Publications by authors named "Zee C"

Background: Healthcare is responsible for 4% to 10% of carbon emissions worldwide, of which 22% is related to transport. Telemedicine emerged as a potential solution to reduce the footprint, for example, by reducing travel. However, a need to understand which variables to include in carbon footprint estimations in telemedicine limits our understanding of the beneficial impact telemedicine might have on our environment.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores a web-based tool for self-assessing visual acuity and refractive error in myopic children, with a focus on its effectiveness compared to traditional clinic measurements.
  • The results demonstrated that children could accurately perform self-assessments at home, showing good agreement with clinical tests, although the web tool tended to underestimate visual acuity for poorer vision cases.
  • The web-based refractive error assessments indicated greater myopia progression than those recorded in the clinic, suggesting this tool could be useful for ongoing monitoring in children.
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The intraoperative optical coherence tomography (iOCT) is recently introduced in Descemet membrane endothelial keratoplasty (DMEK) surgery, which aims to increase clinical performance and surgery safety. However, the acquisition of this modality is a substantial investment. The objective of this paper is to report on the cost-effectiveness of an iOCT-protocol in DMEK surgery with the Advanced Visualization in Corneal Surgery Evaluation (ADVISE) trial.

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Article Synopsis
  • The Nucleocapsid protein (NCAP) of SARS-CoV-2 plays a vital role in the virus's function, with its self-assembly being central to this role.
  • Analysis shows that NCAP has low-complexity domains (LCDs) similar to those in other proteins, which can form phase separation droplets and amyloid fibrils.
  • The study reveals that the central LCD of NCAP can lead to both phase separation and amyloid formation, highlighting three adhesive segments that, when targeted by a new peptide (G12), can inhibit NCAP's self-assembly and exhibit antiviral effects against SARS-CoV-2.
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Electron diffraction (MicroED/3DED) can render the three-dimensional atomic structures of molecules from previously unamenable samples. The approach has been particularly transformative for peptidic structures, where MicroED has revealed novel structures of naturally occurring peptides, synthetic protein fragments, and peptide-based natural products. Despite its transformative potential, MicroED is beholden to the crystallographic phase problem, which challenges its determination of structures.

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Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is highly prevalent in children. Recent literature suggests that children with mTBI are at considerable risk of persisting neurocognitive deficits, threatening post-injury child development. Nevertheless, clinical tools for early identification of children at risk are currently not available.

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Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) is a severe inflammatory disease in children related to SARS-CoV-2 with multisystem involvement including marked cardiac dysfunction and clinical symptoms that can resemble Kawasaki Disease (KD). We hypothesized that MIS-C and KD might have commonalities as well as unique inflammatory responses and studied these responses in both diseases. In total, fourteen children with MIS-C (n=8) and KD (n=6) were included in the period of March-June 2020.

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Rationale: Prompt diagnosis of nontuberculous Mycobacterial (NTM) vertebral osteomyelitis is challenging, yet necessary to prevent serious morbidity and mortality. Here, we report 3 cases of vertebral osteomyelitis caused by NTM with imaging findings.

Patient Concerns: Case 1, a 58-year-old male patient, was admitted to our hospital because of the presence of a pulmonary mass for 6 months with cough and chest pain.

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Health awareness campaigns educate and inform the public about particular health conditions with the aim of either changing behavior or enhancing uptake of appropriate healthcare, such as vaccination or screening. The campaigns may be run by governments and public health bodies but are also deployed by biopharmaceutical companies. Industry-sponsored disease awareness (DA) campaigns intend to provide information about diseases and their prevention or treatment, without mentioning specific products.

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Unlabelled: Pneumocystis jirovecii (Pj) is a fungal pathogen that can cause severe and potential fatal pneumonia (Pneumocystis pneumonia, PCP) in immunocompromised patients. Microbiological diagnosis is necessary to confirm PCP, for which mainly real-time PCR assays are used by detecting Pj from bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) specimens. In this study, we evaluate the performance of the CE-IVD PneumoGenius® assay and CE-IVD RealStar® Pneumocystis jirovecii PCR assay in comparison to the lab developed test (LDT) that is used in routine diagnostics.

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The use of augmented reality (AR) in teaching and studying neuroanatomy has been well researched. Previous research showed that AR-based learning of neuroanatomy has both alleviated cognitive load and was attractive to young learners. However, how the attractiveness of AR effects student motivation has not been discovered.

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Unlabelled: The SARS-CoV-2 Nucleoprotein (NCAP) functions in RNA packaging during viral replication and assembly. Computational analysis of its amino acid sequence reveals a central low-complexity domain (LCD) having sequence features akin to LCDs in other proteins known to function in liquid-liquid phase separation. Here we show that in the presence of viral RNA, NCAP, and also its LCD segment alone, form amyloid-like fibrils when undergoing liquid-liquid phase separation.

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Background: Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) is the most common renal cancer and it has the worst prognosis among all renal cancers. However, traditional radiological characteristics on computed tomography (CT) scans of ccRCC have been insufficient to predict the pathological grade of ccRCC before surgery.

Methods: Patients with ccRCC were retrospectively enrolled into this study and were separated into two groups according to the World Health Organization (WHO)/International Society of Urological Pathology (ISUP) grading system, i.

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Structural elucidation of small macromolecules such as peptides has recently been facilitated by a growing number of technological advances to existing crystallographic methods. The emergence of electron micro-diffraction (MicroED) of protein nanocrystals under cryogenic conditions has enabled the interrogation of crystalline peptide assemblies only hundreds of nanometers thick. Collection of atomic or near-atomic resolution data by these methods has permitted the ab initio determination of structures of various amyloid-forming peptides, including segments derived from prions and ice-nucleating proteins.

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Spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) helps to reduce chronic low back pain (cLBP). However, the underlying mechanism of pain relief and the neurological response to SMT remains unclear. We utilized brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) upon the application of a real-time spot pressure mechanical stimulus to assess the effects of SMT on patients with cLBP.

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The synthesis of graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) that contain site-specifically substituted backbone heteroatoms is one of the essential goals that must be achieved in order to control the electronic properties of these next generation organic materials. We have exploited our recently reported solid-state topochemical polymerization/cyclization-aromatization strategy to convert the simple 1,4-bis(3-pyridyl)butadiynes into the fjord-edge nitrogen-doped graphene nanoribbon structures (fjord-edge N[8]GNRs). Structural assignments are confirmed by CP/MAS C NMR, Raman, and XPS spectroscopy.

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Increasing evidence indicates that the enzyme creatine kinase (CK) is intimately involved in microvascular contractility. The mitochondrial isoenzyme catalyses phosphocreatine synthesis from ATP, while cytoplasmic CK, predominantly the BB isoenzyme in vascular tissue, is tightly bound near myosin ATPase, where it favours ATP production from phosphocreatine to metabolically support vascular contractility. However, the effect of CK gene inactivation on microvascular function is hitherto unknown.

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"Values-based decision-making" frameworks and models are widely described in the literature in various disciplines, including healthcare settings. However, there is a paucity of literature on the application of systematic methods or models in the biopharmaceutical research and development (R&D) field of drugs, vaccines, and immunotherapeutics. In this report, we describe our model that uses company values along with framing questions in a five-step process to guide ethical decisions in the vaccines R&D context.

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Amyloid-β (Aβ) harbors numerous posttranslational modifications (PTMs) that may affect Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis. Here we present the 1.1 Å resolution MicroED structure of an Aβ 20-34 fibril with and without the disease-associated PTM, L-isoaspartate, at position 23 (L-isoAsp23).

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In this article, we presented the detailed measurements and comparisons of skeletal muscle perfusion parameters in a canine hind limb ischemia model. Data presented here is related to and supportive to the research article "Evaluation of skeletal muscle perfusion in canine hind limb ischemia model using color-coded digital subtraction angiography" [1], where interpretation of the research data presented here is available.

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Conventional methods for predicting treatment response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy (nCRT) in patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) are limited. This study retrospectively recruited 134 LARC patients who underwent standard nCRT followed by total mesorectal excision surgery in our institution. Based on pre-operative axial T2-weighted images, machine learning radiomics was performed.

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Objectives: To assess the microstructural properties of cerebral white matter in children with congenital sensorineural hearing loss (CSNHL).

Methods: Children (>4 years of age) with profound CSNHL and healthy controls with normal hearing (the control group) were enrolled and underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). DTI parameters including fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity, axial diffusivity, and radial diffusivity were obtained from a whole-brain tract-based spatial statistics analysis and were compared between the two groups.

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BACKGROUND Arteriovenous fistulas (AVFs) are used to provide vascular access for hemodialysis in patients with end-stage renal failure. However, stenosis and thrombosis can compromise long-term AVF patency. The objective of this study was to evaluate catheter thrombolysis with percutaneous transluminal angioplasty (PTA), using a trans-brachial approach, for acutely thrombosed AVFs.

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The ice-nucleation protein InaZ from contains a large number of degenerate repeats that span more than a quarter of its sequence and include the segment GSTSTA. structures of this repeat segment, resolved to 1.1 Å by microfocus X-ray crystallography and to 0.

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