Work Packages
Work Package 1
Are non-invasive or minimally invasive autopsy techniques for detecting cause of death in prenates, neontates and infants accurate?
This work package revolves around the systematic review element of this project. We are following the Cochrane collaborations guidance on the conduct of diagnostic test accuracy reviews to ensure robust methods are applied. This review has been registered with Prospero (CRD42021223254) and the full protocol is available here. We have produced a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria which all pieces of evidence are assessed against to determine if they should be included in the review. The review focusses on gestational losses, stillbirths and losses of babies under 1 year of age. We are including evidence that compares the diagnosis from one or more of the non-invasive or minimally invasive test to the diagnosis from a traditional autopsy. Traditional autopsy practices are the gold standard for diagnosing cause of death and are the most reliable comparator.
We have considered the following non-invasive or minimally invasive tests:
- MRI
- CT scanning
- Ultrasound imaging, ex utero
- Antenatal ultrasound
- Amniocentesis
- Chorionic villus sampling
- Fetal free DNA analysis
- Percutaneous biopsy
- Endoscopic biopsy
- Umbilical cord examination
- Placental examination
- Verbal autopsy
Work package 1 outputs include collating an extensive final report of the review findings, presentation of the findings at a national conference and publication of the findings in a peer-reviewed journal, available here.
Work Package 2
Methodologies for the construction of search strategies in systematic reviews
Work package 2 focusses on the methodologies availabel to help design a search for evidence. The search should retrieve as many relevant pieces of research as possible so that they can be assessed against the inclusion criteria. This will ensure that the evidence base for the review is comprehensive and the findings of the review are robust. We have developed a full protocol for this work package, available here. The investigation revolves around 16 computational tools that are based on text mining technologies. We are using each tool to assess 5 important papers that compare non-invasive or minimally invasive tests to traditional autopsy to identify terms or phrases that should be included in the search. This search is being used in work package 1 to retrieve the evidence. We are evaluating which tools provide the most benefit, how user friendly each tool is and considering how using these tools might introduce bias into the systematic review process.
We have considered the following computational tools:
- Voyant
- VosViewer
- CitNetExplorer
- PubReMiner
- TerMine
- TextAlyser
- Text Analyzer
- Lingo3G (Carrot)
- Lingo4G
- Carrot2
- MeSHonDemand
- Yale MeSH Analyser
- EndNote
- Anne O’Tate
- BiblioShiny
- Tm for R
Work package 2 outputs include collating an extensive final report of the investigations findings and publication of the investigation in a peer-reviewed journal, available here.
