Publications by authors named "Blanca Flores"

Regenerative therapies show promise in reversing sight loss caused by degenerative eye diseases. Their precise subretinal delivery can be facilitated by robotic systems alongside with Intra-operative Optical Coherence Tomography (iOCT). However, iOCT's real-time retinal layer information is compromised by inferior image quality.

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Communicable diseases remain a leading cause of death and disability in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). mHealth technologies carry considerable promise for managing these disorders within resource-poor settings, but many existing applications exclusively represent digital versions of existing guidelines or clinical calculators, communication facilitators, or patient self-management tools. We thus systematically searched PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane Central for studies published between January 2007 and October 2019 involving technologies that were mobile phone- or tablet-based; able to screen for, diagnose, or monitor a communicable disease of importance in LMICs; and targeted health professionals as primary users.

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Mobile health (mHealth) interventions hold promise for addressing the epidemic of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) by assisting healthcare providers managing these disorders in low-resource settings. We aimed to systematically identify and assess provider-facing mHealth applications used to screen for, diagnose, or monitor NCDs in LMICs. In this systematic review, we searched the indexing databases of PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane Central for studies published between January 2007 and October 2019.

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Purpose: Intra-retinal delivery of novel sight-restoring therapies will require the precision of robotic systems accompanied by excellent visualisation of retinal layers. Intra-operative Optical Coherence Tomography (iOCT) provides cross-sectional retinal images in real time but at the cost of image quality that is insufficient for intra-retinal therapy delivery.This paper proposes a super-resolution methodology that improves iOCT image quality leveraging spatiotemporal consistency of incoming iOCT video streams.

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Regenerative therapies have recently shown potential in restoring sight lost due to degenerative diseases. Their efficacy requires precise intra-retinal delivery, which can be achieved by robotic systems accompanied by high quality visualization of retinal layers. Intra-operative Optical Coherence Tomography (iOCT) captures cross-sectional retinal images in real-time but with image quality that is inadequate for intra-retinal therapy delivery.

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This paper addresses retinal vessel segmentation on (OCT-A) images of the human retina. Our approach is motivated by the need for high precision image-guided delivery of regenerative therapies in vitreo-retinal surgery. OCT-A visualizes macular vasculature, the main landmark of the surgically targeted area, at a level of detail and spatial extent unattainable by other imaging modalities.

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Purpose: Sustained delivery of regenerative retinal therapies by robotic systems requires intra-operative tracking of the retinal fundus. We propose a supervised deep convolutional neural network to densely predict semantic segmentation and optical flow of the retina as mutually supportive tasks, implicitly inpainting retinal flow information missing due to occlusion by surgical tools.

Methods: As manual annotation of optical flow is infeasible, we propose a flexible algorithm for generation of large synthetic training datasets on the basis of given intra-operative retinal images.

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Systems medicine is a paradigm for translating in silico methods developed for modelling biological systems into the field of medicine. Such approaches rely on the integration of as many data sources as possible, both in the dimension of disease knowledge and patient data. This is a challenging task that can only be implemented in clinical routine with the help of suitable information technology from the field of Medical Informatics.

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Although sequencing technology has become widely available in recent years, the steps in bioinformatics pipelines are time-consuming and barely standardized. New tools to improve individual steps in a pipeline are frequently published and configurations can be quickly adapted to use new versions. We performed case studies with a representative set of pipeline management tools using the GEP-R pipeline, and a qualitative study of different software packages covering relevant classes of software tools.

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Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA) is the earliest and most severe retinal degeneration (RD), and the most common cause of incurable blindness diagnosed in children. It is occasionally the presenting symptom of multisystemic ciliopathies which diagnosis will require a specific care of patients. Nineteen LCA genes are currently identified and three of them account for both non-syndromic and syndromic forms of the disease.

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Purpose: To test the proposal that the tense deficit that has been demonstrated for children with specific language impairment (SLI) in other languages is also found in child Spanish and that low performance on tense-related measures can distinguish Spanish-speaking children with SLI from those without.

Method: The authors evaluated evidence from existing spontaneous production, elicited production, and grammaticality judgment studies of finiteness in child Spanish. They measured the relationship of 7 spontaneous speech measures with previous receptive and expressive measures of finiteness and performed a discriminant function analysis, using tense as the target variable, to classify monolingual child Spanish (n = 55) as representing SLI or as typically developing (TD).

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Study Objective: The aim of the investigation was to use electroencephalography (EEG) to study whether long-term thinner abuse may result in the slowing, disorganization and asymmetry of the EEG cortical rhythms.

Method: Twenty-two patients attending with antecedent of thinner abuse only, and twenty two controls without alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse in the same age range and gender were studied. EEG recording were compared by means of the analyses of peak of frequency (POF), frequency of disorganization, and asymmetry of the background activity in patients and controls at rest eyes-closed condition in electrodes P3, P4, O1, and O2.

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