Pretransplant Prediction of Posttransplant Survival for Liver Recipients with Benign End-Stage Liver Diseases: A Nonlinear Model

Background: The scarcity of grafts available necessitates a system that considers expected posttransplant survival, in addition to pretransplant mortality as estimated by the MELD. So far, however, conventional linear techniques have failed to achieve sufficient accuracy in posttransplant outcome prediction. In this study, we aim to develop a pretransplant predictive model for liver recipients ’ survival with benign end-stage liver diseases (BESLD) by a nonlinear method based on pretransplant characteristics, and compare its performance with a BESLD-specific prognostic model (MELD) and a generalillness severity model (the sequential organ failure assessment score, or SOFA score). Methodology/Principal Findings: With retrospectively collected data on 360 recipients receiving deceased-donor transplantation for BESLD between February 1999 and August 2009 in the west China hospital of Sichuan university, we developed a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to predict one-year and two-year survival probability after transplantation. The performances of the MLP, SOFA, and MELD were assessed by measuring both calibration ability and discriminative power, with Hosmer-Lemeshow test and receiver operating characteristic analysis, respectively. By the forward stepwise selection, donor age and BMI; serum concentration of HB, Crea, ALB, TB, ALT, INR, Na +; presence of pretransplant diabetes; dialysis prior to transplantation, and microbiologically proven sepsis were identified to be the optimal input features. The MLP, employing 18 input neurons and 12 hidden neurons, yielded high predictive accuracy, wit

The disruption of proteostasis in neurodegenerative diseases

Cells count on surveillance systems to monitor and protect the cellular proteome which, besides being highly heterogeneous, is constantly being challenged by intrinsic and environmental factors. In this context, the proteostasis network (PN) is essential to achieve a stable and functional proteome. Disruption of the PN is associated with aging and can lead to and/or potentiate the occurrence of many neurodegenerative diseases (ND). This not only emphasizes the importance of the PN in health span and aging but also how its modulation can be a potential target for intervention and treatment of human diseases.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Low awareness of high sodium intake among older Chinese people

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