Publications by authors named "Matthew D Phelps"

Objective: Breast MRI affords high sensitivity with intermediate specificity for cancer detection. Ultrafast dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI assesses early contrast inflow with potential to supplement or replace conventional DCE-MRI kinetic features. We sought to determine whether radiologist's evaluation of ultrafast DCE-MRI can increase specificity of a clinical MRI protocol.

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Breast MRI is the most sensitive modality for assessing the extent of disease in patients with newly-diagnosed breast cancer because it identifies clinically- and mammographically-occult breast cancers. Though highly sensitive, breast MRI has lower specificity that may result in false positive findings and potential overestimation of disease if additional MRI findings are not biopsied prior to surgery. It had been anticipated that the superior cancer detection rate of pre-treatment MRI would translate to improved immediate (surgical re-excision) and long-term patient outcomes such as breast cancer recurrence and survival rates, but studies have not necessarily supported this assumption.

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Article Synopsis
  • The article originally had an error in the spelling of a co-author's name.
  • The correct name is Janith Warnasekara, not Janith Warnasuriya.
  • The mistake has been addressed and the article has been updated accordingly.
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  • Sri Lanka has a high rate of human leptospirosis, particularly during monsoons and floods, prompting a study on risk factors related to environmental, animal, and work exposure.
  • The study analyzed data from 483 patients, revealing that paddy workers have a significantly higher risk for leptospirosis compared to non-paddy workers, largely due to environmental factors in paddy fields.
  • Interestingly, while rat exposure wasn’t a significant risk, cattle and other household animals were found to increase transmission risks, particularly for non-paddy workers, suggesting that managing animal proximity to contaminated areas could help mitigate risks for paddy workers.
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Objective: Uncertainty persists regarding cholera transmission routes. We conducted a structured review of case-control studies on cholera transmission and provide a qualitative summary of reported exposures in order to inform public health efforts and future cholera research.

Methods: We searched two electronic databases for published case-control studies that investigated risk factors for cholera and included any publications that did not match our exclusion criteria.

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Existing methodologies to record diarrheal disease incidence in households have limitations due to a high-episode recall error outside a 48-hour window. Our objective was to use mobile phones for reporting diarrheal episodes in households to provide real-time incidence data with minimum resource consumption and low recall error. From June 2014 to June 2015, we enrolled 417 low-income households in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and asked them to report diarrheal episodes to a call center.

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Background: Planning interventions to respond to cholera epidemics requires an understanding of the major transmission routes. Interrupting short-cycle (household, foodborne) transmission may require different approaches as compared long-cycle (environmentally-mediated/waterborne) transmission. However, differentiating the relative contribution of short- and long-cycle routes has remained difficult, and most cholera outbreak control efforts focus on interrupting long-cycle transmission.

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