BOOSTING SKULL-STRIPPING PERFORMANCE FOR PEDIATRIC BRAIN IMAGES.

Skull-stripping is the removal of background and non-brain anatomical features from brain images. While many skull-stripping tools exist, few target pediatric populations. With the emergence of multi-institutional pediatric data acquisition efforts to broaden the understanding of perinatal brain development, it is essential to develop robust and well-tested tools ready for the relevant data processing.

BOOSTING SKULL-STRIPPING PERFORMANCE FOR PEDIATRIC BRAIN IMAGES.

Skull-stripping is the removal of background and non-brain anatomical features from brain images. While many skull-stripping tools exist, few target pediatric populations. With the emergence of multi-institutional pediatric data acquisition efforts to broaden the understanding of perinatal brain development, it is essential to develop robust and well-tested tools ready for the relevant data processing.

Early Pharmacologic Therapy in Patients With Blunt Cerebrovascular Injury and TBI: Is it Safe and Effective? An EAST Multicenter Study.

Background: Blunt cerebrovascular injury (BCVI) with concurrent traumatic brain injury (TBI) presents increased risk of both ischemic stroke and bleeding. This study investigated the safety and survival benefit of BCVI treatment (antithrombotic and/or anticoagulant therapy) in this population. We hypothesized that treatment would be associated with fewer and later strokes in patients with BCVI and TBI without increasing bleeding complications.

Salmonellosis: An Overview of Epidemiology, Pathogenesis, and Innovative Approaches to Mitigate the Antimicrobial Resistant Infections.

is a major foodborne pathogen and a leading cause of gastroenteritis in humans and animals. is highly pathogenic and encompasses more than 2600 characterized serovars. The transmission of to humans occurs through the farm-to-fork continuum and is commonly linked to the consumption of animal-derived food products.

Nanoparticles reduce monocytes within the lungs to improve outcomes after influenza virus infection in aged mice.

Older people exhibit dysregulated innate immunity to respiratory viral infections, including influenza and SARS-CoV-2, and show an increase in morbidity and mortality. Nanoparticles are a potential practical therapeutic that could reduce exaggerated innate immune responses within the lungs during viral infection. However, such therapeutics have not been examined for effectiveness during respiratory viral infection, particular in aged hosts.

Polysalicylic Acid Polymer Microparticle Decoys Therapeutically Treat Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

Acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) remain problematic due to high mortality rates and lack of effective treatments. Neutrophilic injury contributes to mortality in ALI/ARDS. Here, technology for rapid ARDS intervention is developed and evaluated, where intravenous salicylic acid-based polymer microparticles, i.

The Role of ArlRS and VraSR in Regulating Ceftaroline Hypersusceptibility in Methicillin-Resistant .

Methicillin-resistant infections are a global health problem. New control strategies, including fifth-generation cephalosporins such as ceftaroline, have been developed, however rare sporadic resistance has been reported. Our study aimed to determine whether disruption of two-component environmental signal systems detectably led to enhanced susceptibility to ceftaroline in CA-MRSA strain MW2 at sub-MIC concentrations where cells normally continue to grow.

NPSV: A simulation-driven approach to genotyping structural variants in whole-genome sequencing data.

Background: Structural variants (SVs) play a causal role in numerous diseases but are difficult to detect and accurately genotype (determine zygosity) in whole-genome next-generation sequencing data. SV genotypers that assume that the aligned sequencing data uniformly reflect the underlying SV or use existing SV call sets as training data can only partially account for variant and sample-specific biases.

Results: We introduce NPSV, a machine learning-based approach for genotyping previously discovered SVs that uses next-generation sequencing simulation to model the combined effects of the genomic region, sequencer, and alignment pipeline on the observed SV evidence.

Deformable microparticles for shuttling nanoparticles to the vascular wall.

Vascular-targeted drug carriers must localize to the wall (i.e., marginate) and adhere to a diseased endothelium to achieve clinical utility.

Cellular senescence: friend or foe to respiratory viral infections?

Cellular senescence permanently arrests the replication of various cell types and contributes to age-associated diseases. In particular, cellular senescence may enhance chronic lung diseases including COPD and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. However, the role cellular senescence plays in the pathophysiology of acute inflammatory diseases, especially viral infections, is less well understood.

Insights into the global effect on Staphylococcus aureus growth arrest by induction of the endoribonuclease MazF toxin.

A crucial bacterial strategy to avoid killing by antibiotics is to enter a growth arrested state, yet the molecular mechanisms behind this process remain elusive. The conditional overexpression of mazF, the endoribonuclease toxin of the MazEF toxin-antitoxin system in Staphylococcus aureus, is one approach to induce bacterial growth arrest, but its targets remain largely unknown. We used overexpression of mazF and high-throughput sequence analysis following the exact mapping of non-phosphorylated transcriptome ends (nEMOTE) technique to reveal in vivo toxin cleavage sites on a global scale.

Evolving MRSA: High-level β-lactam resistance in Staphylococcus aureus is associated with RNA Polymerase alterations and fine tuning of gene expression.

Most clinical MRSA (methicillin-resistant S. aureus) isolates exhibit low-level β-lactam resistance (oxacillin MIC 2-4 μg/ml) due to the acquisition of a novel penicillin binding protein (PBP2A), encoded by mecA. However, strains can evolve high-level resistance (oxacillin MIC ≥256 μg/ml) by an unknown mechanism.

Neutrophils preferentially phagocytose elongated particles-An opportunity for selective targeting in acute inflammatory diseases.

Polymeric particles have recently been used to modulate the behavior of immune cells in the treatment of various inflammatory conditions. However, there is little understanding of how physical particle parameters affect their specific interaction with different leukocyte subtypes. While particle shape is known to be a crucial factor in their phagocytosis by macrophages, where elongated particles are reported to experience reduced uptake, it remains unclear how shape influences phagocytosis by circulating phagocytes, including neutrophils that are the most abundant leukocyte in human blood.

Role of Aging and the Immune Response to Respiratory Viral Infections: Potential Implications for COVID-19.

Aging impairs immunity to promote diseases, especially respiratory viral infections. The current COVID-19 pandemic, resulting from SARS-CoV-2, induces acute pneumonia, a phenotype that is alarmingly increased with aging. In this article, we review findings of how aging alters immunity to respiratory viral infections to identify age-impacted pathways common to several viral pathogens, permitting us to speculate about potential mechanisms of age-enhanced mortality to COVID-19.

Model Particulate Drug Carriers Modulate Leukocyte Adhesion in Human Blood Flows.

Drug carriers have been widely explored as a method of improving the efficacy of therapeutic drugs for a variety of diseases, including those involving inflammation. However, few of these formulations have advanced past clinical trials. There are still major gaps in our understanding of how drug carriers impact leukocytes, particularly in inflammatory conditions.

Thermosensitive PBP2a requires extracellular folding factors PrsA and HtrA1 for MRSA β-lactam resistance.

is a major human pathogen and represents a clinical challenge because of widespread antibiotic resistance. Methicillin resistant (MRSA) is particularly problematic and originates by the horizontal acquisition of encoding PBP2a, an extracellular membrane anchored transpeptidase, which confers resistance to β-lactam antibiotics by allosteric gating of its active site channel. Herein, we show that dual disruption of PrsA, a lipoprotein chaperone displaying anti-aggregation activity, together with HtrA1, a membrane anchored chaperone/serine protease, resulted in severe and synergistic attenuation of PBP2a folding that restores sensitivity to β-lactams such as oxacillin.

Increased Adhesive Potential of Antiphospholipid Syndrome Neutrophils Mediated by β2 Integrin Mac-1.

Objective: While the role of antiphospholipid antibodies in activating endothelial cells has been extensively studied, the impact of these antibodies on the adhesive potential of leukocytes has received less attention. This study was undertaken to investigate the extent to which antiphospholipid syndrome (APS) neutrophils adhere to resting endothelial cells under physiologic flow conditions and the surface molecules required for that adhesion.

Methods: Patients with primary APS (n = 43), patients with a history of venous thrombosis but negative test results for antiphospholipid antibodies (n = 11), and healthy controls (n = 38) were studied.

Fusing Mobile Phone Sensing and Brain Imaging to Assess Depression in College Students.

As smartphone usage has become increasingly prevalent in our society, so have rates of depression, particularly among young adults. Individual differences in smartphone usage patterns have been shown to reflect individual differences in underlying affective processes such as depression (Wang et al., 2018).

Sub-Inhibitory Doses of Individual Constituents of Essential Oils Can Select for Resistant Mutants.

Increased bacterial resistance to food preservation technologies represents a risk for food safety and shelf-life. The use of natural antimicrobials, such as essential oils (EOs) and their individual constituents (ICs), has been proposed to avoid the generation of antimicrobial resistance. However, prolonged application of ICs might conceivably lead to the emergence of resistant strains.

A Dock-and-Lock Mechanism Clusters ADAM10 at Cell-Cell Junctions to Promote α-Toxin Cytotoxicity.

We previously identified PLEKHA7 and other junctional proteins as host factors mediating death by S. aureus α-toxin, but the mechanism through which junctions promote toxicity was unclear. Using cell biological and biochemical methods, we now show that ADAM10 is docked to junctions by its transmembrane partner Tspan33, whose cytoplasmic C terminus binds to the WW domain of PLEKHA7 in the presence of PDZD11.

An fMRI investigation of the neural correlates underlying the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR).

: The "autonomous sensory meridian response" (ASMR) is a neologism used to describe an internal sensation of deep relaxation and pleasant head tingling which is often stimulated by gentle sounds, light touch, and personal attention. : An fMRI-based methodology was employed to examine the brain activation of subjects prescreened for ASMR-receptivity (n=10) as they watched ASMR videos and identified specific moments of relaxation and tingling. : Subjects who experienced ASMR showed significant activation in regions associated with both reward (NAcc) and emotional arousal (dACC and Insula/IFG).

Reward-related regions form a preferentially coupled system at rest.

Neuroimaging studies have implicated a set of striatal and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) regions that are commonly activated during reward processing tasks. Resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) studies have demonstrated that the human brain is organized into several functional systems that show strong temporal coherence in the absence of goal-directed tasks. Here we use seed-based and graph-theory RSFC approaches to characterize the systems-level organization of putative reward regions of at rest.

PEGylation of model drug carriers enhances phagocytosis by primary human neutrophils.

Unlabelled: Targeted drug carriers are attractive for the delivery of therapeutics directly to the site of a disease, reducing systemic side effects and enhancing the efficacy of therapeutic molecules. However, the use of particulate carriers for drug delivery comes with its own set of challenges and barriers. Among these, a great deal of research effort has focused on protecting carriers from clearance by phagocytes via altering carrier surface chemistry, mostly with the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) chain coatings.

Reducing reward responsivity and daily food desires in female dieters through domain-specific training.

According to the strength model, self-regulation relies on a domain-general capacity that may be strengthened by training. From this perspective, training self-regulation in one domain may transfer to other domains. Here we used two inhibitory training paradigms, a domain-general and domain-specific stop-signal training task and compared their effects on brain reward activity as well as daily food desires in female dieters.

Tracking Depression Dynamics in College Students Using Mobile Phone and Wearable Sensing.

There are rising rates of depression on college campuses. Mental health services on our campuses are working at full stretch. In response researchers have proposed using mobile sensing for continuous mental health assessment.