Papers by Duncan Ferguson
Veterinary Sciences, 2021
This study surveyed the prescribing behavior of Colombian companion animal veterinarians and comp... more This study surveyed the prescribing behavior of Colombian companion animal veterinarians and compared the responses to the current guidelines of the International Society for Companion Animals on Infectious Diseases (ISCAID). A convenience sample of 100 primary-care veterinary practitioners was selected from the city of Medellin. A questionnaire was designed to present hypothetical clinical scenarios regarding prescription choices for systemic antimicrobials. The numbers of veterinarians empirically prescribing a course of systemic antimicrobials for each scenario were—perioperative elective surgeries (86%), superficial pyoderma (90%), lower urinary tract disease (52%), acute hemorrhagic diarrhea (50%), and kennel cough (46%). For urinary tract disease, cultures and susceptibility testing were only performed by half of the respondents, suggesting lower diagnostic standards. In superficial pyoderma cases, cytology was performed in the following percent of cases—0% (24), 20% (30), 40%...
Journal of Veterinary Medical Education, 2017
First-year didactic course instructors at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medici... more First-year didactic course instructors at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine leverage earlier clinical rotation experiences with weekly “Clinical Correlations” exercises to provide early exposure to critical clinical thinking (CCT). This study evaluated the efficacy of individual and paired group exercises on CCT development. Before and after instruction, the Cornell Critical Thinking Test (Level Z) (CCTTZ) was administered. Based on the hypothesis that students with higher scores would coach lower-scoring colleagues during group exercises, heterogeneous groups with similar mean scores were established for the year. Students completed 14 individual and paired group exercises over 6 months. Exercises were designed to increase in complexity and decline in scaffolding. Seven of the exercises were cases using the Applied Learning Platform (ALP) at http://www.whenknowingmatters.com . Student analyses were scored according to a six-category critical-thinking rubric ...
Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics, 2014
Automatic discovery of medical knowledge using data mining has great potential benefit in improvi... more Automatic discovery of medical knowledge using data mining has great potential benefit in improving population health and reducing healthcare cost. Discovering adverse drug reaction (ADR) is especially important because of the significant morbidity of ADRs to patients. Recently, more and more patients describe the ADRs they experienced and seek for help through online health forums, creating great opportunities for these forums to discover previously unknown ADRs. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised approach to tap into the increasingly available health forums to mine the side effect symptoms of drugs mentioned by forum users. Our approach is based on a novel probabilistic mixture model of symptoms, where the side effect symptoms and disease symptoms are explicitly modeled with two separate component models, and discovery of side effect symptoms can be achieved in an unsupervised way through fitting the mixture model to the forum data. Extensive experiments on online health forums demonstrate that our proposed model is effective for discovering the reported ADRs on forums in a completely unsupervised way. The mined knowledge using our model is directly useful for increasing our understanding of more challenging ADRs, such as long-term side effects, drug-drug interactions, and rare side effects. Since our approach is unsupervised, it can be applied to mining large amounts of growing forum data to discover new knowledge about ADRs, helping many patients become aware of possible ADRs.
Canadian journal of veterinary research = Revue canadienne de recherche vétérinaire, 1993
Selective parathyroidectomy (PTX) is preferred to thyroparathyroidectomy (TPTX) when specific eff... more Selective parathyroidectomy (PTX) is preferred to thyroparathyroidectomy (TPTX) when specific effects of parathyroid hormone depletion are being studied. However, because of the anatomic proximity of thyroid and parathyroid glands, TPTX often is performed, leaving animals depleted of thyroxine (T4) and calcitonin as well as parathyroid hormone (PTH). In the present study, six normal dogs had parathyroid tissue and about seven-eighths of thyroid tissue removed. This quantity of thyroid tissue was inadequate to maintain normal serum T4 concentrations, despite allowance of 168 days for thyroid recovery. Five of six dogs with reduced renal mass had successful selective PTX and normal serum T4 concentrations at 28 days, when one-half or more of thyroid tissue was spared. We conclude that with attention to the surgical technique, selective PTX can be achieved in a high percentage of dogs and sufficient thyroid tissue spared to maintain euthyroidism.
Comments on council report
Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Jan 15, 1992
The effects of stress on gastric ulceration, T3, T4, reverse T3 and Cortisol in neonatal foals
Equine Veterinary Journal, 1992
Sixteen neonatal foals stressed by disease underwent endoscopic examination of their stomachs and... more Sixteen neonatal foals stressed by disease underwent endoscopic examination of their stomachs and blood was assayed for triiodothyronine (T3), reverse T3 (rT3), thyroxine (T4) and cortisol, to determine the effects of severe physiological stress and the occurrence of gastric ulcers. compared with eight age-matched controls, six foals had abnormal cortisol, seven had abnormal T3 and 12 had abnormal T4. Eleven of 13 foals had rT3 outside the 95 per cent confidence interval for clinically normal foals of comparable ages. Gastric lesions were seen more frequently in stressed foals, and gastric glandular mucosal lesions were noted in 40 per cent of the stressed foals. Previous studies report low (3 per cent) occurrence of gastric mucosal lesions. The frequency of squamous mucosal lesions was not different from that reported previously, indicating that stress has little effect on the development of lesions at this site.
Obesity and insulin resistance is a growing problem among humans and cats and is attributed to an... more Obesity and insulin resistance is a growing problem among humans and cats and is attributed to an increased consumption of diets high in saturated fat. The purpose of this study was to determine if a diet high in omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) would affect glucose clearance, insulin secretion, and lipid metabolism in both the lean and obese cat. Twenty-eight cats were used for the study; 14 were fed the PUFA diet and 14 were fed a diet high in saturated fatty acids (SFA) before and after a 21 week period of ad libitum food intake which resulted in significantly greater weight, body mass index, girth, and % fat in cats of both groups. There was no difference in glucose or insulin baseline concentrations as a result of obesity or diet. However, both glucose and insulin 120 minute concentrations were significantly higher with obesity, regardless of diet. Glucose area under curve (AUC) concentrations were significantly higher with obesity, with no effect of diet. Insulin AUC...
Veterinary Sciences
The susceptibility to antimicrobials of bacterial isolates from dogs (n = 1256) and cats (n = 94)... more The susceptibility to antimicrobials of bacterial isolates from dogs (n = 1256) and cats (n = 94) was retrospectively evaluated in a veterinary diagnostic laboratory over a 4-year period (2016–2019). Out of 1316 isolates in dogs, 771 were Staphylococcus spp. distributed as follows: Staph. pseudointermedius (n = 406), Staph. intermedius (n = 160), Staph. aureus (n = 104), and Staph. coagulase-negative (n = 101). In common, all Staphylococcus spp. showed a high prevalence (20–50%) of resistance to ampicillin, cephalosporin, enrofloxacin, gentamicin, tetracycline, and trimethoprim-sulfonamide, but a low prevalence (1–10%) of resistance to amoxicillin-clavulanate. With regards to the other families of bacteria, the number of antimicrobials for which resistance was high (>20%) in dogs was: Enterobacteriaceae (7/12), Enterococcus spp. (10/16), E. coli (11/15), Pseudomonas spp. (10/13), and Streptococcus spp. (4/9). For urinary tract infections caused by E. coli or Enterobacteriaceae (K...
Proceedings of the Sixth (2019) ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale
Automated assessment of complex assignments is crucial for scaling up learning of complex skills ... more Automated assessment of complex assignments is crucial for scaling up learning of complex skills such as critical thinking. To address this challenge, one previous work has applied supervised machine learning to automate the assessment by learning from examples of graded assignments by humans. However, in the previous work, only simple lexical features, such as words or n-grams, have been used. In this paper, we propose to use topics as features for this task, which are more interpretable than those simple lexical features and can also address polysemy and synonymy of lexical semantics. The topics can be learned automatically from the student assignment data by using a probabilistic topic model. We propose and study multiple approaches to construct topical features and to combine topical features with simple lexical features. We evaluate the proposed methods using clinical case assignments performed by veterinary medicine students. The experimental results show that topical features are generally very effective and can substantially improve performance when added on top of the lexical features. However, their effectiveness is highly sensitive to how the topics are constructed and a combination of topics constructed using multiple views of the text data works the best. Our results also show that combining the prediction results of using different types of topical features and of topical and lexical features is more effective than pooling all features together to form a larger feature space.
Veterinary Sciences
A questionnaire study was conducted among 131 veterinarians practicing in the city of Medellin, C... more A questionnaire study was conducted among 131 veterinarians practicing in the city of Medellin, Colombia, to assess views on pain evaluation and management in dogs and cats. When pain recognition and quantification abilities were used as a perceived competence of proper pain assessment, only 83/131 (63.4%, confidence interval (CI) 0.55–0.72) were deemed to have satisfactory skills, with the rest considered to be deficient. There were 49/131 (37.4) veterinarians who had participated in continuing education programs and were more confident assessing pain, with an odds ratio (±standard error) of 2.84 ± 1.15 (p = 0.01; CI 1.27–6.32). In addition, the odds of using pain scales was 4.28 ± 2.17 (p < 0.01, CI 1.58–11.55) greater if they had also participated in continuing education programs. The term multimodal analgesia was familiar to 77 (58.7%) veterinarians who also claimed to use more than one approach to pain control. Nevertheless, homeopathy was the preferred alternative approach ...
ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
As data reported by humans about our world, text data play a very important role in all data mini... more As data reported by humans about our world, text data play a very important role in all data mining applications, yet how to develop a general text analysis system to sup- port all text mining applications is a difficult challenge. In this position paper, we introduce SOFSAT, a new frame- work that can support set-like operators for semantic analy- sis of natural text data with variable text representations. It includes three basic set-like operators|TextIntersect, Tex- tUnion, and TextDi erence|that are analogous to the cor- responding set operators intersection, union, and di erence, respectively, which can be applied to any representation of text data, and di erent representations can be combined via transformation functions that map text to and from any rep- resentation. Just as the set operators can be exibly com- bined iteratively to construct arbitrary subsets or supersets based on some given sets, we show that the correspond- ing text analysis operators can also be combined ...
Journal of feline medicine and surgery, 2016
Since 1979 and 1980 when the first reports of clinical feline hyperthyroidism (FHT) appeared in t... more Since 1979 and 1980 when the first reports of clinical feline hyperthyroidism (FHT) appeared in the literature, our understanding of the disease has evolved tremendously. Initially, FHT was a disease that only referral clinicians treated. Now it is a disease that primary clinicians routinely manage. Inclusion of the measurement of total thyroxine concentration in senior wellness panels, as well as in diagnostic work-ups for sick cats, now enables diagnosis of the condition long before the cat becomes the classic scrawny, unkempt, agitated patient with a bulge in its neck. However, earlier recognition of the problem has given rise to several related questions: how to recognize the health significance of the early presentations of the disease; how early to treat the disease; whether to treat FHT when comorbid conditions are present; and how to manage comorbid conditions such as chronic kidney disease and cardiac disease with treatment of FHT. The 2016 AAFP Guidelines for the Managemen...
Tissue explant co-culture model of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal-liver axis of the fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) as a predictive tool for endocrine disruption
Environmental toxicology and chemistry / SETAC, Oct 2, 2016
Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) can impact the reproductive system by interfering with the ... more Endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs) can impact the reproductive system by interfering with the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis. While in vitro testing methods have been developed to screen chemicals for endocrine disruption, extrapolation of in vitro response to in vivo action shows inconsistent accuracy. We describe here our tissue co-culture of the fathead minnow (Pimephales promelas) HPG axis and liver (HPG-L) as a tissue explant model that mimics in vivo results. Brain (hypothalamus), pituitary, gonad, and liver tissue explants from adult fish were examined for function both individually and in co-culture to determine combinations and conditions that could replicate in vivo behavior. Only co-cultures had the ability to respond to an EDC, trenbolone, similarly to in vivo studies, based upon estradiol, testosterone, and vitellogenin production trends, where lower exposure doses suppressed hormone production but higher doses increased production resulting in distinctive...
Dna Sequence and Expressed Recombinant Glycoproteins Related to Feline Thyrotropin
Recombinant glycoproteins related to feline thyrotropin
Spontaneous feline hyperthyroidism
ABSTRACT
Radioactive iodine (131-I) treatment of feline hyperthyroidism (Abstract
ABSTRACT
Effects of spontaneous hyperadrenocortism on serum thyroid hormone concentrations in the dog
American Journal of Veterinary Research
ABSTRACT
Effects of serum and growth factors on proliferation of cultured normal and adenomatous feline thyrocytes
Annales d Endocrinologie
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Papers by Duncan Ferguson