Standardizing Care of Neuro-oncology Patients Using a Customized Electronic Medical Record Toolkit.

Objective: To develop and implement a customized toolkit within the electronic medical record (EMR) to standardize care of patients with brain tumors.

Patients And Methods: We built a customized structured clinical documentation support toolkit to capture standardized data at office visits. We detail the process by which this toolkit was conceptualized and developed.

Longitudinal Monitoring of Parkinson's Disease in Different Ethnic Cohorts: The DodoNA and LONG-PD Study.

Different factors influence severity, progression, and outcomes in Parkinson's disease (PD). Lack of standardized clinical assessment limits comparison of outcomes and availability of well-characterized cohorts for collaborative studies. Structured clinical documentation support (SCDS) was developed within the DNA Predictions to Improve Neurological Health (DodoNA) project to standardize clinical assessment and identify molecular predictors of disease progression.

Factors Affecting Cognition and Depression in Adult Patients with Epilepsy.

Background And Purpose: Epilepsy patients are more likely to experience depressive symptoms and cognitive impairment compared to individuals in the general population. As the reasons for this are not definitively known, we sought to determine what factors correlate most strongly with cognition and a screening test for depression in epilepsy patients.

Methods: Our study population included 379 adult patients diagnosed with epilepsy or seizure in our neurology clinic.

regQTLs: Single nucleotide polymorphisms that modulate microRNA regulation of gene expression in tumors.

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with trait diversity and disease susceptibility, yet their functional properties often remain unclear. It has been hypothesized that SNPs in microRNA binding sites may disrupt gene regulation by microRNAs (miRNAs), short non-coding RNAs that bind to mRNA and downregulate the target gene. While several studies have predicted the location of SNPs in miRNA binding sites, to date there has been no comprehensive analysis of their impact on miRNA regulation.

Lévy-like movement patterns of metastatic cancer cells revealed in microfabricated systems and implicated in vivo.

Metastatic cancer cells differ from their non-metastatic counterparts not only in terms of molecular composition and genetics, but also by the very strategy they employ for locomotion. Here, we analyzed large-scale statistics for cells migrating on linear microtracks to show that metastatic cancer cells follow a qualitatively different movement strategy than their non-invasive counterparts. The trajectories of metastatic cells display clusters of small steps that are interspersed with long "flights".

Integrative analysis reveals disrupted pathways regulated by microRNAs in cancer.

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small endogenous regulatory molecules that modulate gene expression post-transcriptionally. Although differential expression of miRNAs have been implicated in many diseases (including cancers), the underlying mechanisms of action remain unclear. Because each miRNA can target multiple genes, miRNAs may potentially have functional implications for the overall behavior of entire pathways.

Universal area distributions in the monolayers of confluent mammalian cells.

When mammalian cells form confluent monolayers completely filling a plane, these apparently random "tilings" show regularity in the statistics of cell areas for various types of epithelial and endothelial cells. The observed distributions are reproduced by a model which accounts for cell growth and division, with the latter treated stochastically both in terms of the sizes of the dividing cells as well as the sizes of the "newborn" ones--remarkably, the modeled and experimental distributions fit well when all free parameters are estimated directly from experiments.

Microtubule guidance tested through controlled cell geometry.

In moving cells dynamic microtubules (MTs) target and disassemble substrate adhesion sites (focal adhesions; FAs) in a process that enables the cell to detach from the substrate and propel itself forward. The short-range interactions between FAs and MT plus ends have been observed in several experimental systems, but the spatial overlap of these structures within the cell has precluded analysis of the putative long-range mechanisms by which MTs growing through the cell body reach FAs in the periphery of the cell. In the work described here cell geometry was controlled to remove the spatial overlap of cellular structures thus allowing for unambiguous observation of MT guidance.