Distribution of Microaneurysms and Hemorrhages in Accordance with the Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy in Type Diabetes Patients.

(1) Underlying Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is the primary cause of poor vision in young adults. There are automatic image reading systems that can aid screening for DR. (2) Methods: Using our automatic reading system we have counted the number of microaneurysms and hemorrhages in the four quadrants of the ETDRS grid and evaluated the differences between them according to the type of DR.

Referable Diabetic Retinopathy Prediction Algorithm Applied to a Population of 120,389 Type 2 Diabetics over 11 Years Follow-Up.

(1) Background: Although DR screening is effective, one of its most significant problems is a lack of attendance. The aim of the present study was to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm in predicting the development of any type of DR and referable DR. (2) Methods: A retrospective study with an 11-year follow-up of a population of 120,389 T2DM patients was undertaken.

Effect of Lipids on Diabetic Retinopathy in a Large Cohort of Diabetic Patients after 10 Years of Follow-Up.

(1) Background: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) remains the leading cause of low vision and blindness in young adults of working age. Although the most important risk factors-such as the duration of diabetes mellitus (DM) and glycemic control measured by HbA1c-are known, the effects of lipids are not as clear. The aim of the present study is to analyze the effects of lipids on the development of DR.

Multi-Design Differential Expression Profiling of COVID-19 Lung Autopsy Specimens Reveals Significantly Deregulated Inflammatory Pathways and SFTPC Impaired Transcription.

The transcriptomic profiling of lung damage associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection may lead to the development of effective therapies to prevent COVID-19-related deaths. We selected a series of 21 autoptic lung samples, 14 of which had positive nasopharyngeal swabs for SARS-CoV-2 and a clinical diagnosis of COVID-19-related death; their pulmonary viral load was quantified with a specific probe for SARS-CoV-2. The remaining seven cases had no documented respiratory disease and were used as controls.

Validation of an Algorithm for the Prediction of Diabetic Retinopathy in Type 1 Diabetic Patients in a Spanish Population.

Aim: The aim of the present study was to build a clinical decision support system (CDSS) that can predict the presence of diabetic retinopathy (DR) in type 1 diabetes (T1DM) patients.

Material And Method: We built two versions of our CDSS to predict the presence of any-type DR and sight-threatening DR (STDR) in T1DM patients. The first version was trained using 324 T1DM and 826 T2DM patients.

STAT3-YAP/TAZ signaling in endothelial cells promotes tumor angiogenesis.

The nuclear translocation and activity of the cotranscriptional activators YAP and TAZ (YAP/TAZ) in endothelial cells (ECs) are crucial during developmental angiogenesis. Here, we studied the role of YAP/TAZ signaling in ECs in tumor angiogenesis and found that the expression of and downstream target genes in ECs correlated with tumor vascularization in human colorectal carcinomas and skin melanoma. Treatment with the YAP/TAZ inhibitor verteporfin reduced vessel density and tumor progression in a mouse colorectal cancer (CRC) model.

Testing a Deep Learning Algorithm for Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in a Spanish Diabetic Population and with MESSIDOR Database.

Background: The aim of the present study was to test our deep learning algorithm (DLA) by reading the retinographies.

Methods: We tested our DLA built on convolutional neural networks in 14,186 retinographies from our population and 1200 images extracted from MESSIDOR. The retinal images were graded both by the DLA and independently by four retina specialists.

The Effect of HbA Variability as a Risk Measure for Microangiopathy in Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus.

Background: To measure the relationship between variability in HbA and microalbuminuria (MA) and diabetic retinopathy (DR) in the long term.

Methods: A prospective case-series study, was conducted on 366 Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus patients with normoalbuminuria and without diabetic retinopathy at inclusion. The cohort was followed for a period of 12 years.

A method to determine a personalized set of online exercises for improving the positive mental health of a caregiver of a chronically ill patient.

Background: Taking care of chronic or long-term patients at home is an arduous task. Non-professional caregivers suffer the consequences of doing so, especially in terms of their mental health. Performing some simple activities through a mobile phone app may improve their mindset and consequently increase their positivity.

Convexity shape constraints for retinal blood vessel segmentation and foveal avascular zone detection.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) has become a major worldwide health problem due to the increase in blindness among diabetics at early ages. The detection of DR pathologies such as microaneurysms, hemorrhages and exudates through advanced computational techniques is of utmost importance in patient health care. New computer vision techniques are needed to improve upon traditional screening of color fundus images.

Validation of a Deep Learning Algorithm for Diabetic Retinopathy.

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A Clinical Decision Support System for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening: Creating a Clinical Support Application.

Background: The aim of this study was to build a clinical decision support system (CDSS) in diabetic retinopathy (DR), based on type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) patients.

Method: We built a CDSS from a sample of 2,323 patients, divided into a training set of 1,212 patients, and a testing set of 1,111 patients. The CDSS is based on a fuzzy random forest, which is a set of fuzzy decision trees.

Learning ensemble classifiers for diabetic retinopathy assessment.

Diabetic retinopathy is one of the most common comorbidities of diabetes. Unfortunately, the recommended annual screening of the eye fundus of diabetic patients is too resource-consuming. Therefore, it is necessary to develop tools that may help doctors to determine the risk of each patient to attain this condition, so that patients with a low risk may be screened less frequently and the use of resources can be improved.

RIPK1/RIPK3 promotes vascular permeability to allow tumor cell extravasation independent of its necroptotic function.

Necroptosis is an inflammatory form of programmed cell death requiring receptor-interacting protein kinase 1, 3 (RIPK1, RIPK3) and mixed lineage kinase domain-like protein (MLKL). The kinase of RIPK3 phosphorylates MLKL causing MLKL to form a pore-like structure, allowing intracellular contents to release and cell death to occur. Alternatively, RIPK1 and RIPK3 have been shown to regulate cytokine production directly influencing inflammatory immune infiltrates.

TAM receptors Tyro3 and Mer as novel targets in colorectal cancer.

Purpose: CRC remains the third most common cancer worldwide with a high 5-year mortality rate in advanced cases. Combined with chemotherapy, targeted therapy is an additional treatment option. However as CRC still escapes targeted therapy the vigorous search for new targets is warranted to increase patients´ overall survival.

The Orphan Receptor Tie1 Controls Angiogenesis and Vascular Remodeling by Differentially Regulating Tie2 in Tip and Stalk Cells.

Tie1 is a mechanistically poorly characterized endothelial cell (EC)-specific orphan receptor. Yet, Tie1 deletion is embryonic lethal and Tie1 has been implicated in critical vascular pathologies, including atherosclerosis and tumor angiogenesis. Here, we show that Tie1 does not function independently but exerts context-dependent effects on the related receptor Tie2.

Adaptation strategies for water supply management in a drought prone Mediterranean river basin: Application of outranking method.

The regional water allocation planning is one of those complex decision problems where holistic approach to water supply management considering different criteria would be valuable. However, multi-criteria decision making with diverse indicators measured on different scales and uncertainty levels is difficult to solve. Objective of this paper is to develop scenarios for the future imbalances in water supply and demand for a water stressed Mediterranean area of Northern Spain (Tarragona) and to test the applicability and suitability of an outranking method ELECTRE-III-H for evaluating sectoral water allocation policies.

Induced unbalanced linguistic ordered weighted average and its application in multiperson decision making.

Linguistic variables are very useful to evaluate alternatives in decision making problems because they provide a vocabulary in natural language rather than numbers. Some aggregation operators for linguistic variables force the use of a symmetric and uniformly distributed set of terms. The need to relax these conditions has recently been posited.

A semantic framework to protect the privacy of electronic health records with non-numerical attributes.

Structured patient data like Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a valuable source for clinical research. However, the sensitive nature of such information requires some anonymisation procedure to be applied before releasing the data to third parties. Several studies have shown that the removal of identifying attributes, like the Social Security Number, is not enough to obtain an anonymous data file, since unique combinations of other attributes as for example, rare diagnoses and personalised treatments, may lead to patient's identity disclosure.

An ontology-based measure to compute semantic similarity in biomedicine.

Proper understanding of textual data requires the exploitation and integration of unstructured and heterogeneous clinical sources, healthcare records or scientific literature, which are fundamental aspects in clinical and translational research. The determination of semantic similarity between word pairs is an important component of text understanding that enables the processing, classification and structuring of textual resources. In the past, several approaches for assessing word similarity by exploiting different knowledge sources (ontologies, thesauri, domain corpora, etc.

Using ontologies for structuring organizational knowledge in Home Care assistance.

Purpose: Information Technologies and Knowledge-based Systems can significantly improve the management of complex distributed health systems, where supporting multidisciplinarity is crucial and communication and synchronization between the different professionals and tasks becomes essential. This work proposes the use of the ontological paradigm to describe the organizational knowledge of such complex healthcare institutions as a basis to support their management. The ontology engineering process is detailed, as well as the way to maintain the ontology updated in front of changes.

Knowledge engineering as a support for building an actor profile ontology for integrating Home-Care systems.

One of the tasks towards the definition of a knowledge model for home care is the definition of the different roles of the users involved in the system. The roles determine the actions and services that can or must be performed by each type of user. In this paper the experience of building an ontology to represent the home-care users and their associated information is presented, in a proposal for a standard model of a Home-Care support system to the European Community.