Intestinal Osteosarcoma with Liver Metastasis in a Dog with a History of Recurrent Cotton-Based Toy Fragment Ingestion.

Canine extraskeletal osteosarcomas are mesenchymal, osteoid producing tumors that can arise in soft tissues without initial involvement of the bones. An 8-year-old intact male Beagle dog presented with anorexia, abdominal pain, intermittent vomiting and melena. The patient had a history of recurrent ingestion of cotton based-toy fragments, but no prior surgical procedures involving the abdominal cavity.

Semi-supervised learning of causal relations in biomedical scientific discourse.

Background: The increasing number of daily published articles in the biomedical domain has become too large for humans to handle on their own. As a result, bio-text mining technologies have been developed to improve their workload by automatically analysing the text and extracting important knowledge. Specific bio-entities, bio-events between these and facts can now be recognised with sufficient accuracy and are widely used by biomedical researchers.

Recognising discourse causality triggers in the biomedical domain.

Current domain-specific information extraction systems represent an important resource for biomedical researchers, who need to process vast amounts of knowledge in a short time. Automatic discourse causality recognition can further reduce their workload by suggesting possible causal connections and aiding in the curation of pathway models. We describe here an approach to the automatic identification of discourse causality triggers in the biomedical domain using machine learning.

BioCause: Annotating and analysing causality in the biomedical domain.

Background: Biomedical corpora annotated with event-level information represent an important resource for domain-specific information extraction (IE) systems. However, bio-event annotation alone cannot cater for all the needs of biologists. Unlike work on relation and event extraction, most of which focusses on specific events and named entities, we aim to build a comprehensive resource, covering all statements of causal association present in discourse.

Identifying a window of vulnerability during fetal development in a maternal iron restriction model.

It is well acknowledged from observations in humans that iron deficiency during pregnancy can be associated with a number of developmental problems in the newborn and developing child. Due to the obvious limitations of human studies, the stage during gestation at which maternal iron deficiency causes an apparent impairment in the offspring remains elusive. In order to begin to understand the time window(s) during pregnancy that is/are especially susceptible to suboptimal iron levels, which may result in negative effects on the development of the fetus, we developed a rat model in which we were able to manipulate and monitor the dietary iron intake during specific stages of pregnancy and analyzed the developing fetuses.