dementia research, or more generally in neurology, is...
Background: Laparoscopic cholecystectomy (LC) is one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures. Despite this, patterns of readmission following LC are not
well defined. This meta-analysis aimed to determine rates and predictors of readmission.
Methods: An ethically approved International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews
(PROSPERO...
Background
Hearing aid usage has been linked to improvements in cognition, communication, and socialization, but the extent to which it can affect the onset and progression of dementia is unknown. This study leveraged the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center Uniform Data Set to longitudinally examine the association between the use of hearing a...
Background: Systems Medicine is a novel approach to medicine, i.e. an interdisciplinary field that considers the human body as a system, composed of multiple parts and of complex relationships at multiple levels, and further integrated into an environment. Exploring Systems Medicine implies understanding and combining concepts coming from diametral...
A meta-analysis of the use of the intraoperative cholangiography; time to revisit our approach to cholecystectomy.
This report presents the outputs of a week-long collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute and Great Ormond Street Hospital. The purpose was to scope how vital signs monitoring data can be better used to inform the removal of a breathing tube (i.e. ‘extubation’) in intensive care units (ICUs). The main objectives were evaluating the effectiven...