Identification of biomarkers in diabetic nails by Raman spectroscopy.

Background: The growth of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is a serious public health issue which is more prevalent in developing countries. The main problems related to DM are the gradual changes in the structural and functional integrity of tissues caused by hyperglycemia, which calls for early diagnosis and periodic monitoring exams. Recent studies suggest that the quality of the nail plate has great potential to assess the secondary complications of DM.

Mapping Acoustics to Articulatory Gestures in Dutch: Relating Speech Gestures, Acoustics and Neural Data.

Completely locked-in patients suffer from paralysis affecting every muscle in their body, reducing their communication means to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). State-of-the-art BCIs have a slow spelling rate, which inevitably places a burden on patients' quality of life. Novel techniques address this problem by following a bio-mimetic approach, which consists of decoding sensory-motor cortex (SMC) activity that underlies the movements of the vocal tract's articulators.

Complex nanoemulsion for vitamin delivery: droplet organization and interaction with skin membranes.

Lipid nanoemulsions are promising nanomaterials for drug delivery applications in food, pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries. Despite the noteworthy commercial interest, little is known about their supramolecular organization, especially about how such multicomponent formulations interact with cell membranes. In the present work, coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations have been employed to study the self-assembly of a 15-component lipid nanoemulsion droplet containing vitamins A and E for skin delivery.

Making life stories visible: an ethnographic study of body mapping in the context of HIV and AIDS in South Africa.

This paper analyses the lived experiences of people living with HIV in South Africa through the use of body mapping as a visual research method, by focusing on the physical and symbolic use of the body within the broader context of anthropology and medical anthropology. The study consists of an empirical analysis of the body maps themselves and the accompanied narratives of seven participants, six female and one male participant living with HIV in South Africa. Drawing upon theories and literature on theorising the body in medical anthropology and visual research, this study explores the significance of this practice as a visual research method in understanding the nuanced lived experiences of people living with HIV by highlighting the individuality of the body and emotions; embodied experiences: a bio-cultural approach; and the body politic: social injustice.

Differential fractal dimension is associated with extracellular matrix remodeling in developing bovine corpus luteum.

To assist in evaluating and quantifying tissue changes, fractal dimension (FD) is a useful method for assessing the organization in an image from fractals that describes the amount of space and the self-similarity of the structure, once FD detects subtle morphological changes and performs functional quantitative measures. Here, we hypothesized that fractal analysis may be different in functional and regressing bovine corpus luteum (CL) and may be correlated with differential expression of genes involved in extracellular matrix remodeling. CL presents two developmental stages, the functional and regressing CL, according to progesterone levels and morphology.