Publications by authors named "Castellani G"

The application of three-dimensional (3D) cell cultures such as spheroids and organoids is growing in popularity both in academia and industry. However, morphology of the 3D architecture remains remarkably understudied. Here, we introduce an open-access Spheroid Light Microscopy Image Atlas (SLiMIA) that can serve as a training set for morphology studies of 3D cell cultures.

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Background And Objectives: Several computational pipelines for biomedical data have been proposed to stratify patients and to predict their prognosis through survival analysis. However, these analyses are usually performed independently, without integrating the information derived from each of them. Clustering of survival data is an underexplored problem, and current approaches are limited for biomedical applications, whose data are usually heterogeneous and multimodal, with poor scalability for high-dimensionality.

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Background: The modern approach to treating rectal cancer, which involves total mesorectal excision directed by imaging assessments, has significantly enhanced patient outcomes. However, locally recurrent rectal cancer (LRRC) continues to be a significant clinical issue. Identifying LRRC through imaging is complex, due to the mismatch between fibrosis and inflammatory pelvic tissue.

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The aim of this work was to describe the DNA methylation signature and to identify genes associated with neuropathic pain in type 2 diabetes mellitus. We analyzed two independent diabetic neuropathy cohorts: PROPGER consisting of 72 painful and 67 painless patients recruited at the German Diabetes Center in Düsseldorf (DE), and PROPENG comprising 27 painful and 65 painless diabetic neuropathy patients recruited at the University of Manchester (UK). Genome-wide methylation data was generated using Illumina Infinium Methylation EPIC v1.

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Hematological malignancies are a diverse group of cancers developing in the peripheral blood, the bone marrow or the lymphatic system. Due to their heterogeneity, the identification of novel and advanced molecular signatures is essential for enhancing their characterization and facilitate its translation to new pharmaceutical solutions and eventually to clinical applications. In this study, we collected publicly available microarray data for more than five thousand subjects, across thirteen hematological malignancies.

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Cellular motility is essential for making and maintaining multicellular organisms throughout their lifespan. Migrating cells can move either individually or collectively by a crawling movement that links the cytoskeletal activity to the adhesion surface. In vitro stimulation by electric fields can be achieved by direct, capacitive or inductive coupled setups.

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  • Since 2017, combining targeted therapies with traditional chemotherapy has led to better outcomes for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients.
  • A study of 5,359 AML patients over 20 years used data from the HARMONY Alliance to analyze treatment outcomes during four 5-year periods from 1997 to 2016.
  • Results show significant improvements in 5-year survival rates and reduced 60-day mortality (from 13.0% to 4.7%), even across different genetic risk groups, indicating that the advancements in treatment have positively affected patient outcomes.
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Hyperplexed in-situ targeted proteomics via antibody immunodetection (i.e., >15 markers) is changing how we classify cells and tissues.

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Clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), marked by the accumulation of somatic mutations in hematopoietic stem cells, significantly elevates the risk of all-cause mortality, mainly due to cardiovascular events. Therefore, investigating this pathophysiological phenomenon is crucial for understanding cardiovascular aging and enhancing both health span and lifespan. In the present study, we examined samples of subjects enrolled within the angiographically controlled Verona Heart Study (VHS), which provides a robust model for cardiovascular aging, particularly regarding coronary artery disease (CAD).

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  • The WHO and International Consensus Classification 2022 aim to improve diagnosis and treatment decisions for myelodysplastic syndromes, but disparities in their implementation exist.
  • A panel of experts used a data-driven method and the Delphi consensus process to align the two classifications, focusing on genomic features to create harmonized labels for distinct clusters.
  • Key findings identified nine genomic clusters, with the most significant linked to biallelic TP53 inactivation, and highlighted the inadequacy of traditional morphological assessments in capturing the complexity of these diseases.
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  • Acute kidney injury (AKI) significantly increases the risk of serious health issues and costs in healthcare, affecting up to 50% of ICU patients, especially the elderly and those with existing health problems.
  • Maintaining proper blood flow and auto-regulation in the kidneys is crucial, influenced by various neurohormonal processes and the tubuloglomerular feedback mechanism.
  • Effective management of AKI includes careful fluid management to avoid complications like volume overload, with the review offering insights on managing fluid, utilizing biomarkers, and potential drug treatments.
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  • Impulsivity caused by dopaminergic drugs like pramipexole and aripiprazole can lead to serious behavioral addictions, affecting patients' social lives and overall quality of life.
  • The study aimed to investigate the signs and secondary effects of this impulsivity, using comprehensive data analysis to identify key symptoms for potential intervention.
  • Results indicate that a notable percentage of patients experience drug-induced impulsivity, with common issues including obsessive-compulsive disorder and economic problems, highlighting the need for better awareness and management in clinical settings.
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Balanced rearrangements involving the KMT2A gene (KMT2Ar) are recurrent genetic abnormalities in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), but there is lack of consensus regarding the prognostic impact of different fusion partners. Moreover, prognostic implications of gene mutations co-occurring with KMT2Ar are not established. From the HARMONY AML database 205 KMT2Ar adult patients were selected, 185 of whom had mutational information by a panel-based next-generation sequencing analysis.

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Polar cod (Boreogadus saida) is an endemic key species of the Arctic Ocean ecosystem. The ecology of this forage fish is well studied in Arctic shelf habitats where a large part of its population lives. However, knowledge about its ecology in the central Arctic Ocean (CAO), including its use of the sea-ice habitat, is hitherto very limited.

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Purpose: Rare cancers constitute over 20% of human neoplasms, often affecting patients with unmet medical needs. The development of effective classification and prognostication systems is crucial to improve the decision-making process and drive innovative treatment strategies. We have created and implemented MOSAIC, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based framework designed for multimodal analysis, classification, and personalized prognostic assessment in rare cancers.

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The Enhanced-Deep-Super-Resolution (EDSR) model is a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network suitable for improving image spatial resolution. It was previously trained with general-purpose pictures and then, in this work, tested on biomedical magnetic resonance (MR) images, comparing the network outcomes with traditional up-sampling techniques. We explored possible changes in the model response when different MR sequences were analyzed.

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  • Allogeneic hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation is the only curative option for patients with myelodysplastic syndromes, and the timing of this treatment is crucial for maximizing benefits and minimizing risks.
  • A decision support system was developed to identify the optimal timing for HSCT based on clinical and genomic data from a large study of over 7,000 patients, comparing outcomes using the Molecular International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS-M) against traditional scoring methods.
  • The findings suggest that patients with lower risk can benefit from delaying transplantation, while those at higher risk should undergo it immediately, indicating that the IPSS-M strategy significantly improves life expectancy and supports personalized treatment plans.
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Healthcare-associated infections (HAIa) and antimicrobial resistance are expected to be the next threat to human health and are most frequent in people with severe acquired brain injury (SABI), who can be more easily colonized by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). The study's aim is to investigate the impact of MDRO colonizations and infections on SABI rehabilitation outcomes. This retrospective observational study was performed in a tertiary referral specialized rehabilitation hospital.

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Proton beam therapy is considered a step forward with respect to electromagnetic radiation, thanks to the reduction in the dose delivered. Among unwanted effects to healthy tissue, cardiovascular complications are a known long-term radiotherapy complication. The transcriptional response of cardiac tissue from xenografted BALB/c nude mice obtained at 3 and 10 days after proton irradiation covering both the tumor region and the underlying healthy tissue was analyzed as a function of dose and time.

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Transglutaminase type 2 (TG2) is the most ubiquitously expressed member of the transglutaminase family. TG2 catalyzes the transamidation reaction leading to several protein post-translational modifications and it is also implicated in signal transduction thanks to its GTP binding/hydrolyzing activity. In the nervous system, TG2 regulates multiple physiological processes, such as development, neuronal cell death and differentiation, and synaptic plasticity.

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It is increasingly clear that the central nervous system (CNS) relies significantly on both adaptive and innate immune cells for its repair and lifelong maintenance. These interactions hold profound implications for brain aging and neurodegeneration. Recent work by Smyth et al.

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Treatment with long-acting injection (LAI) antipsychotics, such as paliperidone palmitate, has improved the quality of life in terms of symptoms and prevention of relapses in patients with schizophrenia. Although there are plenty of evidences about the efficacy and safety of paliperidone palmitate 3-monthly injection (PP3M) in adults with schizophrenia, literature appears lacking about the use of LAIs during pregnancy. We hereby describe the clinical case of a pregnant woman affected by schizophrenia (DSM-5-TR), taking pharmacological treatment of PP3M.

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  • Quantitative computed tomography (QCT)-based models have shown better accuracy in predicting hip fractures compared to traditional bone mineral density methods, but manual femur segmentation from CT images is time-consuming and inconsistent.
  • This study proposes a semi-automated segmentation method using bone and joint enhancement filters and graph-cut algorithms, which was tested on 10 subjects and compared to manual segmentation for accuracy.
  • The results indicate that the semi-automated method significantly improves segmentation fidelity and reduces time while maintaining similar hip fracture risk assessments, suggesting its potential for large-scale applications and further development of automated techniques.
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DNA methylation clocks presents advantageous characteristics with respect to the ambitious goal of identifying very early markers of disease, based on the concept that accelerated ageing is a reliable predictor in this sense. Such tools, being epigenomic based, are expected to be conditioned by sex and tissue specificities, and this work is about quantifying this dependency as well as that from the regression model and the size of the training set. Our quantitative results indicate that elastic-net penalization is the best performing strategy, and better so when-unsurprisingly-the data set is bigger; sex does not appear to condition clocks performances and tissue specific clocks appear to perform better than generic blood clocks.

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  • Most new drug approvals rely on large randomized clinical trials (RCTs), but results can vary even among similar trials, making it hard to apply findings broadly.
  • There is a gap between conclusions drawn from RCTs and those based on real-world data (RWD), which reflects actual patient experiences outside of controlled settings.
  • The use of real-world evidence (RWE) from RWD, especially when enhanced by artificial intelligence, is gaining traction in haematology and could help support regulatory decisions alongside traditional trial data.
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