Feasibility Assessment of a Novel Isolation Care Tent in Uganda During the 2022 Outbreak.

This case study describes a feasibility assessment of a novel isolation care tent used in health facilities in Uganda during the 2022 outbreak. The Isolation System for Treatment and Agile Response to High-Risk Infections Model 1B (ISTARI 1B) is a single-occupancy, portable, negative-pressure isolation tent designed for the safe delivery of standard care to patients with a communicable disease, including Ebola disease (Sudan). At the request of the Uganda Ministry of Health, the Makerere University Infectious Diseases Institute and University of Nebraska Medical Center partnered to evaluate 7 health facilities across 4 districts in Uganda for infrastructure, case management, and infection prevention and control (IPC) capacity relevant to isolation care and ISTARI 1B use.

Perspectives on tracking data reuse across biodata resources.

Motivation: Data reuse is a common and vital practice in molecular biology and enables the knowledge gathered over recent decades to drive discovery and innovation in the life sciences. Much of this knowledge has been collated into molecular biology databases, such as UniProtKB, and these resources derive enormous value from sharing data among themselves. However, quantifying and documenting this kind of data reuse remains a challenge.

Tolerogenic dendritic cell reporting: Has a minimum information model made a difference?

Minimum information models are reporting frameworks that describe the essential information that needs to be provided in a publication, so that the work can be repeated or compared to other work. In 2016, Minimum Information about Tolerogenic Antigen-Presenting cells (MITAP) was created to standardize the reporting on tolerogenic antigen-presenting cells, including tolerogenic dendritic cells (tolDCs). tolDCs is a generic term for dendritic cells that have the ability to (re-)establish immune tolerance; they have been developed as a cell therapy for autoimmune diseases or for the prevention of transplant rejection.

Cardiac output affects the response to pulsed inhaled nitric oxide in mechanically ventilated anesthetized ponies determined by CT angiography of the lung.

Objective: To measure changes in regional lung perfusion using CT angiography in mechanically ventilated, anesthetized ponies administered pulsed inhaled nitric oxide (PiNO) during hypotension and normotension.

Animals: 6 ponies for anesthetic 1 and 5 ponies for anesthetic 2.

Procedures: Ponies were anesthetized on 2 separate occasions, mechanically ventilated, and placed in dorsal recumbency within the CT gantry.

Strategies for extended lifetime of implantable intraperitoneal insulin catheters.

Implantable insulin infusion systems using the intra-peritoneal route have dramatically changed the management of diabetes paving the way toward the realization of the potential "holy grail" of a fully implantable artificial pancreas. However, the wear duration of delivery catheters is compromised by the foreign body-mediated immune response. Both occlusion material present at the distal catheter tip end and fibrotic encapsulation surrounding the catheters influence the controlled and precise delivery of insulin, which eventually leads to the need for surgical intervention.

Effects of pulsed inhaled nitric oxide delivery on the distribution of pulmonary perfusion in spontaneously breathing and mechanically ventilated anesthetized ponies.

Objective: To measure changes in pulmonary perfusion during pulsed inhaled nitric oxide (PiNO) delivery in anesthetized, spontaneously breathing and mechanically ventilated ponies positioned in dorsal recumbency.

Animals: 6 adult ponies.

Procedures: Ponies were anesthetized, positioned in dorsal recumbency in a CT gantry, and allowed to breathe spontaneously.

Development of a method to measure regional perfusion of the lung in anesthetized ponies using computed tomography angiography and the maximum slope model.

Objective: To develop a method based on CT angiography and the maximum slope model (MSM) to measure regional lung perfusion in anesthetized ponies.

Animals: 6 ponies.

Procedures: Anesthetized ponies were positioned in dorsal recumbency in the CT gantry.

Root cause determination of intraperitoneal catheter obstructions: Insulin amyloid aggregates vs foreign body reaction.

Continuous intraperitoneal insulin infusion, from an implanted insulin pump connected to a catheter that delivers insulin directly to the peritoneal cavity has many clinical advantages for patients with Type 1 diabetes. However, the ongoing incidence of catheter obstructions remains a barrier to the widespread use of this therapy. To date, the root cause of these obstructions remains unknown.

What can a comparative genomics approach tell us about the pathogenicity of mtDNA mutations in human populations?

Mitochondrial disorders are heterogeneous, showing variable presentation and penetrance. Over the last three decades, our ability to recognize mitochondrial patients and diagnose these mutations, linking genotype to phenotype, has greatly improved. However, it has become increasingly clear that these strides in diagnostics have not benefited all population groups.

Fibrotic Encapsulation Is the Dominant Source of Continuous Glucose Monitor Delays.

Continuous glucose monitor (CGM) readings are delayed relative to blood glucose, and this delay is usually attributed to the latency of interstitial glucose levels. However, CGM-independent data suggest rapid equilibration of interstitial glucose. This study sought to determine the loci of CGM delays.

A fully computational and reasonable representation for karyotypes.

Summary: The human karyotype has been used as a mechanism for describing and detecting gross abnormalities in the genome for many decades. It is used both for routine diagnostic purposes and for research to further our understanding of the causes of disease. Despite these important applications there has been no rigorous computational representation of the karyotype; rather an informal, string-based representation is used, making it hard to check, organize and search data of this form.

A New Animal Model of Insulin-Glucose Dynamics in the Intraperitoneal Space Enhances Closed-Loop Control Performance.

Current artificial pancreas systems (AP) operate via subcutaneous (SC) glucose sensing and SC insulin delivery. Due to slow diffusion and transport dynamics across the interstitial space, even the most sophisticated control algorithms in on-body AP systems cannot react fast enough to maintain tight glycemic control under the effect of exogenous glucose disturbances caused by ingesting meals or performing physical activity. Recent efforts made towards the development of an implantable AP have explored the utility of insulin infusion in the intraperitoneal (IP) space: a region within the abdominal cavity where the insulin-glucose kinetics are observed to be much more rapid than the SC space.

SBOL-OWL: An Ontological Approach for Formal and Semantic Representation of Synthetic Biology Information.

Standard representation of data is key for the reproducibility of designs in synthetic biology. The Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) has already emerged as a data standard to represent information about genetic circuits, and it is based on capturing data using graphs. The language provides the syntax using a free text document that is accessible to humans only.

Family Health History: Invaluable for Adoptees' Medical Care and Self Identity.

Adoption is one of several ways to have a family. Adoption is unique in that it involves birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees. For many adoptees, there is no information about their birth family health history which can create healthcare challenges.

Haplogroup Context is Less Important in the Penetrance of Mitochondrial DNA Complex I Mutations Compared to mt-tRNA Mutations.

Mitochondrial diseases are a highly complex, heterogeneous group of disorders. Mitochondrial DNA variants that are linked to disease can exhibit variable expression and penetrance. This has an implication for mitochondrial diagnostics as variants that cause disease in one individual may not in another.

A document-centric approach for developing the tolAPC ontology.

Background: There are many challenges associated with ontology building, as the process often touches on many different subject areas; it needs knowledge of the problem domain, an understanding of the ontology formalism, software in use and, sometimes, an understanding of the philosophical background. In practice, it is very rare that an ontology can be completed by a single person, as they are unlikely to combine all of these skills. So people with these skills must collaborate.

Mitochondrial DNA sequence context in the penetrance of mitochondrial t-RNA mutations: A study across multiple lineages with diagnostic implications.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) mutations are well recognized as an important cause of inherited disease. Diseases caused by mtDNA mutations exhibit a high degree of clinical heterogeneity with a complex genotype-phenotype relationship, with many such mutations exhibiting incomplete penetrance. There is evidence that the spectrum of mutations causing mitochondrial disease might differ between different mitochondrial lineages (haplogroups) seen in different global populations.

On patterns and re-use in bioinformatics databases.

Motivation: As the quantity of data being depositing into biological databases continues to increase, it becomes ever more vital to develop methods that enable us to understand this data and ensure that the knowledge is correct. It is widely-held that data percolates between different databases, which causes particular concerns for data correctness; if this percolation occurs, incorrect data in one database may eventually affect many others while, conversely, corrections in one database may fail to percolate to others. In this paper, we test this widely-held belief by directly looking for sentence reuse both within and between databases.

Variations in dementia diagnosis in England and association with general practice characteristics.

Objectives: Improving dementia diagnosis rates in England has been a key strategic aim of the UK Government but the variation and low diagnosis rates are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to explore the variation in actual versus expected diagnosis of dementia across England, and how these variations were associated with general practice characteristics.

Method: A cross-sectional, ecological study design using secondary data sources and median regression modelling was used.

Data Integration and Mining for Synthetic Biology Design.

One aim of synthetic biologists is to create novel and predictable biological systems from simpler modular parts. This approach is currently hampered by a lack of well-defined and characterized parts and devices. However, there is a wealth of existing biological information, which can be used to identify and characterize biological parts, and their design constraints in the literature and numerous biological databases.

Minimum information about tolerogenic antigen-presenting cells (MITAP): a first step towards reproducibility and standardisation of cellular therapies.

Cellular therapies with tolerogenic antigen-presenting cells (tolAPC) show great promise for the treatment of autoimmune diseases and for the prevention of destructive immune responses after transplantation. The methodologies for generating tolAPC vary greatly between different laboratories, making it difficult to compare data from different studies; thus constituting a major hurdle for the development of standardised tolAPC therapeutic products. Here we describe an initiative by members of the tolAPC field to generate a minimum information model for tolAPC (MITAP), providing a reporting framework that will make differences and similarities between tolAPC products transparent.

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations.

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources.