Phytoremediation Potential of Flax Grown on Multimetal Contaminated Soils: A Field Experiment.

The aim of this study was to assess the phytoremediation potential of fiber flax ( L., var. Calista) cultivated in a soil contaminated with multiple metals, under real field conditions.

Oral Supplementation with Hydroxytyrosol Synthesized Using Genetically Modified Strains and Essential Oils Mixture: A Pilot Study on the Safety and Biological Activity.

Several natural compounds have been explored as immune-boosting, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory dietary supplements. Amongst them, hydroxytyrosol, a natural antioxidant found in olive products, and endemic medicinal plants have attracted the scientific community's and industry's interest. We investigated the safety and biological activity of a standardised supplement containing 10 mg of hydroxytyrosol synthesized using genetically modified strains and equal amounts (8.

Herbicide Use in the Era of Farm to Fork: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Implications.

Climate change mitigation is a major concern of the European Union (EU). In 2019, the EU presented the European Green Deal (EGD), a new environmental strategy that aimed to neutralize climate change by 2050. Within its policy areas, the EGD included the Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy that aims to reduce pesticide use by 50%, by 2030.

Muscle Cross-Sectional Area Segmentation in Transverse Ultrasound Images Using Vision Transformers.

Automatically measuring a muscle’s cross-sectional area is an important application in clinical practice that has been studied extensively in recent years for its ability to assess muscle architecture. Additionally, an adequately segmented cross-sectional area can be used to estimate the echogenicity of the muscle, another valuable parameter correlated with muscle quality. This study assesses state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and vision transformers for automating this task in a new, large, and diverse database.

The Potential of Transexamic Acid Use for Wide Awake Local Anesthesia No Tourniquet.

Tranexamic acid (TXA) is a drug commonly used to decrease intraoperative bleeding. Its use in various types of surgery is well defined; however, its use in plastic surgery and even more so, hand surgery is not as well researched. Concurrently, the use of wide-awake local anesthesia no tourniquet (WALANT) procedures has increased in popularity.

SIFT-CNN: When Convolutional Neural Networks Meet Dense SIFT Descriptors for Image and Sequence Classification.

Despite the success of hand-crafted features in computer visioning for many years, nowadays, this has been replaced by end-to-end learnable features that are extracted from deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Whilst CNNs can learn robust features directly from image pixels, they require large amounts of samples and extreme augmentations. On the contrary, hand-crafted features, like SIFT, exhibit several interesting properties as they can provide local rotation invariance.

Automatic Extraction of Muscle Parameters with Attention UNet in Ultrasonography.

Automatically delineating the deep and superficial aponeurosis of the skeletal muscles from ultrasound images is important in many aspects of the clinical routine. In particular, finding muscle parameters, such as thickness, fascicle length or pennation angle, is a time-consuming clinical task requiring both human labour and specialised knowledge. In this study, a multi-step solution for automating these tasks is presented.

Sustainable diets & medicinal aromatic plants in Greece: Perspectives towards climate change.

In recent years, climate change continuously concerns the scientific community about its effects on agrobiodiversity, food safety and human health. Remodeling to sustainable diets and lifestyles is proved to be the most radical need to tackle this grave phenomenon. The goals of this commentary are to present the Greek traditional Mediterranean diet as a principal sustainable diet, to emphasize the role of Medicinal and Aromatic Plants in Greece as indispensable components of this healthy dietary pattern, and to discuss the potential results of climate change at their phytochemical content.

Muscle Type and Gender Recognition Utilising High-Level Textural Representation in Musculoskeletal Ultrasonography.

Human assistive technology and computer-aided diagnosis is an emerging field in the area of medical imaging. Following the recent advances in this domain, a study for integrating machine learning techniques in musculoskeletal ultrasonography images was conducted. The goal of this attempt was to investigate how feature extraction techniques, that capture higher-level information, perform in identifying human characteristics.

How does long-term drought acclimation modify structure-function relationships? A quantitative approach to leaf phenotypic plasticity of barley.

Under drought conditions the growth and survival of a plant depend on its adaptive characteristics and acclimation ability. Adaptation refers to inherent morpho-physiological characters providing protection against water losses. Acclimation, however, is a special case of phenotypic plasticity: environment-dependent phenotypic expression resulting to a 'new' phenotype through drought-induced modulations in leaf morphology, anatomy and physiology.

Microscopy image analysis of p63 immunohistochemically stained laryngeal cancer lesions for predicting patient 5-year survival.

The aim of the present study was to design a microscopy image analysis (MIA) system for predicting the 5-year survival of patients with laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma, employing histopathology images of lesions, which had been immunohistochemically (IHC) stained for p63 expression. Biopsy materials from 42 patients, with verified laryngeal cancer and follow-up, were selected from the archives of the University Hospital of Patras, Greece. Twenty six patients had survived more than 5 years and 16 less than 5 years after the first diagnosis.

Exploiting expert systems in cardiology: a comparative study.

An improved Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) in the field of critical cardiovascular diseases is presented. The system stems from an earlier application based only on a Sugeno-type Fuzzy Expert System (FES) with the addition of an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) computational structure. Thus, inherent characteristics of ANNs, along with the human-like knowledge representation of fuzzy systems are integrated.

Computer based correlation of the texture of P63 expressed nuclei with histological tumour grade, in laryngeal carcinomas.

Background: P63 immunostaining has been considered as potential prognostic factor in laryngeal cancer. Considering that P63 is mainly nuclear stain, a possible correlation between the texture of P63-stained nuclei and the tumor's grade could be of value to diagnosis, since this may be related to biologic information imprinted as texture on P63 expressed nuclei.

Objective: To investigate the association between P63 stained nuclei and histologic grade in laryngeal tumor lesions.

Computer-based image analysis system designed to differentiate between low-grade and high-grade laryngeal cancer cases.

Objective: To design a pattern recognition (PR) system for discriminating between low- and high-grade laryngeal cancer cases, employing immunohistochemically stained, for p63 expression, histopathology images.

Study Design: The PR system was designed to assist in the physician's diagnosis for improving patient survival. The material comprised 55 verified cases of laryngeal cancer, 21 of low-grade and 34 of high-grade malignancy.

Analyzing functional brain connectivity by means of commute times: a new approach and its application to track event-related dynamics.

There is growing interest in studying the association of functional connectivity patterns with particular cognitive tasks. The ability of graphs to encapsulate relational data has been exploited in many related studies, where functional networks (sketched by different neural synchrony estimators) are characterized by a rich repertoire of graph-related metrics. We introduce commute times (CTs) as an alternative way to capture the true interplay between the nodes of a functional connectivity graph (FCG).

Characterisation and management of ash produced in the hospital waste incinerator of Athens, Greece.

Bottom and fly ash samples (BASH and FASH) from the APOTEFROTIRAS S.A. medical waste incinerator (Athens, Greece) were investigated.

Hyperthermic isolated limb perfusion for recurrent melanomas and soft tissue sarcomas: feasibility and reproducibility in a multi-institutional Hellenic collaborative study.

Hyperthermic isolated limb perfusion with TNF-alpha and melphalan (TM-HILP) is a complicated surgical procedure. Herein, we present the experience of the Hellenic collaborating centers with TM-HILP for inoperable in-transit melanoma and soft tissue sarcoma (STS) of the extremities to examine safety and feasibility of collaborating as a multi-institutional group for future research studies. From 2001 to 2009, twenty patients (median age 63.

Acute Haemophilus parainfluenzae endocarditis: a case report.

Introduction: Numerous pathogens can cause infective endocarditis, including Haemophilus parainfluenzae. H. parainfluenzae is part of the H.

Concurrent development of spontaneous pyomyositis due to Staphylococcus epidermidis and Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease.

Staphylococcus epidermidis is a common cause of infections associated with prosthetic devices and immunocompromised patients. Spontaneous pyomyositis due to the above pathogen is very uncommon. Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease (KFD) is a subacute necrotizing lymphadenitis, first described in Japan.

Characteristics of ascitic fluid in cardiac ascites.

Objective: Cardiac ascites remains a rare entity with unique clinical and pathogenetic features that are not adequately recognized by clinicians. The purpose of this study was to contribute towards elucidating the nature of cardiac ascites.

Material And Methods: We describe a series of 26 ascitic fluid samples from eight patients with cardiac ascites that were referred and further evaluated for the etiology and nature of their ascites.

Cellular redox-status is associated with regulation of frond division in Spirodela polyrrhiza.

We investigated a possible relationship between the levels of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the stimulation of frond division of the aquatic plant Spirodela polyrrhiza (duckweed) during a 7-day experimental culture period. In particular, we monitored superoxide concentration using a state-of-the-art cell biosensor. A considerable reduction in ROS and superoxide concentration was observed during the first 2 days of culture, whereas duckweed cultures achieved near exponential growth rates after the second day.

Intraoperative electron beam radiotherapy followed by moderate doses of external beam radiotherapy in the treatment of resected soft tissue sarcomas of the extremities.

Purpose: Soft tissue sarcomas (STS) have a high incidence of local recurrence. In an effort to improve the local control rate and the survival in patients with STS, treatment strategies employing intraoperative electron beam radiotherapy (IOERT) in combination with external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and extensive surgical resection have been explored. This study assesses the rate of overall survival (OS), local control and toxicity of this multimodal approach for primary and recurrent STS of the extremities.

Multiple brown tumors of the ribs simulating malignancy.

Bone disease associated with primary hyperparathyroidism, known as osteitis fibrosa cystica, is now very rarely encountered, since the parathyroid disorder is most often diagnosed at the early stage of asymptomatic hypercalcemia. Here, we report the case of a patient with multiple pleural-based masses and hypercalcemia, which led to the presumptive diagnosis of malignancy. However, histological and laboratory data were consistent with the development of brown tumors of the ribs due to underlying severe hyperparathyroidism.

A case of insulin edema with inappropriate hyperaldosteronism.

Edema of variable severity is an uncommon complication of insulin treatment. Increased sodium reabsorption, transient proteinuria and hypoalbuminemia are the most frequently reported laboratory disorders at the time of edema formation. This case report describes a 44-yr-old man with a 4-month history of anorexia, polyuria, polydipsia and weight loss of 25 kg who presented with diabetic ketoacidosis.

A region dissimilarity relation that combines feature-space and spatial information for color image segmentation.

This paper proposes a methodology that incorporates principles from cluster analysis and graph representation to achieve efficient image segmentation results. More specifically, a feature-based, inter-region dissimilarity relation is considered here in order to determine the dissimilarity matrix in a graph-based segmentation scheme. The calculation of the dissimilarity function between adjacent elementary image regions is based on the proximity of each region's feature vector to the main clusters that are formed by the image samples in the feature space.