Introducing and Validating the Multiphasic Evidential Decision-Making Matrix (MedMax) for Clinical Management in Patients with Intrahepatic Cholangiocarcinoma.

Despite the significant advancements of liver surgery in the last few decades, the survival rate of patients with liver and pancreatic cancers has improved by only 10% in 30 years. Precision medicine offers a patient-centered approach, which, when combined with machine learning, could enhance decision making and treatment outcomes in surgical management of ihCC. This study aims to develop a decision support model to optimize treatment strategies for patients with ihCC, a prevalent primary liver cancer.

Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in Differently Processed Smoothies and Fresh Produce from Austria.

Plant-derived foods are potential vehicles for microbial antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), which can be transferred to the human microbiome if consumed raw or minimally processed. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and the amount of clinically relevant ARGs and mobile genetic elements (MGEs) in differently processed smoothies (freshly prepared, cold-pressed, pasteurized and high-pressure processed) and fresh produce samples (organically and conventionally cultivated) to assess potential health hazards associated with their consumption. The MGE and the class 1 integron-integrase gene were detected by probe-based qPCR in concentrations up to 10 copies/mL in all smoothies, lettuce, carrots and a single tomato sample.

Surface Molecular Markers for the Isolation of Viable Fibroblast Subpopulations in the Female Reproductive Tract: A Comprehensive Review.

Advancements in single-cell analyzis technologies, particularly single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and Fluorescence-Activated Cell Sorting (FACS), have enabled the analyzis of cellular diversity by providing resolutions that were not available previously. These methods enable the simultaneous analyzis of thousands of individual transcriptomes, facilitating the classification of cells into distinct subpopulations, based on transcriptomic differences, adding a new level of complexity to biomolecular and medical research. Fibroblasts, despite being one of the most abundant cell types in the human body and forming the structural backbone of tissues and organs, remained poorly characterized for a long time.

Differential Expression of Proteins Involved in Skin Barrier Maintenance and Vitamin D Metabolism in Atopic Dermatitis: A Cross-Sectional, Exploratory Study.

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder influenced by proteins involved in skin barrier maintenance and vitamin D metabolism. Using an intra-patient design, this study compared protein expression in intra-lesional (IL) and peri-lesional (PL) skin biopsies from AD patients and examined associations between protein levels, vitamin D status, and clinical features. Forty-four biopsies from twenty-two AD patients were analyzed using antibody microarrays targeting twelve proteins.

Investigation of Basic Assumption for Contact Between Spheric Asperities in Rough Surface.

Accurate analyses of contact problems for rough surfaces are important but complicated. Some assumptions, namely that all asperities can be approximated by a hemisphere with the same radius and assuming a Gaussian distribution of the asperity heights, are convenient but may lead to less accurate results. The purpose of this work is to investigate these assumptions and analyze the conditions under which they are valid.

Improving the Robustness of Deep-Learning Models in Predicting Hematoma Expansion from Admission Head CT.

Background And Purpose: Robustness against input data perturbations is essential for deploying deep-learning models in clinical practice. Adversarial attacks involve subtle, voxel-level manipulations of scans to increase deep-learning models' prediction errors. Testing deep-learning model performance on examples of adversarial images provides a measure of robustness, and including adversarial images in the training set can improve the model's robustness.

Biochar@MIL-88A(Fe) accelerates direct interspecies electron transfer and hydrogen transfer in waste activated sludge anaerobic digestion: Exploring electron transfer and biomolecular mechanisms.

Adding additives exogenously is an effective strategy to enhance methanogenic activity and improve AD stability. Corn straw-based biochar@MIL-88A(Fe) (BM) was synthesized herewith and used as an exogenous additive to boost methane (CH) production. After adding BM at 250 mg/g WAS VS, the accumulative CH production and maximum CH yield increased by 1.

Neuroretinal and RPE changes and susceptibility to Age-Related Macular Degeneration: insights from the longitudinal Alienor Study.

Purpose: We assessed the associations of macular layer thicknesses, measured using spectral-domain OCT (SD-OCT), with incident age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and AMD polygenic risk scores (PRS).

Design: Population-based cohort study PARTICIPANTS: 653 participants of the Alienor study, with biennial eye imaging from 2009 to 2024.

Methods: Macular layer thicknesses of eight distinct layers and three compound layers were automatically segmented based on SD-OCT imaging of the macula.

Enhancement of health beneficial bioactivities of bitter melon (Momordica charantia L.) by puffing.

Effects of puffing and extraction method on physical and biological efficacy of bitter melon was investigated. Puffing increased the Maillard reaction products, extraction yield, total phenolic and total flavonoid contents. Antioxidant activity was the highest at 980 kPa, but there was no significant difference between two extraction methods.

Leptospira spp. is recognized by TLR2 and induces IFN-β and IFN-λ expression in smegma from naturally infected bulls.

Leptospirosis, a zoonosis with a wide worldwide distribution, causes significant reproductive losses in cattle. The genital presentation of the disease has been reported, and its understanding is crucial for the implementation of adequate sanitary measures. Although Leptospira spp.

Learning the language of antibody hypervariability.

Protein language models (PLMs) have demonstrated impressive success in modeling proteins. However, general-purpose "foundational" PLMs have limited performance in modeling antibodies due to the latter's hypervariable regions, which do not conform to the evolutionary conservation principles that such models rely on. In this study, we propose a transfer learning framework called Antibody Mutagenesis-Augmented Processing (AbMAP), which fine-tunes foundational models for antibody-sequence inputs by supervising on antibody structure and binding specificity examples.

The NeuroML ecosystem for standardized multi-scale modeling in neuroscience.

Data-driven models of neurons and circuits are important for understanding how the properties of membrane conductances, synapses, dendrites, and the anatomical connectivity between neurons generate the complex dynamical behaviors of brain circuits in health and disease. However, the inherent complexity of these biological processes makes the construction and reuse of biologically detailed models challenging. A wide range of tools have been developed to aid their construction and simulation, but differences in design and internal representation act as technical barriers to those who wish to use data-driven models in their research workflows.

Slower swimming promotes chemotactic encounters between bacteria and small phytoplankton.

Chemotaxis enables marine bacteria to increase encounters with phytoplankton cells by reducing their search times, provided that bacteria detect noisy chemical gradients around phytoplankton. Gradient detection depends on bacterial phenotypes and phytoplankton size: large phytoplankton produce spatially extended but shallow gradients, whereas small phytoplankton produce steeper but spatially more confined gradients. To date, it has remained unclear how phytoplankton size and bacterial swimming speed affect bacteria's gradient detection ability and search times for phytoplankton.

Mapping patterns of thought onto brain activity during movie-watching.

Movie-watching is a central aspect of our lives and an important paradigm for understanding the brain mechanisms behind cognition as it occurs in daily life. Contemporary views of ongoing thought argue that the ability to make sense of events in the 'here and now' depend on the neural processing of incoming sensory information by auditory and visual cortex, which are kept in check by systems in association cortex. However, we currently lack an understanding of how patterns of ongoing thoughts map onto the different brain systems when we watch a film, partly because methods of sampling experience disrupt the dynamics of brain activity and the experience of movie-watching.

CD3+ Tumor-Infiltrating Lymphocytes in Breast Carcinoma: Their Prognostic Role and Association With Clinical Parameters.

Background Breast carcinoma cases are rising steadily and represent a major cause of mortality and morbidity in India. In response to breast carcinoma, the immune system is activated, resulting in lymphocyte infiltration in and around the tumor nests. This interaction between the tumor and immune system is the basis for studying tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs).

Explainable unsupervised anomaly detection for healthcare insurance data.

Background: Waste and fraud are important problems for health insurers to deal with. With the advent of big data, these insurers are looking more and more towards data mining and machine learning methods to help in detecting waste and fraud. However, labeled data is costly and difficult to acquire as it requires expert investigators and known care providers with atypical behavior.

Failure to repair damaged NAD(P)H blocks de novo serine synthesis in human cells.

Background: Metabolism is error prone. For instance, the reduced forms of the central metabolic cofactors nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH), can be converted into redox-inactive products, NADHX and NADPHX, through enzymatically catalyzed or spontaneous hydration. The metabolite repair enzymes NAXD and NAXE convert these damaged compounds back to the functional NAD(P)H cofactors.

CRISPR-Enabled Autonomous Transposable Element (CREATE) for RNA-based gene editing and delivery.

To address a wide range of genetic diseases, genome editing tools that can achieve targeted delivery of large genes without causing double-strand breaks (DSBs) or requiring DNA templates are necessary. Here, we introduce CRISPR-Enabled Autonomous Transposable Element (CREATE), a genome editing system that combines the programmability and precision of CRISPR/Cas9 with the RNA-mediated gene insertion capabilities of the human LINE-1 (L1) element. CREATE employs a modified L1 mRNA to carry a payload gene, and a Cas9 nickase to facilitate targeted editing by L1-mediated reverse transcription and integration without relying on DSBs or DNA templates.

Ongoing replication stress tolerance and clonal T cell responses distinguish liver and lung recurrence and outcomes in pancreatic cancer.

Patients with metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma survive longer if disease spreads to the lung but not the liver. Here we generated overlapping, multi-omic datasets to identify molecular and cellular features that distinguish patients whose disease develops liver metastasis (liver cohort) from those whose disease develops lung metastasis without liver metastases (lung cohort). Lung cohort patients survived longer than liver cohort patients, despite sharing the same tumor subtype.

Vitamin D as an add-on therapy to phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor in experimental pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Severe vitamin D (vitD) deficiency is a very common condition in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) and it is predictor of poor prognosis. There is emerging evidence suggesting a connection between the insufficient response to phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitors (PDE5i) and vitD deficiency in patients with PAH. In the present translational study, vitD deficiency was induced in Wistar rats by exposure to vitD free diet for 5 weeks and followed by Su5416 administration and hypoxia (10%) for 3 weeks, a standard experimental model of PAH.

A high-throughput platform for single-molecule tracking identifies drug interaction and cellular mechanisms.

The regulation of cell physiology depends largely upon interactions of functionally distinct proteins and cellular components. These interactions may be transient or long-lived, but often affect protein motion. Measurement of protein dynamics within a cellular environment, particularly while perturbing protein function with small molecules, may enable dissection of key interactions and facilitate drug discovery; however, current approaches are limited by throughput with respect to data acquisition and analysis.

Percutaneous transhepatic arterial access for coil embolization of hepatic artery infusion pump-associated bleeding.

Background: Hepatic artery infusion pump (HAIP) chemotherapy is a locoregional treatment for intrahepatic malignancies. HAIPs are surgically implanted, and the catheter tip is typically inserted into a ligated gastroduodenal artery stump. Potential complications at the catheter insertion site include dehiscence, pseudoaneurysm or extravasation, and adjacent hepatic arterial stenosis and thrombosis.

Novel insights into the role of gut microbiota and its metabolites in diabetic chronic wounds.

Wounds in patients with diabetes present significant physical and economic challenges due to impaired healing and prolonged inflammation, exacerbated by complex interactions between microbes. Especially, the development and healing of diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) remain an urgent clinical problem. The human gut harbors a vast microbial ecosystem comprising intestinal flora and their metabolic products.

Clinical and immunological outcomes after randomized trial of baked milk oral immunotherapy for milk allergy.

BACKGROUNDCow's milk (CM) allergy is the most common food allergy in young children. Treatment with oral immunotherapy (OIT) has shown efficacy, but high rates of adverse reactions. The aim of this study was to determine whether baked milk OIT (BMOIT) could reduce adverse reactions while still inducing desensitization, and to identify immunological correlates of successful BMOIT.

Benzimidazole Derivatives in Breast Cancer: Target-Specific Therapeutic Breakthroughs.

Despite ongoing advancements in drug design and developments, breast cancer remains a serious and devastating disease and is ranked as the second most common illness in women. Breast cancer rates have increased significantly during the last 40 years. This necessitates the development of novel treatment techniques.