Publications by authors named "Akinori Murakami"

This case report details a 78-year-old male with periorbital Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) cellulitis whose condition rapidly deteriorated despite treatment. An autopsy confirmed acute fibrinous and organizing pneumonia (AFOP), revealing fibrin ball formation and organizing pneumonia. While both idiopathic and secondary AFOP cases often exhibit bilateral consolidation on CT, our patient presented with ground-glass opacities, which are frequently associated with secondary AFOP.

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  • * A study of 4,016 RA patients analyzed the impact of joint tenderness and swelling on these assessment tools, revealing that specific joints contribute differently to various scores.
  • * Findings indicate that while the wrist and knee have broad influence across multiple assessment tools, other joints like the shoulder and ankle play unique roles, suggesting that joint symptom changes affect assessments in distinct ways.
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  • The study investigated whether high tibial osteotomy (HTO) could improve the biological environment within osteoarthritic knees by correcting alignment.
  • Researchers collected synovial tissue and fluid from 31 patients to analyze gene expression and inflammation levels, finding down-regulated inflammatory genes and a shift in macrophage types.
  • The results suggested that HTO reduces inflammation and enhances healing by promoting a transition from pro-inflammatory M1 macrophages to anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages in the knee joint.
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A 75-year-old man was referred to our hospital with a suspected pancreatic cyst. Imaging tests revealed a 3-cm cystic lesion located ventrally in the duodenal bulbus, which was suspected to be a duplication cyst with its muscularis propria contiguous to that of the duodenum. One year later, the cyst grew to 6 cm due to intracystic hemorrhaging; therefore, surgery was performed.

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Intercalated duct lesions (IDLs) are usually asymptomatic. We report a case of IDL, in which a palpable mass formed. The patient was a 45-year-old Japanese male, who noticed a mass in the left parotid region.

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Background: Thyroid tumors are often difficult to histopathologically diagnose, particularly follicular adenoma (FA) and follicular carcinoma (FC). Papillary carcinoma (PAC) has several histological subtypes. Periostin (PON), which is a non-collagenous extracellular matrix molecule, has been implicated in tumor invasiveness.

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Hexylthiophene-conjugated boron-dibenzopyrromethenes with benzo[1,3,2]oxazaborinine rings, 1, that absorb near-infrared light with relatively high molecular extinction coefficients have been synthesized. The incorporation of 3-hexylthiophene-conjugated dye 1a at a blend ratio of 5 wt % into a polymeric solar cell based on a P3HT/indene-C(70) bisadduct (IC(70)BA) bulk heterojunction structure improved power conversion efficiency from 3.7 to 4.

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Phenol blue (PB) is a primary skeletal structure part of indoaniline dyes and well-known as a solvatochromic dye. It has been recently observed by pump-probe (PP) transient absorption measurements that PB shows ultrafast ground state recovery within a few hundred femtoseconds after photoexcitation. In this work, the ultrafast photochemical reaction mechanism of PB has been investigated using direct ab initio (CASSCF) nonadiabatic molecular dynamics with the trajectory surface hopping (TSH) method.

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Electrochemical cyclization/cycloreversion reactions of a diarylethene, 1,2-bis(3-methyl-2-thienyl)perfluorocyclopentene, are examined experimentally by electron spin resonance (ESR) and absorption spectra. To understand the ESR spectrum, the hyperfine coupling constants are calculated by the density functional theory (DFT) with the B3LYP exchange-correlation functional. The averaged values of the hyperfine coupling constants are approximated by imposing the C(2) symmetry on the structure of the diarylethene.

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A photochromic polymer film containing three different diarylethene derivatives, that is, 1,2-bis(3,5-dimethyl-2-thienyl)perfluorocyclopentene (1), 1,2-bis(2,5-dimethyl-3-thienyl)perfluorocyclopentene (2), and 1,2-bis(2-methyl-5-phenyl-3-thienyl)perfluorocyclopentene (3) was prepared. Upon UV irradiation, the three derivatives changed to their closed-ring isomers having different colors, yellow, red, and blue. They showed different spectra not only in UV/Vis region but also in the IR spectral region.

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The mechanism of the photochromic cycloreversion reactions is theoretically examined in a model system of dithienylethenes by means of the CASSCF and CASPT2 methods. The structures of its conical intersections (CIs), which are the branching points of the internal conversions, were obtained. The analyses of the minimum energy paths from the Franck-Condon states and the CI points suggest that the cycloreversion reaction occurs during the intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution (IVR) toward the quasi-equilibrium on the 2A state.

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The electronic structure of azulene molecule has been studied. We have obtained the optimized structures of ground and singlet excited states by using the complete active space self-consistent-field (CASSCF) method, and calculated vertical and 0-0 transition energies between the ground and excited states with second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (CASPT2). The CASPT2 calculations indicate that the bond-equalized C(2v) structure is more stable than the bond-alternating C(s) structure in the ground state.

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