Application of caries assessment spectrum and treatment instrument for staging and evaluating treatment needs of an adult population - A hospital based cross-sectional study

Background: Application of caries assessment spectrum and treatment (CAST) instrument for staging and evaluating treatment needs of an adult population suffering from dental carious lesionObjectives: Study was conducted with aim of applying CAST instrument for staging adult urban Indian population according to severity of carious lesion and treatment needs required.Methods: Cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted on 300 adult patients. After training session and calibration of examiner, all patients were examined for the caries experience and CAST codes were recorded on a structured proforma.Results: Of 300 adult patients, 18% (54) adults have healthy dentition denoted by codes 0,1, and 2. 12 % and 15.3% adults were in reversible premorbidity stage (code 3) and morbidity stage (codes 4 and 5) respectively. The largest number of adults 29.7% were seen in serious morbidity stage (codes 6 and 7) followed by 21.3% adults in mortality stage (code 8) requiring either root canal treatment or extraction and replacement of teeth as treatment needs.Conclusion: CAST instrument has been found useful in staging adult population suffering with dental carious lesion and evaluating their treatment needs. Moreover, CAST is easy to apply for staging the carious lesion due its hierarchical structure and reporting results in an understandable manner.Keywords: Adults; Caries Assessment Spectrum and Treatment; Dental Caries; Treatment needs

ECM Degradation, Matricryptic Peptides, and Stem Cell Recruitment

Biologic scaffolds composed of extracellular matrix (ECM) have been used to promote site-specific, functional remodeling of tissue in both preclinical animal models and human clinical applications. Although the mechanisms of action of ECM scaffolds are not completely understood, proteolytic degradation of the ECM scaffold and subsequent progenitor cell recruitment are thought to be important mediators of the constructive remodeling process.Proteolytic degradation of the ECM scaffolds results in the generation and release of cryptic peptides with novel bioactive properties not associated with their parent molecules such as angiogenic, antimicrobial, mitogenic, and chemotactic properties. While previous studies have suggested that degradation products of ECM scaffolds are chemotactic for progenitor cells in vitro, the present thesis expands upon these findings in vivo.In a non-regenerating model of mid-second phalanx digit amputation, treatment with ECM degradation rpodcuts resulted in the accumulation of a heterogeneous population of cells with in vitro differentiation potential along osteogenic, adipogenic, and neuroectodermal lineages. Focusing specifically on the Sox2+ population of cells found at the site of injury, work in the present thesis showed that Sox2+ cells co-express bone marrow and periosteal stem cell markers CD90 and Sca1, but not dermal stem cell marker CD133 or circulating stem cell marker c-kit (CD117). Additionally, bone marrow chimeric studies utilizing wild type C57/BL6 and Sox2 eGFP/+ mice showed that the Sox2+ cells are not derived from the bone marrow, but more likely from a local tissue source such as the periosteum. Fractionation of the ECM degradation products resulted in the identification of a highly conserved cryptic peptide derived from the C-terminal telopeptide of the collagen type IIIα molecule with chemotactic activity for multiple progenitor cells in vitro, IAGVGGEKSGGF. Administration of the cryptic peptide in a model of digit amputation resulted in the accumulation of Sox2+, Sca1+, Lin- cells at the site of amputation. Peptide treatment also resulted in the formation of a bone nodule at the site that coincided with the spatial location of Sox2+ cells. In vitro, the peptide accelerated osteogenesis of mesenchymal stem cells and increased the expression of osteogenic and chondrogenic genes.The result of this body of work shows that degradation products of ECM scaffolds contain cryptic peptides with the ability to influence chemotaxis and differentiation of progenitor cells in vitro and in vivo. The ability to influence stem cell phenotype and fate may be useful in designing new therapies for regenerative medicine approaches to complex, composite tissue reconstruction. Additionally, the findings of the present thesis may serve as the basis for future studies investigating the importance of ECM degradation in the downstream constructive remodeling events at a site of ECM implantation in soft tissue models of injury

A new Constant Pushing Force Device for human walking analysis

Walking mechanics has been studied for a long time, being essentially simple but nevertheless including quite tricky aspects. During walking, muscular forces are needed to support body weight and accelerate the body, thereby requiring a metabolic demand. In this paper, a new Constant Pushing Force Device (CPFD) is presented. Based on a novel actuation concept, the device is totally passive and is used to apply a constant force to the pelvis of a subject walking on a treadmill. The device is a serial manipulator featuring springs that provide gravity balancing to the device and exert a constant force regardless of the pelvis motion during walking. This is obtained using only two extension springs and no auxiliary links, unlike existing designs. A first experiment was carried out on a healthy subject to experimentally validate the device and assess the effect of the external force on gait kinematics and timing. Results show that the device was capable of exerting an approximately constant pushing force, whose action affected subject’s cadence and the motion of the hip and ankle joints

Diverse Rule Sets

While machine-learning models are flourishing and transforming many aspects of everyday life, the inability of humans to understand complex models poses difficulties for these models to be fully trusted and embraced. Thus, interpretability of models has been recognized as an equally important quality as their predictive power. In particular, rule-based systems are experiencing a renaissance owing to their intuitive if-then representation. However, simply being rule-based does not ensure interpretability. For example, overlapped rules spawn ambiguity and hinder interpretation. Here we propose a novel approach of inferring diverse rule sets, by optimizing small overlap among decision rules with a 2-approximation guarantee under the framework of Max-Sum diversification. We formulate the problem as maximizing a weighted sum of discriminative quality and diversity of a rule set. In order to overcome an exponential-size search space of association rules, we investigate several natural options for a small candidate set of high-quality rules, including frequent and accurate rules, and examine their hardness. Leveraging the special structure in our formulation, we then devise an efficient randomized algorithm, which samples rules that are highly discriminative and have small overlap. The proposed sampling algorithm analytically targets a distribution of rules that is tailored to our objective. We demonstrate the superior predictive power and interpretability of our model with a comprehensive empirical study against strong baselines

Tuberculoma of the Tongue Presenting as Hemimacroglossia

The underdiagnosis of extrapulmonary tuberculosis lesions, along with an emerging global resistance to antitubercular drugs, warrants an increased awareness of the involvement of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in atypical lesions of oral cavity. Tongue is the most common site of oral tuberculosis. We report a rare presentation of lingual tuberculosis in a 65-year-old male, a chronic tobacco chewer, who came to us with swelling of the tongue which apparently looked like hemimacroglossia, leading to the clinical diagnosis of submucosal carcinoma of tongue. Enlargement of tongue is a slow process resulting from gradual invasion and lodging of bacilli in the tongue. Biopsy and histopathological examination revealed tuberculous etiology of the lesion and the patient responded well to antitubercular therapy

A family of membrane-shaping proteins at ER subdomains regulates pre-peroxisomal vesicle biogenesis

Saccharomyces cerevisiae contains three conserved reticulon and reticulon-like proteins that help maintain ER structure by stabilizing high membrane curvature in ER tubules and the edges of ER sheets. A mutant lacking all three proteins has dramatically altered ER morphology. We found that ER shape is restored in this mutant when Pex30p or its homologue Pex31p is overexpressed. Pex30p can tubulate membranes both in cells and when reconstituted into proteoliposomes, indicating that Pex30p is a novel ER-shaping protein. In contrast to the reticulons, Pex30p is low abundance, and we found that it localizes to subdomains in the ER. We show that these ER subdomains are the sites where most preperoxisomal vesicles (PPVs) are generated. In addition, overproduction or deletion of Pex30p or Pex31p alters the size, shape, and number of PPVs. Our findings suggest that Pex30p and Pex31p help shape and generate regions of the ER where PPV biogenesis occurs