The TB Portals: an Open-Access, Web-Based Platform for Global Drug-Resistant-Tuberculosis Data Sharing and Analysis.

The TB Portals program is an international consortium of physicians, radiologists, and microbiologists from countries with a heavy burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis working with data scientists and information technology professionals. Together, we have built the TB Portals, a repository of socioeconomic/geographic, clinical, laboratory, radiological, and genomic data from patient cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis backed by shareable, physical samples. Currently, there are 1,299 total cases from five country sites (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and Romania), 976 (75.

Association of TNF-α and CCL5 with response to interferon-based therapy in patients with HCV 1 genotype.

Aim Of The Study: To evaluate the role of potential genetic predictors -308G/A TNF-α and -403G/A CCL5 in treatment for HCV 1 genotype.

Material And Methods: Treatment results of 130 patients with chronic hepatitis C 1 genotype according to different genotypes of IL28B, CCL5, and TNF-α were analysed using multiple logistic regression.

Results: IL28B genotypes CC/CT/TT were found in 27 (20.

Computational identification of novel entry inhibitor scaffolds mimicking primary receptor CD4 of HIV-1 gp120.

Virtual screening of novel entry inhibitor scaffolds mimicking primary receptor CD4 of HIV-1 gp120 was carried out in conjunction with evaluation of their potential inhibitory activity by molecular modeling. To do this, pharmacophore models presenting different sets of the hotspots of cellular receptor CD4 for its interaction with gp120 were generated. These models were used as the templates for identification of CD4-mimetic candidates by the pepMMsMIMIC screening platform.

Morphological Changes Induced by Bipolar Radiofrequency Ablation in Thyroid Nodules - a Preclinical Investigation.

Recently, radiofrequency ablation (RFA) has been increasingly used for the treatment of thyroid nodules. However, immediate morphological changes associated with bipolar devices are poorly shown. To present the results of analysis of gross and microscopic alterations in human thyroid tissue induced by RFA delivered through the application of the original patented device.

Characteristics of young adults of Belarus with post-Chernobyl papillary thyroid carcinoma: a long-term follow-up of patients with early exposure to radiation at the 30th anniversary of the accident.

Objectives: Studies of thyroid cancer related to the Chernobyl accident have focused on children as they are the most vulnerable group with the highest risk of developing radiation-associated cancer. In contrast, our research aimed to look at the clinical and pathological features of patients with post-Chernobyl papillary thyroid carcinoma that were 2 years old or less at the time of the Chernobyl accident.

Design: The study subjects were patients (n = 359) aged 0 to 2 at the time of the Chernobyl accident and aged ≥19 years at presentation/surgery who were treated in Belarus for papillary thyroid carcinoma during the period 2003-2013.

Reliability of Questionnaire Data in the Distant Past: Relevance for Radiation Exposure Assessment.

Interviews with questionnaires are often employed to provide information that may be used for exposure assessment, although the reliability of such information is largely unknown. In this work, the consistency of individual behavior and dietary data collected by means of personal interviews during two study screenings was evaluated. Data were collected for a cohort of about 11,000 persons exposed to 131I in childhood and adolescence shortly after the Chernobyl accident.

PESI - a taxonomic backbone for Europe.

Background: Reliable taxonomy underpins communication in all of biology, not least nature conservation and sustainable use of ecosystem resources. The flexibility of taxonomic interpretations, however, presents a serious challenge for end-users of taxonomic concepts. Users need standardised and continuously harmonised taxonomic reference systems, as well as high-quality and complete taxonomic data sets, but these are generally lacking for non-specialists.

Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of skeletal muscle fatty degenerative changes using whole-body Dixon nuclear magnetic resonance imaging for an important reduction of the acquisition time.

In recent years, MRI has proven its usefulness for the diagnostic workup of patients with musculo-skeletal diseases, and also shown great promise as a non-invasive, quantitative outcome measure in clinical studies. The characterization of patterns of fatty degenerative lesions, which now plays an important part in the diagnosis of some diseases, is typically performed by the radiologist on routine T1-weighted images. We propose to rationalize acquisitions and reduce patients' time in the scanner by allowing radiologists to perform the qualitative grading of the muscles on images derived from fat/water acquisitions.

Computational discovery of novel HIV-1 entry inhibitors based on potent and broad neutralizing antibody VRC01.

Computational prediction of novel HIV-1 entry inhibitors presenting peptidomimetics of broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) VRC01 was carried out based on the analysis of the X-ray complex of this antibody antigen-binding fragment with the HIV envelope gp120 core. Using these empirical data, peptidomimetic candidates of bNAb VRC01 were identified by a public web-oriented virtual screening platform (pepMMsMIMIC) and models of these candidates bound to gp120 were generated by molecular docking. At the final point, the stability of the complexes of these molecules with gp120 was estimated by molecular dynamics and binding free energy calculations.

Simulated unbound structures for benchmarking of protein docking in the DOCKGROUND resource.

Background: Proteins play an important role in biological processes in living organisms. Many protein functions are based on interaction with other proteins. The structural information is important for adequate description of these interactions.

Thyroid Dose Estimates for a Cohort of Belarusian Children Exposed to (131)I from the Chernobyl Accident: Assessment of Uncertainties.

Deterministic thyroid radiation doses due to iodine-131 ((131)I) intake were reconstructed in a previous article for 11,732 participants of the Belarusian-American cohort study of thyroid cancer and other thyroid diseases in individuals exposed during childhood or adolescence to fallout from the Chernobyl accident. The current article describes an assessment of uncertainties in reconstructed thyroid doses that accounts for the shared and unshared errors. Using a Monte Carlo simulation procedure, 1,000 sets of cohort thyroid doses due to (131)I intake were calculated.

Optimized leaf ordering with class labels for hierarchical clustering.

Hierarchical clustering is extensively used in the bioinformatics community to analyze biomedical data. These data are often tagged with class labels, as e.g.

Morphological and clinical presentation of papillary thyroid carcinoma in children and adolescents of Belarus: the influence of radiation exposure and the source of irradiation.

Objective: The aims were to analyse the features of papillary thyroid carcinoma in a large cohort of children and adolescents in Belarus and to study the influence of radiation exposure as well as the source of irradiation on the morphological and clinical presentations of tumours.

Design And Patients: The clinical and pathological features of 1086 young patients (age range=4 to 18 inclusive, followed up for ≥18years) with papillary thyroid carcinoma diagnosed during the years 1990 to 2010 were reviewed. The patients were divided into three groups: "external radiation-related", "post-Chernobyl" (internal irradiation-related) and "sporadic".

Protein models docking benchmark 2.

Structural characterization of protein-protein interactions is essential for our ability to understand life processes. However, only a fraction of known proteins have experimentally determined structures. Such structures provide templates for modeling of a large part of the proteome, where individual proteins can be docked by template-free or template-based techniques.

Structural templates for comparative protein docking.

Structural characterization of protein-protein interactions is important for understanding life processes. Because of the inherent limitations of experimental techniques, such characterization requires computational approaches. Along with the traditional protein-protein docking (free search for a match between two proteins), comparative (template-based) modeling of protein-protein complexes has been gaining popularity.

Initial presentation and late results of treatment of post-Chernobyl papillary thyroid carcinoma in children and adolescents of Belarus.

Background: The aim of this population-based study was to evaluate the clinical and pathological characteristics and outcome of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) that have arisen in the Belarusian childhood population exposed to the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident within a long-term period.

Patients And Methods: The long-term treatment results were investigated in 1078 children and adolescents (<19 years old) with PTC who were surgically treated during the years 1990 through 2005.

Results: Patients had high rates of metastatic PTC at presentation, with 73.

HUM calculator and HUM package for R: easy-to-use software tools for multicategory receiver operating characteristic analysis.

Unlabelled: Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is usually applied in bioinformatics to evaluate the abilities of biological markers to differentiate between the presence or absence of a disease. It includes the derivation of the useful scalar performance measure area under the ROC curve for binary classification tasks. As real applications often deal with more than two classes, multicategory ROC analysis and the corresponding hypervolume under the manifold (HUM) measure have become a topic of growing interest.

Segmentation of cell nuclei in heterogeneous microscopy images: a reshapable templates approach.

Histological tissue images typically exhibit very sophisticated spatial color patterns. It is of great clinical importance to extract qualitative and quantitative information from these images. As an ad hoc solution, various unsupervised approaches address the object detection and segmentation problem which are suitable for limited classes of histology images.

Protein models: the Grand Challenge of protein docking.

Characterization of life processes at the molecular level requires structural details of protein-protein interactions (PPIs). The number of experimentally determined protein structures accounts only for a fraction of known proteins. This gap has to be bridged by modeling, typically using experimentally determined structures as templates to model related proteins.

Entropy-based cluster validation and estimation of the number of clusters in gene expression data.

Many external and internal validity measures have been proposed in order to estimate the number of clusters in gene expression data but as a rule they do not consider the analysis of the stability of the groupings produced by a clustering algorithm. Based on the approach assessing the predictive power or stability of a partitioning, we propose the new measure of cluster validation and the selection procedure to determine the suitable number of clusters. The validity measure is based on the estimation of the "clearness" of the consensus matrix, which is the result of a resampling clustering scheme or consensus clustering.

Angiogenesis in Malignant Thyroid Tumors.

It is well known that radiation significantly impacts the morbidity of thyroid cancer and that is why Belarus has the highest incidence of the malignancy. Author describes statistical data, classification of angiogenesis, and typical pathological features of malignant thyroid diseases with regard to the vascular network.

Lung cancer differential diagnosis based on the computer assisted radiology: The state of the art.

The concepts of the modern computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), the methods of pulmonary nodules detection and facts derived from the available literature on the pulmonary nodule differential CAD topic are compiled in one source and described in some details. Several issues of the lung cancer epidemiology and an early diagnosis are discussed. The analysis of the performed research shows an evidence that various CAD systems can be successfully applied for chest radiographs, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET).

Computer-aided Image Processing of Angiogenic Histological.

Unlabelled: This article reviews the questions regarding the image evaluation of angiogeneic histological samples, particularly the ovarian epithelial cancer. Review is focused on the principles of image analysis in the field of histology and pathology. The definition, classification, pathogenesis and angiogenesis regulation in the ovaries are also briefly discussed.

Texture anisotropy of the brain's white matter as revealed by anatomical MRI.

The purpose of this work was to study specific texture properties of the brain's white matter (WM) based on conventional high-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets. Quantitative parameters anisotropy and laminarity were derived from 3-D texture analysis. Differences in WM texture associated with gender were evaluated on an age-matched sample of 210 young healthy subjects (mean age 24.