The Role of Oxidative Stress in Sarcoidosis.

Sarcoidosis is a rare, systemic inflammatory disease whose diagnosis and management can pose a challenge for clinicians and specialists. Scientific knowledge on the molecular pathways that drive its development is still lacking, with no standardized therapies available and insufficient strategies to predict patient outcome. In recent years, oxidative stress has been highlighted as an important factor in the pathogenesis of sarcoidosis, involving several enzymes and molecules in the mechanism of the disease.

Long-term prognostic outcomes in patients with haemoptysis.

Background: Haemoptysis is a challenging symptom that can be associated with potentially life-threatening medical conditions. Follow-up is key in these patients to promptly detect new or misdiagnosed pathologic findings. Few prospective studies have evaluated long-term prognostic outcomes in patients with haemoptysis.

Latent Correlation Representation Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation With Missing MRI Modalities.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a widely used imaging technique to assess brain tumor. Accurately segmenting brain tumor from MR images is the key to clinical diagnostics and treatment planning. In addition, multi-modal MR images can provide complementary information for accurate brain tumor segmentation.

Olfactory and gustatory function impairment in COVID-19 patients: Italian objective multicenter-study.

Background: Objective data on chemosensitive disorders during COVID-19 are lacking in the Literature.

Methods: Multicenter cohort study that involved four Italian hospitals. Three hundred and forty-five COVID-19 patients underwent objective chemosensitive evaluation.

Word Embedding for French Natural Language in Healthcare: A Comparative Study.

Structuring raw medical documents with ontology mapping is now the next step for medical intelligence. Deep learning models take as input mathematically embedded information, such as encoded texts. To do so, word embedding methods can represent every word from a text as a fixed-length vector.

Word Embedding for the French Natural Language in Health Care: Comparative Study.

Background: Word embedding technologies, a set of language modeling and feature learning techniques in natural language processing (NLP), are now used in a wide range of applications. However, no formal evaluation and comparison have been made on the ability of each of the 3 current most famous unsupervised implementations (Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText) to keep track of the semantic similarities existing between words, when trained on the same dataset.

Objective: The aim of this study was to compare embedding methods trained on a corpus of French health-related documents produced in a professional context.

Effect of ambulatory oxygen on quality of life for patients with fibrotic lung disease (AmbOx): a prospective, open-label, mixed-method, crossover randomised controlled trial.

Background: In fibrotic interstitial lung diseases, exertional breathlessness is strongly linked to health-related quality of life (HRQOL). Breathlessness is often associated with oxygen desaturation, but few data about the use of ambulatory oxygen in patients with fibrotic interstitial lung disease are available. We aimed to assess the effects of ambulatory oxygen on HRQOL in patients with interstitial lung disease with isolated exertional hypoxia.

Retrospective analysis of Bluetongue farm risk profile definition, based on biology, farm management practices and climatic data.

Bluetongue (BT) is a vector-borne disease transmitted by species of Culicoides midges (Diptera: Ceratopogonidae). Many studies have contributed to clarifying various aspects of its aetiology, epidemiology and vector dynamic; however, BT remains a disease of epidemiological and economic importance that affects ruminants worldwide. Since 2000, the Sardinia region has been the most affected area of the Mediterranean basin.

Desmoplastic small round cell tumors of the pleura: a review of the clinical literature.

Desmoplastic small round cell tumor of the pleura is a rare malignancy, with only a few cases reported in the scientific literature. The aim of the present review is to discuss the demographic, pathological, clinical, and therapeutic features of this rare tumor. English-language articles published since 1989, when the first case of desmoplastic small round cell tumor of the pleura was described, were retrieved, and fifteen cases included in fourteen articles were revised.

Bronchial mucoepidermoid carcinoma: A case report.

Introduction: Bronchial localization of Mucoepidermoid carcinoma (MEC) is rare. The precise nature of these neoplasms is not yet clear and little is known on the histogenesis and pathogenesis of the disease. Here we present a case of a bronchial MEC with a detailed pathological, immunohistochemical, and molecular analysis.

Tracheobronchopathia Osteochondroplastica: a rare case report of a non-smoker and non-atopic patient, with a long history of wheezing since childhood.

Background: Tracheobronchopathia Osteochondroplastica (TBPO) is an uncommon and benign condition characterized by osseous or metaplastic cartilaginous 1-3 mm nodules in the submucosa of the tracheo-bronchial tree. Posterior membranous wall of trachea is typically spared. Ecchondrosis and exostosis nodules can cause chronic inflammation and mucosal metaplasia, stiffness and airway obstruction.

Learning SVM in Kreĭn Spaces.

This paper presents a theoretical foundation for an SVM solver in Kreĭn spaces. Up to now, all methods are based either on the matrix correction, or on non-convex minimization, or on feature-space embedding. Here we justify and evaluate a solution that uses the original (indefinite) similarity measure, in the original Kreĭn space.

Chest tuberculosis with mediastinal asymptomatic lymphadenitis without lung involvement in an immunocompetent patient.

Tuberculosis remains the major cause of morbidity and mortality by a single infectious agent, particularly in developing countries. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of uncommon radiographic patterns of chest tuberculosis. Lymphadenitis is the most common extrapulmonary tuberculosis (TB) manifestation which, in developed countries, occurs more frequently in childhood, but also among adult immigrants from endemic countries and in HIV-infected people.

lp-lq penalty for sparse linear and sparse multiple kernel multitask learning.

Recently, there has been much interest around multitask learning (MTL) problem with the constraints that tasks should share a common sparsity profile. Such a problem can be addressed through a regularization framework where the regularizer induces a joint-sparsity pattern between task decision functions. We follow this principled framework and focus on l(p)-l(q) (with 0 ≤ p ≤ 1 and 1 ≤ q ≤ 2) mixed norms as sparsity-inducing penalties.

Predisposition to repeat breeding in UK cattle and success of artificial insemination alone or in combination with embryo transfer.

To investigate whether there was a subpopulation of repeat breeders (cows or heifers that returned to oestrus after three inseminations) that were less fertile after a fourth artificial insemination (AI) with or without additional embryo transfer, and to estimate the efficacy of AI plus embryo transfer to overcome repeat breeding problems, a two-part investigation was carried out. Part 1 involved 85 repeat breeders and 85 controls subjected to AI alone. In part 2, 128 repeat breeders received AI on day 0 plus an embryo transfer seven days later, while controls received embryo transfer alone on day 7.

Dopamine is involved in the antidepressant-like effect of allopregnanolone in the forced swimming test in female rats.

Evidence from both animal and human studies suggests a role for dopamine in the therapeutic effect of antidepressant drugs. Consistently, dopamine receptor antagonists antagonize the effect of antidepressant drugs in different experimental models of depression. Neurosteroids, and in particular allopregnanolone, seem to be involved both in the pathophysiology of depression and in the mechanism of action of antidepressant drugs, and their role seems to be particularly important in the understanding of mood disturbances related to the different phases of the reproductive life in women.

Cell sex determines anoikis resistance in vascular smooth muscle cells.

Sexual dimorphism, detectable in vascular smooth muscle cells freshly isolated from aorta of male and female rats, is associated with a different susceptibility to radiation-induced apoptosis. In this work we investigated the mechanism underlying this difference and discovered that, in comparison with cells from male rats, cells from female rats show adhesion-associated resistance to apoptosis, the so called anoikis resistance. This is apparently due to a more adhering phenotype, characterized by a well organized actin microfilament cytoskeleton and to an increased phosphorylated focal adhesion kinase, and, more importantly, to a higher propensity to undergo survival by autophagy.

Cell sex: a new look at cell fate studies.

Cell death processes have been widely investigated in recent years in order to elucidate the different pathways involved in the complex machinery implicated in determining cell fate. Different forms of cell death have been described: Apart from the classical form of death known as necrosis, a well-characterized traumatic injury of the cell, several additional forms of cell death have been identified. Of these, apoptosis has been characterized in the greatest detail.

Redox state and gender differences in vascular smooth muscle cells.

Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMC) have been isolated from male and female rat aorta and studied to assess their susceptibility to ultraviolet radiation-induced oxidative stress. Interestingly, a gender difference, in terms of reactive oxygen species production, was detected in both basal and irradiated VSMC. Namely, VSMC from male rats were more susceptible to radiation-induced stress and easier underwent apoptosis in comparison to cells from female rats.