Publications by authors named "Dominik Muller"

Article Synopsis
  • The use of "Wildling mice" with a natural microbiome presents a unique research tool for studying human-like immune systems, but poses challenges for animal husbandry due to their diverse microbial content.
  • A specialized facility was created at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin to manage these mice, incorporating unique designs and protocols for hygiene and microbiome containment.
  • The study shows that "Wildling mice" develop distinct immune cell populations compared to SPF mice, suggesting that using these mice could improve the relevancy of preclinical findings for human health.
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Background: Therapeutic apheresis (TA) are promising treatment option for neuroimmunological disorders. In paediatrics, the available data is limited, particularly for the use of IA. The aim of this study was to analyse the use of PE and IA in children and adolescents, with emphasis on outcome and neurological course after treatment as well as the safety of the two modalities.

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The integration of machine learning into the domain of radiomics has revolutionized the approach to personalized medicine, particularly in oncology. Our research presents RadTA (RADiomics Trend Analysis), a novel framework developed to facilitate the automatic analysis of quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIBs) from time-series CT volumes. RadTA is designed to bridge a technical gap for medical experts and enable sophisticated radiomic analyses without deep learning expertise.

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Very small superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (VSOPs) show diagnostic value in multiple diseases as a promising MRI contrast agent. Macrophages predominantly ingest VSOPs, but the mechanism remains unclear. This study identifies differences in VSOP uptake between pro-inflammatory M1 and anti-inflammatory M2 macrophages and explores the role of the pericellular glycocalyx.

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Background: Preeclampsia is a severe hypertensive disorder in pregnancy that causes preterm delivery, maternal and fetal morbidity, mortality, and life-long sequelae. Understanding the pathogenesis of preeclampsia is a critical first step toward protecting mother and child from this syndrome and increased risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. However, effective early predictive tests and therapies for preeclampsia are scarce.

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  • High salt (HS) intake can worsen immune responses and contribute to the development of hypertensive vascular diseases, particularly after exposure to Ang II, a hormone that raises blood pressure.
  • In experiments with mice, a short period of HS consumption led to increased inflammation and a higher occurrence of severe vascular issues when combined with Ang II infusion, despite no blood pressure differences between groups.
  • The study concludes that transient HS intake triggers a mild immune response that becomes problematic when followed by Ang II exposure, suggesting that HS acts as a precursor to more significant hypertension-related health risks.
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  • Microvascular imaging is becoming crucial for diagnosing and treating various diseases, highlighting the need to study how different organs communicate through their vascular systems.
  • A new perfusion protocol has been developed to effectively deliver a contrast agent to the micro-vessels of multiple organs in the same animal model, ensuring consistency and repeatability in the process.
  • The research also focuses on optimizing image acquisition by balancing shorter scanning times with high spatial resolution, resulting in a robust protocol for investigating vascular health and disease across different organs.
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  • Large datasets of fundus images for eye diseases have been collected to train deep learning models for diagnosing common conditions like diabetic retinopathy, but many systems overlook rare, sight-threatening diseases.
  • A grand challenge called "Retinal Image Analysis for multi-Disease Detection" was held at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging to enhance automatic detection for both common and rare eye diseases, using a new dataset called RFMiD.
  • The challenge attracted significant interest, with 74 submissions, and the best solutions combined techniques like data-preprocessing, augmentation, and model ensembling to improve detection capabilities across a wider range of ocular diseases.
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  • Metformin, a diabetes medication, appears to offer cardiovascular protection and influences gut microbiota in hypertensive rats.
  • In the study, metformin treatment increased short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) in feces, lowered blood pressure, and improved cardiac function, despite some increase in cardiac hypertrophy.
  • The research suggests that SCFA levels may mediate the observed anti-inflammatory and blood pressure-lowering effects of metformin, even in the absence of diabetes.
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Introduction: Glioblastoma (GB) is one of the most aggressive tumors of the brain. Despite intensive treatment, the average overall survival (OS) is 15-18 months. Therefore, it is helpful to be able to assess a patient's OS to tailor treatment more specifically to the course of the disease.

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M2-like macrophages promote tumor growth and cancer immune evasion. This study used an in vitro model to investigate how hypoxia and tumor metabolism affect macrophage polarization. Liver cancer cells (HepG2 and VX2) and macrophages (THP1) were cultured under hypoxic (0.

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Data-driven decision making can improve the situation for caregivers and residents in nursing homes. However, smaller facilities often lack the technical and personnel resources required to prepare and analyze data. We introduce a conceptual framework to enable data transformation and analyzation in smaller nursing homes.

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Prostate cancer is a dominant health concern calling for advanced diagnostic tools. Utilizing digital pathology and artificial intelligence, this study explores the potential of 11 deep neural network architectures for automated Gleason grading in prostate carcinoma focusing on comparing traditional and recent architectures. A standardized image classification pipeline, based on the AUCMEDI framework, facilitated robust evaluation using an in-house dataset consisting of 34,264 annotated tissue tiles.

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Intestinal absorption of phosphate is bimodal, consisting of a transcellular pathway and a poorly characterized paracellular mode, even though the latter one contributes to the bulk of absorption under normal dietary conditions. Claudin-3 (Cldn3), a tight junction protein present along the whole intestine in mice, has been proposed to tighten the paracellular pathway for phosphate. The aim of this work was to characterize the phosphate-related phenotype of Cldn3-deficient mice.

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Challenges drive the state-of-the-art of automated medical image analysis. The quantity of public training data that they provide can limit the performance of their solutions. Public access to the training methodology for these solutions remains absent.

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Background: Infantile nephropathic cystinosis (INC) is a rare lysosomal storage disorder, mostly and often firstly affecting the kidneys, together with impaired disharmonious growth and rickets, eventually resulting in progressive chronic kidney disease (CKD). With the introduction of cysteamine therapy, most pediatric patients reach adulthood with no need for kidney replacement therapy. Still, detailed changes in INC patients' clinical and morphological presentation over the past decades have not yet been thoroughly investigated.

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Background: Occult blood in the urine, or microhematuria, is a common finding (about 10%) in children and young adults. It is often of brief duration and therefore harmless. In persistent microhematuria, acanthocytes in the urine are a frequently unrecognized early marker of glomerular kidney disease.

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Background: Kidney transplantation (KTx) from small donors is associated with inferior graft survival in registry studies, whereas single-center studies show favorable results.

Methods: We compared 175 pediatric KTx from small donors ≤20 kg (SDKTx) with 170 age-matched recipients from adult donors (ADKTx) from 20 centers within the Cooperative European Paediatric Renal Transplant Initiative registry. Graft survival and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) were analyzed by Cox regression and mixed models.

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Many genomic, anatomical and functional differences exist between the medullary (MTAL) and the cortical thick ascending limb of the loop of Henle (CTAL), including a higher expression of claudin-10 (CLDN10) in the MTAL than in the CTAL. Therefore, we assessed to what extent the gene expression is a determinant of differential gene expression between MTAL and CTAL. RNAs extracted from CTAL and MTAL microdissected from wild type (WT) and Cldn10 knock out mice (cKO) were analyzed by RNAseq.

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The combination of vancomycin and piperacillin/tazobactam (V+P/T) is used for empirical antibiotic treatment of severe infections, especially in immunocompromised patients and those colonized with multidrug-resistant bacteria. Nephrotoxicity is a frequently observed adverse effect of vancomycin. Its risk can be reduced by therapeutic drug monitoring and adjusted dosing.

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Patients with mutations in suffer from familial hypomagnesaemia with hypercalciuria and nephrocalcinosis (FHHNC) which can lead to renal insufficiency. Mice lacking claudin-16 show hypomagnesemia and hypercalciuria, but no nephrocalcinosis. Calcium oxalate and calcium phosphate are the most common insoluble calcium salts that accumulate in the kidney in the case of nephrocalcinosis, however, the formation of these salts is less favored in acidic conditions.

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Background: Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) entails high morbidity and mortality rates. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are capable of generating highly accurate predictions from imaging data. Our objective was to predict mortality in SAH patients by processing initial CT scans using a CNN-based algorithm.

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Background: Venous leak appears to be the most common cause of vasculogenic erectile dysfunction (ED), which can be treated with venous embolization. Traditionally, conventional cavernosography was used for the diagnosis and treatment planning of venous leak. Recently, computed tomography (CT) cavernosography was introduced as a novel cross-sectional imaging method proposed to be advantageous over conventional cavernosography.

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