To apply electrical impedance tomography (EIT) technology to assess the lung regional ventilation distribution in patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) after a cardiac surgery, and to analyze its value of predicting patients' short-term prognosis.

Data from 46 patients admitted to ICU after a cardiac surgery from January to November 2023 were retrospectively collected. Using EIT, we assessed the lung regional ventilation of four regions of interest (ROI) and analyzed its influence on patients' length of stay in ICU, mechanical ventilation duration and tracheal intubation duration.

A total of 46 patients were selected, including 29 males and 17 females, with an average age of (58.2±9.5) years.The patients who received a cardiac surgery equal to or over 5 hours had worse ventilation in the dorsal region (ROI 4) (P=0.022). The patients with worse dorsal region ventilation (ROI 4 < 9%) had lower oxygenation index (P=0.025), longer mechanical ventilation duration (P=0.004), longer tracheal intubation duration (P=0.010), and longer ICU stay (P=0.018). A larger ROI 4 percent was a protective factor for patients' prognosis (OR=0.743, 95% CI: 0.587-0.941, P=0.014) after controlling for the impact of age, gender, length of surgery and acute physiology and chronic health evaluation (APACHE) score at the admission. With a cutoff value of 9.5%, ROI 4 had 85.7% sensitivity and 56.2% specificity to predict worse prognosis.The area under the curve (AUC) was 0.752 (95% CI: 0.599-0.905, P=0.007).

The length of a cardiac surgery influences patients' lung ventilation, which further impacts patients' prognosis. EIT can be used as a bedside tool to assess patients' lung ventilation and inform corresponding clinical interventions to improve patients' prognosis.

This study aimed to explore key quality control factors that affected the prognosis of intensive care unit (ICU) patients in Chinese mainland over six years (2015-2020). The data for this study were from 31 provincial and municipal hospitals (3425 hospital ICUs) and included 2 110 685 ICU patients, for a total of 27 607 376 ICU hospitalization days. We found that 15 initially established quality control indicators were good predictors of patient prognosis, including percentage of ICU patients out of all inpatients (%), percentage of ICU bed occupancy of total inpatient bed occupancy (%), percentage of all ICU inpatients with an APACHE II score ⩾15 (%), three-hour (surviving sepsis campaign) SSC bundle compliance (%), six-hour SSC bundle compliance (%), rate of microbe detection before antibiotics (%), percentage of drug deep venous thrombosis (DVT) prophylaxis (%), percentage of unplanned endotracheal extubations (%), percentage of patients reintubated within 48 hours (%), unplanned transfers to the ICU (%), 48-h ICU readmission rate (%), ventilator associated pneumonia (VAP) (per 1000 ventilator days), catheter related blood stream infection (CRBSI) (per 1000 catheter days), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) (per 1000 catheter days), in-hospital mortality (%). When exploratory factor analysis was applied, the 15 indicators were divided into 6 core elements that varied in weight regarding quality evaluation: nosocomial infection management (21.35%), compliance with the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines (17.97%), ICU resources (17.46%), airway management (15.53%), prevention of deep-vein thrombosis (14.07%), and severity of patient condition (13.61%). Based on the different weights of the core elements associated with the 15 indicators, we developed an integrated quality scoring system defined as F score=21.35%xnosocomial infection management + 17.97%xcompliance with SSC guidelines + 17.46%×ICU resources + 15.53%×airway management + 14.07%×DVT prevention + 13.61%×severity of patient condition. This evidence-based quality scoring system will help in assessing the key elements of quality management and establish a foundation for further optimization of the quality control indicator system.
Humans ; China/epidemiology* ; Cross Infection/epidemiology* ; Intensive Care Units/statistics & numerical data* ; Quality Control ; Quality Indicators, Health Care/statistics & numerical data* ; Sepsis/therapy* ; East Asian People/statistics & numerical data*

A young female patient presented with fever, arthralgia, and rash was diagnosed with adults still's disease. When treated with glucocorticoid steroid, the above patient progressed to anuria, sudden, and confusion. After a teamwork involving different departments, the patient was finally diagnosed with atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS) and treated with good outcome. aHUS is a rare disease, while Eculizumab is an orphan drug. The diagnosis and treatment of the patient reveals the importance of multidisciplinary team on the diagnosis and treatment of rare and difficult diseases.

Bioengineering majors require students to acquire excellent abilities of thinking and analyzing complex problems and have high requirements for students' comprehensive practical skills. Because of the professional characteristics, it is necessary to develop students' abilities to solve complex problems via the teaching of a series of experiments. Therefore, it is particularly important to reform the traditional experiment teaching for students majoring in bioengineering to improve the teaching quality, which have great significance for the cultivation of comprehensive talents. In this study, with the advantages of geographical location and resources to cultivate application-oriented innovative talents, the course group of Comprehensive Experiment of Bioengineering has designed the course based on virtual simulation technology in Binzhou University. Taking the experiment of extraction and bioactivity analysis of Suaeda salsa (growing in the Yellow River Delta) polysaccharide in fermentation as a case, we studied the course design idea, experimental process, teaching method and result analysis, and have improved the teaching performance. This case analysis provides new ideas and content reference for the teaching reform of similar courses.
Bioengineering/education* ; Biomedical Engineering/education* ; Humans ; Students ; Technology ; Universities

Background::It is crucial to improve the quality of care provided to ICU patient, therefore a national survey of the medical quality of intensive care units (ICUs) was conducted to analyze adherence to quality metrics and outcomes among critically ill patients in China from 2015 to 2019.Methods::This was an ICU-level study based on a 15-indicator online survey conducted in China. Considering that ICU care quality may vary between secondary and tertiary hospitals, direct standardization was adopted to compare the rates of ICU quality indicators among provinces/regions. Multivariate analysis was performed to identify potential factors for in-hospital mortality and factors related to ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSIs), and catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs).Results::From the survey, the proportions of structural indicators were 1.83% for the number of ICU inpatients relative to the total number of inpatients, 1.44% for ICU bed occupancy relative to the total inpatient bed occupancy, and 51.08% for inpatients with Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation II scores ≥15. The proportions of procedural indicators were 74.37% and 76.60% for 3-hour and 6-hour surviving sepsis campaign bundle compliance, respectively, 62.93% for microbiology detection, 58.24% for deep vein thrombosis prophylaxis, 1.49% for unplanned endotracheal extubations, 1.99% for extubated inpatients reintubated within 48 hours, 6.38% for unplanned transfer to the ICU, and 1.20% for 48-hour ICU readmission. The proportions of outcome indicators were 1.28‰ for VAP, 3.06‰ for CRBSI, 3.65‰ for CAUTI, and 10.19% for in-hospital mortality. Although the indicators varied greatly across provinces and regions, the treatment level of ICUs in China has been stable and improved based on various quality control indicators in the past 5 years. The overall mortality rate has dropped from 10.19% to approximately 8%.Conclusions::The quality indicators of medical care in China’s ICUs are heterogeneous, which is reflected in geographic disparities and grades of hospitals. This study is of great significance for improving the homogeneity of ICUs in China.

The gut microbiota of intensive care unit (ICU) patients displays extreme dysbiosis asso-ciated with increased susceptibility to organ failure, sepsis, and septic shock. However, such dysbio-sis is difficult to characterize owing to the high dimensional complexity of the gut microbiota. We tested whether the concept of enterotype can be applied to the gut microbiota of ICU patients to describe the dysbiosis. We collected 131 fecal samples from 64 ICU patients diagnosed with sepsis or septic shock and performed 16S rRNA gene sequencing to dissect their gut microbiota compo-sitions. During the development of sepsis or septic shock and during various medical treatments, the ICU patients always exhibited two dysbiotic microbiota patterns, or ICU-enterotypes, which could not be explained by host properties such as age, sex, and body mass index, or external stressors such as infection site and antibiotic use. ICU-enterotype I (ICU E1) comprised predominantly Bac-teroides and an unclassified genus of Enterobacteriaceae, while ICU-enterotype Ⅱ(ICU E2) com-prised predominantly Enterococcus. Among more critically ill patients with Acute Physiology and Chronic Health Evaluation Ⅱ(APACHE Ⅱ) scores > 18, septic shock was more likely to occur with ICU E1 (P = 0.041). Additionally, ICU E1 was correlated with high serum lactate levels (P = 0.007). Therefore, different patterns of dysbiosis were correlated with different clinicaloutcomes, suggesting that ICU-enterotypes should be diagnosed as independent clinical indices. Thus, the microbial-based human index classifier we propose is precise and effective for timely mon-itoring of ICU-enterotypes of individual patients. This work is a first step toward precision medicine for septic patients based on their gut microbiota profiles.

Objective To evaluate the prognostic value of arterial blood lactate clearance based on central venous oxygen saturation and perfusion index in patients with septic shock related myocardial injury after early goal-directed therapy.Methods One hundred and fifty-seven patients with septic shock after early resuscitation were enrolled from August 2013 to July 2016 in ICU at Peking Union Medical College Hospital.Parameters indicating early resuscitation included central venous pressure (CVP) 8-12 mmHg (1 mmHg=0.133 kPa),mean arterial pressure (MAP)＞65 mmHg,central venous oxygen saturation(ScvO2)＞70％ and urine volume (UO) ＞0.Sml · kg-1 · h-1 and arterial blood lactatc (Lac) ＞2 mmoL/L.Patients were divided into group A [ScvO2＞80％ and perfusion index (PI)＞1.4],group B(ScvO2＞80％ and PI＜1.4),group C (ScvO2＜80％ and PI＞1.4),group D(ScvO2＜80％ and Pl＜l.4).Hemodynamic parameters and tissue perfusion indexes at 2 hours(T2),4 hours(T4) and 6 hours(T6) after early resuscitation and troponin Ⅰ which indicated myocardial damage,on day 1 2 3 in ICU were recorded.Results (1)Lac clearance in group C was the quickest,which was 34.57％ (21.44％,44.20％),58.33％ (30.19％,70.79％),71.43％ (53.75％,82.79％) at T2,T4,T6 respectively.(2)The maximal incidence of myocardial damage was in group B(85.0％) and the lowest in group A (45.7％) on day 1 in ICU.Whereas on day 2,group C showed the lowest incidence of myocardial damage (29.3％) and group B the highest(70.0％).On day 3,the proportion of elevated troponin Ⅰ in group B was 70.0％,which was significantly higher than that of group B (29.3％,P＜0.008).(3)Logistic regression analysis suggested that the rate of Lac clearance at T4 in group B was related to the incidence of myocardial damage on day 2 and 3 in ICU.Conclusions The combination of PI and ScvO2 as a resuscitation target in patients with septic shock facilitates Lac clearance as the goal of resuscitation.The rate of arterial Lac clearance based on ScvO2 and PI is correlated with myocardial injury in patients with septic shock after early goal-directed therapy.

Objective To investigate the expression of triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells receptor-1 (TREM-1) in plasma and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) and its correlation with Galactomannan,IFN,IL-6 and IL-10 in Aspergillus infected mice.Methods Cyclophosphamide (CTX) was intraperitoneally injected and fumigatus spore suspension was inhaled by nose to establish the immunocompromised invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) mouse model.Healthy controls,immunocompromised only and IPA only groups were also established.Each group had 6 mice.After inoculation,mice were sacrificed.Lung tissue specimens,BALF,and plasma samples were collected.Plasma and BALF soluble TREM-1 (sTREM-1),Galactomannan,IFNγ,IL-6,and IL-10 were detected by ELISA.Results Positive Aspergillus fumigatus was found by tissue culture in the lung.Infiltration of inflammatory cells,blood congestion and interstitial lung tissue injury were observed in histological sections of both IPA and immunocompromised IPA mice.Compared to IPA group [(453.78 ± 74.18) ng/L,P ＜ 0.001;(10.21±1.46) ng/L,P＜0.001] and control group [(245.16 ±65.85) ng/L,P＜0.001;(6.60 ± 3.74) ng/L,P ＜ 0.001],the plasma and BALF sTREM-1 significantly increased in immunocompromised IPA group [(1 537.64 ± 359.52) ng/L;(20.12-± 2.72) ng/L].Compared to control group,both the BALF sTREM-1 in IPA group (P =0.041) and the plasma and BALF Galactomannan,IFNγ,IL-6,and IL-10 levels in IPA and immunocompromised IPA groups were significantly higher (P ＜0.01).Pearson correlation analysis showed that plasma and BALF sTREM-1 were significantly correlated with Galactomannan (r =0.83,P ＜ 0.001;r =0.82,P ＜ 0.001),IFNγ (r =0.79,P＜0.001;r=0.61,P＜0.01),IL-6 (r=0.81,P＜0.001;r=0.66,P＜0.01),andIL-10 (r=0.70,P =0.001;r =0.54,P =0.02).Conclusions Plasma and BALF sTREM-1 appears highly expressed in Aspergillus infected mice.sTREM-1 in mice plasma and BALF is closely correlated with Galactomannan,IFNγ,IL-6,and IL-10 levels,which suggests that sTREM-1 has great diagnostic value during invasive fungal infection.

Objective To investigate the function of triggering receptor expresses on myeloid cells receptor-1 (TREM-1) in lymphocyte differentiation and regulation of Aspergillus infected immunosuppressed rats.Methods Cyclophosphamide (CTX) was intraperitoneally injected and Fumigatus spore suspension was inhaled by percutaneous tracheostomy to establish the immunosuppressive invasive pulmonary aspergillosis (IPA) rat model.After 24 h, 48 h, 72 h and 96 h inoculation, rats were sacrificed.Lung tissue specimens, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) , and plasma samples were collected.Plasma and BALF sTREM-1, plasma T cell-specific transcription factor (T-box expressed in T cells, T-bet) and eomesodermin(Eomes) were detected by ELISA.Biopsy specimens of lung tissue were used for periodic acid-schiff (PAS) staining and culture.Results The mortality rate of immunosuppressed rats after Aspergillus inhalation for 96 h was as high as 54.4％.Biopsy of lung tissue suggested acute inflammatory cell infiltration, interstitial lung congestion, alveolar structural damage, and visible Aspergillus hyphae in alveoli.Compared with normal control group[(110.50 ± 7.70)ng/L], plasma sTREM-1 in study groups were significantly increased [IPA : (146.77 ± 10.41) ng/L;CXT + IPA at 24 h : (226.00 ± 11.88) ng/L;CTX + IPA at 48 h : (200.77 ± 10.63) ng/L;P ＜ 0.05], so were T-bet levels [IPA : (561.17 ± 7.23) μg/L;CXT + IPA at 24 h : (647.00 ± 33.03) μg/L;CTX + IPA at 48 h : (619.23 ± 87.44) μg/L;control group : (340.03 ± 26.32) μg/L;respectively, P ＜0.05].However, plasma Eomes levels in IPA group, CTX + IPA at 24 h and 48 h were significantly lower compared with that in normal controls [IPA : (7.96 ± 0.65) ng/L;CXT + IPA at 24 h : (3.97 ± 0.35) ng/L;CTX + IPA at 48 h : (4.00 ± 0.74) ng/L;control group : (8.38 ± 0.51) ng/L;respectively,P ＜0.001].Compared with those in CTX + IPA vaccination after 24 h and 48 h, plasma sTREM-1 [(106.67 ±7.64)ng/L;(133.27 ± 32.79) ng/L] and T-bet [(299.64±63.07)μg/L;(398.02 ± 109.22) μg/L] in CTX + IPA at 72 h and 96 h inoculation were significantly lower (P ＜ 0.001).While Eomes [(8.38 ± 0.54) ng/L;(8.40 ± 0.70) ng/L] raised significantly higher (P ＜ 0.001).Compared with the control group, sTREM-1 levels in BALF of IPA + CTX 24 h, 48 h, 72 h, and 96 h groups were consistently high (P ＜ 0.05).Pearson correlation analysis showed that sTREM-1 and T-bet had a significant positive correlation (r =0.91, P ＜ 0.001), yet Eomes was negatively correlated with them (r =-0.788, P ＜ 0.001).Conclusions sTREM-1 in rat plasma and BALF appears highly expressed in immune compromised Aspergillus infected rat model.Plasma sTREM-1 is closely correlated with T-bet and Eomes levels, which suggests that TREM-1 may be involved in lymphocytic regulation and differentiation during fungal infection.

BACKGROUNDAcute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD) is a common condition, which affects not only the quality of life of patients but also their prognosis. The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of an inhaled salbutamol sulfate solution and an inhalation suspension of the glucocorticoid budesonide that were atomized with heliox to treat patients with AECOPD.

METHODSTwenty-three patients with AECOPD were divided into a treatment group (He/O2 = 70%/30%) and a control group (N2/O2 = 70%/30%). The salbutamol sulfate and budesonide were administered by inhalation twice a day for 7 days. Vital signs, arterial blood gas levels, pulmonary function and the levels of serum myostatin (sMSTN) were measured and lung vibration imaging was performed.

RESULTSWe found that the PaO2 and PaCO2 values were not significantly different between the two groups at the various time points (P > 0.05). There were also no significant differences in any of the parameters of pulmonary function between the two groups. However, after baseline correction, the increase rate of the forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1), the forced vital capacity (FVC), and the maximum minute ventilation (MVV) appeared to be significantly increased at some time points compared with the baseline (before treatment) in both groups (P < 0.05). Although the values of quantitative lung distribution (QLD) for different regions and the levels of sMSTN were slightly different between the two groups, the repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that there were no significant differences between the two groups or within any group (P > 0.05).

CONCLUSIONAlthough the use of heliox as a driving gas can improve symptoms and benefit patients with AECOPD, the heliox treatment group did not have significant differences in arterial blood gases, lung function, lung vibration response imaging or the levels of sMSTN compared with the control group. (Chinese Clinical Trial Register Center ChiCTRTRC-00000273).

Administration, Inhalation ; Aged ; Albuterol ; administration & dosage ; therapeutic use ; Budesonide ; administration & dosage ; therapeutic use ; Drug Interactions ; Female ; Helium ; administration & dosage ; therapeutic use ; Humans ; Male ; Middle Aged ; Oxygen ; administration & dosage ; therapeutic use ; Prospective Studies ; Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive ; drug therapy