Publications by authors named "Albert Pla"

Cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) is a clinical syndrome secondary to a spinal cord compression due to cervical spondylosis. In some cases, conventional MRI typically shows an intramedullary hyperintense signal on T2W imaging and contrast enhancement on post-gadolinium T1W imaging. We report a series of seven patients with CSM who had typical clinical presentation and imaging findings on T2W and contrast-enhanced T1W sequences.

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Despite the broad variety of available microRNA (miRNA) prediction tools, their application to the discovery and annotation of novel miRNA genes in domestic species is still limited. In this study we designed a comprehensive pipeline (eMIRNA) for miRNA identification in the yet poorly annotated porcine genome and demonstrated the usefulness of implementing a motif search positional refinement strategy for the accurate determination of precursor miRNA boundaries. The small RNA fraction from gluteus medius skeletal muscle of 48 Duroc gilts was sequenced and used for the prediction of novel miRNA loci.

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Motivation: The existence of complex subpopulations of miRNA isoforms, or isomiRs, is well established. While many tools exist for investigating isomiR populations, they differ in how they characterize an isomiR, making it difficult to compare results across different tools. Thus, there is a need for a more comprehensive and systematic standard for defining isomiRs.

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MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that regulate gene expression by binding to partially complementary regions within the 3'UTR of their target genes. Computational methods play an important role in target prediction and assume that the miRNA "seed region" (nt 2 to 8) is required for functional targeting, but typically only identify ∼80% of known bindings. Recent studies have highlighted a role for the entire miRNA, suggesting that a more flexible methodology is needed.

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The use of family information is a key issue to deal with inheritance illnesses. This kind of information use to come in the form of pedigree files, which contain structured information as tree or graphs, which explains the family relationships. Knowledge-based systems should incorporate the information gathered by pedigree tools to assess medical decision making.

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Objective: Medical applications have special features (interpretation of results in medical metrics, experiment reproducibility and dealing with complex data) that require the development of particular tools. The eXiT*CBR framework is proposed to support the development of and experimentation with new case-based reasoning (CBR) systems for medical diagnosis.

Method: Our framework offers a modular, heterogeneous environment that combines different CBR techniques for different application requirements.

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