Immunological health has been challenging to characterize but could be defined as the absence of immune pathology. While shared features of some immune diseases and the concept of immunologic resilience based on age-independent adaptation to antigenic stimulation have been developed, general metrics of immune health and its utility for assessing clinically healthy individuals remain ill defined. Here we integrated transcriptomics, serum protein, peripheral immune cell frequency and clinical data from 228 patients with 22 monogenic conditions impacting key immunological pathways together with 42 age- and sex-matched healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Deep learning-based (DL) methods are the best-performing methods for white matter tract segmentation in anatomically healthy subjects. However, tract annotations are variable or absent in clinical data and manual annotations are especially difficult in patients with tumors where normal anatomy may be distorted. Direct cortical and subcortical stimulation is the gold standard ground truth to determine the cortical and sub-cortical lo- cation of motor-eloquent areas intra-operatively.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMonogenic diseases are often studied in isolation due to their rarity. Here we utilize multiomics to assess 22 monogenic immune-mediated conditions with age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Despite clearly detectable disease-specific and "pan-disease" signatures, individuals possess stable personal immune states over time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcute viral infections can have durable functional impacts on the immune system long after recovery, but how they affect homeostatic immune states and responses to future perturbations remain poorly understood. Here we use systems immunology approaches, including longitudinal multimodal single-cell analysis (surface proteins, transcriptome and V(D)J sequences) to comparatively assess baseline immune statuses and responses to influenza vaccination in 33 healthy individuals after recovery from mild, non-hospitalized COVID-19 (mean, 151 days after diagnosis) and 40 age- and sex-matched control individuals who had never had COVID-19. At the baseline and independent of time after COVID-19, recoverees had elevated T cell activation signatures and lower expression of innate immune genes including Toll-like receptors in monocytes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAround one third of epilepsies are drug-resistant. For these patients, seizures may be reduced or cured by surgically removing the epileptogenic zone (EZ), which is the portion of the brain giving rise to seizures. If noninvasive data are not sufficiently lateralizing or localizing, the EZ may need to be localized by precise implantation of intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) electrodes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSimul Synth Med Imaging
September 2022
Laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT) is a novel minimally invasive treatment that is used to ablate intracranial structures to treat mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). Region of interest (ROI) segmentation before and after LITT would enable automated lesion quantification to objectively assess treatment efficacy. Deep learning techniques, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are state-of-the-art solutions for ROI segmentation, but require large amounts of annotated data during the training.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOMiCC (OMics Compendia Commons) is a biologist-friendly web platform that facilitates data reuse and integration. Users can search over 40,000 publicly available gene expression studies, annotate and curate samples, and perform meta-analysis. Since the initial publication, we have incorporated RNA-seq datasets, compendia sharing, RESTful API support, and an additional meta-analysis method based on random effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSemiology describes the evolution of symptoms and signs during epileptic seizures and contributes to the evaluation of individuals with focal drug-resistant epilepsy for curative resection. Semiology varies in complexity from elementary sensorimotor seizures arising from primary cortex to complex behaviours and automatisms emerging from distributed cerebral networks. Detailed semiology interpreted by expert epileptologists may point towards the likely site of seizure onset, but this process is subjective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIdentifying white matter (WM) tracts to locate eloquent areas for preoperative surgical planning is a challenging task. Manual WM tract annotations are often used but they are time-consuming, suffer from inter- and intra-rater variability, and noise intrinsic to diffusion MRI may make manual interpretation difficult. As a result, in clinical practice direct electrical stimulation is necessary to precisely locate WM tracts during surgery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial and augmented intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) methods are expanding into the health care space. Big data are increasingly used in patient care applications, diagnostics, and treatment decisions in allergy and immunology. How these technologies will be evaluated, approved, and assessed for their impact is an important consideration for researchers and practitioners alike.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFViral infections can have profound and durable functional impacts on the immune system. There is an urgent need to characterize the long-term immune effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection given the persistence of symptoms in some individuals and the continued threat of novel variants. Here we use systems immunology, including longitudinal multimodal single cell analysis (surface proteins, transcriptome, and V(D)J sequences) from 33 previously healthy individuals after recovery from mild, non-hospitalized COVID-19 and 40 age- and sex-matched healthy controls with no history of COVID-19 to comparatively assess the post-infection immune status (mean: 151 days after diagnosis) and subsequent innate and adaptive responses to seasonal influenza vaccination.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEpilepsy affects 50 million people worldwide and a third are refractory to medication. If a discrete cerebral focus or network can be identified, neurosurgical resection can be curative. Most excisions are in the temporal-lobe, and are more likely to result in seizure-freedom than extra-temporal resections.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere has been a significant rise in robotic trajectory guidance devices that have been utilised for stereotactic neurosurgical procedures. These devices have significant costs and associated learning curves. Previous studies reporting devices usage have not undertaken prospective parallel-group comparisons before their introduction, so the comparative differences are unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The piriform cortex (PC) occupies both banks of the endorhinal sulcus and has an important role in the pathophysiology of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). A recent study showed that resection of more than 50% of PC increased the odds of becoming seizure free by a factor of 16.
Objective: We report the feasibility of manual segmentation of PC and application of the Geodesic Information Flows (GIF) algorithm to automated segmentation, to guide resection.
Objective: Anteromesial temporal lobe resection (ATLR) results in long-term seizure freedom in patients with drug-resistant focal mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). There is significant anatomical variation in the anterior projection of the optic radiation (OR), known as Meyer's loop, between individuals and between hemispheres in the same individual. Damage to the OR results in contralateral superior temporal quadrantanopia that may preclude driving in 33%-66% of patients who achieve seizure freedom.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFComput Methods Programs Biomed
September 2021
Background And Objective: Processing of medical images such as MRI or CT presents different challenges compared to RGB images typically used in computer vision. These include a lack of labels for large datasets, high computational costs, and the need of metadata to describe the physical properties of voxels. Data augmentation is used to artificially increase the size of the training datasets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLocal fiber orientation distributions (FODs) can be computed from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI). The accuracy and ability of FODs to resolve complex fiber configurations benefits from acquisition protocols that sample a high number of gradient directions, a high maximum b-value, and multiple b-values. However, acquisition time and scanners that follow these standards are limited in clinical settings, often resulting in dMRI acquired at a single shell (single b-value).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Instability of the craniocervical junction in paediatric patients with skeletal dysplasia poses a unique set of challenges including anatomical abnormalities, poor bone quality, skeletal immaturity and associated general anaesthetic risks. Instrumented fixation provides optimal stabilisation and fusion rates. The small vertebrae make the placement of C2 pedicle screws technically demanding with low margins of error between the spinal canal and the vertebral artery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Comput Assist Radiol Surg
October 2021
Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg
May 2021
PURPOSE : Electrode bending observed after stereotactic interventions is typically not accounted for in either computer-assisted planning algorithms, where straight trajectories are assumed, or in quality assessment, where only metrics related to entry and target points are reported. Our aim is to provide a fully automated and validated pipeline for the prediction of stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) electrode bending. METHODS : We transform electrodes of 86 cases into a common space and compare features-based and image-based neural networks on their ability to regress local displacement ([Formula: see text]) or electrode bending ([Formula: see text]).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCOVID-19 exhibits extensive patient-to-patient heterogeneity. To link immune response variation to disease severity and outcome over time, we longitudinally assessed circulating proteins as well as 188 surface protein markers, transcriptome, and T cell receptor sequence simultaneously in single peripheral immune cells from COVID-19 patients. Conditional-independence network analysis revealed primary correlates of disease severity, including gene expression signatures of apoptosis in plasmacytoid dendritic cells and attenuated inflammation but increased fatty acid metabolism in CD56CD16 NK cells linked positively to circulating interleukin (IL)-15.
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