Intracardiac electrogram analysis may allow for prediction of lesion transmurality after pulsed field ablation of atria in a porcine model.

Background: Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is a novel cardiac ablation modality with an increasing clinical acceptance in treatment of atrial fibrillation due to its clinical efficacy and excellent safety profile. However, intraprocedural guidance for PFA to ensure durable pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) is lacking.

Objective: We quantified changes in intracardiac electrograms (iEGMs) following PFA and radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and investigated their applicability for prediction of lesion transmurality.

New York City jails: COVID discharge policy, data transparency, and reform.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered the release of individuals incarcerated in New York City jails who were at high risk of contracting the disease and at low risk of committing criminal reoffense. Using public information, we construct and analyze a database of nearly 350,000 incarceration episodes in the city jail system from 2014-2020, paying special attention to what happened during the week of March 23-29, 2020, immediately following the mayor's order. In concordance with de Blasio's stated policy, we find that being discharged during this focus week is associated with a lower probability of readmission as compared to being discharged during the same calendar week in previous years.

MODELING MICROBIAL ABUNDANCES AND DYSBIOSIS WITH BETA-BINOMIAL REGRESSION.

Using a sample from a population to estimate the proportion of the population with a certain category label is a broadly important problem. In the context of microbiome studies, this problem arises when researchers wish to use a sample from a population of microbes to estimate the population proportion of a particular taxon, known as the taxon's In this paper, we propose a beta-binomial model for this task. Like existing models, our model allows for a taxon's relative abundance to be associated with covariates of interest.

Estimating diversity in networked ecological communities.

Comparing ecological communities across environmental gradients can be challenging, especially when the number of different taxonomic groups in the communities is large. In this setting, community-level summaries called diversity indices are widely used to detect changes in the community ecology. However, estimation of diversity indices has received relatively little attention from the statistical community.

Fecal dysbiosis in infants with cystic fibrosis is associated with early linear growth failure.

Most infants with cystic fibrosis (CF) have pancreatic exocrine insufficiency that results in nutrient malabsorption and requires oral pancreatic enzyme replacement. Newborn screening for CF has enabled earlier diagnosis, nutritional intervention and enzyme replacement for these infants, allowing most infants with CF to achieve their weight goals by 12 months of age. Nevertheless, most infants with CF continue to have poor linear growth during their first year of life.

Author Correction: Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Changes in the spatial distribution of the under-five mortality rate: Small-area analysis of 122 DHS surveys in 262 subregions of 35 countries in Africa.

The under-five mortality rate (U5MR) is a critical and widely available population health indicator. Both the MDGs and SDGs define targets for improvement in the U5MR, and the SDGs require spatial disaggregation of indicators. We estimate trends in the U5MR for Admin-1 subnational areas using 122 DHS surveys in 35 countries in Africa and assess progress toward the MDG target reductions for each subnational region and each country as a whole.

Niche Separation Increases With Genetic Distance Among Bloom-Forming Cyanobacteria.

Bacterial communities are composed of distinct groups of potentially interacting lineages, each thought to occupy a distinct ecological niche. It remains unclear, however, how quickly niche preference evolves and whether more closely related lineages are more likely to share ecological niches. We addressed these questions by following the dynamics of two bloom-forming cyanobacterial genera over an 8-year time-course in Lake Champlain, Canada, using 16S amplicon sequencing and measurements of several environmental parameters.

Methods for Real-Time Prediction of the Mode of Travel Using Smartphone-Based GPS and Accelerometer Data.

We propose and compare combinations of several methods for classifying transportation activity data from smartphone GPS and accelerometer sensors. We have two main objectives. First, we aim to classify our data as accurately as possible.