Probing Tissue Microarchitecture of the Baby Brain via Spherical Mean Spectrum Imaging.

During the first years of life, the human brain undergoes dynamic spatially-heterogeneous changes, invo- lving differentiation of neuronal types, dendritic arbori- zation, axonal ingrowth, outgrowth and retraction, synaptogenesis, and myelination. To better quantify these changes, this article presents a method for probing tissue microarchitecture by characterizing water diffusion in a spectrum of length scales, factoring out the effects of intra-voxel orientation heterogeneity. Our method is based on the spherical means of the diffusion signal, computed over gradient directions for a set of diffusion weightings (i.

The Longitudinal Effects of Caregiver Grief in Dementia and the Modifying Effects of Social Services: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Background: Caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD) can experience loss and grief long before the death of the PWD, with such caregiver grief postulated to affect the well-being of the PWD-caregiver dyads. However, the longitudinal effects of caregiver grief and the moderating effects of social services are not yet clear.

Objectives: We investigated the longitudinal effects of caregiver grief on caregiver depression, caregivers' quality of life (QoL), and caregivers' perceived positive aspects of caregiving (PAC); and examined potential effect modification of social service utilization (dementia care services, caregiver programs, and paid caregivers).

Biotoxoid Photonic Sensors with Temperature Insensitivity Using a Cascade of Ring Resonator and Mach-Zehnder Interferometer.

The great advances in silicon photonic-sensing technology have made it an attractive platform for wide sensing applications. However, most silicon photonic-sensing platforms suffer from high susceptibility to the temperature fluctuation of an operating environment. Additional complex and costly chemical signal-enhancement strategies are usually required to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

An Overview of the Genetic Variations of the SARS-CoV-2 Genomes Isolated in Southeast Asian Countries.

Monitoring the mutation dynamics of human severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is critical in understanding its infectivity, virulence and pathogenicity for development of a vaccine. In an "age of mobility," the pandemic highlights the importance and vulnerability of regionalization and labor market interdependence in Southeast Asia. We intend to characterize the genetic variability of viral populations within the region to provide preliminary information for regional surveillance in the future.

SLIR: Synthesis, localization, inpainting, and registration for image-guided thermal ablation of liver tumors.

Thermal ablation is a minimally invasive procedure for treating small or unresectable tumors. Although CT is widely used for guiding ablation procedures, yet the contrast of tumors against normal soft tissues is often poor in CT scans, aggravating the accurate thermal ablation. In this paper, we propose a fast MR-CT image registration method to overlay pre-procedural MR (pMR) and pre-procedural CT (pCT) images onto an intra-procedural CT (iCT) image to guide the thermal ablation of liver tumors.

Transcriptomic analysis of multi-drug resistant K-12 strain in response to essential oil.

To better understand the synergistic antibacterial activity between piperacillin and essential oil (LEO) against multidrug-resistant , we performed microarray transcriptomic analysis of LEO when used alone and in combination with piperacillin against the non-treated control. In total, 90 genes were differentially expressed after the combination of LEO and piperacillin treatment. Among the up-regulated genes, , are known to control microbial metabolism and nitrotoluene degradation, which were observed only in the LEO-piperacillin combinatory treatment.

Timely Lessons from a Pandemic on the Benefits of Person Centric Care in Long Term Care Facilities.

Since the outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been few deadlier places than in nursing homes. As such, several useful guidelines on coping with COVID-19 in nursing homes have emerged. The critical immediate term measures mentioned in the guidelines have longer term implications especially on quality of care.

Optical Potential-Well Array for High-Selectivity, Massive Trapping and Sorting at Nanoscale.

Optical tweezers are versatile tools capable of sorting microparticles, yet formidable challenges are present in the separation of nanoparticles smaller than 200 nm. The difficulties arise from the controversy on the requirement of a tightly focused light spot in order to create strong optical forces while a large area is kept for the sorting. To overcome this problem, we create a near-field potential well array with connected tiny hotspots in a large scale.

First detection of Klebsiella quasipneumoniae producing OXA-181 carbapenemase in Malaysia.

The emergence of carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae has become a major global concern. OXA-48-like carbapenemase gene and its variants have been increasingly reported worldwide. This study reported the first OXA-181-producing Klebsiella quasipneumoniae isolate in Malaysia.

Persistence and treatment patterns of fixed combination drugs for glaucoma: a retrospective claims database study in Japan.

Background: Poor persistence with glaucoma therapy can lead to disease progression and subsequent blindness. Persistence with second-line glaucoma combination treatment in a Japanese real-world setting and whether it differed from fixed and unfixed combination drugs was investigated.

Methods: This was a retrospective, non-interventional, cohort study using data from a Japanese medical claims database.

Real-Time Quality Assessment of Pediatric MRI via Semi-Supervised Deep Nonlocal Residual Neural Networks.

In this paper, we introduce an image quality assessment (IQA) method for pediatric T1- and T2-weighted MR images. IQA is first performed slice-wise using a nonlocal residual neural network (NR-Net) and then volume-wise by agglomerating the slice QA results using random forest. Our method requires only a small amount of quality-annotated images for training and is designed to be robust to annotation noise that might occur due to rater errors and the inevitable mix of good and bad slices in an image volume.

Biodiscovery of antibacterial constituents from the endolichenic fungi isolated from .

A total of nine endolichenic fungi were isolated from the foliose lichen (Nyl.) Hale. Of the nine endolichenic fungi, three taxa (, , ) showed antibacterial activities as determined by the disk diffusion assay against ESKAPE bacterial pathogens.

Estimating Reference Shape Model for Personalized Surgical Reconstruction of Craniomaxillofacial Defects.

Objective: To estimate a patient-specific reference bone shape model for a patient with craniomaxillofacial (CMF) defects due to facial trauma.

Methods: We proposed an automatic facial bone shape estimation framework using pre-traumatic conventional portrait photos and post-traumatic head computed tomography (CT) scans via a 3D face reconstruction and a deformable shape model. Specifically, a three-dimensional (3D) face was first reconstructed from the patient's pre-traumatic portrait photos.

Dyadic approach to supervised community rehabilitation participation in an Asian setting post-stroke: exploring the role of caregiver and patient characteristics in a prospective cohort study.

Objective: To study the association of caregiver factors and stroke survivor factors with supervised community rehabilitation (SCR) participation over the first 3 months and subsequent 3 to 12 months post-stroke in an Asian setting.

Design: Prospective cohort study.

Setting: Community setting.

Whole genome analysis of multidrug-resistant Citrobacter freundii B9-C2 isolated from preterm neonate's stool in the first week.

Background: Resistance to colistin, the last line therapy for infections caused by multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria, represents a major public health threat. Citrobacter freundii B9-C2 which was isolated from the stool of preterm neonate on the first week of life, displayed resistance to almost all major antibiotics, including colistin. Through whole genome sequencing (WGS), we characterised the genome features that underline the antibiotic-resistance phenotype of this isolate.

A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Caregivers of Community Dwelling Persons with Severe Dementia (PISCES): Study Protocol.

Although many persons with severe dementia (PWSDs) are cared for at home by their family caregivers, few studies have assessed end of life (EOL) care experiences of PWSDs. We present the protocol for the PISCES study (Panel study Investigating Status of Cognitively impaired Elderly in Singapore) which aims to describe the clinical course, health care utilization, and expenditures for community-dwelling PWSDs; and perceived burden, coping, resilience, anticipatory and prolonged grief among their caregivers. This ongoing multi-center prospective longitudinal study is recruiting primary informal caregivers of 250 PWSDs from major restructured public hospitals, community hospitals, home care foundations, and hospices in Singapore.

Association between long-term exposure to ambient air pollution and prevalence of diabetes mellitus among Malaysian adults.

Background: Malaysia has the highest rate of diabetes mellitus (DM) in the Southeast Asian region, and has ongoing air pollution and periodic haze exposure.

Methods: Diabetes data were derived from the Malaysian National Health and Morbidity Surveys conducted in 2006, 2011 and 2015. The air pollution data (NO, NO, SO, O and PM) were obtained from the Department of Environment Malaysia.

Microplastics in the freshwater and terrestrial environments: Prevalence, fates, impacts and sustainable solutions.

The ubiquitous occurrences of microplastics in the environment have raised much concern and resulted in voluminous studies related to microplastics. Studies on microplastics pollution of the marine environment have received significantly higher attention compared to those of the freshwater and terrestrial environments. With the impetus to better understand microplastics in the freshwater and terrestrial environments, this review elucidates the findings of >100 articles related to the prevalence, fates and impacts of microplastics therein and the sustainable solutions, mostly in the past 10 years.

A toolbox for brain network construction and classification (BrainNetClass).

Brain functional network has been increasingly used in understanding brain functions and diseases. While many network construction methods have been proposed, the progress in the field still largely relies on static pairwise Pearson's correlation-based functional network and group-level comparisons. We introduce a "Brain Network Construction and Classification (BrainNetClass)" toolbox to promote more advanced brain network construction methods to the filed, including some state-of-the-art methods that were recently developed to capture complex and high-order interactions among brain regions.

Wavelet-based Semi-supervised Adversarial Learning for Synthesizing Realistic 7T from 3T MRI.

Ultra-high field 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners produce images with exceptional anatomical details, which can facilitate diagnosis and prognosis. However, 7T MRI scanners are often cost prohibitive and hence inaccessible. In this paper, we propose a novel wavelet-based semi-supervised adversarial learning framework to synthesize 7T MR images from their 3T counterparts.

Reconstructing High-Quality Diffusion MRI Data from Orthogonal Slice-Undersampled Data Using Graph Convolutional Neural Networks.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI), while powerful for the characterization of tissue microstructure, suffers from long acquisition times. In this paper, we propose a super-resolution (SR) reconstruction method based on orthogonal slice-undersampling for accelerated dMRI acquisition. Instead of scanning full diffusion-weighted (DW) image volumes, only a subsample of equally-spaced slices need to be acquired.

Multifold Acceleration of Diffusion MRI via Deep Learning Reconstruction from Slice-Undersampled Data.

Diffusion MRI (dMRI), while powerful for characterization of tissue microstructure, suffers from long acquisition time. In this paper, we present a method for effective diffusion MRI reconstruction from slice-undersampled data. Instead of full diffusion-weighted (DW) image volumes, only a subsample of equally-spaced slices need to be acquired.

Surface-Volume Consistent Construction of Longitudinal Atlases for the Early Developing Brain.

Infant brain atlases are essential for characterizing structural changes in the developing brain. Volumetric and cortical atlases are typically constructed independently, potentially causing discrepancies between tissue boundaries and cortical surfaces. In this paper, we present a method for surface-volume consistent construction of longitudinal brain atlases of infants from 2 weeks to 12 months of age.

Allantoin, a Potential Metabolite That Promotes AMPK Phosphorylation and Suppresses Cholesterol Biosynthesis Via the Mevalonate Pathway and Bloch Pathway.

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of probiotic administration on obese and ageing models. Sprague Dawley rats were subjected to high-fat diet (HFD) and injected with D-galactose to induce premature ageing. Upon 12 weeks of treatment, the faecal samples were collected and subjected to gas chromatography-mass spectrophotometry (GC-MS) analysis for metabolite detection.