Publications by authors named "Ionescu B"

Article Synopsis
  • - Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) like polycythemia vera (PV), essential thrombocythemia (ET), and primary myelofibrosis (PMF) involve excessive production of mature blood cells and can transform into acute myeloid leukemia (sAML), with changes in oxidative stress and antioxidant levels observed.
  • - A study measured total antioxidant capacity (TAC) and 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxy-guanosine (8-OHdG) levels in 117 MPN patients and 21 sAML patients versus healthy controls, finding higher TAC levels in MPNs, especially in ET and PMF.
  • - The research revealed associations between TAC and
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  • A new Romanian version of the MPN Symptom Assessment Form Total Symptom Score (MPN-SAF TSS; MPN-10) was developed to evaluate quality of life (QoL) for patients with myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs), addressing their high symptom burden.
  • *The study included 180 patients and revealed fatigue, inactivity, and concentration issues as the most problematic symptoms, with notable scoring differences among different MPN subtypes.
  • *The Romanian MPN-10 demonstrated strong reliability and validity, indicated by high internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.855) and significant psychometric testing results, making it a trustworthy tool for assessing symptom burden and QoL in this patient
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The hallmark of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is the presence of the characteristic fusion transcript of the promyelocytic leukemia gene with the retinoic acid receptor α gene (PML::RARA). The PML::RARA fusion is a molecular target for all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) and arsenic trioxide (ATO). Therapies based on ATRA plus ATO have excellent outcomes in terms of complete remission rates, overall survival, and achievement of deep and durable molecular responses with a very low incidence of relapse.

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  • Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a serious heart condition linked to genetic factors, increasing the risk of heart failure and sudden cardiac death; genetic testing plays a crucial role in managing and understanding the disease.
  • A study of 122 Romanian patients with DCM revealed that over half (50.8%) had identifiable genetic variants that could cause the disease, along with 31 new variants that had not been reported before.
  • The findings indicate that more than half of the patients had a family history of DCM or sudden cardiac death, underscoring the importance of genetic testing for better risk assessment and treatment strategies in this population.
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  • The paper explores the principles of Sustainable Development and Circular Economy while focusing on the development of materials like cementitious composites and alkali-activated geopolymers.
  • It analyzes how different compositional and technological factors impact the physical-mechanical properties, self-healing abilities, and biocidal properties of these materials, particularly enhanced by the addition of TiO nanoparticles.
  • The study highlights the increasing interest in these innovative materials but also points out the need for further research to address controversial aspects and promote the integration of improved performance with reduced environmental impacts in building materials.
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The combination of TMS and EEG has the potential to capture relevant features of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology. We used a machine learning framework to explore time-domain features characterizing AD patients compared to age-matched healthy controls (HC). More than 150 time-domain features including some related to local and distributed evoked activity were extracted from TMS-EEG data and fed into a Random Forest (RF) classifier using a leave-one-subject out validation approach.

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Fusarium, a common fungus, emerges as a pathogen in severely immunocompromised patients. We present a series of patients who developed invasive fusariosis (IF) during admission to an acute leukaemia ward: an outbreak of 12 cases in June and July 2018, followed by four sporadic cases until 2021. No case was reported earlier.

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Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is a unique, highly curable subtype of acute myeloid leukemia, owing to the therapeutic advances of the last decades which led to high complete remission rates and excellent long-term survival. Nevertheless, it remains associated with high early mortality rates. Early death is the major cause of treatment failure in APL and is mainly attributed to coagulopathy, differentiation syndrome, and less commonly, infectious events.

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The use of waste from industrial activities is of particular importance for environmental protection. Fly ash has a high potential in the production of construction materials. In the present study, the use of fly ash in the production of geopolymer paste and the effect of FeO, MgO and molarity of NaOH solution on the mechanical strength of geopolymer paste are presented.

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Transcranial magnetic stimulation co-registered with electroencephalographic (TMS-EEG) has previously proven a helpful tool in the study of Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this work, we investigate the use of TMS-evoked EEG responses to classify AD patients from healthy controls (HC). By using a dataset containing 17AD and 17HC, we extract various time domain features from individual TMS responses and average them over a low, medium and high density EEG electrode set.

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Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) combined with EEG recordings (TMS-EEG) has shown great potential in the study of the brain and in particular of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In this study, we propose an automatic method of determining the duration of TMS-induced perturbation of the EEG signal as a potential metric reflecting the brain's functional alterations. A preliminary study is conducted in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD).

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While past work on how people can optimize dual-tasking has focused on strategic timing (i.e., when to select responses), little is known about the extent to which people can optimize dual-tasking by taking care of which responses they select.

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Supervised automatic sleep scoring algorithms are usually trained using sleep stage labels manually annotated on 30 s epochs of PSG data. In this study, we investigate the impact of using shorter epochs with various PSG input signals for training and testing a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) neural network. An LSTM model is evaluated on the provided 30 s epoch sleep stage labels from a publicly available dataset, as well as on 10 s subdivisions.

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Using a collection of publicly available links to short form video clips of an average of 6 seconds duration each, 1275 users manually annotated each video multiple times to indicate both long-term and short-term memorability of the videos. The annotations were gathered as part of an online memory game and measured a participant's ability to recall having seen the video previously when shown a collection of videos. The recognition tasks were performed on videos seen within the previous few minutes for short-term memorability and within the previous 24 to 72 hours for long-term memorability.

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Crystalline admixtures embedded in concrete may react in the presence of water and generate thin crystals able to fill pores, capillaries and micro-cracks. Once the concrete has dried, the crystalline chemicals sit dormant until another dose of water starts the crystallization again. The research aims to analyses the early age self-sealing effect of a crystalline admixture at a dosage rate of 1-3% of the cement mass.

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Neurodegenerative diseases have shown an increasing incidence in the older population in recent years. A significant amount of research has been conducted to characterize these diseases. Computational methods, and particularly machine learning techniques, are now very useful tools in helping and improving the diagnosis as well as the disease monitoring process.

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Methods developed for automatic sleep stage detection make use of large amounts of data in the form of polysomnographic (PSG) recordings to build predictive models. In this study, we investigate the effect of several dimensionality reduction techniques, i.e.

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Automatic sleep stage detection can be performed using a variety of input signals from a polysomnographic (PSG) recording. In this study, we investigate the effect of different input signals on the performance of feature-based automatic sleep stage classification algorithms with both a Random Forest (RF) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifier. Combinations of the EEG (electroencephalographic) signal and ECG (electrocardiographic), EMG (electromyographic) and respiratory signals as input are investigated as input with respect to using single channel and multi-channel EEG as input.

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Automatic epileptic seizure prediction from EEG (electroencephalogram) data is a challenging problem. This is due to the complex nature of the signal itself and of the generated abnormalities. In this paper, we investigate several deep network architectures i.

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Therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) are currently initially efficient, but even if a high percentage of patients have an initial complete remission (CR), most of them relapse. Recent data shows that immunotherapy with either bispecific T-cell engagers (BiTEs) of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells can eliminate residual chemotherapy-resistant B-ALL cells. The objective of the manuscript is to present improvements in the clinical outcome for chemotherapy-resistant ALL in the real-life setting, by describing Romania's experience with bispecific antibodies for B-cell ALL.

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Defined as a rare extramedullary tumor, myeloid sarcoma (MS) is in the attention of specialists, although the information in the literature is represented especially through case reports. MS can precede acute myeloid leukemia (AML), appear simultaneous and can be the only manifestation of leukemia relapse after allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT). We present the case of a 30-year-old female diagnosed with acute myelomonocytic leukemia (AML M4), with complete remission (CR) after chemotherapy, followed by allo-SCT for consolidation.

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Background: The "watch and wait" approach has recently been proposed as an alternative to surgery in locally-advanced rectal cancer patients that respond to neo-adjuvant chemoradiotherapy, in order to decrease its negative functional consequences upon the quality of life of these patients. Current methods show low accuracy for the identification of complete responders.

Materials And Methods: A review of the literature was conducted for articles published up to March 31th, 2019.

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Unlabelled: Philadelphia chromosome positive acute lymphoblastic leukemia is classified as a very high-risk group and it requires an intensive chemotherapy regimen associated with tyrosine-kinase inhibitors and allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant from related or unrelated HLA matched donor. Most times, intensive chemotherapy regimens are associated with prolonged and profound pancytopenia when the risk of invasive fungal infection increases. After Candida and Aspergillus species, Mucormycosis is the third frequent fungal infection in hematology patients and it is associated with a reduced overall survival.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the response of HeLa cells to the interaction with inactivated Staphylococcus aureus cells and live challenge with herpes simplex virus (HSV).The results of this study are indicating that the interaction between the HeLa cells and S. aureus inactivated whole cells could modulate the host cell apoptosis and cytokine production, and therefore, influence the progression of HSV infection.

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