Keratose Hydrogel Drives Differentiation of Cardiac Vascular Smooth Muscle Progenitor Cells: Implications in Ischemic Treatment.

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a common vascular disorder in the extremity of limbs with limited clinical treatments. Stem cells hold great promise for the treatment of PAD, but their therapeutic efficiency is limited due to multiple factors, such as poor engraftment and non-optimal selection of cell type. To date, stem cells from a variety of tissue sources have been tested, but little information is available regarding vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) for PAD therapy.

A flexible three-dimensional heterophase computed tomography hepatocellular carcinoma detection algorithm for generalizable and practical screening.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) can be potentially discovered from abdominal computed tomography (CT) studies under varied clinical scenarios (e.g., fully dynamic contrast-enhanced [DCE] studies, noncontrast [NC] plus venous phase [VP] abdominal studies, or NC-only studies).

Interleukin Receptor Associated Kinase 1 Signaling and Its Association with Cardiovascular Diseases.

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) and interleukin-1 receptor (IL-1R) directly interact with intracellular interleukin receptor associated kinase (IRAK) family members to initialize innate immune and inflammatory responses following activation by pathogen-associated or host-derived elements. Although four IRAK family members [IRAK1, 2, 3 ( IRAK-M), and 4] are involved in TLR and IL-1R signaling pathways, IL-1R > IRAK1 signaling appears to be the most studied pathway, with sufficient evidence to support its central role linking the innate immune response to the pathogenesis of various diseases, including cancers, metabolic disorders, and non-infectious immune disorders. However, IRAK1's involvement in cardiovascular diseases was only recently revealed and the detailed mechanism underling the pathogenesis of cardiovascular diseases, such as atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, and heart failure (all non-infectious disorders), remains largely unknown with very limited publications to date.

Pathogenic Mechanisms of Trimethylamine N-Oxide-induced Atherosclerosis and Cardiomyopathy.

Trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO) is a gut microbiota metabolite derived from trimethylamine- containing nutrient precursors such as choline, L-carnitine, and betaine, which are rich in many vegetables, fruits, nuts, dairy products, and meats. An increasing number of clinical studies have demonstrated a strong relationship between elevated plasma TMAO levels and adverse cardiovascular events. It is commonly agreed that TMAO acts as an independent risk factor and a prognostic index for patients with cardiovascular disease.

Common differentially expressed genes and pathways correlating both coronary artery disease and atrial fibrillation.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) and atrial fibrillation (AF) share common risk factors, such as hypertension and diabetes. The patients with CAD often suffer concomitantly AF, but how two diseases interact with each other at cellular and molecular levels remain largely unknown. The present study aims to dissect the common differentially expressed genes (DEGs) that are concurrently associated with CAD and AF.

Learning From Multiple Datasets With Heterogeneous and Partial Labels for Universal Lesion Detection in CT.

Large-scale datasets with high-quality labels are desired for training accurate deep learning models. However, due to the annotation cost, datasets in medical imaging are often either partially-labeled or small. For example, DeepLesion is such a large-scale CT image dataset with lesions of various types, but it also has many unlabeled lesions (missing annotations).

Lesion-Harvester: Iteratively Mining Unlabeled Lesions and Hard-Negative Examples at Scale.

The acquisition of large-scale medical image data, necessary for training machine learning algorithms, is hampered by associated expert-driven annotation costs. Mining hospital archives can address this problem, but labels often incomplete or noisy, e.g.

PET Index of Bone Glucose Metabolism (PIBGM) Classification of PET/CT Data for Fever of Unknown Origin Diagnosis.

Objectives: Fever of unknown origin (FUO) remains a challenge in clinical practice. Fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) is helpful in diagnosing the etiology of FUO. This paper aims to develop a completely automatic classification method based on PET/CT data for the computer-assisted diagnosis of FUO.

Kinetic analysis of dynamic (11)C-acetate PET/CT imaging as a potential method for differentiation of hepatocellular carcinoma and benign liver lesions.

Objective: The kinetic analysis of (11)C-acetate PET provides more information than routine one time-point static imaging. This study aims to investigate the potential of dynamic (11)C-acetate hepatic PET imaging to improve the diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and benign liver lesions by using compartmental kinetic modeling and discriminant analysis.

Methods: Twenty-two patients were enrolled in this study, 6 cases were with well-differentiated HCCs, 7 with poorly-differentiated HCCs and 9 with benign pathologies.

Diffuse Hepatic FDG Activity From Nonmalignant Etiologies.

Diffuse increased ¹⁸F-FDG activity is commonly caused by malignant involvement. We describe here cases of diffuse, uniformly increased ¹⁸F-FDG activity due to nonmalignant illnesses in 2 patients: one had parvovirus B19 infection, whereas the other had porphyria, a heme synthesis disorder.