Early Detection of Red Palm Weevil, Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier), Infestation Using Data Mining

In the past 30 years, the red palm weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier), a pest that is highly destructive to all types of palms, has rapidly spread worldwide. However, detecting infestation with the RPW is highly challenging because symptoms are not visible until the death of the palm tree is inevitable. In addition, the use of automated RPW weevil identification tools to predict infestation is complicated by a lack of RPW datasets. In this study, we assessed the capability of 10 state-of-the-art data mining classification algorithms, Naive Bayes (NB), KSTAR, AdaBoost, bagging, PART, J48 Decision tree, multilayer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), random forest, and logistic regression, to use plant-size and temperature measurements collected from individual trees to predict RPW infestation in its early stages before significant damage is caused to the tree. The performance of the classification algorithms was evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure using a real RPW dataset. The experimental results showed that infestations with RPW can be predicted with an accuracy up to 93%, precision above 87%, recall equals 100%, and F-measure greater than 93% using data mining. Additionally, we found that temperature and circumference are the most important features for predicting RPW infestation. However, we strongly call for collecting and aggregating more RPW datasets to run more experiments to validate these results and provide more conclusive findings

Chimerism analysis of cell-free DNA in patients treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation may predict early relapse in patients with hematologic malignancies

Background: We studied DNA chimerism in cell-free DNA (cfDNA) in patients treated with HSCT.Methods: Chimerism analysis was performed on CD3+ cells, polymorphonuclear (PMN) cells, and cfDNA using 16 small tandem repeat loci. The resulting labeled PCR-products were size-fractionated and quantified.Results: Analyzing samples from 191 patients treated with HSCT for nonneoplastic hematologic disorders demonstrated that the cfDNA chimerism is comparable to that seen in PMN cells. Analyzing leukemia patients (N = 126) showed that, of 84 patients with 100% donor DNA in PMN, 16 (19%) had evidence of clinical relapse and \u3e10% recipient DNA in the plasma. Additional 16 patients of the 84 (19%) showed \u3e10% recipient DNA in plasma, but without evidence of relapse. Eight patients had mixed chimerism in granulocytes, lymphocytes, and plasma, but three of these patients had \u3e10% recipient DNA in plasma compared to PMN cells and these three patients had clinical evidence of relapse. The remaining 34 patients showed 100% donor DNA in both PMN and lymphocytes, but cfDNA showed various levels of chimerism. Of these patients 14 (41%) showed laboratory or clinical evidence of relapse and all had \u3e10% recipient DNA in cfDNA.Conclusion: Monitoring patients after HSCT using cfDNA might be more reliable than cellular DNA in predicting early relapse

Angiogenin Levels and Their Association with Cardiometabolic Indices Following Vitamin D Status Correction in Saudi Adults

Angiogenin (ANG), a multifunctional protein known to induce blood vessel formation, is a potential biomarker for cardiovascular diseases; however, whether it is affected by vitamin D supplementation is not known. This interventional study in vitamin D-deficient Saudi adults was designed to investigate it. A total of 100 vitamin D-deficient Saudi adults aged 30–50 years were randomly selected to undergo 6-month vitamin D supplementation. Circulating levels of fasting glucose, lipids, vitamin D, apolipoproteins (AI, AII, B, CI, CII, CIII, E, and H), and ANG were measured using commercially available assays at baseline and after six months. Overall, vitamin D levels increased significantly post intervention. With this, levels of apo-CIII and apo-E significantly increased (p-values of 0.001 and 0.009, respectively) with a significant parallel decrease in apo-B (p = 0.003). ANG levels were significantly positively associated with most apolipoproteins and inversely correlated with HDL-cholesterol. Post intervention, the changes in ANG levels were positively correlated with apo-E (r = 0.32; p p < 0.05 in males). Vitamin D supplementation may modestly affect ANG levels. The association observed between ANG and apo-E is worthy of further investigation since both biomarkers have been linked to neurodegenerative disorders