244 results match your criteria: "Cockrell School of Engineering[Affiliation]"

Measurement of biomechanical properties of transversely isotropic biological tissue using traveling wave expansion.

Med Image Anal

January 2025

School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200030, China; Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200040, China; National Engineering Research Center of Advanced Magnetic Resonance Technologies for Diagnosis and Therapy (NERC-AMRT), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200040, China; Department of Radiology, Ruijin Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai 200025, China. Electronic address:

The anisotropic mechanical properties of fiber-embedded biological tissues are essential for understanding their development, aging, disease progression, and response to therapy. However, accurate and fast assessment of mechanical anisotropy in vivo using elastography remains challenging. To address the dilemma of achieving both accuracy and efficiency in this inverse problem involving complex wave equations, we propose a computational framework that utilizes the traveling wave expansion model.

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Background: Febrile seizure (FS) is the most common convulsive disorder in children. Understanding its time-of-day pattern can provide insight into mechanisms and prevention.

Purpose: We explored clock-time variation of FS presentations of children to a US pediatric emergency department (PED) in comparison to two control cohorts: one (n = 5719) like-aged children presenting solely with fever, i.

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Novel AIRTrode-based wearable electrode supports long-term, online brain-computer interface operations.

J Neural Eng

January 2025

Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin 78712 TX, United States of America.

Non-invasive electroencephalograms (EEG)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) play a crucial role in a diverse range of applications, including motor rehabilitation, assistive and communication technologies, holding potential promise to benefit users across various clinical spectrums. Effective integration of these applications into daily life requires systems that provide stable and reliable BCI control for extended periods. Our prior research introduced the AIRTrode, a self-adhesive (A), injectable (I), and room-temperature (RT) spontaneously-crosslinked hydrogel electrode (AIRTrode).

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UBA1 inhibition sensitizes cancer cells to PARP inhibitors.

Cell Rep Med

December 2024

Department of Epigenetics and Molecular Carcinogenesis, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA; Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA; Quantitative and Computational Biosciences Program, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.

Therapeutic strategies targeting the DNA damage response, such as poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors (PARPi), have revolutionized cancer treatment in tumors deficient in homologous recombination (HR). However, overcoming innate and acquired resistance to PARPi remains a significant challenge. Here, we employ a genome-wide CRISPR knockout screen and discover that the depletion of ubiquitin-activating enzyme E1 (UBA1) enhances sensitivity to PARPi in HR-proficient ovarian cancer cells.

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Objective: Despite the number of studies on the contribution of pelvic floor muscles (PFM) to the penile erection process, their significance is still underestimated. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of PFM in the erection process in non-human primates.

Materials And Methods: First, we performed an anatomical study of the penile structures in 12 baboon cadavers.

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Anisotropic conductive eutectogels for strain sensing and triboelectric nanogeneration in extreme environments.

J Colloid Interface Sci

February 2025

School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China; Haihe Laboratory of Sustainable Chemical Transformations, Tianjin 300192, China; Frontiers Science Center for Synthetic Biology and Key Laboratory of Systems Bioengineering (Ministry of Education), Tianjin University, Tianjin 300350, China. Electronic address:

Conductive hydrogels have attracted widespread attention for their promising application prospects in portable and flexible electronic devices. However, hydrogels commonly suffer from problems such as solvent volatilization and freezing at low temperatures. Inspired by tissues such as human muscles, tendons, and ligaments, this study proposes a facile method to produce anisotropic conductive strong and tough eutectogels through directional freezing integrated with solvent substitution (DFSS) strategy.

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Chronotherapy is the timing of medications to circadian rhythms to optimize beneficial and minimize adverse outcomes. We reviewed the US Online Prescribers' Digital Reference for the specified administration schedule of medications prescribed to manage coronary heart disease (CHD) and its major risk factors. For arterial hypertension, dosing of terazosin and guanfacine is recommended in the evening and thiazide, thiazide-like, and sulfonamide diuretics morning; Verapamil (Verelan®) morning, its "PM" formulation evening, and long-acting diltiazem (Cardizem® LA), per clinical goal, morning or evening.

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Article Synopsis
  • Growing research is focusing on the cerebellum in relation to brain injuries, both targeted (focal) and widespread (diffuse), affecting the cerebral cortex.
  • Studies in adults show that brain injuries lead to the loss of Purkinje cells in the cerebellum and activation of immune cells called microglia, a phenomenon known as "diaschisis."
  • When similar injuries occur in developing brains, they may cause neurodegeneration in the cerebellum, leading to severe long-term effects due to both diaschisis and interruptions in normal brain development.
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  • Large language models (LLMs) show potential in summarizing medical evidence, but using proprietary models can lead to issues like lack of transparency and reliance on specific vendors.
  • This study focused on enhancing the performance of open-source LLMs by fine-tuning three models—PRIMERA, LongT5, and Llama-2—using a dataset of 8,161 systematic reviews and summaries.
  • Fine-tuning resulted in significant performance improvements, with LongT5 performing similarly to GPT-3.5 in certain settings, indicating that smaller models can outperform larger models in specific tasks, like summarizing medical evidence.
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Pervasive mislocalization of pathogenic coding variants underlying human disorders.

Cell

November 2024

Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada. Electronic address:

Article Synopsis
  • Widespread sequencing has identified thousands of missense variants linked to diseases, creating a challenge in assessing their functional impact at scale.
  • A new high-throughput imaging platform was developed to evaluate the effects of 3,448 missense variants across over 1,000 genes, revealing that mislocalization of proteins is a frequent outcome.
  • Mislocalization affects about one-sixth of pathogenic variants and is mainly caused by issues with protein stability and membrane insertion, which can influence disease severity and help interpret uncertain variants.
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Prioritizing social vulnerability in urban heat mitigation.

PNAS Nexus

September 2024

Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.

We utilized city-scale simulations to quantitatively compare the diverse urban overheating mitigation strategies, specifically tied to social vulnerability and their cooling efficacies during heatwaves. We enhanced the Weather Research and Forecasting model to encompass the urban tree effect and calculate the Universal Thermal Climate Index for assessing thermal comfort. Taking Houston, Texas, and United States as an example, the study reveals that equitably mitigating urban overheat is achievable by considering the city's demographic composition and physical structure.

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Closing the gap between open source and commercial large language models for medical evidence summarization.

NPJ Digit Med

September 2024

Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA.

Article Synopsis
  • Large language models (LLMs) show potential in summarizing medical evidence but are often limited by issues such as lack of transparency when using proprietary models.
  • This study examines the effects of fine-tuning open-source LLMs like PRIMERA, LongT5, and Llama-2 to enhance their performance, using a dataset of systematic reviews and summaries.
  • Results indicate that fine-tuning improves the performance of open-source models, with LongT5 performing nearly as well as GPT-3.5, and smaller fine-tuned models sometimes outperforming larger models in evaluations.
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Global scale assessment of urban precipitation anomalies.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

September 2024

Maseeh Department of Civil Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712.

Urbanization has accelerated dramatically across the world over the past decades. Urban influence on surface temperatures is now being considered as a correction term in climatological datasets. Although prior research has investigated urban influences on precipitation for specific cities or selected thunderstorm cases, a comprehensive examination of urban precipitation anomalies on a global scale remains limited.

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Introduction: The use of hashtags is a common way to promote e-cigarette content on social media. Analysis of hashtags may provide insight into e-cigarette promotion on social media. However, the examination of text data is complicated by the voluminous amount of social media data.

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Vital rules learned from fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) radiomics of tumor subregional response can provide clinical decision support for precise treatment adaptation. We combined a rule-based machine learning (ML) model (RuleFit) with a heuristic algorithm (gray wolf optimizer, GWO) for mid-chemoradiation FDG-PET response prediction in patients with locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer.Tumors subregions were identified using K-means clustering.

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Article Synopsis
  • Discrimination in medical settings (DMS) significantly contributes to healthcare disparities in the U.S., with a national study revealing that about 36.89% of surveyed adults experienced DMS in various situations.
  • The study analyzed data from nearly 42,000 adults, identifying that individuals with certain characteristics—like being female, non-Hispanic Black, or having multiple chronic conditions—reported higher rates of DMS.
  • By recognizing DMS patterns, the research highlights the need for targeted policies to improve patient care and reduce healthcare inequalities.
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Blood-contact medical devices are indispensable for clinical interventions, yet their susceptibility to thrombosis and bacterial infections poses substantial risks to treatment efficacy and patient well-being. This study introduces a polysulfobetaine/alginate-Cu (SAC) zwitterionic hydrogel coating on polyurethane (PU) surfaces. This approach retains the superhydrophilic and antifouling nature of pSBMA while conferring the antibacterial effects of copper ions.

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Targeting OXCT1-mediated ketone metabolism reprograms macrophages to promote antitumor immunity via CD8 T cells in hepatocellular carcinoma.

J Hepatol

October 2024

Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences), Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China. Electronic address:

Background & Aims: The liver is the main organ of ketogenesis, while ketones are mainly metabolized in peripheral tissues via the critical enzyme 3-oxoacid CoA-transferase 1 (OXCT1). We previously found that ketolysis is reactivated in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells through OXCT1 expression to promote tumor progression; however, whether OXCT1 regulates antitumor immunity remains unclear.

Methods: To investigate the expression pattern of OXCT1 in HCC in vivo, we conducted multiplex immunohistochemistry experiments on human HCC specimens.

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Urban development pattern's influence on extreme rainfall occurrences.

Nat Commun

May 2024

Department of Geological Sciences, Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas, TX, USA.

Growing urban population and the distinct strategies to accommodate them lead to diverse urban development patterns worldwide. While local evidence suggests the presence of urban signatures in rainfall anomalies, there is limited understanding of how rainfall responds to divergent urban development patterns worldwide. Here we unveil a divergence in the exposure to extreme rainfall for 1790 inland cities globally, attributable to their respective urban development patterns.

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Riemannian geometry-based classification (RGBC) gained popularity in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) lately, due to its ability to deal with non-stationarities arising in electroencephalography (EEG) data. Domain adaptation, however, is most often performed on sample covariance matrices (SCMs) obtained from EEG data, and thus might not fully account for components affecting covariance estimation itself, such as regional trends. Detrended cross-correlation analysis (DCCA) can be utilized to estimate the covariance structure of such signals, yet it is computationally expensive in its original form.

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Pioneering new frontiers in circadian medicine chronotherapies for cardiovascular health.

Trends Endocrinol Metab

July 2024

Centre for Cardiovascular Investigations, University of Guelph; Guelph, Ontario, Canada; Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Guelph; Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Electronic address:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a global health concern. Circadian medicine improves cardiovascular care by aligning treatments with our body's daily rhythms and their underlying cellular circadian mechanisms. Time-based therapies, or chronotherapies, show special promise in clinical cardiology.

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Article Synopsis
  • Single-cell technologies allow detailed studies of how specific molecules define cell traits, but challenges like sparse data and cell differences make it tough to model biological variability.
  • SCORPION is introduced as a new tool that reconstructs gene regulatory networks from single-cell RNA-sequencing data, providing reliable comparisons across different populations.
  • In tests, SCORPION outperformed existing techniques and effectively identified differences in regulatory networks related to cancer, helping to reveal important factors that could affect patient survival.
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