L'isle Sur Doubs, France

Molecular Endotype-Specific Dynamics of Lung Endothelial Barrier Integrity in Sepsis

The CROCO Study: CROhn's Disease COhort Study

Therefore, the investigators designed a prospective, multicentre, study of the clinical course, anatomical progression and treatment of newly diagnosed CD and plan to include 600 patients over a 2-year period. Patients will be followed over 5 years after diagnosis (the date of diagnosis will be the date of the index histopathology describing CD; in special situations where pathology is not available the date of diagnosis will be the date that CD was declared by the physician). A morphological evaluation (LI), using abdominal magnetic resonance, will be performed at 1, 3 and 5 years after diagnosis. Ileocolonoscopy, upper endoscopy and/or pelvic MRI will be included according to disease location. Patients will be treated with standard of care therapy and will be followed for 5 years after diagnosis, with semestrial visits after the Year 1 (LI 1). At each visit, clinical and laboratory markers will be collected. Perianal and abdominal surgeries during follow-up will be registered. The disability index questionnaire will also be recorded every year. A preliminary requisite is therefore to implement and standardize examination reports and damage definitions used to calculate the LI. To this end, training session, supervised by members of the steering committee, will be held for participating gastroenterologist and radiologists. Based on commented ileocolonoscopy, upper endoscopy abdominal MRI and pelvic MRI, these sessions will highlight how lesions should be characterized and graded accordingly to implement the Lémann Index.

Non-Invasive Vital Signs Monitoring (NIVS) Project

Non-invasive monitoring of vital signs is an area that is gaining increasing popularity in clinical practise due to its advantages of increased comfort to patients and reduced risk of transmission of multidrug resistant organisms. This study aims to assess the feasibility of using RGB cameras and thermal imaging cameras for monitoring of heart rate and rhythm and respiratory rate and rhythm in the intensive care setting. Videos of patients are taken in the ICU of a Maltese University-affiliated tertiary hospital (Mater Dei Hospital) under varying conditions, including varying light intensity, different patient positions and periods of time where clinical staff are performing regular care tasks and minor interventions such as bloodletting. Patients enrolled will be able to provide consent for the study after being given a detailed explanation of the study aims, data collected, data storage and processing and any other information they may wish to know. The video data will be analysed via a convolutional neural network which has been previously trained to extract cardiovascular and respiratory parameters from videos taken from healthy volunteers in a non-clinical setting (a laboratory located in the University of Malta). The heart rate and respiratory rate extracted from patient videos are then compared to ground truth data obtained by current gold standard contact monitoring (data collected from Phillips Intellivue monitors used throughout the ICU) and assessed for accuracy. The practicality of setting up a camera-based system in the intensive care setting and potential means of overcoming limitations faced will also be tackled in this study from a qualitative aspect.

DOAC in Unusual Site Venous Thrombosis

'The Actual and Perceived Levels of Physical Fitness and Lifestyle Habits in University of Malta Students'

The ultimate goal for every health-care system is to have a healthy population by maintaining good physical fitness levels and lifestyle habits, including regular physical activity, good sleep quality, smoking and alcohol abstinence. The main components of physical fitness include body composition, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility and cardiovascular endurance. A national research based on actual and perceived physical fitness levels in University of Malta (UM) students where both physical and non-physical testing are included, is lacking. Also, to the knowledge of the researcher, no such research investigated the relationship between the actual and perceived levels of physical fitness with lifestyle habits (smoking, alcohol consumption and sleep). This study aims to investigate the correlation between the actual and perceived levels of physical fitness (body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and endurance and flexibility) by physical and non-physical testing, the correlation between lifestyle patterns (smoking, alcohol consumption and sleep. This proposed research shall adopt a quantitative-based, correlational type of study design. Registrar and student organisations shall act as intermediary entities and send an information letter via electronic mail to all students aged between 18-30 years. All participants who respond to the call, on attendance to a pre-set date for a face-to-face information session by the researcher, will be asked to sign an informed consent form. Each participant will come for data collection only once at the Department of Physiotherapy laboratories, Faculty of Health Sciences, at the University of Malta and shall take around 20 minutes. Every query will be answered, a detailed explanation and demonstration of each test will be given to each participant, and qualified physiotherapists will perform the testing. In this proposed study, the aim of The Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND), Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) is to quantitatively study various lifestyle habits in UM students including smoking, alcohol consumption and sleep quality respectively. The Self-Perceived Fitness questionnaire (SPF) shall be used to measure self-perceived physical fitness in University of Malta students. The Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence is open-access, and can be used for free for research purposes. On the other hand, permissions to use the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and Self-Perceived Fitness questionnaire were given by their respective authors. Body composition shall be measured by Body Mass Index and Waist Circumference, lower and upper limb flexibility shall be measured by Modified Sit and Reach Test and Back Scratch Test respectively. In addition, cardiovascular endurance shall be measured by Resting Heart Rate, Blood Pressure and 3 Min Step Test, while Squats and Push-ups until fatigue shall be used to measure lower and upper limb muscular strength and endurance. All data will then be analysed using statistical methods.