Publications by authors named "Samuel Wu"

Cognitive aging has become a public health concern as the mean age of the population is ever-increasing. It is a naturalistic and common process of degenerative and compensatory changes that may result in neurocognitive disorders. While heterogeneous, cognitive aging mostly affects executive functions that may be associated with functional losses during activities of daily living.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the role of mechanosensitive channels (MSCs) in the retina, particularly how they relate to conditions like glaucoma and retinal injuries caused by increased pressure.
  • Using advanced techniques, the researchers analyzed the expression of various MSCs in different retinal cells, including Müller cells and retinal ganglion cells (RGCs).
  • They found a critical balance between hyperpolarizing and depolarizing MSCs in retinal neurons, suggesting that this balance may affect how vulnerable these neurons are to pressure-induced damage, highlighting potential new avenues for treatment.
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Background: Glenohumeral instability is a common pathology, particularly in young, active patients.

Methods: A narrative review was performed to describe the history of surgical treatments for anterior shoulder instability.

Results: Open surgical techniques were first described by Bankart in 1923.

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Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness worldwide and glaucoma patients exhibit an early diffuse loss of retinal sensitivity followed by focal loss of RGCs. Combining some previous published results and some new data, this paper provides our current view on how high IOP (H-IOP) affects the light response sensitivity of a subset of RGCs, the alpha-ganglion cells (αGCs), as well as their presynaptic bipolar cells (DBCs and HBCs) and A2 amacrine cells (AIIACs) in dark-adapted mouse retinas. Our data demonstrate that H-IOP in experimental glaucoma mice significantly decreases light-evoked spike response sensitivity of sONαGCs and sOFFαGCs (i.

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Conducting secure computations to protect against malicious adversaries is an emerging field of research. Current models designed for malicious security typically necessitate the involvement of two or more servers in an honest-majority setting. Among privacy-preserving data mining techniques, significant attention has been focused on the classification problem.

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Introduction: Mechanical sensitive channels expressed in mammalian retinas are effectors of elevated pressure stresses, but it is unclear how their activation affects visual function in pressure-related retinal disorders.

Methods: This study investigated the role of the transient potential channel vanilloid TRPV4 in photoreceptors and rod bipolar cells (RBCs) with immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy, electroretinography (ERG), and patch-clamp techniques.

Results: TRPV4 immunoreactivity (IR) was found in the outer segments of photoreceptors, dendrites and somas of PKCα-positive RBCs and other BCs, plexiform layers, and retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) in wild-type mice.

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Maintaining safe and potent pharmaceutical drug levels is often challenging. Multidomain peptides (MDPs) assemble into supramolecular hydrogels with a well-defined, highly porous nanostructure that makes them attractive for drug delivery, yet their ability to extend release is typically limited by rapid drug diffusion. To overcome this challenge, we developed self-assembling boronate ester release (SABER) MDPs capable of engaging in dynamic covalent bonding with payloads containing boronic acids (BAs).

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Aging is a public health concern with an ever-increasing magnitude worldwide. An array of neuroscience-based approaches like transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and cognitive training have garnered attention in the last decades to ameliorate the effects of cognitive aging in older adults. This study evaluated the effects of 3 months of bilateral tDCS over the frontal cortices with multimodal cognitive training on working memory capacity.

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Aims And Objectives: To investigate whether interference screw fixation through an anteromedial portal into an outside-in drilled femoral tunnel via a flip cutter results in acceptable hardware position.

Materials & Methods: 10 cadaveric knees underwent ACL-reconstruction with patellar BTB autograft. Femoral tunnel drilling was performed utilizing an outside-in flip cutter drill and interference screws for femoral fixation.

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Objectives: Low cholesterol levels in early sepsis patients are associated with mortality. We sought to test if IV lipid emulsion administration to sepsis patients with low cholesterol levels would prevent a decline or increase total cholesterol levels at 48 hours.

Design: Phase II, adaptive, randomized pilot clinical trial powered for 48 patients.

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Article Synopsis
  • Cognitive training with the Useful Field of View (UFOV) task can reduce dementia risk and improve daily living activities in older adults, but results vary among different studies.
  • This study examined how learning from verbal and visuospatial memory tasks (HVLT-R and BVMT-R) affects outcomes from a UFOV task called Double Decision after a 3-month cognitive training intervention.
  • Findings revealed that older adults who struggled more with BVMT-R showed significant improvements in the Double Decision task, suggesting that those with lower baseline visuospatial abilities may benefit the most from speed-of-processing cognitive training.
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Background: Pharmacological interventions for depression and anxiety in older adults often have significant side effects, presenting the need for more tolerable alternatives. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a promising non-pharmacological intervention for depression in clinical populations. However, its effects on depression and anxiety symptoms, particularly in older adults from the general public, are understudied.

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Photoreceptors are electrically coupled to one another, and the spatiotemporal properties of electrical synapses in a two-dimensional retinal network are still not well studied, because of the limitation of the single electrode or pair recording techniques which do not allow simultaneously measuring responses of multiple photoreceptors at various locations in the retina. A multiple electrode recording system is needed. In this study, we investigate the network properties of the two-dimensional rod coupled array of the salamander retina (both sexes were used) by using the newly available multiple patch electrode system that allows simultaneous recordings from up to eight cells and to determine the electrical connectivity among multiple rods.

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When multiple influential covariates need to be balanced during a clinical trial, stratified blocked randomization and covariate-adaptive randomization procedures are frequently used in trials to prevent bias and enhance the validity of data analysis results. The latter approach is increasingly used in practice for a study with multiple covariates and limited sample sizes. Among a group of these approaches, the covariate-adaptive procedures proposed by Pocock and Simon are straightforward to be utilized in practice.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Non-pathological aging leads to declines in cognitive functions, especially processing speed, making it a critical public health concern as the older adult population grows rapidly.
  • - Studies indicate that cognitive training and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can significantly enhance cognition in older adults, focusing on attention and working memory.
  • - This research shows that when combined, active tDCS and cognitive training improve functional brain connectivity and potentially enhance cognitive performance, more so than cognitive training alone.
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Objective: To develop a lossless distributed algorithm for regularized Cox proportional hazards model with variable selection to support federated learning for vertically distributed data.

Methods: We propose a novel distributed algorithm for fitting regularized Cox proportional hazards model when data sharing among different data providers is restricted. Based on cyclical coordinate descent, the proposed algorithm computes intermediary statistics by each site and then exchanges them to update the model parameters in other sites without accessing individual patient-level data.

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Unlabelled: Brief episodes of low oxygen breathing (therapeutic acute intermittent hypoxia; tAIH) may serve as an effective plasticity-promoting primer to enhance the effects of transcutaneous spinal stimulation-enhanced walking therapy (WALK) in persons with chronic (>1 year) spinal cord injury (SCI). Pre-clinical studies in rodents with SCI show that tAIH and WALK therapies harness complementary mechanisms of plasticity to maximize walking recovery. Here, we present a multi-site clinical trial protocol designed to examine the influence of tAIH + WALK on walking recovery in persons with chronic SCI.

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Confidence interval for the difference of two proportions has been studied for decades. Many methods were developed to improve the approximation of the limiting distribution of test statistics, such as the profile likelihood method, the score method, and the Wilson method. For the Wilson interval developed by Beal (1987), the approximation of the Z test statistic to the standard normal distribution may be further improved by utilizing the continuity correction, in the observation of anti-conservative intervals from the Wilson interval.

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T-cell-mediated immunotherapies are limited by the extent to which cancer-specific antigens are homogenously expressed throughout a tumor. We reasoned that recurrent splicing aberrations in cancer represent a potential source of tumor-wide and public neoantigens, and to test this possibility, we developed a novel pipeline for identifying neojunctions expressed uniformly within a tumor across diverse cancer types. Our analyses revealed multiple neojunctions that recur across patients and either exhibited intratumor heterogeneity or, in some cases, were tumor-wide.

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We present a nonparametric method for estimating the conditional future state entry probabilities and distributions of state entry time conditional on a past state visit when data are subject to dependent censorings in a progressive multistate model where Markovianity of the system is not assumed. These estimators are constructed using the competing risk techniques with risk sets consisting of fractional observations and inverse probability of censoring weights. The fractional observations correspond to estimates of the number of persons who ultimately enter a state from which the future state in question can be reached in one step.

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Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) can lead to serious disease in infants, and no approved RSV vaccine is available for infants. This first in-human clinical trial evaluated a single dose of BLB201, a PIV5-vectored RSV vaccine administrated via intranasal route, for safety and immunogenicity in RSV-seropositive healthy adults (33 to 75 years old). No severe adverse events (SAEs) were reported.

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Limited research exists on the association between resting-state functional network connectivity in the brain and learning and memory processes in advanced age. This study examined within-network connectivity of cingulo-opercular (CON), frontoparietal control (FPCN), and default mode (DMN) networks, and verbal and visuospatial learning and memory in older adults. Across domains, we hypothesized that greater CON and FPCN connectivity would associate with better learning, and greater DMN connectivity would associate with better memory.

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Minimizing head motion during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is important for maintaining the integrity of neuroimaging data. While there are a variety of techniques to control for head motion, oftentimes, individuals with excessive in-scanner motion are removed from analyses. Movement in the scanner tends to increase with age; however, the cognitive profile of these "high-movers" in older adults has yet to be explored.

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The optimal conditions for simultaneous determination of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) and European Union (EU) priority polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in coffee beans and coffee brews were developed.

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Background: There is a need for effective interventions to stave off cognitive decline in older adults. Cognitive training has variably produced gains in untrained tasks and daily functioning. Combining cognitive training with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) may augment cognitive training effects; however, this approach has yet to be tested on a large-scale.

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