Comparative Effectiveness of Minimally Invasive Versus Open Radical Prostatectomy

This chapter summarizes an important observational study using claims-based data that compared minimally invasive radical prostatectomy (mostly performed as robotic-assisted laparoscopic prostatectomy) to open radical prostatectomy using propensity scoring. The results favored minimally invasive radical prostatectomy for the outcomes of perioperative complications, rates of transfusion, and length of stay but not other patient-important outcomes.

Impact of hypertension on short- and long-term survival of Patients Who Underwent Emergency Surgery for Type A Acute Aortic Dissection

ObjectiveTo explore the clinical characteristics and prognosis of patients with hypertension underwent emergency surgery for type A acute aortic dissection (TA-AAD).MethodsThe present study enrolled 712 consecutive patients diagnosed with TA-AAD who were admitted to our hospital between January 2014 to December 2018. All patients accepted aortic repair surgery during hospitalization. The cohort was separated into two groups based on if they were diagnosed with hypertension upon administration. Before analyzing the short-term outcomes, baseline characteristics were matched for propensity scores. Patients’ clinical characteristics were compared and analyzed before and after propensity scoring. To identify predictors for long-term mortality rate, Kaplan-Meier survival estimation and Cox proportional hazard analysis were performed.ResultsThe 492 patients (69.1% of all patients in the cohort) included in the hypertensive group were generally older and heavier than patients in the non-hypertensive group. Between two groups, preoperative leukocyte count and serum creatinine level were found significant different (P < 0.05). After propensity scoring, 128 pairs (256 patients) were successfully matched. Our analysis showed that there was no significant difference of ventilation duration, 30-day mortality rate, intensive care unit (ICU) stay time and hospitalization time between these patients. However, our observation from surgeries suggested that hypertensive patients presented with less intraoperative aortic valve involvement.There was a significant difference in long-term survival rate (P=0.037) between two groups and Cox regression analysis demonstrated that hypertension was an independent risk factor (hazard ratio [HR], 2.290; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.013-5.178; P=0.046).Conclusions Our data suggested that TA-AAD patients complicated with hypertension were generally older and heavier compared to non-hypertensive patients. The hypertension diagnosed upon hospital administration was an independent risk factors for long-term survival in TA-AAD patients but did not influence the 30-day mortality rate.

Reasoning about Political Bias in Content Moderation

Content moderation, the AI-human hybrid process of removing (toxic) content from social media to promote community health, has attracted increasing attention from lawmakers due to allegations of political bias. Hitherto, this allegation has been made based on anecdotes rather than logical reasoning and empirical evidence, which motivates us to audit its validity. In this paper, we first introduce two formal criteria to measure bias (i.e., independence and separation) and their contextual meanings in content moderation, and then use YouTube as a lens to investigate if the political leaning of a video plays a role in the moderation decision for its associated comments. Our results show that when justifiable target variables (e.g., hate speech and extremeness) are controlled with propensity scoring, the likelihood of comment moderation is equal across left- and right-leaning videos.