Publications by authors named "Vangelis Sakkalis"

Background/objectives: Pseudo-vascular network formation in vitro is considered a key characteristic of vasculogenic mimicry. While many cancer cell lines form pseudo-vascular networks, little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics of these formations.

Methods: Here, we present a framework for monitoring and characterising the dynamic formation and dissolution of pseudo-vascular networks in vitro.

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Background Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a well-recognised treatment for advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. Structural brain alterations of the white matter can correlate with disease progression and act as a biomarker for DBS therapy outcomes. This study aims to develop a machine learning-driven predictive model for DBS patient selection using whole-brain white matter radiomics and common clinical variables.

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The massive amount of human biological, imaging, and clinical data produced by multiple and diverse sources necessitates integrative modeling approaches able to summarize all this information into answers to specific clinical questions. In this paper, we present a hypermodeling scheme able to combine models of diverse cancer aspects regardless of their underlying method or scale. Describing tissue-scale cancer cell proliferation, biomechanical tumor growth, nutrient transport, genomic-scale aberrant cancer cell metabolism, and cell-signaling pathways that regulate the cellular response to therapy, the hypermodel integrates mutation, miRNA expression, imaging, and clinical data.

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Adjuvant Temozolomide is considered the front-line Glioblastoma chemotherapeutic treatment; yet not all patients respond. Latest trends in clinical trials usually refer to Doxorubicin; yet it can lead to severe side-effects if administered in high doses. While Glioblastoma prognosis remains poor, little is known about the combination of the two chemotherapeutics.

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Neonatal epileptic seizures take place in the early childhood years, accounting for a severe condition with several deaths and neurological problems in newborn neonates. Despite the early advancements on the diagnosis and/or treatment of this condition, as a major difficulty accounts the inability of the physicians to identify and characterize a seizure, as one a small percentage gets detected in neonatal intensive care units (NICU). An important step towards any kind of seizure classification is the detection and reduction of non-cerebral activity.

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Drifted by the hype of new and efficient machine learning and artificial intelligence models aiming to unlock the information wealth hidden inside heterogeneous datasets across different markets and disciplines, healthcare data are in the center of novel technological advancements in predictive health diagnostics, remote healthcare, assistive leaving and wellbeing. Nevertheless, this emerging market has underlined the necessity of developing new methods and updating existing ones for preserving the privacy of the data and their owners, as well as, ensuring confidentiality and trust throughout the health care data processing pipelines. This paper presents one of the key innovations of a Horizon Europe funded project named "TRUSTEE", which focuses on building a trust and privacy framework for cross-European data exchange by employing a secure and private federated framework to empower companies, organizations, and individuals to securely access data across different disciplines, use and re-use data and metadata to extract knowledge with trust.

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This is the largest study on Radiomics analysis looking into the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on Non-Motor Symptoms (NMS) of Parkinson's disease. Preoperative brain white matter radiomics of 120 patients integrated with clinical variables were used to predict the DBS effect on NMS after 1 year from the surgery. Patients were classified "suboptimal" vs "good" based on a 10% or more improvement in NMS score.

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Glioblastoma is the most aggressive and infiltrative glioma, classified as Grade IV, with the poorest survival rate among patients. Accurate and rigorously tested mechanistic in silico modeling offers great value to understand and quantify the progression of primary brain tumors. This paper presents a continuum-based finite element framework that is built on high performance computing, open-source libraries to simulate glioblastoma progression.

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The regulation policies implemented, the characteristics of vaccines, and the evolution of the virus continue to play a significant role in the progression of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Numerous research articles have proposed using mathematical models to predict the outcomes of different scenarios, with the aim of improving awareness and informing policy-making. In this work, we propose an expansion to the classical SEIR epidemiological model that is designed to fit the complex epidemiological data of COVID-19.

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Healthcare organizations are frequently subject to cybersecurity incidents. The outbreak of a pandemic such as COVID-19 has shown the need for specific operational and organizational measures to be in place in order to reduce the risk of successful cyberattacks. Time will be key: preparation is needed to ensure quick secure set-up of additional resources (IT, staff, medical devices) when the next emergency will hit.

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This work aims to provide information, guidelines, established practices and standards, and an extensive evaluation on new and promising technologies for the implementation of a secure information sharing platform for health-related data. We focus strictly on the technical aspects and specifically on the sharing of health information, studying innovative techniques for secure information sharing within the health-care domain, and we describe our solution and evaluate the use of blockchain methodologically for integrating within our implementation. To do so, we analyze health information sharing within the concept of the PANACEA project that facilitates the design, implementation, and deployment of a relevant platform.

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The main reason why therapeutic schemes fail in Glioblastoma lies on its own peculiarities as a cancer and on our failure to fully decipher them. Fast tumor evolution, invasiveness and incomplete surgical resection contribute to disease recurrence, therapy resistance and high mortality. More faithful models must be developed to address Glioblastoma biology and better clinical guidance.

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Glioblastoma is the most malignant brain tumor among adults. Despite multimodality treatment, it remains incurable, mainly because of its extensive heterogeneity and infiltration in the brain parenchyma. Recent evidence indicates dysregulation of the expression of the Promyelocytic Leukemia Protein (PML) in primary Glioblastoma samples.

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Tumors are complex, dynamic, and adaptive biological systems characterized by high heterogeneity at genetic, epigenetic, phenotypic, as well as tissue microenvironmental level. In this work, utilizing cellular automata methods, we focus on intrinsic heterogeneity with respect to cell cycle duration and explore whether and to what extent this heterogeneity affects cancer cell growth dynamics when cytotoxic treatment is applied. We assume that treatment acts on cancer cells specifically during mitosis and compare it with a (cell cycle-non-specific) cytotoxic treatment that acts randomly regardless of the cell cycle phase.

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Due to the advent of novel technologies and digital opportunities allowing to simplify user lives, healthcare is increasingly evolving towards digitalization. This represent a great opportunity on one side but it also exposes healthcare organizations to multiple threats (both digital and not) that may lead an attacker to compromise the security of medial processes and potentially patients' safety. Today technical cybersecurity countermeasures are used to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and information systems - especially in the healthcare domain.

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Community pharmacists are critically placed in the patient care chain being an extended frontline within primary healthcare networks across Europe. They are trained to ensure safe and effective medication use, a crucial and responsible role, extending beyond the common misconception limited to just providing timely access to medicines for the population. Technology-wise, eHealth being committed to an effective, networked, patient-centered and accessible healthcare would prove a real asset in this direction by achieving improved therapy adherence with better outcomes and direct contribution to a cost-effective healthcare system.

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Field Dependence-Independence (FDI) is a widely studied dimension of cognitive styles designed to measure an individual's ability to identify embedded parts of an organized visual field as entities separate from that given field. The research aims to determine whether the brain activity features that are considered to be perceptual switching indicators could serve as robust features, differentiating Field-Dependent (FD) from Field-Independent (FI) participants. Previous research suggests that various features derived from event related potentials (ERP) and frequency features are associated with the perceptual reversal occurring during the observation of a bistable image.

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Major Glioblastoma's hallmarks include proliferation, invasion and heterogeneity. Biological 3D tumor spheroid models can serve as intermediate systems between traditional 2D cell culture and complex in vivo models. Tumor spheroids have been shown to more accurately reproduce the spatial organization and microenvironmental factors of in vivo micro-tumors, such as relevant gradients of nutrients and other molecular agents, while they maintain cell-to-cell and cell-to-matrix interactions.

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Herbal medicinal products (HMPs) are the subject of increasing interest regarding their benefits for health. However, a serious concern is the potential appearance of clinically significant drug⁻herb interactions in patients. This work provides an overview of drug⁻herb interactions and an evaluation of their clinical significance.

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Metabolic reprogramming is a hallmark of cancer. The main aim of this paper is to integrate a genome-scale metabolic description of tumor cells into a tumor growth model that accounts for the spatiotemporally heterogeneous tumor microenvironment, in order to study the effects of microscopic characteristics on tumor evolution. A lactate maximization metabolic strategy that allows near-optimal growth solution, while maximizing lactate secretion, is assumed.

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Congestive heart failure (CHF) occurs when the heart cannot provide the necessary cardiac output for the metabolic needs of the human body. The most prominent symptoms are increased venous pressure, abnormal heart and breathing rate, tiredness and leg swelling. Most important pathogenesis influence are: age, gender, high blood pressure, alcohol and smoking, sedentary lifestyle and diet, genetic predisposition and family history, diabetes, and atherosclerosis.

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Breast cancer and Glioblastoma brain cancer are severe malignancies with poor prognosis. In this study, primary Glioblastoma and secondary breast cancer spheroids are formed and treated with the well-known Temozolomide and Doxorubicin chemotherapeutics, respectively. High resolution imaging of both primary and secondary cancer cell spheroids is possible using a custom multi-angle Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscope.

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Anti-cancer therapy efficacy in solid tumors mainly depends on drug transportation through the vasculature system and the extracellular matrix, on diffusion gradients and clonal heterogeneity within the tumor mass, as well as on the responses of the individual tumor cells to drugs and their interactions with each other and their local microenvironment. In this work, we develop a mathematical predictive model for tumor growth and drug response based on 3D spheroids experiments that possess several in vivo features of tumors and are considered better for drug screening. The model takes into account the diffusion gradients of both oxygen and drug through the tumor volume, describes the tumor population at cell level and assumes a simple underlying cellular dose-response curve that is translated to a cell death probability.

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