Search results for "INFORMATICS"

Genetic bases of urinary albumin excretion and related traits in hypertension

2010

Epidemiological as well as animal studies have recognized the potential role of genetic factors in the development of microalbuminuria and related traits (renal insufficiency, end-stage renal disease and nephroangiosclerosis) in hypertension. To unravel genetic variants of susceptibility, candidate gene, linkage and genome wide scan analysis has been used. In spite of the great efforts that have been made in the field, sound knowledge about the major genetic variants causing the susceptibility to develop renal damage in hypertension is scarce, since many associations were not replicated or only showed association in a certain subgroup of patients. Looking initially at genes of the most impo…

Customized approach for otogenic brain abscess: the neurosurgical prospective

2017

Primary ciliary dyskinesia assessment by means of optical flow analysis of phase-contrast microscopy images

2014

Primary ciliary dyskinesia implies cilia with defective or total absence of motility, which may result in sinusitis, chronic bronchitis, bronchiectasis and male infertility. Diagnosis can be difficult and is based on an abnormal ciliary beat frequency (CBF) and beat pattern. In this paper, we present a method to determine CBF of isolated cells through the analysis of phase-contrast microscopy images, estimating cilia motion by means of an optical flow algorithm. After having analyzed 28 image sequences (14 with a normal beat pattern and 14 with a dyskinetic pattern), the normal group presented a CBF of 5.2 +/- 1.6 Hz, while the dyskinetic patients presented a 1.9 +/- 0.9 Hz CBF. The cutoff …

Non-alcoholic steatohepatitis: Pathogenesis and novel therapeutic approaches

2013

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) refers to a disease spectrum, ranging from mere hepatic steatosis to hepatic necroinflammation (NASH, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis). NASH often leads to fibrosis, which can progress to cirrhosis with a high risk of liver failure and hepatocellular carcinoma. The course of NAFLD is highly variable, and only a minority of patients (2-3%) progress to end-stage liver disease. However, due to a dramatic increase of the risk factors for NAFLD, that is obesity and insulin resistance/type 2 diabetes, that affect 15-30% and 7-15% of subjects, in most industrialized countries, respectively, NAFLD has become the most frequent liver disease and is even conside…

Thrombin Generation in Chronic Liver Diseases—A Pilot Study

2021

The knowledge about coagulation disorders in patients with chronic liver disease changed in the last decade. The aim of this study was to analyze the parameters of thrombin generation in patients with chronic liver disease, as they are the most appropriate biomarkers to explore coagulation. (1) Background: The knowledge about coagulation disorders in patients with chronic liver disease changed in the last decade. The study of thrombin generation in patients with chronic liver disease provides a much more accurate assessment of the coagulation cascade

New prognostic markers in neuroblastoma

2013

Introduction: The hallmark of neuroblastoma is its clinical and biological heterogeneity, with the likelihood of cure varying widely according to age at diagnosis, extent of disease and tumor biology. We hope this review will be useful for understanding part of the unfamiliar neuroblastoma codex. Areas covered: In the first part of this review, the authors summarize the currently used prognostic factors for risk-adapted therapy, with the focus on clinical management of neuroblastoma patients. In the second part, the authors discuss the evolving prognostic factors for future treatment schemes. A search of online medical research databases was undertaken focusing especially on literature publ…

Typical asymmetry in the hemispheric activation during an fMRI verbal comprehension paradigm is related to better performance in verbal and non-verba…

2018

Chronic exposure to seizures in patients with left hemisphere (LH) epileptic focus could favor higher activation in the contralateral hemisphere during language processing, but the cognitive effects of this remain unclear. This study assesses the relationship between asymmetry in hemispheric activation during language fMRI and performance in verbal and non-verbal tasks. Whereas prior studies primarily used fMRI paradigms that favor frontal lobe activation and less prominent activation of the medial or superior temporal lobes, we used a verbal comprehension paradigm previously demonstrated to activate reliably receptive language areas. Forty-seven patients with drug-resistant epilepsy candid…

Associations between parenting and substance use, meal pattern and food choices: A cross-sectional survey of 13,269 Norwegian adolescents

2019

Identifying factors that affect adolescent lifestyle behaviors is essential in order to develop effective generic prevention approaches. This study aimed to investigate the association between parental monitoring, parental emotional support, parental-adolescent conflict and adolescent substance use, meal pattern and food choices. The study included data from 13,269 Norwegian adolescents aged 13–16 years collected in 2016. Multivariable logistic regression models adjusted for gender, age and parental education were applied. Results show that low parental monitoring was associated with increased substance use (Odds ratios (OR) ranging from 2.8; 95% Confidence intervals (CI) 2.1–3.6 to OR 3.8;…

A fully automatic 2D segmentation method for uterine fibroid in MRgFUS treatment evaluation

2015

PurposeMagnetic Resonance guided Focused UltraSound (MRgFUS) represents a non-invasive surgical approach that uses thermal ablation to treat uterine fibroids. After the MRgFUS treatment, an operator must manually segment the treated fibroid areas to evaluate the NonPerfused Volume (NPV). This manual approach is operator-dependent, introducing issues of result reproducibility, which could lead to errors in the subsequent follow-up phase. Moreover, manual segmentation is time-consuming, and can have a negative impact on the optimization of both machine-time and operator-time. MethodTo address these issues, in this paper a novel fully automatic method based on the unsupervised Fuzzy C-Means cl…

Data-driven discovery of changes in clinical code usage over time: a case-study on changes in cardiovascular disease recording in two English electro…

2020

[EN] Objectives To demonstrate how data-driven variability methods can be used to identify changes in disease recording in two English electronic health records databases between 2001 and 2015. Design Repeated cross-sectional analysis that applied data-driven temporal variability methods to assess month-by-month changes in routinely collected medical data. A measure of difference between months was calculated based on joint distributions of age, gender, socioeconomic status and recorded cardiovascular diseases. Distances between months were used to identify temporal trends in data recording. Setting 400 English primary care practices from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD GOLD) …