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This document summarises best practice recommendations for medical imaging use of ultrasound in Europe, representing the agreed consensus of experts from the Ultrasound Subcommittee of the European Society of Radiology (ESR), the European Union of Medical Specialists (UEMS) Section of Radiology, and the European Federation of Societies for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. Recommendations are given for education and training, equipment and its maintenance, documentation, hygiene and infection prevention, and medico-legal issues.

Medical psychotropics are widely used and prescribed in developed countries. These medications may have an impairing effect on mood or perception and may induce harmful behaviors. Nevertheless, in Europe, studies on their importance from a medico-legal perspective are scarce. To fill this gap, we evaluate the determinants of these drugs in a retrospective study based on data obtained from forensic autopsies. Toxicological analyses were performed on 394 blood samples from compulsory autopsies at the Institute of Legal Medicine of Las Palmas. Of the samples, 41% (159) were positive for at least one psychotropic, with benzodiazepines being the most frequently detected (24.1%), followed by opiates and antidepressants. Benzodiazepines, opiates, and antidepressants were detected more frequently in men who suffered a violent death. More than 30% of the positive samples showed two or more drugs, suggesting a prevalence of polypharmacy among forensic autopsy subjects, with the most frequently combination found being benzodiazepines plus opiates (28.3% of positive samples). A combination of opiates plus antidepressants was also found in subjects involved in violent deaths. Our results suggest that more than 40% of the adult European population involved in medico-legal issues may be under the influence of legal psychotropics. The link between violent deaths and the use of medical psychotropics is particularly worrisome and indicates that these drugs should be carefully monitored in developed countries, in all forensic autopsies, in a similar way to illegal psychotropics.

Opioids have a rapid transplacental passage (i.e., less than 60 min); furthermore, symptoms characterize the maternal and fetal withdrawal syndrome. Opioid withdrawal significantly impacts the fetus, inducing worse outcomes and a risk of mortality. Moreover, neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) follows the delivery, lasts up to 10 weeks, and requires intensive management. Therefore, the prevention and adequate management of NAS are relevant public health issues. This review aims to summarize the most updated evidence in the literature regarding toxicological, clinical, and forensic issues of intrauterine exposure to opioids to provide a multidisciplinary, evidence-based approach for managing such issues. Further research is required to standardize testing and to better understand the distribution of opioid derivatives in each specimen type, as well as the clinically relevant cutoff concentrations in quantitative testing results. A multidisciplinary approach is required, with obstetricians, pediatricians, nurses, forensic doctors and toxicologists, social workers, addiction specialists, and politicians all working together to implement social welfare and social services for the baby when needed. The healthcare system should encourage multidisciplinary activity in this field and direct suspected maternal and neonatal opioid intoxication cases to local referral centers.

Facial biometric data, while valuable for clinical applications, poses substantial privacy and security risks. This paper aims to address the privacy and security concerns related to facial biometric data and support auxiliary diagnoses, in pursuit of which we developed Digital FaceDefender, an artificial intelligence-driven privacy safeguard solution. We constructed a diverse set of digitally synthesized Asian face avatars representing both sexes, spanning ages 5 to 85 years in 10-year increments, using 70,000 facial images and 13,061 Asian face images. Landmark data were separately extracted from both patient and avatar images. Affine transformations ensured spatial alignment, followed by color correction and Gaussian blur to enhance fusion quality. For auxiliary diagnosis, we established 95% CIs for pixel distances within the eye region on a cohort of 1163 individuals, serving as diagnostic benchmarks. Reidentification risk was assessed using the ArcFace model, applied to 2500 images reconstructed via Detailed Expression Capture and Animation (DECA). Finally, Cohen Kappa analyses (n=114) was applied to assess agreement between diagnostic benchmarks and ophthalmologists' evaluations. Compared to the DM method, Digital FaceDefender significantly reduced facial similarity scores (FDface vs raw images: 0.31; FLAME_FDface vs raw images: 0.09) and achieved zero Rank-1 accuracy in Pose #2-#3 and Pose #2-#5, with near-zero accuracy in Pose #4 (0.02) and Pose #5 (0.04), confirming lower reidentification risk. Cohen Kappa analysis demonstrated moderate agreement between our benchmarks and ophthalmologists' assessments for the left eye (κ=0.37) and right eye (κ=0.45; both P<.001), validating diagnostic reliability of the benchmarks. Furthermore, the user-friendly Digital FaceDefender platform has been established and is readily accessible for use. In summary, Digital FaceDefender effectively balances privacy protection and diagnostic use.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has rapidly emerged as a promising tool in health care. Despite its growing adoption, how physicians make use of it in medical practice has not been qualitatively studied. Existing literature has largely focused on theoretical applications or experimental validations, with limited insight into real-world physician engagement with GenAI technologies. The aim of this study was to leverage a fine-grained dataset at the query level to quantitatively examine how physicians incorporate GenAI into their clinical and research workflows. The primary objective was to analyze usage patterns over time and across physician demographics. A secondary goal was to assess potential risks to patient privacy arising from physicians' interactions with GenAI platforms. This study collected 106,942 query-and-answer pairs by 989 physicians between August 29, 2023, and April 16, 2024. We performed topic classification to identify the most prevalent use cases, examining how these use cases evolved over time and across demographics. We also developed sensitivity classifiers to detect personally identifiable information in physicians' queries to explore the potential privacy breach risks around physicians' use of GenAI. Approximately 40% (396/989) of the enrolled physicians were female, 45.9% (454/989) were younger than 25 years, and 54.1% (535/989) were between 25 and 56 years of age. The majority of them worked in clinical departments (680/989, 68.8%) or medical technology departments (127/989, 12.8%). Our classification-based quantitative analyses suggest the following. First, physicians use GenAI predominantly for medical research (64,379/106,942, 60.2%) rather than clinical practice (13,100/106,942, 12.25%). Second, physicians focus more on health care-related questions (rising from 64,165/106,942, 60% to 83,415/106,942, 78%) within the first 15% (16,041/106,942) of their query sequence. Third, the use of GenAI differed across physician demographics and features. Specifically, female physicians asked a larger proportion of clinical questions (female: 0.154 vs male: 0.108; P<.001) and administration questions (female: 0.027 vs male: 0.018; P<.001) than male physicians; younger physicians posed more clinical questions (age ≤25: 0.146 vs age ∈ (25, 40]: 0.115 vs age >40: 0.103; P<.001) but fewer research questions (age ≤25: 0.580 vs age ∈ (25, 40]: 0.607 vs age >40: 0.664; P<.001) than senior physicians; and physicians accessing GenAI via computers asked more research questions (computer: 0.637 vs mobile: 0.296; P<.001), whereas physicians using mobile devices asked more clinical questions (computer: 0.107 vs mobile: 0.264; P<.001). Fourth, only 2.68% (2866/106,942) of physician queries contained sensitive information, the majority of which were primarily derived from writing and editing. Physicians are actively integrating GenAI into their professional routines, primarily leveraging it for research but also increasingly for clinical support. Usage patterns vary significantly across demographic lines, including gender, age, and device preference. Despite the presence of sensitive information in some queries, the risk of privacy breaches appears to be low.

The awareness of legal issues related to libraries among library professionals in Gujarat is discussed in the current study. The research is based on an online survey of library professionals of Gujarat. The major findings of the survey reveal that there is an acute need to improve the awareness and knowledge about legal issues and legal provisions among LIS professionals in Gujarat. The results also show that educational background, experience, or designation have no correlation with level of awareness or knowledge about legal aspects among library professionals. This study provides indications to major legal issues that affect the work of library professionals and what resources may be needed to enhance the level of awareness and knowledge about legal aspects related to libraries.The current study is limited to the study of library professionals in Gujarat, India and has potential to be conducted on national scale to check the level of awareness and knowledge about legal issues and legal provisions and may also provide important indications to address the issue of training and education of library professionals.

Literature on Second Life (SL) was retrieved, reviewed, and aggregated. Although it was found to provide sufficient information about SL's social, technological, business model, and legal issues, and although SL received overall dense media coverage, the literature was found to be lacking when it came to a thorough documentation of its economic development in 2003-2008. Using the retrieved literature, the attempt to reconstruct the development of the number of avatars, active users, prices and fees, and monetary development exposes the limits of reconstructing the economic development of a virtual world years after its popularity peak. This article serves as an argument and a reminder for a proper documentation of such developments. Future documentation of virtual worlds in academia should thoroughly track the economic development of next-generation virtual worlds. Otherwise, post-analysis, economic development reconstruction, and trace backs might prove difficult, costly, or infeasible.

We study theoretically how local measurements performed on critical quantum ground states affect long-distance correlations. These states are highly entangled and feature algebraic correlations between local observables. As a consequence, local measurements can have highly nonlocal effects. Our focus is on Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid ground states, a continuous family of critical states in one dimension whose structure is characterized by a Luttinger parameterK. We show that arbitrarily weak local measurements, performed over extended regions of space, can conspire to drive transitions in long-distance correlations. Conditioning first on a translation-invariant set of measurement outcomes, we show that there is a transition in the character of the postmeasurement quantum state forK<1, and highlight a formal analogy with the effect of a static defect on transport through a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. To investigate the full ensemble of measurement outcomes, we consider averages of physical quantities which are necessarily nonlinear in the system density matrix. We show how their behavior can be understood within a replica field theory, and for the measurements that we consider we find that the symmetry of the theory under exchange of replicas is broken forK<1/2. A well-known barrier to experimentally observing the collective effects of multiple measurements has been the need to postselect on random outcomes. Here we resolve this problem by introducing cross-correlations between experimental measurement results and classical simulations, which act as resource-efficient probes of the transition. The phenomena we discuss are, moreover, robust to local decoherence.