1,810 research outputs found
Portal vein grafts in hepatic transplantation
Confirmation of patency of the portal vein by either ultrasound or angiography is a routine part of the evaluation of patients being considered for hepatic transplantation. Complete thrombosis of the portal vein usually has been viewed as precluding successful orthotopic hepatic replacement. In addition, some pediatric patients present with extremely small portal veins which, although patent, have proved to be thick walled and sclerotic. Our recent experience has shown that, in both of these situations, successful and complete revascularization of hepatic allografts is quite feasible by using a vein graft to ensure adequate portal venous flow
Accuracy of computerized tomography in determining hepatic tumor size in patients receiving liver transplantation or resection
Computerized tomography (CT) of liver is used in oncologic practice for staging tumors, evaluating response to treatment, and screening patients for hepatic resection. Because of the impact of CT liver scan on major treatment decisions, it is important to assess its accuracy. Patients undergoing liver transplantation or resection provide a unique opportunity to test the accuracy of hepatic-imaging techniques by comparison of finding of preoperative CT scan with those at gross pathologic examination of resected specimens. Forty-one patients who had partial hepatic resection (34 patients) or liver transplantation (eight patients) for malignant (30 patients) or benign (11 patients) tumors were evaluable. Eight (47%) of 17 patients with primary malignant liver tumors, four (31%) of 13 patients with metastatic liver tumors, and two (20%) of 10 patients with benign liver tumors had tumor nodules in resected specimens that were not apparent on preoperative CT studies. These nodules varied in size from 0.1 to 1.6 cm. While 11 of 14 of these nodules were 1.0 cm. These results suggest that conventional CT alone may be insufficient to accurately determine the presence or absence of liver metastases, extent of liver involvement, or response of hepatic metastases to treatment
Divided right atrium. Diagnosis by echocardiography, and considerations on the functional role of the Eustachian valve
A child presented at birth with severe cyanosis. Echocardiography showed hypoplasia of the right heart with a right-to-left shunt at atrial level. A conservative approach was adopted initially, and the situation improved over a few months, with reversal of the atrial shunt. Surgery was successfully performed at 4 years of age after further echocardiography revealed a congenitally large Eustachian valve and an atrial septal defec
Event-Based Modeling with High-Dimensional Imaging Biomarkers for Estimating Spatial Progression of Dementia
Event-based models (EBM) are a class of disease progression models that can
be used to estimate temporal ordering of neuropathological changes from
cross-sectional data. Current EBMs only handle scalar biomarkers, such as
regional volumes, as inputs. However, regional aggregates are a crude summary
of the underlying high-resolution images, potentially limiting the accuracy of
EBM. Therefore, we propose a novel method that exploits high-dimensional
voxel-wise imaging biomarkers: n-dimensional discriminative EBM (nDEBM). nDEBM
is based on an insight that mixture modeling, which is a key element of
conventional EBMs, can be replaced by a more scalable semi-supervised support
vector machine (SVM) approach. This SVM is used to estimate the degree of
abnormality of each region which is then used to obtain subject-specific
disease progression patterns. These patterns are in turn used for estimating
the mean ordering by fitting a generalized Mallows model. In order to validate
the biomarker ordering obtained using nDEBM, we also present a framework for
Simulation of Imaging Biomarkers' Temporal Evolution (SImBioTE) that mimics
neurodegeneration in brain regions. SImBioTE trains variational auto-encoders
(VAE) in different brain regions independently to simulate images at varying
stages of disease progression. We also validate nDEBM clinically using data
from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). In both
experiments, nDEBM using high-dimensional features gave better performance than
state-of-the-art EBM methods using regional volume biomarkers. This suggests
that nDEBM is a promising approach for disease progression modeling.Comment: IPMI 201
Pattern matching and pattern discovery algorithms for protein topologies
We describe algorithms for pattern matching and pattern
learning in TOPS diagrams (formal descriptions of protein topologies).
These problems can be reduced to checking for subgraph isomorphism
and finding maximal common subgraphs in a restricted class of ordered
graphs. We have developed a subgraph isomorphism algorithm for
ordered graphs, which performs well on the given set of data. The
maximal common subgraph problem then is solved by repeated
subgraph extension and checking for isomorphisms. Despite the
apparent inefficiency such approach gives an algorithm with time
complexity proportional to the number of graphs in the input set and is
still practical on the given set of data. As a result we obtain fast
methods which can be used for building a database of protein
topological motifs, and for the comparison of a given protein of known
secondary structure against a motif database
Topography-Mediated Fibroblast Cell Migration Is Influenced by Direction, Wavelength, and Amplitude
Biophysical stimuli including topography play a crucial role in the regulation of cell morphology, adhesion, migration, and cytoskeleton organization and have been known to be important in biomaterials design for tissue engineering. However, little is known about the individual effects of topographic direction, structure repetition, and feature size of the substrate on which wound healing occurs. We report on the design of a topographical gradient with wavelike features that gradually change in wavelength and amplitude, which provides an efficient platform for an in vitro wound healing assay to investigate fibroblast migration. The wound coverage rate was measured on selected areas with wavelength sizes of 2, 5, and 8 mu m in perpendicular and parallel orientations. Furthermore, a method was developed to produce independently controlled wavelength and amplitude and study which parameter has greater influence. Cell movement was guided by topographical properties, with a lower wrinkle wavelength (2 mu m) eliciting the fastest migration speed, and the migration speed increased with decreasing amplitude. However, when the amplitudes were matched, cells migrated faster on a larger wavelength. This study also highlights the sensitivity of fibroblasts to the topographic orientation, with cells moving faster in the parallel direction of the topography. The overall behavior indicated that the wavelength and amplitude both play an important role in directing cell migration. The collective cell migration was found not to be influenced by altered cell proliferation. These findings provide key insights into topography-triggered cell migration and indicate the necessity for better understanding of material-directed wound healing for designing bio-inductive biomaterials
Electronic structure of the candidate 2D Dirac semimetal SrMnSb2: a combined experimental and theoretical study
SrMnSb is suggested to be a magnetic topological semimetal. It contains
square, 2D Sb planes with non-symmorphic crystal symmetries that could protect
band crossings, offering the possibility of a quasi-2D, robust Dirac semi-metal
in the form of a stable, bulk (3D) crystal. Here, we report a combined and
comprehensive experimental and theoretical investigation of the electronic
structure of SrMnSb, including the first ARPES data on this compound.
SrMnSb possesses a small Fermi surface originating from highly 2D, sharp
and linearly dispersing bands (the Y-states) around the (0,/a)-point in
-space. The ARPES Fermi surface agrees perfectly with that from
bulk-sensitive Shubnikov de Haas data from the same crystals, proving the
Ystates to be responsible for electrical conductivity in SrMnSb. DFT and
tight binding (TB) methods are used to model the electronic states, and both
show good agreement with the ARPES data. Despite the great promise of the
latter, both theory approaches show the Y-states to be gapped above E,
suggesting trivial topology. Subsequent analysis within both theory approaches
shows the Berry phase to be zero, indicating the non-topological character of
the transport in SrMnSb, a conclusion backed up by the analysis of the
quantum oscillation data from our crystals.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, revised submission to SciPost after including
changes requested by referees. All referee reports are open and can be viewed
here: https://scipost.org/submissions/1711.07165v2
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