On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 was a pandemic. 1 At that time, only 118,000 cases had been reported globally, 90% of which had occurred in 4 countries. 1 Since then, the world landscape has changed dramatically. As of March 31, 2020, there are now nearly 800,000 cases, with truly global involvement. 2 Countries that were previously unaffected are currently experiencing mounting rates of the novel coronavirus infection with associated increases in COVID-19erelated deaths. At present, Canada has more than 8000 cases of COVID-19, with considerable variation in

Although career satisfaction and specialty interest were similar between the genders, women were less likely to intend to perform research during their careers despite similar previous research experience. Women also demonstrated lower rates of marriage and childbearing compared with their male counterparts.

Acute massive or submassive pulmonary embolism (PE) requires prompt diagnosis, risk-stratification and aggressive treatment. Mortality rates can rise up to 70% within the first hour of presentation and are strongly correlated with the degree of right ventricular (RV) dysfunction, cardiac arrest, and consequential congestive heart failure. While anticoagulation is universally employed, there are inadequate data to establish definitive guidelines for the management of massive PE despite the availability of multiple treatment modalities. Medical thrombolytic therapy has not been shown to significantly reduce mortality in patients with massive PE but is still widely employed, whereas surgical and catheter embolectomy are only reserved as last resort treatments for critically ill patients with hemodynamic instability, or for those who are either not candidates for or have failed thrombolysis. Following an extensive review of medical literature, we outline the treatment options for this clinical scenario while focusing on the role of surgical embolectomy. Although traditionally reserved as rescue therapy for cases of failed thrombolysis, surgical embolectomy is a safe procedure with low mortality when performed early and in a selected group of patients. Sufficient evidence exists to extend the criteria for surgical embolectomy from strictly rescue therapy to include hemodynamically stable patients with RV dysfunction. Multidisciplinary approach to this condition coupled with a meticulous surgical technique has significantly lowered the mortality associated with this surgical procedure over the last 10 years.

Background-Evidence supporting the use of bioprostheses for heart valve replacement in young adults is accumulating.However, reoperation data, which may help guide clinical decision making in young patients, remains poorly defined in the literature. Methods and Results-We examined the need for reoperation in 3975 patients who underwent first-time bioprosthetic aortic valve replacement (AVR) (nϭ3152) or mitral valve replacement (MVR) (nϭ823). There were 895 patients below the age of 60 years at bioprosthesis implant (AVR, nϭ636; MVR, nϭ259

Healthcare is a data-intensive domain, once a considerable volume of data is daily to monitoring patients, managing clinical research, producing medical records, and processing medical insurance claims. While the focus of applications of blockchain in practice has been to build distributed ledgers involving virtual tokens, the impetus of this emerging technology has now extended to the medical domain. With the increased popularity, it is crucial to study how this technology accompanied with a system for smart contracts can support and challenge the healthcare domain for all interrelated actors (patients, physicians, insurance companies, regulators) and involved assets (e.g. patients' data, physician's data, equipment's and drug's supply chain, etc.). The contributions of this paper are the following: (i) report the results of a systematic literature review conducted to identify, extract, evaluate and synthesize the studies on the symbiosis of blockchain in healthcare; (ii) summarize and categorize existing benefits/challenges on incorporating blockchain in healthcare domain; (iii) provide a framework that will facilitate new research activities; and (iv) establish the state of evidence with in-depth assessment.