Publications by authors named "Horst C"

The diversity of physiological roles of the endocannabinoid system has turned it into an attractive yet elusive therapeutic target. However, chemical probes with various functionalities could pave the way for a better understanding of the endocannabinoid system at the cellular level. Notably, inverse agonists of CBR - a key receptor of the endocannabinoid system - lagged behind despite the evidence regarding the therapeutic potential of its antagonism.

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Objective: Palatal fistulas after palatoplasty could pose difficulties for both patients and surgeons. Numerous surgical approaches are available to treat palatal fistulas. In this manuscript, we investigate surgical treatment options for palatal fistula repair looking at the different anatomical locations, and we create a summary of surgical approaches to facilitate the decision-making process for palatal fistulae repair.

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Quantum state teleportation is commonly used in designs for large-scale quantum computers. Using Quantinuum's H2 trapped-ion quantum processor, we demonstrate fault-tolerant state teleportation circuits for a quantum error correction code-specifically the Steane code. The circuits use up to 30 qubits at the physical level and employ real-time quantum error correction.

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Interest in affinity-based probes (AfBPs) as novel tools to interrogate G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) has gained traction in recent years. AfBPs represent an interesting and more versatile alternative to antibodies. In the present study, we report the development and validation of AfBPs that target the intracellular allosteric pocket of CCR2, a GPCR of interest for the development of therapies targeting autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and also cancer.

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Fault-tolerant operations based on stabilizer codes are the state of the art in suppressing error rates in quantum computations. Most such codes do not permit a straightforward implementation of non-Clifford logical operations, which are necessary to define a universal gate set. As a result, implementations of these operations must use either error-correcting codes with more complicated error correction procedures or gate teleportation and magic states, which are prepared at the logical level, increasing overhead to a degree that precludes near-term implementation.

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Article Synopsis
  • The cannabinoid receptor type 1 (CBR) plays a key role in various bodily functions, including appetite, pain, memory, and body temperature regulation, but our understanding of its cellular signaling and dynamics is limited.
  • Researchers developed new fluorescent probes for CBR by using a modular design approach that centers around a diethyl glycine-based building block, making synthesis easier and more efficient.
  • Validation of these probes through various assays supports their potential use in real-time imaging studies to explore CBR's localization, movement, and effects in different diseases.
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Lung cancer screening (LCS) using annual computed tomography (CT) scanning significantly reduces mortality by detecting cancerous lung nodules at an earlier stage. Deep learning algorithms can improve nodule malignancy risk stratification. However, they have typically been used to analyse single time point CT data when detecting malignant nodules on either baseline or incident CT LCS rounds.

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The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a leading candidate algorithm for solving optimization problems on quantum computers. However, the potential of QAOA to tackle classically intractable problems remains unclear. Here, we perform an extensive numerical investigation of QAOA on the low autocorrelation binary sequences (LABS) problem, which is classically intractable even for moderately sized instances.

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Background: Evidence-based guidelines for the treatment of vascular malformations (VMs) are not readily available, possibly due to the diversity in methods used to evaluate treatment efficacy in clinical research, complicating the aggregation and comparison of study results. The Outcome measures for VAscular MAlformations (OVAMA) questionnaire was developed to measure uniformly symptoms and appearance (i.e.

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Background: Developing countries experience limited access to HCV laboratory tests for different reasons. Providing near to real-time HCV testing and results especially to at-risk populations including those in rural settings for timely initiation to treatment is key. Within a rural Myanmar setting, we compared HCV diagnostic detection and quantification of the GeneXpert, and Advanced Biological Laboratories UltraGene-HCV assays against the gold standard and reference method Roche real-time HCV in Myanmar.

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Article Synopsis
  • PD-L1 expression is a key biomarker for predicting the effectiveness of immunotherapy in patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and is linked to glucose metabolism.
  • This study analyzed data from 210 patients with resectable NSCLC to see how metabolic parameters from [F]FDG-PET/CT scans relate to PD-L1 expression levels in tumors and lymph nodes.
  • Results showed that while certain metabolic scores were higher in patients with PD-L1 expression ≥ 1%, the accuracy of these scores for predicting PD-L1 positivity was only moderate, indicating limited reliability in clinical settings.
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Purpose: To train an explainable deep learning model for patient reidentification in chest radiograph datasets and assess changes in model-perceived patient identity as a marker for emerging radiologic abnormalities in longitudinal image sets.

Materials And Methods: This retrospective study used a set of 1 094 537 frontal chest radiographs and free-text reports from 259 152 patients obtained from six hospitals between 2006 and 2019, with validation on the public ChestX-ray14, CheXpert, and MIMIC-CXR datasets. A deep learning model was trained for patient reidentification and assessed on patient identity confirmation, retrieval of patient images from a database based on a query image, and radiologic abnormality prediction in longitudinal image sets.

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Vascular malformations (VMs) are clinically diverse with regard to the vessel type, anatomical location, tissue involvement and size. Consequently, symptoms and disease impact differ significantly. Diverse causative mutations in more and more genes are discovered and play a major role in the development of VMs.

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Capillary malformations (CM) (port-wine stains) are congenital skin lesions that are characterized by dilated capillaries and postcapillary venules. CMs are caused by altered functioning of the vascular endothelium. Somatic genetic mutations have predominantly been identified in the endothelial cells of CMs, providing an opportunity for the development of targeted therapies.

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Purpose: Interpretability is essential for reliable convolutional neural network (CNN) image classifiers in radiological applications. We describe a weakly supervised segmentation model that learns to delineate the target object, trained with only image-level labels ("image contains object" or "image does not contain object"), presenting a different approach towards explainable object detectors for radiological imaging tasks.

Methods: A weakly supervised Unet architecture (WSUnet) was trained to learn lung tumour segmentation from image-level labelled data.

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Cannabinoid CB receptor (CBR) is a class A G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) involved in a broad spectrum of physiological processes and pathological conditions. For that reason, targeting CBR might provide therapeutic opportunities in neurodegenerative disorders, neuropathic pain, inflammatory diseases, and cancer. The main components from Cannabis sativa, such as Δ-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ-THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), have been therapeutically exploited and synthetically-derived analogs have been generated.

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Background: Episodic growth due to microvascular proliferations (MVP) has been reported in congenital arteriovenous malformations (AVM), which are normally quiescent lesions composed of mature malformed vessels. Since AVM also may worsen under conditions of hormonal dysregulation, we hypothesized that hormonal influences may stimulate this process of vasoproliferative growth through potential interactions with hormone receptors (HR).

Methods: 13 Cases of AVM tissue with histologically documented vasoproliferative growth were analyzed quantitatively for the presence and tissue localization of estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PGR), growth hormone receptor (GHR) and follicle-stimulating hormone receptor (FSHR) in relation to resident cells of interest (endothelial cells (EC), smooth muscle cells (SMC) and mast cells (MC)) by applying multiplex immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining.

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Background: In shared decision-making (SDM), patients and healthcare professionals (HCPs) reach a joint clinical decision based on the best available evidence and the patient's preferences. SDM seems particularly valuable in plastic surgery, as often multiple treatment options are available. This cross-sectional online survey study aimed to assess HCPs' views and knowledge about SDM, identify facilitators and barriers of SDM, and determine specific requirements for SDM within plastic surgery.

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Background: Patients with capillary malformations (CMs) may undergo medical tattooing (MT) as an alternative to laser therapy. But little is known about treatment results and impact from the patients' perspective.

Objectives: In this cross-sectional digital survey study, we evaluated the patient-reported outcomes of MT for CMs.

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Background: Pulmonary and extrapulmonary incidental findings are frequently identified on CT scans performed for lung cancer screening. Uncertainty regarding their clinical significance and how and when such findings should be reported back to clinicians and participants persists. We examined the prevalence of non-malignant incidental findings within a lung cancer screening cohort and investigated the morbidity and relevant risk factors associated with incidental findings.

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Background: Discrepancies have been noted between the clinical and histologic diagnosis of vascular malformations.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of the International Society for Study of Vascular Anomalies (ISSVA) classification in diagnosing benign vascular anomalies based on clinical and (immuno) histologic parameters, focusing on lymphatic differentiation and vascular proliferation.

Method: A retrospective study of 121 consecutive patients with benign skin and soft-tissue vascular anomalies located in the head and neck region (pyogenic granulomas and angioma senilis were excluded) by applying multiplex immunohistochemistry staining for lymph vessels (D2-40), endothelial blood vessels, and proliferating cells (Ki67).

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Introduction: Vascular malformations are rare congenital anomalies of the vascular system, which can involve the capillaries, veins, arteries, lymphatics, or a combination of vessel types. Patients with vascular malformations experience an impaired health-related quality of life (HRQoL) because of their symptoms (e.g.

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