Deep-Learning Model for Mortality Prediction of ICU Patients with Paralytic Ileus.

Paralytic Ileus (PI) patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) face a significant risk of death. Current predictive models for PI are often complex and rely on many variables, resulting in unreliable outcomes for such a serious health condition. Predicting mortality in ICU patients with PI is particularly challenging due to the vast amount of data and numerous features involved.

Contractile responses of engineered human myometrium to prostaglandins and inflammatory cytokines.

Preterm labor is a prevalent public health problem and occurs when the myometrium, the smooth muscle layer of the uterus, begins contracting before the fetus reaches full term. Abnormal contractions of the myometrium also underlie painful menstrual cramps, known as dysmenorrhea. Both disorders have been associated with increased production of prostaglandins and cytokines, yet the functional impacts of inflammatory mediators on the contractility of human myometrium have not been fully established, in part due to a lack of effective model systems.

Human iPSC-derived motor neuron innervation enhances the differentiation of muscle bundles engineered with benchtop fabrication techniques.

Engineered skeletal muscle tissues are critical tools for disease modeling, drug screening, and regenerative medicine, but are limited by insufficient maturation. Because innervation is a critical regulator of skeletal muscle development and regeneration in vivo, motor neurons are hypothesized to improve the maturity of engineered skeletal muscle tissues. Although motor neurons have been added to pre-engineered muscle constructs, the impact of motor neurons added prior to the onset of muscle differentiation has not been evaluated.

Profiling paracrine interactions between hypoxic and normoxic skeletal muscle tissue in a microphysiological system fabricated from 3D printed components.

Disrupted blood flow in conditions such as peripheral artery disease and critical limb ischemia leads to variations in oxygen supply within skeletal muscle tissue, creating regions of poorly perfused, hypoxic skeletal muscle surrounded by regions of adequately perfused, normoxic muscle tissue. These oxygen gradients may have significant implications for muscle injury or disease, as mediated by the exchange of paracrine factors between differentially oxygenated tissue. However, creating and maintaining heterogeneous oxygen landscapes within a controlled experimental setup to ensure continuous paracrine signaling is a technological challenge.

Flow Characterization in a Partially Liquefied Vitreous Humor.

The purpose of this study is to systematically examine the basic fluid dynamics associated with a fully liquid region within a porous material. This work has come about as a result of our investigation on the ocular fluid dynamics and transport process in a partially liquefied vitreous humor. The liquid is modeled as a sphere with Stokes flow while the surrounding infinite porous region is described by Brinkman flow.

FLT3/CD99 Bispecific Antibody-Based Nanoparticles for Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

Unlabelled: Cluster of differentiation 99 (CD99) is a receptor that is significantly upregulated in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 internal tandem duplication mutation in AML (FLT3-ITD AML) exhibits even higher levels of CD99 expression. Our group previously employed a novel peptide platform technology called elastin-like polypeptides and fused it with single-chain antibodies capable of binding to FLT3 (FLT3-A192) or CD99 (CD99-A192).

Engineering programmable material-to-cell pathways via synthetic notch receptors to spatially control differentiation in multicellular constructs.

Synthetic Notch (synNotch) receptors are genetically encoded, modular synthetic receptors that enable mammalian cells to detect environmental signals and respond by activating user-prescribed transcriptional programs. Although some materials have been modified to present synNotch ligands with coarse spatial control, applications in tissue engineering generally require extracellular matrix (ECM)-derived scaffolds and/or finer spatial positioning of multiple ligands. Thus, we develop here a suite of materials that activate synNotch receptors for generalizable engineering of material-to-cell signaling.

Hypoxic-Normoxic Crosstalk Activates Pro-Inflammatory Signaling in Human Cardiac Fibroblasts and Myocytes in a Post-Infarct Myocardium on a Chip.

Myocardial infarctions locally deprive myocardium of oxygenated blood and cause immediate cardiac myocyte necrosis. Irreparable myocardium is then replaced with a scar through a dynamic repair process that is an interplay between hypoxic cells of the infarct zone and normoxic cells of adjacent healthy myocardium. In many cases, unresolved inflammation or fibrosis occurs for reasons that are incompletely understood, increasing the risk of heart failure.

Prediction of Micro- and Macrovascular Complications in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus using Heart Rate Variability.

Objective: To explore the utility of heart rate variability (HRV), a noninvasive marker of cardiac autonomic activity, as a prescreening tool for the prediction of micro- and macrovascular complications in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM).

Methods: Consenting type 2 diabetic patients of both genders between 30 and 70 years, without known micro- and macrovascular complications of diabetes, were enrolled. Patients with medications affecting the HRV were excluded.

A data-driven intravoxel mean diffusivities distribution approach for molecular classifications and MIB-1 prediction of gliomas.

Background: Measuring non-parametric intravoxel mean diffusivity distributions (MDDs) using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a sensitive method for detecting intracellular diffusivity changes during physiological alterations. Histological and molecular glioma classifications are essential for prognosis and treatment, with distinct water diffusion dynamics among subtypes.

Purpose: We developed a data-driven approach using a fully connected network (FCN) to enhance the speed and stability of calculating MDDs across varying SNRs, enable tumor microstructural mapping, and test its reliability in identifying MIB-1 labeling index (LI) levels and molecular status of gliomas.

Subchronic inhalation exposure to ultrafine particulate matter alters the intestinal microbiome in various mouse models.

Exposure to ultrafine particles (UFPs) has been associated with multiple adverse health effects. Inhaled UFPs could reach the gastrointestinal tract and influence the composition of the gut microbiome. We have previously shown that oral ingestion of UFPs alters the gut microbiome and promotes intestinal inflammation in hyperlipidemic Ldlr mice.

Regulation of oxytocin-induced calcium transients and gene expression in engineered myometrial tissues by tissue architecture and matrix rigidity.

The uterus is susceptible to benign tumors known as fibroids, which have been associated with many pregnancy complications, including preterm labor. However, the impact of fibrotic tissue remodeling on the physiology of the myometrium, the smooth muscle layer of the uterus, is poorly understood, in large part due to a lack of model systems. In this study, we engineered healthy-like and fibrotic-like myometrium by culturing human myometrial smooth muscle cells on polyacrylamide hydrogels micropatterned with fibronectin to independently tune matrix rigidity and tissue alignment, respectively.

A machine learning approach to improve implementation monitoring of family-based preventive interventions in primary care.

Background: Evidence-based parenting programs effectively prevent the onset and escalation of child and adolescent behavioral health problems. When programs have been taken to scale, declines in the quality of implementation diminish intervention effects. Gold-standard methods of implementation monitoring are cost-prohibitive and impractical in resource-scarce delivery systems.

Methods for dynamic and whole volume imaging of the zebrafish heart.

Tissue development and regeneration are dynamic processes involving complex cell migration and cell-cell interactions. We have developed a protocol for complementary time-lapse and three-dimensional (3D) imaging of tissue for developmental and regeneration studies which we apply here to the zebrafish cardiac vasculature. 3D imaging of fixed specimens is used to first define the subject at high resolution then live imaging captures how it changes dynamically.

User-friendly microfluidic system reveals native-like morphological and transcriptomic phenotypes induced by shear stress in proximal tubule epithelium.

Drug-induced nephrotoxicity is a leading cause of drug attrition, partly due to the limited relevance of pre-clinical models of the proximal tubule. Culturing proximal tubule epithelial cells (PTECs) under fluid flow to mimic physiological shear stress has been shown to improve select phenotypes, but existing flow systems are expensive and difficult to implement by non-experts in microfluidics. Here, we designed and fabricated an accessible and modular flow system for culturing PTECs under physiological shear stress, which induced native-like cuboidal morphology, downregulated pathways associated with hypoxia, stress, and injury, and upregulated xenobiotic metabolism pathways.

A Model for Reinfections and the Transition of Epidemics.

Reinfections of infected individuals during a viral epidemic contribute to the continuation of the infection for longer periods of time. In an epidemic, contagion starts with an infection wave, initially growing exponentially fast until it reaches a maximum number of infections, following which it wanes towards an equilibrium state of zero infections, assuming that no new variants have emerged. If reinfections are allowed, multiple such infection waves might occur, and the asymptotic equilibrium state is one in which infection rates are not negligible.

Biomimetic SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Nanoparticles.

COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This virus contains a crucial coat protein that engages with target cells a receptor binding domain (RBD) on its spike protein. To better study the RBD and its therapeutic opportunities, we genetically engineered a simple fusion with a thermo-responsive elastin-like polypeptide (ELP).

Can language representation models think in bets?

In recent years, transformer-based language representation models (LRMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on difficult natural language understanding problems, such as question answering and text summarization. As these models are integrated into real-world applications, evaluating their ability to make rational decisions is an important research agenda, with practical ramifications. This article investigates LRMs' rational decision-making ability through a carefully designed set of decision-making benchmarks and experiments.

A myocardial infarct border-zone-on-a-chip demonstrates distinct regulation of cardiac tissue function by an oxygen gradient.

After a myocardial infarction, the boundary between the injured, hypoxic tissue and the adjacent viable, normoxic tissue, known as the border zone, is characterized by an oxygen gradient. Yet, the impact of an oxygen gradient on cardiac tissue function is poorly understood, largely due to limitations of existing experimental models. Here, we engineered a microphysiological system to controllably expose engineered cardiac tissue to an oxygen gradient that mimics the border zone and measured the effects of the gradient on electromechanical function and the transcriptome.

Mathematical Model of Macromolecular Drug Transport in a Partially Liquefied Vitreous Humor.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of partial liquefaction (due to ageing) of the vitreous humor on the transport of ocular drugs. In our model, the gel part of the vitreous is treated as a Darcy-type porous medium. A spherical region within the porous part of vitreous is in a liquid state which, for computational purposes, is also treated as a porous medium but with a much higher permeability.