A Prospective Study on Fertility Preservation in Prepubertal and Adolescent Girls Undergoing Hematological Stem Cell Transplantation.

Background: Hematological stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is an established method which has markedly increased the survival rate of hematologic malignancies since its introduction in the 1980's. The conditioning for HSCT has known gonadotoxic effects and often leads to premature loss of fertility. In this study we have prospectively followed a cohort of girls undergoing HSCT and studied the outcomes of fertility preservation treatments performed before or after HSCT, as well as the long-term reproductive outcome.

Hot Topics on Fertility Preservation for Women and Girls-Current Research, Knowledge Gaps, and Future Possibilities.

Fertility preservation is a novel clinical discipline aiming to protect the fertility potential of young adults and children at risk of infertility. The field is evolving quickly, enriched by advances in assisted reproductive technologies and cryopreservation methods, in addition to surgical developments. The best-characterized target group for fertility preservation is the patient population diagnosed with cancer at a young age since the bulk of the data indicates that the gonadotoxicity inherent to most cancer treatments induces iatrogenic infertility.

Speaker separation in realistic noise environments with applications to a cognitively-controlled hearing aid.

Future wearable technology may provide for enhanced communication in noisy environments and for the ability to pick out a single talker of interest in a crowded room simply by the listener shifting their attentional focus. Such a system relies on two components, speaker separation and decoding the listener's attention to acoustic streams in the environment. To address the former, we present a system for joint speaker separation and noise suppression, referred to as the Binaural Enhancement via Attention Masking Network (BEAMNET).

Chondrodysplasia and growth failure in children after early hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for non-oncologic disorders.

Bone dysplasias (osteochondrodysplasias) are a large group of conditions associated with short stature, skeletal disproportion, and radiographic abnormalities of skeletal elements. Nearly all are genetic in origin. We report a series of seven children with similar findings of chondrodysplasia and growth failure following early hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) for pediatric non-oncologic disease: hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis or HLH (five children, three with biallelic HLH-associated variants [in PRF1 and UNC13D] and one with HLH secondary to visceral Leishmaniasis), one child with severe combined immunodeficiency and one with Omenn syndrome (both children had biallelic RAG1 pathogenic variants).