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Women in the 6th and 7th decades of life experience higher levels of bother from POP than older or younger women with the same stage of prolapse. This suggests that women in these decades of life might be at a higher risk for impairment of quality of life from POP.

The portable bladder scanner accurately measures PVR in patients with pelvic organ prolapse and could be considered as an alternative to catheterized assessment. However, stage III/IV prolapse is associated with increased bladder scanner error, which should be considered when determining appropriate candidates for bladder scanner PVR assessment.This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal.

OBJECTIVE: To assess whether the readability of online patient education materials provided by eight nationally recognized obstetrics and gynecology societies is in accordance with the recommended 6th-grade reading level outlined by the American Medical Association, National Institute of Health, and United States Department of Health and Human Services. METHODS: An analysis of 410 online patient education materials from the American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American Urogynecologic Society, the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, the Society of Gynecologic Oncology, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and Voices for Pelvic Floor Disorders was completed, and the readability scores using the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Flesch Reading Ease, Gunning Fog Scale, and Simple Measure of Gobbledygook readability scales were calculated. These scales are used to assess print and web-based written material across a wide range of medical specialties and are endorsed by the National Institutes of Health. All four scales are computer-based assessments of readability that consider word count, number of syllables, and length of sentences when calculating a score that corresponds to grade level. RESULTS: Majority of the patient education materials across all eight obstetrics and gynecology societies had readability scores above the recommended 6th-grade reading level. The average reading level for the 69 obstetrics-related articles ranged from 9th to 12th grade. The mean grade level for the 341 gynecology articles had a similar range across the four readability scales. CONCLUSION: Online patient education materials provided by major obstetrics and gynecology societies do not currently adhere to recommended readability guidelines. Continued efforts to provide accessible and informative patient education materials is recommended to help improve health literacy for women.

Aims The objective of this study was to investigate sacral electrical stimulation (SES) and gastric electrical stimulation (GES) by comparing upper and lower gastrointestinal (GI) and genitourinary (GU) symptoms and quality of life, before treatment and in the long term after treatment. We hypothesized that dual-device treatment would greatly improve upper and lower gastrointestinal and genitourinary symptoms, as well as quality of life. Methods Fifty-four patients who underwent dual-device treatment (GES and SES) were enrolled in this study. Patients who had surpassed 24 months since the second-device insertion were included. Patients were evaluated before and after both devices were implanted and given a symptom questionnaire regarding their upper GI, lower GI, and GU symptoms and their quality of life. Results With combined treatment, a statistically significant improvement was seen in upper GI, lower GI, and GU symptoms and quality of life. However, fecal incontinence and fecal urgency improvements did not reach statistical significance, likely due to the small sample size. Conclusion The implantation of two stimulators appears to be safe and effective to improve patients’ quality of life for those with upper GI symptoms, bowel problems, and bladder dysfunction.

Robotic Burch colposuspension can be completed in a safe and effective manner and should be considered as an option for patients in whom an anti-incontinence procedure is indicated and who are already undergoing robotic surgery.

Over recent years, the volume of big data has drastically increased for medical applications. Such data are shared by cloud providers for storage and further processing. Medical images contain sensitive information, and these images are shared with healthcare workers, patients, and, in some scenarios, researchers for diagnostic and study purposes. However, the security of these images in the transfer process is extremely important, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper proposes a secure watermarking algorithm, termed WatMIF, based on multimodal medical image fusion. The proposed algorithm consists of three major parts: the encryption of the host media, the fusion of multimodal medical images, and the embedding and extraction of the fused mark. We encrypt the host media with a key-based encryption scheme. Then, a nonsubsampled contourlet transform (NSCT)-based fusion scheme is employed to fuse the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scan images to generate the fused mark image. Furthermore, the encrypted host media conceals the fused watermark using redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) and randomised singular value decomposition (RSVD). Finally, denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN) is used to improve the robustness of the WatMIF algorithm. The simulation experiments on two standard datasets were used to evaluate the algorithm in terms of invisibility, robustness, and security. When compared with the existing algorithms, the robustness is improved by 20.14%. Overall, the implementation of proposed watermarking for hiding fused marks and efficient encryption improved the identity verification, invisibility, robustness and security criteria in our WatMIF algorithm.

Nowadays, the demand for digital images from different intelligent devices and sensors has dramatically increased in smart healthcare. Due to advanced low-cost and easily available tools and software, manipulation of these images is an easy task. Thus, the security of digital images is a serious challenge for the content owners, healthcare communities and researchers against illegal access and fraudulent usage. In this paper, a secure medical image encryption algorithm, EiMOL , based on optimization and the Lorenz system, is proposed for smart healthcare applications. In the first stage, an optimized random sequence (ORS) is generated through directed weighted complex network particle swarm optimization using the genetic algorithm (GDWCN-PSO). This random number matrix and the Lorenz system are adopted to encrypt plain medical images, obtaining the cipher messages with a relationship to the plain images. According to our obtained results, the proposed EiMOL encryption algorithm is effective and resistant to the many attacks on benchmark Kaggle and Open-i datasets. Further, extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.