Insights into the epidemiology, pathogenesis, and differential diagnosis of schistosomiasis.

Schistosomiasis is a neglected tropical disease that is prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. There are five human pathogenic species, of which Schistosoma haematobium, Schistosoma mansoni and Schistosoma japonicum are the most prevalent worldwide and cause the greatest burden of disease in terms of mortality and morbidity. In addition, hybrid schistosomes have been identified through molecular analysis.

Classification of tumor types using XGBoost machine learning model: a vector space transformation of genomic alterations.

Background: Machine learning (ML) represents a powerful tool to capture relationships between molecular alterations and cancer types and to extract biological information. Here, we developed a plain ML model aimed at distinguishing cancer types based on genetic lesions, providing an additional tool to improve cancer diagnosis, particularly for tumors of unknown origin.

Methods: TCGA data from 9,927 samples spanning 32 different cancer types were downloaded from cBioportal.

The new SUMPOT to predict postoperative complications using an Artificial Neural Network.

An accurate assessment of preoperative risk may improve use of hospital resources and reduce morbidity and mortality in high-risk surgical patients. This study aims at implementing an automated surgical risk calculator based on Artificial Neural Network technology to identify patients at risk for postoperative complications. We developed the new SUMPOT based on risk factors previously used in other scoring systems and tested it in a cohort of 560 surgical patients undergoing elective or emergency procedures and subsequently admitted to intensive care units, high-dependency units or standard wards.

Decomposition Techniques for Multilayer Perceptron Training.

In this paper, we consider the learning problem of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) formulated as the problem of minimizing a smooth error function. As well known, the learning problem of MLPs can be a difficult nonlinear nonconvex optimization problem. Typical difficulties can be the presence of extensive flat regions and steep sided valleys in the error surface, and the possible large number of training data and of free network parameters.

Efficient synthesis of scutellarein.

Scutellarein is a component of Scutellaria, recently known as a potent cytotoxic agent on human leukaemia cells. The aim of this study was the synthesis of scutellarein and its methylated derivative. The new features are the innovating method to afford flavones from flavanones and the A-ring regioselective bromination step that lead to the target molecule by a facile and high-yielding pathway.