Retinal OCT-Derived Texture Features as Potential Biomarkers for Early Diagnosis and Progression of Diabetic Retinopathy.

Purpose: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is usually diagnosed many years after diabetes onset. Indeed, an early diagnosis of DR remains a notable challenge, and, thus, developing novel approaches for earlier disease detection is of utmost importance. We aim to explore the potential of texture analysis of optical coherence tomography (OCT) retinal images in detecting retinal changes in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic animals at "silent" disease stages when early retinal molecular and cellular changes that cannot be clinically detectable are already occurring.

Accelerated Infant Brain Rhythm Maturation in Autism.

Electroencephalography (EEG) captures characteristic oscillatory shifts in infant brain rhythms over the first year of life, offering unique insights into early functional brain development and potential markers for detecting neural differences associated with autism. This study used functional principal component analysis (FPCA) to derive dynamic markers of spectral maturation from task-free EEG recordings collected at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from 87 infants, 51 of whom were at higher likelihood of developing autism due to an older sibling diagnosed with the condition. FPCA revealed three principal components explaining over 96% of the variance in infant power spectra, with power increases between 6 and 9 Hz (FPC1) representing the most significant age-related trend, accounting for more than 71% of the variance.

Assessment of quality of life using the EORTC 30 protocol in patients with soft tissue sarcoma undergoing surgical treatment.

Objective: To evaluate the quality of life among patients with Soft Tissue Sarcomas treated at the Evangelic Mackenzie Hospital (HUEM) from 2018 to 2024 and undergoing surgical treatment.

Material And Methods: descriptive and cross-sectional analysis of 23 patients with soft tissue neoplasia who underwent surgery and whether they underwent neoadjuvant or adjuvant clinical treatments. Epidemiological, clinical, and pathological data were considered.

Optimization of a disposable pipette tips extraction (DPX) for the analysis of psychoactive substances in sweat specimens using Design of Experiments.

Novel psychoactive substances (NPS) continue to emerge in the marketplace and are often found as substances in traditional illicit drug materials, and users are often unaware of the presence of other drugs. The proper identification and confirmation of the exposure to a drug is made possible when a biological specimen is collected and tested. Sweat is an alternative biological matrix of great interest for clinical, and forensic analysis.

Autosomal-dominant macular dystrophy linked to a chromosome 17 tandem duplication.

Hereditary macular dystrophies (HMDs) are a genetically diverse group of disorders that cause central vision loss due to photoreceptor and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) damage. We investigated a family with a presumed novel autosomal-dominant HMD characterized by faint, hypopigmented RPE changes involving the central retina. Genome and RNA sequencing identified the disease-causing variant to be a 560 kb tandem duplication on chromosome 17 [NC_000017.