Browse Articles

Incidence, Risk Factors, Microbiology and Outcomes of VAP at an NCU in India: A Prospective Observational Study

Comprehensive assessment of the physical and health features of the threatened Araguaian River dolphin Inia araguaiaensis

The Araguaia River dolphin is endemic to the Tocantins-Araguaia River Basin and is under severe anthropogenic threats. Given the species’ vulnerability and historical neglect, preliminary data on its health and physical parameters are presented, along with an evaluation of potential differences between individuals from areas with varying human activity. A comparison of these data with its closely related species, the Amazon River dolphin I. geoffrensis, was also aimed. Twenty-four dolphins were captured and released in Cantão State Park (protected area, n = 10), Tocantins state; and Luiz Alves (exposed to fishing activities, n = 14), Goiás state. Preliminary data indicates no significant differences in the body morphology and physical parameters between individuals from the two areas. Araguaia River dolphins tended to show larger grey areas in their bodies than their counterparts, Amazon river dolphins. Cardiac rate, respiratory frequency, and oral temperature did not vary between individuals from different areas, sex, or age classes. Hematological and serum chemistry variables differences were observed among age classes, mainly related to body and immune system development. Dolphins from Cantão had higher AST and urea/creatinine and lower GGT, total bilirubin, and creatinine than dolphins from Luiz Alves. Such variations may reflect different prey types, intensities of muscle extenuation during capture, or subclinical diseases. Most hematological parameters for the Araguaia River dolphin were outside the reference intervals described for the Amazon river dolphin but inside its minimum and maximum ranges. Conversely, the serum chemistry values from both species overlap with the reference values. The highest serum testosterone was detected in adult males and the highest serum progesterone and estradiol in adult females. Correlations between reproductive hormones and body measurements demonstrated preliminary hormonal variation according to the body’s development as the individuals reach sexual maturity. Understanding the current physical and health status of individuals from areas with different human activity intensities is crucial to drive management efforts toward species conservation.

The association between ten anthropometric measures and osteoporosis and osteopenia among postmenopausal women

Validity of Blood Urea Nitrogen to Serum Albumin Ratio as an Independent Biomarker to Predict Severity and Mortality of Community-acquired Pneumonia

Two methods, two views: Integrating phytoliths in thin sections and bulk samples on the urban Dark Earths from the DIVA-site (Antwerp, Belgium)

Traditionally, phytolith analyses are carried out by extraction from bulk (sediment) samples. This technique provides valuable information, not only on the morphological and/or taxonomic assignment of phytoliths, but also on their concentration (quantitative analysis). However, extraction leads to the loss of the (micro-)context in which they are embedded. Over the past 20 years, the study of phytoliths in soil thin sections has proven to be a consistent method. As phytoliths are neither removed from their sedimentary matrix nor artificially concentrated, their analysis provides information on their taphonomical history, but their morphological identification is sometimes limited. Therefore, it seems obvious that the next step to improve phytolith analysis is to combine the two approaches. The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of this integration. For this purpose, we focus on the urban Dark Earth of the DIVA-site (Antwerp, Belgium), with a chronology between the end of the Gallo-Roman Empire and the 11th century AD. Three different stratigraphic units, micromorphologically recognized within the Dark Earth, have been studied. They correspond to an agricultural field, unconsolidated walking surfaces and a floor. Our results confirm the added value of combining the two methods. The possibility of observing the phytoliths in their (micro-)context allowed us to characterize each stratigraphic unit with a particular phytolith assemblage. At the same time, the information derived from the bulk samples overcomes the difficulties in the morphological identification of phytoliths in soil thin sections.

Predictive and clinicopathological importance of HMGB2 in various carcinomas: a meta and bioinformatic approach

Planning for a Dignified Death with a Living Will

Curcumin induces mitochondrial dysfunction-associated oxidative DNA damage in ovarian cancer cells

Resistance to chemotherapeutic agents is a critical challenge for the clinical management of ovarian cancer. While curcumin has been reported to possess anti-cancer properties, how it exerts its anti-neoplastic effect on ovarian cancer cells remains to be explored. We here characterized the fate of human ovarian cancer cell lines HO8910 and OVCAR3 treated with curcumin. Cell proliferation, cell death, mitochondrial function, oxidative damage and tumor formation in nude mice were examined. Significant inhibition of proliferation and induction of apoptosis were observed in ovarian cells treated with curcumin. The cancer cells exhibit cell cycle arrest at G2/M phase, mitochondrial accumulation, mitochondrial oxidative stress and high level of DNA damage after curcumin treatment. This effect of curcumin is independent of the BRCA mutation status. Curcumin-induced proliferation inhibition and apoptosis were effectively attenuated by the application of antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC), suggesting that curcumin exerts its anti-cancer effect by inflicting oxidative stress. Curcumin applied at 200 mg/kg intraperitoneal infusion daily also inhibited the growth, oxidative damage, and mitochondrial accumulation of tumor xenografts in vivo. Together, the results indicate that curcumin can exert its anti-tumor effect via inducing mitochondrial dysfunction-associated oxidative DNA damage and can be potentially used in combination with other DNA repair-interfering therapeutics, such as PARP inhibitor, in the treatment of ovarian cancer.

Back analysis of mechanical parameters based on GPSO-BP neural network and its application

Correlation of Ultrasound Examination with FOB for Airway Assessment in Burn Patients with Inhalational Injury: A Prospective Observational Study

Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library

This study explores the literary practice of excerpting in Syriac manuscripts through a computational-quantitative analysis, contributing to the emerging field of Syriac material philology. The primary objective is to offer a “big picture” charting of Syriac excerpting as a non-authorial literary practice. Using digitized data from the British Library’s Syriac manuscript collection, the study analyzes nearly 20,000 excerpts, introducing the Excerpts Per Manuscript (EPM) metric to quantify and compare excerpting practices across manuscripts. The results reveal that most manuscripts contain fewer than 20 excerpts, but a small number show much higher levels of excerpting, highlighting the immense intellectual and literary activities implicated in their production. These high-EPM manuscripts appear across multiple genres, indicating that excerpting was a widespread and essential cultural activity rather than confined to specific literary types. The study also finds that manuscripts with the highest EPM values are concentrated between the 6th and 9th centuries CE, corresponding with a period of intense literary compilation in late antiquity. This pattern reflects the importance of excerpting in knowledge organization, aligning with broader trends in the canonization of texts within Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman traditions. The research emphasizes the limitations of earlier cataloging approaches, which obscure non-authorial practices by focusing on authors and texts. By reorienting data through computational analysis, the study provides new insights into the role of excerpting in Syriac manuscript culture. This approach demonstrates the value of digital tools in material philology, uncovering patterns that bridge genres and timeframes, and identifying high-EPM manuscripts as key sites of intellectual and cultural activity in the Syriac literary tradition.

Influence of duration and visual feedback on the perception of tactile illusions of motion

Author Response: Can Early Use of High-flow Nasal Cannula with Improved Study Design Make a Statistically Significant Difference in the Rate of Intubation in Patients with Post-traumatic Lung Contusion?

Gradients in signal complexity of sleep-wake intracerebral EEG

Spatial variation in the morphology of the electroencephalogram (EEG) over the head is classically described. Ultimately, location-dependent variation in EEG must arise from the cytoarchitectural and network structure of the portion of cortex sensed. In previous work, we demonstrated that over the lateral frontal lobe, sample entropy (SE) of intracerebral EEG (iEEG) over a subdural recording contact was predictive of that contact’s connectivity to other contacts. In this work, we used a publicly available repository (the Montreal Neurological Institute Atlas; MNIA) of whole-brain normative iEEG to calculate SE over the entire cortical surface. SE was averaged region-wise and classified by the state of arousal (awake, N2, N3 and REM). SE averages were transformed to a linear scale between zero and unity, mapped to continuous color scale and overlaid on segmented cortical surface models, one for each sleep-wake state. Wake SE followed a rostro-caudal gradient (RCG), with high values anteriorly and a global minimum in the posterior cortex. Superimposed on the RCG were other gradients radiating away from primary somatic sensorimotor, visual and auditory regions to their association areas. All gradients were attenuated in deep (N3) sleep. In REM, the majority of the cortex exhibited wake-like SE, with the prominent exception of primary cortical sensory and motor areas. Normative human intracerebral EEG exhibits rich spatial structure - cortical gradients - in the distribution of SE. SE in the wake state tracks temporal processing hierarchies in cerebral cortex, concordant to the distribution of several other cortical attributes of structure (e.g., cortical thickness, myelin content). Sleep disrupts these gradients, with REM sleep bringing out unusual discordances between primary sensory and their association areas. Our results deepen the interpretation of EEG from conventional descriptors such as Berger bands to a spatial perspective related to cortical biology.

Differential association between cumulative dose of 5α-reductase inhibitors and mortality

Muscle Wasting in ICU Patients is Multifactorial and Requires Thorough Workup

An updated compendium and reevaluation of the evidence for nuclear transcription factor occupancy over the mitochondrial genome

In most eukaryotes, mitochondrial organelles contain their own genome, usually circular, which is the remnant of the genome of the ancestral bacterial endosymbiont that gave rise to modern mitochondria. Mitochondrial genomes are dramatically reduced in their gene content due to the process of endosymbiotic gene transfer to the nucleus; as a result most mitochondrial proteins are encoded in the nucleus and imported into mitochondria. This includes the components of the dedicated mitochondrial transcription and replication systems and regulatory factors, which are entirely distinct from the information processing systems in the nucleus. However, since the 1990s several nuclear transcription factors have been reported to act in mitochondria, and previously we identified 8 human and 3 mouse transcription factors (TFs) with strong localized enrichment over the mitochondrial genome using ChIP-seq ( Ch romatin I mmuno p recipitation) datasets from the second phase of the ENCODE ( Enc yclopedia o f D NA E lements) Project Consortium. Here, we analyze the greatly expanded in the intervening decade ENCODE compendium of TF ChIP-seq datasets (a total of 6,153 ChIP experiments for 942 proteins, of which 763 are sequence-specific TFs) combined with interpretative deep learning models of TF occupancy to create a comprehensive compendium of nuclear TFs that show evidence of association with the mitochondrial genome. We find some evidence for chrM occupancy for 50 nuclear TFs and two other proteins, with bZIP TFs emerging as most likely to be playing a role in mitochondria. However, we also observe that in cases where the same TF has been assayed with multiple antibodies and ChIP protocols, evidence for its chrM occupancy is not always reproducible. In the light of these findings, we discuss the evidential criteria for establishing chrM occupancy and reevaluate the overall compendium of putative mitochondrial-acting nuclear TFs.

Detection of antibodies in suspected autoimmune encephalitis diseases using machine learning

Abstract In our study, we aim to predict the antibody serostatus of patients with suspected autoimmune encephalitis (AE) using machine learning based on pre-contrast T2-weighted MR images acquired at symptom onset. A confirmation of seropositivity is of great importance for a reliable diagnosis in suspected AE cases. The cohort used in our study comprises 98 patients diagnosed with AE. 57 of these patients had previously tested positive for autoantibodies associated with AE. In contrast, no antibodies were detected in the remaining 41 patients. A manual bilateral segmentation of the hippocampus was performed using the open-source software 3D Slicer on T2-weighted MR-images. Subsequently, 107 Radiomics features were extracted from each T2-weighted MR image utilizing the open source PyRadiomics software package. Our study cohort was randomly divided into training and independent test data. Five conventional machine learning algorithms and a neural network were tested regarding their ability to differentiate between seropositive and seronegative patients. All performance values were determined based on independent test data. Our final model includes six features and is based on a Lasso regression. Using independent test data, this model yields a mean AUC of 0.950, a mean accuracy of 0.892, a mean sensitivity of 0.892 and a mean specificity of 0.891 in predicting antibody serostatus in patients with suspected AE. Our results show that Radiomics-based machine learning is a very promising method for predicting serostatus of suspected AE patients and can thus help to confirm the diagnosis. In the future, such methods could facilitate and accelerate the diagnosis of AE even before the results of specific laboratory tests are available, allowing patients to benefit more quickly from a reliable treatment strategy.

Acute Hemodynamic Changes Induced by Physiotherapy in Critically Ill Patients: A Prospective Observational Study

The evolutionary characteristics and neighbourhood mechanisms of urban innovation networks: The case of China’s sports industry

Taking the patents granted from 2006 to 2023 and the applicants located in different cities in China as data samples, with the help of UCINET 6.0 software and according to the timeline, we visualise the cooperation and innovation network of the sports industry during the period of the “11th Five-Year Plan” to the “14th Five-Year Plan”. QAP multiple regression analysis was used to explore the impact of geographical, cognitive, institutional, economic, and technological proximity on the collaborative innovation performance of the sports industry at different stages.The research results indicate that (1) The scale of China’s sports industry cooperation and innovation network continues to expand, the cohesion of the network is constantly strengthening, and the complexity of regional cooperation relationships is gradually increasing, forming a grid-based cooperation trend with multiple innovative entities from the early “one place leading” model; (2) From 2006 to 2015, innovation cooperation in the sports industry was more likely to occur between geographically adjacent regions. Since 2016, innovation cooperation in the sports industry has gradually broken geographical limitations. In addition, since 2011, the level of knowledge sharing among sports technology innovation entities in various cities in China has further deepened, the gap in cognitive ability has intensified the efficiency of cooperation between different innovation entities, and innovation cooperation is concentrated between cities with comparable economic strength. Starting from the “14th Five Year Plan” period, cooperation between cities with similar innovative technological capabilities has become closer, and the efficiency of innovation output has significantly improved