New and emerging technologies for the treatment of inherited retinal diseases: a horizon scanning review.

The horizon scanning review aimed to identify new and emerging technologies in development that have the potential to slow or stop disease progression and/or reverse sight loss in people with inherited retinal diseases (IRDs). Potential treatments were identified using recognized horizon scanning methods. These included a combination of online searches using predetermined search terms, suggestions from clinical experts and patient and carer focus groups, and contact with commercial developers. Twenty-nine relevant technologies were identified. These included 9 gene therapeutic approaches, 10 medical devices, 5 pharmacological agents, and 5 regenerative and cell therapies. A further 11 technologies were identified in very early phases of development (typically phase I or pre-clinical) and were included in the final report to give a complete picture of developments 'on the horizon'. Clinical experts and patient and carer focus groups provided helpful information and insights, such as the availability of specialised services for patients, the potential impacts of individual technologies on people with IRDs and their families, and helped to identify additional relevant technologies. This engagement ensured that important areas of innovation were not missed. Most of the health technologies identified are still at an early stage of development and it is difficult to estimate when treatments might be available. Further, well designed trials that generate data on efficacy, applicability, acceptability, and costs of the technologies, as well as the long-term impacts for various conditions are required before these can be considered for adoption into routine clinical practice

Ranking Significant Discrepancies in Clinical Reports

Medical errors are a major public health concern and a leading cause of death worldwide. Many healthcare centers and hospitals use reporting systems where medical practitioners write a preliminary medical report and the report is later reviewed, revised, and finalized by a more experienced physician. The revisions range from stylistic to corrections of critical errors or misinterpretations of the case. Due to the large quantity of reports written daily, it is often difficult to manually and thoroughly review all the finalized reports to find such errors and learn from them. To address this challenge, we propose a novel ranking approach, consisting of textual and ontological overlaps between the preliminary and final versions of reports. The approach learns to rank the reports based on the degree of discrepancy between the versions. This allows medical practitioners to easily identify and learn from the reports in which their interpretation most substantially differed from that of the attending physician (who finalized the report). This is a crucial step towards uncovering potential errors and helping medical practitioners to learn from such errors, thus improving patient-care in the long run. We evaluate our model on a dataset of radiology reports and show that our approach outperforms both previously-proposed approaches and more recent language models by 4.5% to 15.4%.Comment: ECIR 2020 (short

Search for eta-mesic Helium with the WASA-at-COSY detector

A search for the 4He-eta bound state via exclusive measurement of the excitation function for the dd->3Heppi- reaction, was performed at the Cooler Synchrotron COSY-Juelich with the WASA-at-COSY detection system. The data were taken during a slow acceleration of the beam from 2.185 GeV/c to 2.400 GeV/c crossing the kinematic threshold for the eta production in the dd -> 4He-eta reaction at 2.336 GeV/c. The corresponding excess energy in the 4He-eta system varied from -51.4 MeV to 22 MeV. The shape of the excitation function for the dd -> 3Heppi- was examined. No signal of the 4He-eta bound state was observed in the excitation function.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in proceedings of MESON201

Anxiety: An Evolutionary Approach

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental illnesses, with huge attendant suffering. Current treatments are not universally effective, suggesting that a deeper understanding of the causes of anxiety is needed. To understand anxiety disorders better, it is first necessary to understand the normal anxiety response. This entails considering its evolutionary function as well as the mechanisms underlying it. We argue that the function of the human anxiety response, and homologues in other species, is to prepare the individual to detect and deal with threats. We use a signal detection framework to show that the threshold for expressing the anxiety response ought to vary with the probability of threats occurring, and the individual's vulnerability to them if they do occur. These predictions are consistent with major patterns in the epidemiology of anxiety. Implications for research and treatment are discussed

The viscosity radius in dilute polymer solutions: Universal behaviour from DNA rheology and Brownian dynamics simulations

The swelling of the viscosity radius, $\alpha_\eta$, and the universal viscosity ratio, $U_{\eta R}$, have been determined experimentally for linear DNA molecules in dilute solutions with excess salt, and numerically by Brownian dynamics simulations, as a function of the solvent quality. In the latter instance, asymptotic parameter free predictions have been obtained by extrapolating simulation data for finite chains to the long chain limit. Experiments and simulations show a universal crossover for $\alpha_\eta$ and $U_{\eta R}$ from $\theta$ to good solvents in line with earlier observations on synthetic polymer-solvent systems. The significant difference between the swelling of the dynamic viscosity radius from the observed swelling of the static radius of gyration, is shown to arise from the presence of hydrodynamic interactions in the non-draining limit. Simulated values of $\alpha_\eta$ and $U_{\eta R}$ are in good agreement with experimental measurements in synthetic polymer solutions reported previously, and with the measurements in linear DNA solutions reported here.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, two column, Supporting Information added, to appear in Macromolecule

Bone mechanical stimulation with piezoelectric materials

This chapter summarized explores in vivo use of a piezoelectric polymer for bone mechanical stimulatio

Swift J164449.3+573451 event: generation in the collapsing star cluster?

We discuss the multiband energy release in a model of a collapsing galactic nucleus, and we try to interpret the unique super-long cosmic gamma-ray event Swift J164449.3+573451 (GRB 110328A by early classification) in this scenario. Neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes can form evolutionary a compact self-gravitating subsystem in the galactic center. Collisions and merges of these stellar remnants during an avalanche contraction and collapse of the cluster core can produce powerful events in different bands due to several mechanisms. Collisions of neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes can generate gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) similar to the ordinary models of short GRB origin. The bright peaks during the first two days may also be a consequence of multiple matter supply (due to matter release in the collisions) and accretion onto the forming supermassive black hole. Numerous smaller peaks and later quasi-steady radiation can arise from gravitational lensing, late accretion of gas onto the supermassive black hole, and from particle acceleration by shock waves. Even if this model will not reproduce exactly all the Swift J164449.3+573451 properties in future observations, such collapses of galactic nuclei can be available for detection in other events.Comment: 7 pages, replaced by the final versio