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Novel algorithm identifies adverse drug events across the seven pediatric development stages

Attendance plummets at LA covid vaccination events

Side effects from pediatric drug treatment are responsible for nearly 10 percent of childhood hospitalizations, with nearly half of those being life-threatening. Despite the need to know more about these drugs and the adverse events they can have on children, little evidence is currently available.

Clinical trials remain the gold standard for identifying adverse drug events (ADEs) for adults, but these have both ethical and methodological concerns for the pediatric population. The rapidly changing biologic and physiologic developments only enhance the challenges of understanding the potential impacts of different drug treatments at various stages of childhood.

Researchers at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center developed a novel algorithm that identified nearly 20,000 ADEs signals (information on a new or known side effect that may be caused by a particular drug) across the seven pediatric development stages and made them freely available. This process is strengthened by a novel approach that allows neighboring development stages to enhance the signal detection power, which helps it overcome limited data within individual stages.

This use of predictive modeling on real-world data can help address a critical gap in healthcare research around the understudied pediatric community.

DBMI associate professor Nicholas Tatonetti and Nick Giangreco, a recent Systems Biology PhD graduate at Columbia University, shared these findings in the study A database of pediatric drug effects to evaluate ontogenic mechanisms from child growth and development, which was recently published in Med.

For many reasons, children have historically not been included in clinical trials. There are many ethical issues around including children in trials, and there are several limitations when children are included that make it difficult to assess the effectiveness and safety of drugs.”

Nicholas Tatonetti, DBMI associate professor

Because of these factors, few drugs are specifically approved for use in children, though once drugs are approved for adults, physicians can prescribe them “off-label” to children.

“Since drugs are not studied and approved in children directly, physicians must rely on guidelines for adults,” he added. “Essentially treating children as if they were simply small adults is oftentimes an incorrect assumption. This study is an attempt to elucidate systematically what the potential side effects are when drugs are used off label in children.”

The study goes beyond simply differentiating side effects in children from those in adults. It focuses on ADEs across seven developmental stages, starting at term neonatal and going through late adolescence, and it is powered by sharing information from neighboring developmental stages. For example, the development of infants and toddlers is close enough that there will be more shared characteristics than there would be for infants and those in early or late adolescence.

“Previously, children were essentially grouped together,” Tatonetti said. “There were only a few studies that just focused on children, and they basically focused on people 18 and under or 21 and under in one group. The innovation here is using known developmental stages and our newly introduced DGAMs (disproportionality generalized additive models) to improve power and enable that analysis.”

Tatonetti stressed that these signals are not validated and are primarily meant for researchers. Parents should consult with their pediatricians on specific drug side effects.

Giangreco, currently a Quantitative Translational Scientist at Regeneron, noted one of several side effects that were identified by this model.

“One we corroborated that the FDA had found was that montelukast, an asthma drug, was found to elicit psychiatric side effects,” he said. “We saw that in our database as well, but we were able to pinpoint certain developmental stages where the risk was more significant, especially the second year of life.”

The study also integrates pediatric enzyme expression data and found that pharmacogenes with dynamic childhood expression are associated with pediatric ADEs.

“This was a biologically-inspired modeling strategy,” Giangreco said. “We used what we knew about biological processes occurring during childhood and formed the modeling strategy. These safety signals came from this prior knowledge of the biological processes that are happening. Our data-driven approach really tried to capture what we thought were the important biologically and physiologically dynamic processes that happen during childhood and use that to tease apart observations across the development stages.”

The model was used on a database of 264,453 pediatric reports in the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS). The output of the study is available via KidSIDES, a free and publicly available database of pediatric drug safety signals for the research community, as well as the Pediatric Drug Safety portal (PDSportal), which will facilitate evaluation of drug safety signals across childhood growth and development.

“The primary intention is for other researchers to use it, to follow up on signals they may observe,” Tatonetti said. “If they are experts on a particular drug usage, or particular disease domain and have observed these types of effects, they could follow up on them and be reassured, or could look at what the other evidence is for that effect as we aggregate it together. Clinicians can use it as a gut check. Maybe they saw an effect, or they are wondering if others are seeing this effect, and they can check the PDSPortal to see if others are seeing this effect or to prompt them to write another case report to the FDA.”

Source:

Journal reference:

Giangreco, N.P., et al. (2022) A database of pediatric drug effects to evaluate ontogenic mechanisms from child growth and development. Med. doi.org/10.1016/j.medj.2022.06.001.

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Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

AWS recently announced the general availability of Streaming Video Events, a new feature of Amazon Rekognition to provide real-time alerts on live video streams.

The managed service for image and video analysis can help camera manufacturers and service providers detect objects such as people, animals, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Streaming Video Events triggers a notification to the device as soon as the expected object is detected. Prathyusha Cheruku, principal product manager at AWS, explains how it works:

The service starts analyzing the video clip only when a motion event is triggered by the camera. When the desired object is detected, it sends a notification that includes the objects detected, bounding box coordinates, zoomed-in image of the objects detected, and the timestamp. The Amazon Rekognition pre-trained APIs provide high accuracy even in varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and resolutions.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/connected-home

Amazon Rekognition Video relies on Kinesis Video Streams to receive and process the video stream: the AWS::Rekognition::StreamProcessor type creates a stream processor used to detect and recognize faces or to find connected home labels.

To better manage the machine learning inferencing costs, customers can specify the length of the video clips to be processed (between 10 and 120 seconds) and can choose one or more objects such as people, pets, and packages, minimizing false alerts from camera motion events. Cheruku clarifies the benefit of Streaming Video Events over traditional motion detectors:

Many camera manufacturers and security service providers offer home security solutions that include camera doorbells, indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, and value-added notification services to help their users understand what is happening on their property. Cameras with built-in motion detectors are placed at entry or exit points of the home to notify users of any activity in real time, such as “Motion detected in the backyard”. However, motion detectors are noisy, can be set off by innocuous events like wind and rain, creating notification fatigue, and resulting in clunky home automation setup.

According to AWS, service providers can use the feature to create better in-app experiences, for example Alexa announcements such as “a package was detected at the front door”. In a separate article, Mike Ames, Prathyusha Cheruku, and David Robo explain how 3xLOGIC uses the new feature to provide intelligent video analytics on live video streams to monitoring agents.

Streaming Video Events is not the only new feature of Amazon Rekognition. Among the 2022 announcements, Rekognition Video added new languages for text detection, introduced new Face APIs for improved accuracy and improved content moderation.

Video Streaming Events is a feature available in a subset of AWS regions, including Northern Virginia, Ohio, Ireland and Mumbai. The label detection is charged at $0.00817/min, with minute increments. The processing of Kinesis Video Streams is charged separately.

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Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

Amazon Rekognition Introduces Streaming Video Events

AWS recently announced the general availability of Streaming Video Events, a new feature of Amazon Rekognition to provide real-time alerts on live video streams.

The managed service for image and video analysis can help camera manufacturers and service providers detect objects such as people, animals, and packages in live video streams from connected cameras. Streaming Video Events triggers a notification to the device as soon as the expected object is detected. Prathyusha Cheruku, principal product manager at AWS, explains how it works:

The service starts analyzing the video clip only when a motion event is triggered by the camera. When the desired object is detected, it sends a notification that includes the objects detected, bounding box coordinates, zoomed-in image of the objects detected, and the timestamp. The Amazon Rekognition pre-trained APIs provide high accuracy even in varying lighting conditions, camera angles, and resolutions.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/connected-home

Amazon Rekognition Video relies on Kinesis Video Streams to receive and process the video stream: the AWS::Rekognition::StreamProcessor type creates a stream processor used to detect and recognize faces or to find connected home labels.

To better manage the machine learning inferencing costs, customers can specify the length of the video clips to be processed (between 10 and 120 seconds) and can choose one or more objects such as people, pets, and packages, minimizing false alerts from camera motion events. Cheruku clarifies the benefit of Streaming Video Events over traditional motion detectors:

Many camera manufacturers and security service providers offer home security solutions that include camera doorbells, indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, and value-added notification services to help their users understand what is happening on their property. Cameras with built-in motion detectors are placed at entry or exit points of the home to notify users of any activity in real time, such as “Motion detected in the backyard”. However, motion detectors are noisy, can be set off by innocuous events like wind and rain, creating notification fatigue, and resulting in clunky home automation setup.

According to AWS, service providers can use the feature to create better in-app experiences, for example Alexa announcements such as “a package was detected at the front door”. In a separate article, Mike Ames, Prathyusha Cheruku, and David Robo explain how 3xLOGIC uses the new feature to provide intelligent video analytics on live video streams to monitoring agents.

Streaming Video Events is not the only new feature of Amazon Rekognition. Among the 2022 announcements, Rekognition Video added new languages for text detection, introduced new Face APIs for improved accuracy and improved content moderation.

Video Streaming Events is a feature available in a subset of AWS regions, including Northern Virginia, Ohio, Ireland and Mumbai. The label detection is charged at $0.00817/min, with minute increments. The processing of Kinesis Video Streams is charged separately.

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Current Events: Scott Street development, infrastructure plans

Current Events: Scott Street development, infrastructure plans

MISSOULA – This edition of Current Events with founding editor of the Missoula Current Martin Kidston takes an in-depth look at development efforts in the Scott Street area.

“That’s the ever-moving target out there with that project that’s unfolding on city property. The city owns 19 acres out there. They’ve given roughly nine acres to this development that is taking place off Scott Street. That project will include roughly 70 townhomes and condos on an affordable land trust to keep those homes permanently affordable,” Kidston explained. “It also includes 250 market-rate apartments along with a convenience store, a grocery store and a daycare, a big central plaza with a green space. It’s a really neat project. The problem is it gets pushed down the road because of economic headwinds — such as the cost of labor, the shortage of labor, the cost of lumber, and interest rates now going up. The developer said last week that this could get pushed off another year.”

Another project that is possibly being eyed for the Scott Street area is a new facility for Mountain Line.

“Yeah, the same area and kind of the same situation. Mountain Line received a letter of intent from the city to buy that property last week. Mountain Line needs that letter to apply for a roughly $50 million federal grant which they would use — if they receive it — to build a new transit facility and maintenance shop and garage in the Scott Street area on roughly eight acres. Three of those acres are on city property,” Kidston noted. “Mountain Line is looking to move over there as well, relocate their facilities from where they are currently at on Shakespeare Street. They need this new space urgently, they say. They can’t mean their goals of electrification and route expansion unless they have more room to operate.

One concern with the possible Scott Street projects is the additional infrastructure work that will be needed in the area.

“The city admitted this week — the first time I heard them say it — that Scott Street will likely reach its breaking point in the near future when all these new apartment units, housing projects, and transit facilities come online. Scott Street is really the only way in and out of that neighborhood,” Kidston said. “The city has received grant funding from the EPA to begin designing a road network in there. As far how they’re going to fund that road network still needs to be determined. That will include right-of-way purchases. A new interchange there at Interstate 90. Turner Street will be extended. So, there’s a lot of work there. It’s kind of pie in the sky thinking right now. All of this stuff is a vision, it’s a plan, it’s all in the works but none of it has come to fruition at this time.”

The federal government would need to be involved in the infrastructure work if an additional interchange on I-90 were to be built.

“Yes, if it’s a federal route. All that road structure south from the Interstate between the railroad tracks and the Interstate needs to be grown as well. There’s really nothing in there but garbage trucks and school buses, so there’s a lot of work to do, and it’s going to require a lot of cash,” Kidston concluded.

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Charleston County’s outreach events start Monday for national community development week

Charleston County’s outreach events start Monday for national community development week

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) – Monday is the start of national community development week and Charleston County has outreach events planned all over the county.

The Charleston Community Development Department will be in all corners of the county to provide information about their partners and the programs they have available.

Housing, legal services, and workshops like homeowner conservation, are just a few of the programs the community can sign up for at this week’s events.

Chelsea Diedrich, with the Charleston Community Development Department, says they’re looking to get these services into the rural pockets in the county.

This year the department received roughly $2.5 million dollars from the urban entitlement funds. This amount is a projection from previous years.

Through grant programs like this, they provide money to several local nonprofits in the community to help establish programs that benefit the community.

The home investment partnerships program for example provides access to over 650 local jurisdictions to create safe, sanitary, and affordable housing communities.

“This urban entitlement funding has offered allocations to over 20 nonprofits and we are excited to see the work they’ll be able to do in the coming program year,” Diedrich says.

Charleston County Council recently approved the Community Development Department’s annual action plan which lays out recommended allocation for the coming program year.

The community can weigh in on the approved action plan until May 5th by calling (843)202-6960 or emailing Program Administrator Chelsea Diedrich at cdiedrich@charlestoncounty.org.

Community Development Week 2022 schedule can be found here.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.

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Fauna Transactional Database Introduces Event Streaming

Fauna Transactional Database Introduces Event Streaming

Fauna, the company behind the Fauna transactional database, recently announced the general availability of event streaming, a push-based stream that sends changes at both the document and collection levels to subscribed clients.

Shashank Golla, senior product marketing manager at Fauna, explains:

Fauna’s event streaming employs an open, push-based streaming method to automatically stream real-time data updates to your clients when there is a change in your database. Unlike polling, in event streaming the subscription from the client side happens once and changes are automatically broadcast to the client whenever the subscribed document or collection is updated.

Source: https://fauna.com/blog/event-streaming#ensure-clients-have-least-privilege-access-with-abac

Fauna supports two types of event streaming: document streaming, where the client subscribes to a document reference, and set streaming, where the client subscribes to a set reference and when one or more documents enter or leave the set an event notification is triggered.

A distributed database, Fauna is an object-relational, globally replicated service that supports an indexed-document data model and distributed ACID transactions. A subscription is a connection to the cloud service that is held open by the client through the Fauna driver and set and document streaming features are available using the C#, Go, JavaScript, JVM (Java, Scala) and Python drivers. Explaining how to integrate event streaming using a sample react application, Shadid Haque, developer advocate at Fauna, suggests:

Avoid running a query to fetch a document and then establishing a stream. Multiple events may have modified the document prior to stream startup, which can lead to an inaccurate representation of the document data in your application.

Event streaming databases have become popular in the last few years and the major cloud providers offer different managed options to stream data, including DynamoDB Streams and AWS Kinesis Datastream, Datastream on Google Cloud and Azure Event Hubs. CockroachDB and Astra DB support event-driven architectures using Change Data Capture (CDC). Jeremy Daly, GM of serverless cloud at Serverless Inc, comments in his latest newsletter:

If you are a database provider and you’re not drifting into the world of event-driven architecture, you might as well start looking for something else to do.

To ensure that clients have least privilege access, Golia suggests using ABAC, a Fauna’s extension of the traditional role-based access control:

With ABAC, you can implement least privilege access using streaming and provide real-time changes to only the users who should be receiving the updates.

The following limitations apply to Fauna event streaming: GraphQL subscriptions are currently not supported, a browser can open a maximum of 100 streams and a document stream reports only events for the fields and values within the document’s data field.

Event streaming is charged according to usage and is available in all Fauna pricing plans. Each streamed event counts two read operations and includes 4k bytes read from storage, plus one read operation per additional 4k bytes, per subscriber. One compute operation per subscriber is counted for every second a stream is held open.

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Week of Events Highlights Sustainable Development Goals

The campus community is invited to participate in a variety of events that increase awareness of and encourage actions that advance the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Celebrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) Action and Awareness Week

Celebrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDG) Action and Awareness Week

Sustainable Development Goals Action and Awareness Week 2022 is Feb. 28 – March 4. The campus community is invited to participate in a variety of events that increase awareness of and encourage actions that advance the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. They address the world’s most monumental challenges, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, and peace and justice. Some of the objectives are improved industry, innovation, and infrastructure; affordable and clean energy; and sustainable cities and communities. The SDGs appear by name in the Institute’s strategic plan as long-term goals that should guide teaching, research, and operations.

SDG Action and Awareness Week 2022 will begin with an interactive campus discussion, titled Engaging With the SDGs Across Campus, focusing on how the goals are being realized across the Institute and ways to better work together across disciplines and departments to amplify our impact. President Ángel Cabrera will moderate the discussion with participants from the College of Sciences, Serve-Learn-Sustain, Interdisciplinary Research, and Engineers Without Borders.

Other events during the week include a Tech Dining Sustainability Showcase, a panel on Infrastructure and Sustainability, Changing Relationships: You and Your Aging Parents, Toilet Talk With Shan and Shannon, A Healthy Georgia: Exploring the Impact of the Energy Transition on Public Health, the Association for Sustainable Investment Podcast Club Kickoff, and Engaging With the SDGs to Advance Sustainability in Atlanta. View a full listing of the week’s events.

In Fall 2020, a panel discussion and keynote address by Cabrera introduced the Tech community to the 17 goals. The event covered their relevance to the Institute and emphasized how Georgia Tech can lead the region in implementing and advancing these goals.

“If we are committed to improving the human condition, then we should embrace the SDGs to guide our actions as a university,” Cabrera said when introducing the SDGs.

SDG Action and Awareness Week is part of a larger global effort through the University Global Coalition, whose partners are hosting a variety of online events that are open to all.