Tag: nevin manimala

Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2021 Mar 4:ncab017. doi: 10.1093/rpd/ncab017. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Digital tomosynthesis (DTS) is currently undergoing validation for potential clinical implications. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential for DTS as a low-dose alternative to computed tomography (CT) in imaging of pulmonary pathology in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF).

METHODS: DTS and CT were performed as part of the routine triannual follow-up in 31 CF patients. Extent of disease was quantified according to modality-specific scoring systems. Statistical analysis included Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (r) and Krippendorff’s alpha (α).

MAJOR FINDINGS: The median effective dose was 0.14 for DTS and 2.68 for CT. Intermodality correlation was very strong for total score and the subscores regarding bronchiectasis and bronchial wall-thickening (r = 0.82-0.91, P < 0.01). Interobserver reliability was high for total score, bronchiectasis and mucus plugging (α = 0.83-0.93) in DTS.

CONCLUSION: Chest tomosynthesis could be a low-dose alternative to CT in quantitative estimation of structural lung disease in CF.

PMID:33683309 | DOI:10.1093/rpd/ncab017

Br J Neurosurg. 2021 Mar 8:1-5. doi: 10.1080/02688697.2021.1896677. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVES: This study aims to compare and analyze the clinical features, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of culture-negative and culture-positive primary pyogenic spondylitis.

METHODS: In a retrospective analysis, 202 cases of adult primary pyogenic spondylitis with complete clinical data in our hospital from January 2013 to January 2020 were divided into two groups according to bacterial culture results: culture negative (n = 126) and culture positive (n = 76). We compare the clinical characteristics, diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of patients with different culture results.

RESULTS: The culture positive rate was 37.62% (76/202). There were no significant differences in age, gender, affected segment, spinal abscess, diabetes mellitus, course of disease, surgery, recurrence, and follow-up time between the two groups (p>.05). There were statistically significant differences in hospital admission erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), admission C-reactive protein (CRP), admission white blood cell (WBC) count, discharge ESR, discharge CRP, ESR decline rate, CRP (p<.05). There were statistically significant differences in the rate of decline, hospitalization days, and body temperature ≥38 °C (p<.05). Higher CRP levels on admission, antibiotic treatment time <6 weeks, and body temperature ≥ 38 °C are independent risk factors for infection recurrence.

CONCLUSIONS: The culture-negative group’s admission WBC, admission ESR, admission CRP, discharge ESR, discharge CRP, ESR decline rate, CRP decline rate, and hospital stay were lower than the culture positive group, the difference was statistically significant (p<.05). The independent risk factors for infection recurrence are higher CRP levels in hospital admission, antibiotic treatment time <6 weeks, and body temperature ≥ 38 °C.

PMID:33683182 | DOI:10.1080/02688697.2021.1896677

Elife. 2021 Mar 8;10:e62073. doi: 10.7554/eLife.62073.

ABSTRACT

Although brain temperature has neurobiological and clinical importance, it remains unclear which factors contribute to its daily dynamics and to what extent. Using a statistical approach, we previously demonstrated that hourly brain temperature values co-varied strongly with time spent awake (Hoekstra et al., 2019). Here we develop and make available a mathematical tool to simulate and predict cortical temperature in mice based on a 4-s sleep-wake sequence. Our model estimated cortical temperature with remarkable precision and accounted for 91% of the variance based on three factors: sleep-wake sequence, time-of-day (‘circadian’), and a novel ‘prior wake prevalence’ factor, contributing with 74%, 9%, and 43%, respectively (including shared variance). We applied these optimized parameters to an independent cohort of mice and predicted cortical temperature with similar accuracy. This model confirms the profound influence of sleep-wake state on brain temperature, and can be harnessed to differentiate between thermoregulatory and sleep-wake-driven effects in experiments affecting both.

PMID:33683202 | DOI:10.7554/eLife.62073

JMIR Form Res. 2021 Mar 8;5(3):e25123. doi: 10.2196/25123.

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND: Web-based interventions have shown promise for chronic disease management but have not been widely applied to populations with stroke. Existing barriers may inhibit the adoption of web-based interventions among stroke survivors and necessitate the involvement of informal caregivers. However, limited information is available on internet accessibility and usability among stroke survivors and their caregivers.

OBJECTIVE: This study aims to investigate internet access and usage in a cohort of stroke survivors and their caregivers.

METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 375 participants (248 stroke survivors and 127 caregivers). Descriptive statistics were generated using cross-tabulation. Comparisons with categorical data were conducted using the chi-square test, whereas the Mann-Whitney U test was used for comparisons involving ordinal variables.

RESULTS: Overall, 86.1% (323/375) of the participants reported having internet access. Caregivers were more likely than stroke survivors to access the internet (N=375, χ²₁=18.5, P<.001) and used text messaging (n=321, χ²₁=14.7, P<.001). Stroke survivors and caregivers with internet access were younger than stroke survivors and caregivers without internet access. The highest number of participants who reported internet access were non-Hispanic White. Smartphones were the most common devices used to access the internet. Email was the most common type of internet usage reported. Patients who survived for >12 months after a stroke reported higher internet access than those who survived <3 months (P<.001). The number of hours per week spent using the internet was higher for caregivers than for stroke survivors (P<.001).

CONCLUSIONS: Future feasibility and acceptability studies should consider the role of the informal caregiver, participant age, race and ethnicity, the use of smartphone apps, email and text correspondence, and the amount of time elapsed since the stroke event in the design and implementation of web-based interventions for populations with stroke.

PMID:33683206 | DOI:10.2196/25123

Cancer Med. 2021 Mar 7. doi: 10.1002/cam4.3796. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Tissue micro-morphological abnormalities and interrelated quantitative data can provide immediate evidences for tumorigenesis and metastasis in microenvironment. However, the multiscale three-dimensional nondestructive pathological visualization, measurement, and quantitative analysis are still a challenging for the medical imaging and diagnosis. In this work, we employed the synchrotron-based X-ray phase-contrast tomography (SR-PCT) combined with phase-and-attenuation duality phase retrieval to reconstruct and extract the volumetric inner-structural characteristics of tumors in digesting system, helpful for tumor typing and statistic calculation of different tumor specimens. On the basis of the feature set including eight types of tumor micro-lesions presented by our SR-PCT reconstruction with high density resolution, the AlexNet-based deep convolutional neural network model was trained and obtained the 94.21% of average accuracy of auto-classification for the eight types of tumors in digesting system. The micro-pathomophological relationship of liver tumor angiogenesis and progression were revealed by quantitatively analyzing the microscopic changes of texture and grayscale features screened by a machine learning method of area under curve and principal component analysis. The results showed the specific path and clinical manifestations of tumor evolution and indicated that these progressions of tumor lesions rely on its inflammation microenvironment. Hence, this high phase-contrast 3D pathological characteristics and automatic analysis methods exhibited excellent recognizable and classifiable for micro tumor lesions.

PMID:33682368 | DOI:10.1002/cam4.3796

Rev Med Liege. 2021 Mar;76(3):160-165.

ABSTRACT

Diffuse bilateral uveal melanocytic proliferation is a rare paraneoplastic ophthalmologic syndrome. The increase in life expectancy in oncology partly explains the gradual increase in its incidence. In almost half of the cases, the syndrome manifests itself before the diagnosis of primary neoplasia. It should be suspected in cases of bilateral uveal pigmented lesions that do not meet the clinical criteria for other known eye pathologies. Legal blindness occurs for the majority of patients during the first year after the initial clinical presentation. Death, due to the severity of the underlying pathology, occurs statistically within three years. Here we display the case of such a diffuse bilateral uveal melanocytic proliferation in a patient with relapsed colonic adenocarcinoma, initially treated for age-related macular degeneration.

PMID:33682384

Mol Ecol Resour. 2021 Mar 7. doi: 10.1111/1755-0998.13371. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

Strong selection can cause rapid evolutionary change, but temporal fluctuations in the form, direction and intensity of selection can limit net evolutionary change over longer time periods. Fluctuating selection could affect molecular diversity levels and the evolution of plasticity and ecological specialization. Nonetheless, this phenomenon remains understudied, in part because of analytical limitations and the general difficulty of detecting selection that does not occur in a consistent manner. Herein, I fill this analytical gap by presenting an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) method to detect and quantify fluctuating selection on polygenic traits from population-genomic time-series data. I propose a model for environment dependent phenotypic selection. The evolutionary genetic consequences of selection are then modeled based on a genotype-phenotype map. Using simulations, I show that the proposed method generates accurate and precise estimates of selection when the generative model for the data is similar to the model assumed by the method. Performance of the method when applied to an evolve-and-resequence study of host adaptation in the cowpea seed beetle (Callosobruchus maculatus) was more idiosyncratic and depended on specific analytical choices. Despite some limitations, these results suggest the proposed method provides a powerful approach to connect causes of (variable) selection to traits and genome-wide patterns of evolution. Documentation and open source computer software (fsabc) implementing this method are available from GitHub (https://github.com/zgompert/fsabc.git).

PMID:33682340 | DOI:10.1111/1755-0998.13371

Cancer Med. 2021 Mar 7. doi: 10.1002/cam4.3653. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This study aims to evaluate HR-HPV viral load in the cervical lesion assessment and its diagnostic value on the triage of ASCUS. The three-step protocol for cervical cancer screening was carried out in 5171 patients from June 2017 to August 2019, and 1620 histopathological results were obtained. The positive rate of HR-HPV and TCT increased with the aggravation of pathological grades of cervical lesions. The sensitivity and specificity of HR-HPV (DH3) to detect CIN II+ were 91.91% and 84.46%, respectively. In comparison, the corresponding results of the cytology test were 80.51% and 83.12%. HPV16/18 viral load was positively correlated with the grade of cervical lesions (p < 0.001, r = 0.321). The diagnostic efficiency of AUC by applying HPV16/18 viral load was 0.682 for the diagnosis of CIN II+. The optimal HPV16/18 viral load for predicting CIN II+ was 6.80 RLU/CO (relative light units/cut-off), with corresponding sensitivity of 48.6%, specificity of 79.7%, and Youden index of 0.283. In the ASCUS population, viral loads were statistically different in HPV16/18 and the other 12 HR-HPV when compared cervicitis group with CIN I group and CIN II+ group (all p < 0.05). Statistical differences were detected concerning HPV16/18 viral load, contact bleeding status, and smoking status when compared cervicitis group with CIN I group and CIN II+ group (p < 0.05), with a corresponding odds ratio of 1.004, 1.533, and 5.513, respectively. Our findings suggest that HR-HPV viral load can be regarded as a useful tool to predict the grade of cervical lesions for ASCUS triage. ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03178136.

PMID:33682355 | DOI:10.1002/cam4.3653

J Cosmet Dermatol. 2021 Mar 8. doi: 10.1111/jocd.14044. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

AIM: To investigate whether acne treatment agent systemic isotretinoin causes susceptibility to COVID-19 disease.

MATERIAL AND METHOD: Patients admitted to a single center due to acne between March 2020 and December 2020 were included. A retrospective analysis was conducted on the medical records of acne patients receiving systemic isotretinoin or topical treatments. The patients with PCR confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection were recorded.

RESULTS: 302 patients who used isotretinoin and 329 patients who used topical treatment were included in the study. No statistically significant difference was found between the groups in terms of age (p=0,151). It was found that of the 302 patients who used isotretinoin, 33 had PCR test for SARS CoV-2 and 2 of these had PCR positivity, while of the 329 patients who received topical treatment, 45 had PCR test and 5 of these had PCR positivity. No statistically significant difference was found between the groups in terms of having SARS CoV-2 positivity with PCR (p=0,692).

CONCLUSION: Susceptibility to COVID-19 disease was not observed in patients using systemic isotretinoin.

PMID:33682290 | DOI:10.1111/jocd.14044

J Cosmet Dermatol. 2021 Mar 8. doi: 10.1111/jocd.14048. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

AIM: Alopecia areata (AA) is an inflammatory condition that causes regional shedding without scarring on the hair or eyebrows, eyelashes and beard. In studies conducted, it has been concluded that platelet/lymphocyte ratio (PLR), neutrophil/lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and mean platelet volume (MPV) are significant indicators of systemic inflammation in various diseases. In the present study, our aim is to examine these parameters in AA patients and to investigate their relationship with the disease.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: 135 AA patients and 135 healthy controls who did not have any systemic, inflammatory, infectious or autoimmune diseases were included in this study. Demographic characteristics and complete blood count (CBC) results were analysed retrospectively and recorded and statistical analysis was performed.

RESULTS: PLR, NLR and MPV values were not differ between AA patients and the control group.

CONCLUSION: It can be concluded that PLR, NLR and MPV values are not convenient parameters to show inflammatory response in AA.

PMID:33682292 | DOI:10.1111/jocd.14048