The National Center for Health Research (formerly the National Research Center for Women & Families) is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization founded in 1999. It uses objective, research-based information to encourage new, more effective programs and policies that promote the health and safety of women, children, and families. The center educates patients, consumers, and health professionals through its articles, trainings, and media, and educates policymakers and analysts about the latest research at briefings, hearings, and meetings. The President of the National Center is Diana Zuckerman. The primary program is The Cancer Prevention and Treatment Fund, which has an online health hotline and provides free, research-based information and services to patients and their families.In 2014, the think tank changed its name from the National Research Center for Women & Families to the National Center for Health Research.
Accurate interpretation of ophthalmic ultrasound is crucial for diagnosing eye conditions but remains time-consuming and requires significant expertise. With the increasing volume of ultrasound data, there is a need for Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems capable of efficiently analyzing images and generating reports. Traditional AI models for report generation cannot simultaneously identify lesions and lack interpretability. This study proposes the Vision-Language Segmentation (VLS) model, combining Vision-Language Model (VLM) with the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to improve interpretability in ophthalmic ultrasound imaging. Using data from three hospitals, totaling 64,098 images and 21,355 reports, the VLS model achieved a BLEU4 score of 66.37 in internal test set, and 85.36 and 73.77 in external test sets. The model achieved a mean dice coefficient of 59.6% in internal test set, and dice coefficients of 50.2% and 51.5% with specificity values of 97.8% and 97.7% in external test sets, respectively. Overall diagnostic accuracy was 90.59% in internal and 71.87% in external test sets. A cost-effectiveness analysis demonstrated a 30-fold reduction in report costs, from $39 per report by senior ophthalmologists to $1.3 for VLS. This approach enhances diagnostic accuracy, reduces manual effort, and accelerates workflows, offering a promising solution for ophthalmic ultrasound interpretation.
Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), burdened with a high incidence of cervical cancer, often face challenges in implementing National Immunization Programs (NIP) or Provincial Immunization Programs (PIP) of Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines. In the context of limited resources, the economic evidence provided by Budget Impact Analysis (BIA) becomes crucial for the inclusion of vaccines in the NIP and PIP. This study adopted the perspective of the Basic Medical Insurance System (BMIS) payer, took the imported and domestic bivalent HPV vaccines as the target vaccines. We estimated the effect of HPV vaccines on burden of cervical cancer in China from 2019 to 2110, assuming that there were different reimbursement rates and market substitution rates for the vaccines. This study aimed to establish a comprehensive and standardized BIA framework that can be referenced to promote HPV vaccination in LMICs. Input parameters included vaccine efficacy vs. HPV 16/18, target age group, cancer treatment cost (per episode, over lifetime), discount rate, cohort size at 9 years old and etc., which were mainly derived from public sources, published literature, and a database of field surveys on treatment costs for patients of cervical cancer in China. Main outcomes encompassed incidence and treatment costs of cervical cancer, vaccination costs. The proposed BIA framework included the target population, BIA, and uncertainty analysis across three scenarios based on origin. In the case of China, without immunization program, the average yearly spent on cervical cancer treatment throughout the country amounts to 6,736,507.32. Upon the execution of the immunization program (2019–2025), this expenditure reduced to6,645,564.95 each year. Under Scenario 1–3, the vaccine reimbursement costs were 62,513,268.73,44,927,307.37, and 58,916,163.27, respectively. During the period of immunization program, annual vaccination costs constituted a range of 0.05 to 1.08 parts per million relative to the current expenditure of BMIS fund and 2.68 and 14.12 parts per million relative to current balance of BMIS fund. The BIA framework provided a valuable reference for policy formulation in other LMICs with a high burden of cervical cancer that have not yet included the vaccine in their NIPs.
Newborn screening (NBS) is a critical public health initiative aimed at the early detection of congenital disorders. The emergence of next-generation sequencing (NGS) holds the potential to expand the spectrum of diseases detectable at birth. To evaluate the feasibility of integrating NGS into existing biochemical screening workflows, we conducted a prospective pilot study involving 1,810 newborns. In parallel with routine biochemical screening, we employed two NGS strategies—multiplex PCR-NGS (M-NGS) and target-capture NGS (T-NGS)—to compare their performance. A total of 32 cases were confirmed via NGS or biochemical methods. Notably, NGS identified 17 cases missed by biochemical screening, including 15 cases of hereditary deafness and 2 of congenital hypothyroidism. T-NGS demonstrated high sensitivity [96.88
Non-invasive neuromodulation techniques such as neurofeedback (NF) and transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) are attracting growing interest for their potential to influence brain activity and emotional regulation. This pilot study investigated the individual and combined effects of these methods on psychological measures, electrophysiological markers, and salivary cortisol. Twenty healthy young adults (19 females, 1 male, aged 18–24) participated, with outcomes including psychological measures (anxiety and depression), EEG Alpha / Theta ratio, and salivary cortisol. NF was associated with significant reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms. Notably, despite the NF protocol directly targeting Alpha / Theta oscillations, a significant increase in the Alpha / Theta ratio was observed only in the tVNS group, indicating a distinct bottom-up influence on neural dynamics. The combined intervention did not yield additional benefits, and cortisol levels remained unchanged. These preliminary findings suggest that NF and tVNS may operate through distinct pathways—NF influencing psychological outcomes via top-down regulation and tVNS modulating electrophysiological activity via bottom-up pathways. The absence of sham control conditions limits causal attribution of effects. Given the small sample size (n = 5 per group) and exploratory nature of this study, these results should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating and require replication in larger, adequately powered trials.
BACKGROUND:Federally qualified health centers and look-alikes are outpatient care settings that provide primary care and other health services in health professional shortage areas and to their populations. Compiling and disseminating data from these centers that is accessible for patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) is critical to understanding health care provided at these settings. OBJECTIVE:To describe the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey Health Center (NAMCS HC) Component, and how this redesigned survey can be utilized to understand health care provided at health centers, improve data capacity, and facilitate PCOR. METHODS:Beginning in 2021, the NAMCS HC Component began collecting visit data through electronic health record (EHR) submission from a nationally representative sample of FQHCs and FQHC look-alikes. Resulting datasets are made available for researchers to analyze, used to produce readily available interactive data visualizations, and linked to external datasets. RESULTS:The NAMCS HC Component and its resulting data resources are described. Availability of restricted and public datafiles is highlighted, with an example of how these can be used to study visits across different patient characteristics. Interactive dashboards are presented, including how researchers, health centers, and patients can view biannual preliminary visit rates/counts. Finally, linkages between the NAMCS HC Component and external data sources are highlighted, including how these linkages can be used to study health outcomes among different populations. CONCLUSIONS:EHR data collected from FQHCs and look-alikes through the redesigned NAMCS HC Component fills a gap to improve PCOR capacity at these unique settings.
