Interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) are pathologies affecting the pulmonary interstitium and, less frequently, the alveolar and vascular epithelia. Bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) is commonly used in ILD evaluation since it allows the sampling of the lower respiratory tract. The prognostic value of BAL cell counts in ILD is unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurol Neuroimmunol Neuroinflamm
November 2024
Background And Objectives: Recovery of vision after acute optic neuritis (AON) is critical to improving the quality of life of people with demyelinating diseases. The objective of the study was to prospectively assess the changes in visual acuity, retinal layer thickness, and cortical visual network in patients with AON to identify the predictors of permanent visual disability.
Methods: We studied a prospective cohort of 88 consecutive patients with AON with 6-month follow-up using high and low-contrast (2.
We aimed to compare the ability of diffusion tensor imaging and multi-compartment spherical mean technique to detect focal tissue damage and in distinguishing between different connectivity patterns associated with varying clinical outcomes in multiple sclerosis (MS). Seventy-six people diagnosed with MS were scanned using a SIEMENS Prisma Fit 3T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), employing both conventional (T1w and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery) and advanced diffusion MRI sequences from which fractional anisotropy (FA) and microscopic FA (μFA) maps were generated. Using automated fiber quantification (AFQ), we assessed diffusion profiles across multiple white matter (WM) pathways to measure the sensitivity of anisotropy diffusion metrics in detecting localized tissue damage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS Comput Biol
February 2024
Complex diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis (MS) cover a wide range of biological scales, from genes and proteins to cells and tissues, up to the full organism. In fact, any phenotype for an organism is dictated by the interplay among these scales. We conducted a multilayer network analysis and deep phenotyping with multi-omics data (genomics, phosphoproteomics and cytomics), brain and retinal imaging, and clinical data, obtained from a multicenter prospective cohort of 328 patients and 90 healthy controls.
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