Purpose. To investigate sleep quality of hospital staff nurses, both by subjective questionnaire and objective measures.Methods. Female staff nurses at a regional teaching hospital in Northern Taiwan were recruited. The Chinese version of the pittsburgh sleep quality index (C-PSQI) was used to assess subjective sleep quality, and an electrocardiogram-based cardiopulmonary coupling (CPC) technique was used to analyze objective sleep stability. Work stress was assessed using questionnaire on medical worker’s stress.Results. A total of 156 staff nurses completed the study. Among the staff nurses, 75.8% (117) had a PSQI score of ≥5 and 39.8% had an inadequate stable sleep ratio on subjective measures. Nurses with a high school or lower educational degree had a much higher risk of sleep disturbance when compared to nurses with a college or higher level degree.Conclusions. Both subjective and objective measures demonstrated that poor sleep quality is a common health problem among hospital staff nurses. More studies are warranted on this important issue to discover possible factors and therefore to develop a systemic strategy to cope with the problem.

Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) based on cell-free DNA in maternal circulation has been accepted worldwide by the clinical community since 2011 but limitations, such as maternal malignancy and fetoplacental mosaicism, preclude its full replacement of invasive prenatal diagnosis. We present a novel silicon-based nanostructured microfluidics platform named as “Cell Reveal™” to demonstrate the feasibility of capturing circulating fetal nucleated red blood cells (fnRBC) and extravillous cytotrophoblasts (EVT) for cell-based noninvasive prenatal diagnosis (cbNIPD). The “Cell Reveal™” system is a silicon-based, nanostructured microfluidics using immunoaffinity to capture the trophoblasts and the nucleated RBC (nRBC) with specific antibodies. The automated computer analysis software was used to identify the targeted cells through additional immunostaining of the corresponding antigens. The identified cells were retrieved for whole genome amplification for subsequent investigations by micromanipulation in one microchip, and left in situ for subsequent fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in another microchip. When validation, bloods from pregnant women (n = 24) at gestational age 11–13+6 weeks were enrolled. When verification, bloods from pregnant women (n = 5) receiving chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis at gestation age 11+4–21 weeks with an aneuploid or euploid fetus were enrolled, followed by genetic analyses using FISH, short tandem repeat (STR) analyses, array comparative genomic hybridization, and next generation sequencing, in which the laboratory is blind to the fetal genetic complement. The numbers of captured targeted cells were 1–44 nRBC/2 ml and 1–32 EVT/2 ml in the validation group. The genetic investigations performed in the verification group confirmed the captured cells to be fetal origin. In every 8 ml of the maternal blood being blindly tested, both fnRBC and EVT were always captured. The numbers of captured fetal cells were 14–22 fnRBC/4 ml and 1–44 EVT/4 ml of maternal blood. This report is one of the first few to verify the capture of fnRBC in addition to EVT. The scalability of our automated system made us one step closer toward the goal of in vitro diagnostics.

Circulating tumor cell (CTC) test is currently used as a biomarker in cancer treatment. Unfortunately, the poor reproducibility and limited sensitivity with the CTC detection have limited its potential impact on clinical application. A reliable automated CTC detection system is therefore needed. We have designed an automated microfluidic chip-based CTC detection system and hypothesize this novel system can reliably detect CTC from clinical specimens. SKOV3 ovarian cancer cell line was used first to test the reliability of our system. Ten healthy volunteers, 5 patients with benign ovarian tumors, and 8 patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) were recruited to validate the CTC capturing efficacy in the peripheral blood. The capture rates for spiking test in SKOV3 cells were 48.3% and 89.6% by using anti-EpCAM antibody alone and a combination of anti-EpCAM antibody and anti-N-cadherin antibody, respectively. The system was sensitive to detection of low cell count and showed a linear relationship with the cell counts in our test range. The sensitivity and specificity were 62.5% and 100% when CTC was used as a biomarker for EOC. Our results demonstrated that this automatic CTC platform has a high capture rate and is feasible for detection of CTCs in EOC.

Background. This study conducted exploratory research using artificial intelligence methods. The main purpose of this study is to establish an association model between metabolic syndrome and the TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) constitution using the characteristics of individual physical examination data and to provide guidance for medicated diet care. Methods. Basic demographic and laboratory data were collected from a regional hospital health examination database in northern Taiwan, and artificial intelligence algorithms, such as logistic regression, Bayesian network, and decision tree, were used to analyze and construct the association model between metabolic syndrome and the TCM constitution. Findings. It was found that the phlegm-dampness constitution (90.6) accounts for the majority of TCM constitution classifications with a high risk of metabolic syndrome, and high cholesterol, blood glucose, and waist circumference were statistically significantly correlated with the phlegm-dampness constitution. This study also found that the age of patients with metabolic syndrome has been advanced, and shift work is one of the risk indicators. Therefore, based on the association model between metabolic syndrome and TCM constitution, in the future, metabolic syndrome can be predicted through the syndrome differentiation of the TCM constitution, and relevant medicated diet care schemes can be recommended for improvement. Conclusion. In order to increase the publics knowledge and methods for mitigating metabolic syndrome, in the future, nursing staff can provide nonprescription medicated diet-related nursing guidance information via the prediction and assessment of the TCM constitution.