Publications by authors named "Gabriela Ochoa"

Liver transplantation (LT) is a cost-effective therapy for advanced liver disease. Although LT significantly improves long-term survival, it requires strict control of immunosuppressants and their potential complications. Several available immunosuppressive drugs include glucocorticoids, calcineurin inhibitors, mycophenolate, mTOR inhibitors, and anti-CD25 antibodies.

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This study explored the transformative journey of community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in the Bay Islands National Marine Park, Honduras, revealing the interplay of cooperation, funding, and communication in fostering successful conservation initiatives. Using a mixed-method approach, we investigated the historical and legislative process and enabling conditions that led to the transition to CBNRM, based on Gruber's 12 key principles. In regards to the present CBNRM system, we looked at its strengths, its challenges, and whether its functioning is seen as satisfying by local resource-users.

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Article Synopsis
  • Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (iCC) is a serious liver disease and surgery is the only way to cure it, but not many patients can have surgery right away.
  • This study looked at using living donor liver transplants (LDLT) as a treatment for iCC, including a special case of a patient whose cancer couldn’t be removed by surgery.
  • While using liver transplants for this cancer used to have bad results, now it seems to be a better option, especially for certain patients, even though there are still not enough organ donors available.
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Introduction And Importance: Portal biliopathy (PB) is an abnormality of the biliary tree wall due to extrahepatic portal hypertension. Among the complications of portal biliopathy are digestive bleeding, jaundice, and cholangitis. Surgical treatment is an exception when medical management is not possible.

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Population data have shown an association between higher circulating branched-chain amino acids (BCAA) and the severity of insulin resistance in people with diabetes. While several studies have assessed BCAA metabolism as a potential target for regulation, less attention has been paid to the role of L-type amino acid transporter 1 (LAT1), the primary transporter of BCAA in skeletal muscle. The aim of this study was to assess the impact of JPH203 (JPH), a LAT1 inhibitor, on myotube metabolism in both insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant myotubes.

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Antimicrobial resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development. Antibiotic overuse and misuse are the main drivers for the emergence of resistance. It is crucial to optimise the use of existing antibiotics in order to improve medical outcomes, decrease toxicity and reduce the emergence of resistance.

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Background: The increasing prevalence of obesity and need for bariatric surgery as well as the expanding use of living donors for liver transplantation means that potential donors could present with this surgical history. We present 4 cases of liver donors with previous bariatric surgery in our living donor liver transplant program.

Methods: A retrospective descriptive analysis of patients with a bariatric surgery history who underwent right hepatectomy in our living donor liver transplant program is presented.

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Background: Liver transplantation has been demonstrated to be the best treatment for several liver diseases, while grafts are limited. This has caused an increase in waiting lists, making it necessary to find ways to expand the number of organs available for transplantation. Normothermic perfusion (NMP) of liver grafts has been established as an alternative to static cold storage (SCS), but only a small number of perfusion machines are commercially available.

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An optimal recombination operator for two-parent solutions provides the best solution among those that take the value for each variable from one of the parents (gene transmission property). If the solutions are bit strings, the offspring of an optimal recombination operator is optimal in the smallest hyperplane containing the two parent solutions. Exploring this hyperplane is computationally costly, in general, requiring exponential time in the worst case.

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The lack of organs available for transplantation is a global problem. The high mortality rates on the waiting list and the high number of discarded livers are reasons to develop new tools in the preservation and transplantation process. New tools should also be available for low-income countries.

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Vasculobiliary injuries (VBI) caused by cholecystectomies are infrequent but extremely serious. We report a case of a severe VBI successfully treated at our center. A 22-year-old woman underwent an open cholecystectomy as treatment for acute cholecystitis and bile duct stones.

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Mass production and use of antibiotics has led to the rise of resistant bacteria, a problem possibly exacerbated by inappropriate and non-optimal application. Antibiotic treatment often follows fixed-dose regimens, with a standard dose of antibiotic administered equally spaced in time. But are such fixed-dose regimens optimal or can alternative regimens be designed to increase efficacy? Yet, few mathematical models have aimed to identify optimal treatments based on biological data of infections inside a living host.

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Connection patterns among (LONs) can inform heuristic design for optimisation. LON research has predominantly required complete enumeration of a fitness landscape, thereby restricting analysis to problems diminutive in size compared to real-life situations. LON algorithms are therefore important.

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Antibiotic resistance is one of the major challenges we face in modern times. Antibiotic use, especially their overuse, is the single most important driver of antibiotic resistance. Efforts have been made to reduce unnecessary drug prescriptions, but limited work is devoted to optimising dosage regimes when they are prescribed.

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Internet data are being increasingly integrated into health informatics research and are becoming a useful tool for exploring human behavior. The most popular tool for examining online behavior is Google Trends, an open tool that provides information on trends and the variations of online interest in selected keywords and topics over time. Online search traffic data from Google have been shown to be useful in analyzing human behavior toward health topics and in predicting disease occurrence and outbreaks.

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Generalized Partition Crossover (GPX) is a deterministic recombination operator developed for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Partition crossover operators return the best of reachable offspring, where is the number of recombining components. This article introduces a new GPX2 operator, which finds more recombining components than GPX or Iterative Partial Transcription (IPT).

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Background: In the era of information overload, are big data analytics the answer to access and better manage available knowledge? Over the last decade, the use of Web-based data in public health issues, that is, infodemiology, has been proven useful in assessing various aspects of human behavior. Google Trends is the most popular tool to gather such information, and it has been used in several topics up to this point, with health and medicine being the most focused subject. Web-based behavior is monitored and analyzed in order to examine actual human behavior so as to predict, better assess, and even prevent health-related issues that constantly arise in everyday life.

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The search landscape is a common metaphor to describe the structure of computational search spaces. Different landscape metrics can be computed and used to predict search difficulty. Yet, the metaphor falls short in visualisation terms because it is hard to represent complex landscapes, both in terms of size and dimensionality.

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Directed evolution has proven to be an invaluable tool for protein engineering; however, there is still a need for developing new approaches to continue to improve the efficiency and efficacy of these methods. Here, we demonstrate a new method for library design that applies a previously developed bioinformatic method, Statistical Coupling Analysis (SCA). SCA uses homologous enzymes to identify amino acid positions that are mutable and functionally important and engage in synergistic interactions between amino acids.

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The increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria poses a threat to the continued use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. The overuse and misuse of antibiotics has been identified as a significant driver in the emergence of resistance. Finding optimal treatment regimens is therefore critical in ensuring the prolonged effectiveness of these antibiotics.

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Objectives: This study extends a previous mathematical model of cancer cytotoxic chemotherapy, which considered cycling tumor cells and interactions with the immune system, by incorporating a different type of drug: a cytostatic agent. The effect of a cytostatic drug is to arrest cells in a phase of their cycle. In consequence, once tumor cells are arrested and synchronized they can be targeted with a cytotoxic agent, thus maximizing cell kill fraction and minimizing normal cell killing.

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We propose a network characterization of combinatorial fitness landscapes by adapting the notion of inherent networks proposed for energy surfaces. We use the well-known family of NK landscapes as an example. In our case the inherent network is the graph whose vertices represent the local maxima in the landscape, and the edges account for the transition probabilities between their corresponding basins of attraction.

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