Search results for "INFORMATICS"
showing 10 items of 2542 documents
Letter: proton pump inhibitor use and bone fracture risk-a mechanistic point of view. Authors' reply
2021
Evolving therapies for liver fibrosis
2013
Fibrosis is an intrinsic response to chronic injury, maintaining organ integrity when extensive necrosis or apoptosis occurs. With protracted damage, fibrosis can progress toward excessive scarring and organ failure, as in liver cirrhosis. To date, antifibrotic treatment of fibrosis represents an unconquered area for drug development, with enormous potential but also high risks. Preclinical research has yielded numerous targets for antifibrotic agents, some of which have entered early-phase clinical studies, but progress has been hampered due to the relative lack of sensitive and specific biomarkers to measure fibrosis progression or reversal. Here we focus on antifibrotic approaches for li…
Nanotechnology applications for the therapy of liver fibrosis.
2013
Chronic liver diseases represent a major global health problem both for their high prevalence worldwide and, in the more advanced stages, for the limited available curative treatment options. In fact, when lesions of different etiologies chronically affect the liver, triggering the fibrogenesis mechanisms, damage has already occurred and the progression of fibrosis will have a major clinical impact entailing severe complications, expensive treatments and death in end-stage liver disease. Despite significant advances in the understanding of the mechanisms of liver fibrinogenesis, the drugs used in liver fibrosis treatment still have a limited therapeutic effect. Many drugs showing potent ant…
Antifibrotic therapies in the liver.
2015
Significant progress has been made in understanding the principles underlying the development of liver fibrosis. This includes appreciating its dynamic nature, the importance of active fibrolysis in fibrosis regression, and the plasticity of cell populations endowing them with fibrogenic or fibrolytic properties. This is complemented by an increasing array of therapeutic targets with known roles in the progression or regression of fibrosis. With a key role for fibrosis in determining clinical outcomes and encouraging data from recently Food and Drug Administration-approved antifibrotics for pulmonary fibrosis, the development and validation of antifibrotic therapies has taken center stage i…
Dental management in patients with cirrhosis
2015
The present article makes a brief review about dental management of the patients with cirrhosis. It focus on problems related with infections, haemorrhagic events and treatment with drugs of common use in odontology.
Competency of different cell models to predict human hepatotoxic drugs.
2014
The liver is the most important target for drug-induced toxicity. This vulnerability results from functional liver features and its role in the metabolic elimination of most drugs. Drug-induced liver injury is a significant leading cause of acute, chronic liver disease and an important safety issue when developing new drugs.This review describes the advantages and limitations of hepatic cell-based models for early safety risk assessment during drug development. These models include hepatocytes cultured as monolayer, collagen-sandwich; emerging complex 3D configuration; liver-derived cell lines; stem cell-derived hepatocytes.In vitro toxicity assays performed in hepatocytes or hepatoma cell …
The role of apoptosis versus oncotic necrosis in liver injury: Facts or faith?
2006
A tightly controlled balance between cell division and cell death is a basic feature for the development and maintenance of liver homeostasis. Disturbances of this balance contribute to liver diseases: too much cell death can cause liver injury, too little cell death is a prerequisite for the development of hepatocellular carcinoma. Thus, a stringent control of the equilibrium of life and death in the liver is necessary. During the last decade most research activities in hepatology dealing with liver injury focussed on the evaluation of apoptosis pathways. Therefore, our understanding of the mechanisms of apoptosis has made profound progress. Programmed cell death (PCD) in the liver enables…
Automatic segmentation and 3D reconstruction of intravascular ultrasound images for a fast preliminar evaluation of vessel pathologies.
2007
Abstract Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging is used along with X-ray coronary angiography to detect vessel pathologies. Manual analysis of IVUS images is slow and time-consuming and it is not feasible for clinical purposes. A semi-automated method is proposed to generate 3D reconstructions from IVUS video sequences, so that a fast diagnose can be easily done, quantifying plaque length and severity as well as plaque volume of the vessels under study. The methodology described in this work has four steps: a pre-processing of IVUS images, a segmentation of media–adventitia contour, a detection of intima and plaque and a 3D reconstruction of the vessel. Preprocessing is intended to remove …
A smart and operator independent system to delineate tumours in Positron Emission Tomography scans
2018
Abstract Positron Emission Tomography (PET) imaging has an enormous potential to improve radiation therapy treatment planning offering complementary functional information with respect to other anatomical imaging approaches. The aim of this study is to develop an operator independent, reliable, and clinically feasible system for biological tumour volume delineation from PET images. Under this design hypothesis, we combine several known approaches in an original way to deploy a system with a high level of automation. The proposed system automatically identifies the optimal region of interest around the tumour and performs a slice-by-slice marching local active contour segmentation. It automa…