Intact Fish Skin Graft to Treat Deep Diabetic Foot Ulcers.

Background: Diabetic foot ulcers are chronic, difficult to heal, and potentially life-threatening. Few medical devices have been studied in diabetic ulcers penetrating to bone or tendon.

Methods: We conducted an international, open-label randomized controlled trial, randomly assigning patients with diabetic ulcers penetrating to bone, joint, or tendon 1:1 to intact fish skin graft or standard wound care, with assigned treatment applied through 14 weeks.

Fine-Tuning SSL-Model to Enhance Detection of Cilioretinal Arteries on Colored Fundus Images.

Cilioretinal arteries are a common congenital anomaly of retinal blood supply. This paper presents a deep learning-based approach for the automated detection of a CRA from color fundus images. Leveraging the Vision Transformer architecture, a pre-trained model from RETFound was fine-tuned to transfer knowledge from a broader dataset to our specific task.

Automatic Extraction of Medication Data from Semi-Structured Prescriptions.

In many healthcare facilities, the prescription of drugs is done only in a semi-structured manner, using free-text fields where various information is often mixed. Therefore, automatic processing, especially for secondary use such as research purposes, is often challenging. This paper compares various approaches that identify and classify the various parts of these free-text fields in German language, namely simple Levenshtein-based, rule-based and CRF (conditional random field)-based approaches.

[Design of a clinical study to demonstrate the therapeutic benefit of another wound treatment product].

Background: Due to new legal requirements, a patient-relevant benefit for other wound treatment products (sPW) must be demonstrated through clinical studies if reimbursement at the expense of the statutory health insurance is sought in the non-inpatient sector.

Method: An interdisciplinary group with expertise in clinical wound care has developed general recommendations for the design of suitable studies. In addition to regulatory documents, previous studies that have already been recognized as proof of benefit in other areas served as a basis.

Cbl and Cbl-b ubiquitin ligases are essential for intestinal epithelial stem cell maintenance.

Receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) control stem cell maintenance vs. differentiation decisions. Casitas B-lineage lymphoma (CBL) family ubiquitin ligases are negative regulators of RTKs, but their stem cell regulatory roles remain unclear.

GD2 and its biosynthetic enzyme GD3 synthase promote tumorigenesis in prostate cancer by regulating cancer stem cell behavior.

While better management of loco-regional prostate cancer (PC) has greatly improved survival, advanced PC remains a major cause of cancer deaths. Identification of novel targetable pathways that contribute to tumor progression in PC could open new therapeutic options. The di-ganglioside GD2 is a target of FDA-approved antibody therapies in neuroblastoma, but the role of GD2 in PC is unexplored.

Europe's Largest Research Infrastructure for Curated Medical Data Models with Semantic Annotations.

Background: Structural metadata from the majority of clinical studies and routine health care systems is currently not yet available to the scientific community.

Objective: To provide an overview of available contents in the Portal of Medical Data Models (MDM Portal).

Methods: The MDM Portal is a registered European information infrastructure for research and health care, and its contents are curated and semantically annotated by medical experts.

Integration of Patient-Reported Outcome Data Collected Via Web Applications and Mobile Apps Into a Nation-Wide COVID-19 Research Platform Using Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources: Development Study.

Background: The Network University Medicine projects are an important part of the German COVID-19 research infrastructure. They comprise 2 subprojects: COVID-19 Data Exchange (CODEX) and Coordination on Mobile Pandemic Apps Best Practice and Solution Sharing (COMPASS). CODEX provides a centralized and secure data storage platform for research data, whereas in COMPASS, expert panels were gathered to develop a reference app framework for capturing patient-reported outcomes (PROs) that can be used by any researcher.

Awareness of smoking cessation amongst German vascular surgeons.

Smoking represents the well-known enemy of vascular well-being. Numerous previous studies emphasised the important role of smoking on the development and progression of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The current study aimed to identify hurdles and barriers for an insufficient implementation of secondary prevention in the treatment of lower extremity peripheral arterial disease (PAD).

Telemedicine Plus Standard Care Versus Standard Care Only in Specialized Outpatient Palliative Care: A Randomized Controlled Noninferiority Trial.

t p Clinical Trial Registration Number: NCT06054048.

Narcissistic dimensions and depressive symptoms in patients across mental disorders in cognitive behavioural therapy and in psychoanalytic interactional therapy in Germany: a prospective cohort study.

Background: Narcissistic personality traits have been theorised to negatively affect depressive symptoms, therapeutic alliance, and treatment outcome, even in the absence of narcissistic personality disorder. We aimed to examine how the dimensional narcissistic facets of admiration and rivalry affect depressive symptoms across treatment modalities in two transdiagnostic samples.

Methods: We did a naturalistic, observational prospective cohort study in two independent adult samples in Germany: one sample pooled from an inpatient psychiatric clinic and an outpatient treatment service offering cognitive behavioural treatment (CBT), and one sample from an inpatient clinic providing psychoanalytic interactional therapy (PIT).

Comparison of German Translations of the System Usability Scale - Which to Take?

The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a reliable tool for usability measurement and evaluation. Since its original language is English, a translation is required before a target group can answer it in their native language. The challenge of translating questionnaires lies in the preservation of its original properties.

Cold Plasma Therapy in Chronic Wounds-A Multicenter, Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial (Plasma on Chronic Wounds for Epidermal Regeneration Study): Preliminary Results.

Chronic wounds (CWs) pose a significant health challenge in clinical practice. Standard wound therapy (SWT) is currently considered the gold standard. However, recent evidence suggests that cold plasma therapy (CPT) holds promise for improving CWs.

EHD1-dependent traffic of IGF-1 receptor to the cell surface is essential for Ewing sarcoma tumorigenesis and metastasis.

Overexpression of the EPS15 Homology Domain containing 1 (EHD1) protein has been linked to tumorigenesis but whether its core function as a regulator of intracellular traffic of cell surface receptors plays a role in oncogenesis remains unknown. We establish that EHD1 is overexpressed in Ewing sarcoma (EWS), with high EHD1 mRNA expression specifying shorter patient survival. ShRNA-knockdown and CRISPR-knockout with mouse Ehd1 rescue established a requirement of EHD1 for tumorigenesis and metastasis.

Cbl and Cbl-b Ubiquitin Ligases are Essential for Intestinal Epithelial Stem Cell Maintenance.

Among the signaling pathways that control the stem cell self-renewal and maintenance vs. acquisition of differentiated cell fates, those mediated by receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) activation are well established as key players. CBL family ubiquitin ligases are negative regulators of RTKs but their physiological roles in regulating stem cell behaviors are unclear.

Development of a Command Line Interface for the Analysis of Result Sets from Automated Queries to Literature Databases.

The first step of a systematic review is the identification of publications related to a research question in different literature databases. The quality of the final review is mainly influenced by finding the best search query resulting in high precision and recall. Usually, this process is iterative and requires refining the initial query and comparing the different result sets.

U-Net-Based Segmentation of Current Imaging Biomarkers in OCT-Scans of Patients with Age Related Macular Degeneration.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the Western world. In this work, the non-invasive imaging technique spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) is used to acquire retinal images, which are then analyzed using deep learning techniques. The authors trained a convolutional neural network (CNN) using 1300 SD-OCT scans annotated by trained experts for the presence of different biomarkers associated with AMD.

Telemedical Consultations in Palliative Care: Benefits through Knowledge Exchange and Intercollegiate Collaboration-Findings from the German oVID Project.

(1) Background: As the number of people receiving specialized palliative care (PC) continues to rise, there is a need to ensure the transfer of this expertise from university-based PC departments to primary care hospitals without such in-house access. The present study examines the potential of telemedicine to bridge these gaps. (2) Methods: This is a prospective multi-center feasibility trial.

Creating a Telemedicine Network of Specialists in Maternal-Fetal Medicine: A Prospective Cohort Study.

p

EHD1-dependent traffic of IGF-1 receptor to the cell surface is essential for Ewing sarcoma tumorigenesis and metastasis.

Overexpression of EPS15 Homology Domain containing 1 (EHD1) has been linked to tumorigenesis but whether its core function as a regulator of intracellular traffic of cell surface receptors plays a role in oncogenesis remains unknown. We establish that EHD1 is overexpressed in Ewing sarcoma (EWS), with high EHD mRNA expression specifying shorter patient survival. ShRNA and CRISPR-knockout with mouse Ehd1 rescue established a requirement of EHD1 for tumorigenesis and metastasis.

EHD2 overexpression promotes tumorigenesis and metastasis in triple-negative breast cancer by regulating store-operated calcium entry.

With nearly all cancer deaths a result of metastasis, elucidating novel pro-metastatic cellular adaptations could provide new therapeutic targets. Here, we show that overexpression of the EPS15-Homology Domain-containing 2 (EHD2) protein in a large subset of breast cancers (BCs), especially the triple-negative (TNBC) and HER2+ subtypes, correlates with shorter patient survival. The mRNAs for EHD2 and Caveolin-1/2, structural components of caveolae, show co-overexpression across breast tumors, predicting shorter survival in basal-like BC.

Raising the standards of patient-centered outcomes research in myelodysplastic syndromes: Clinical utility and validation of the subscales of the QUALMS from the MDS-RIGHT project.

Background: Clinical decision-making for patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) is challenging, and both disease and treatment effects heavily impact health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of these patients. Therefore, disease-specific HRQoL measures can be critical to harness the patient voice in MDS research.

Methods: We report a prospective international validation study of the Quality of Life in Myelodysplasia Scale (QUALMS) with a main focus on providing information on the psychometric characteristics of its three subscales: physical burden (QUALMS-P), emotional burden (QUALMS-E), and benefit finding (QUALMS-BF).