An overview of tissue engineering approaches for management of spinal cord injuries

Severe spinal cord injury (SCI) leads to devastating neurological deficits and disabilities, which necessitates spending a great deal of health budget for psychological and healthcare problems of these patients and their relatives. This justifies the cost of research into the new modalities for treatment of spinal cord injuries, even in developing countries. Apart from surgical management and nerve grafting, several other approaches have been adopted for management of this condition including pharmacologic and gene therapy, cell therapy, and use of different cell-free or cell-seeded bioscaffolds. In current paper, the recent developments for therapeutic delivery of stem and non-stem cells to the site of injury, and application of cell-free and cell-seeded natural and synthetic scaffolds have been reviewed

The university münster model surgery system for orthognathic surgery. Part II – KD-MMS

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Model surgery is an integral part of the planning procedure in orthognathic surgery. Most concepts comprise cutting the dental cast off its socket. The standardized spacer plates of the KD-MMS provide for a non-destructive, reversible and reproducible means of maxillary and/or mandibular plaster cast separation.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In the course of development of the system various articulator types were evaluated with regard to their capability to provide a means of realizing the concepts comprised of the KD-MMS. Special attention was dedicated to the ability to perform three-dimensional displacements without cutting of plaster casts. Various utilities were developed to facilitate maxillary displacement in accordance to the planning. Objectives of this development comprised the ability to implement the values established in the course of two-dimensional ceph planning.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The system - KD-MMS comprises a set of hardware components as well as a defined procedure. Essential hardware components are red spacer and blue mounting plates. The blue mounting plates replace the standard yellow SAM mounting elements. The red spacers provide for a defined leeway of 8 mm for three-dimensional movements. The non-destructive approach of the KD-MMS makes it possible to conduct different model surgeries with the same plaster casts as well as to restore the initial, pre-surgical situation at any time. Thereby, surgical protocol generation and gnathologic splint construction are facilitated.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The KD-MMS hardware components in conjunction with the defined procedures are capable of increasing efficiency and accuracy of model surgery and splint construction. In cases where different surgical approaches need to be evaluated in the course of model surgery, a significant reduction of chair time may be achieved.</p

Differential Sex, Morphotype and Tissue Accumulation of Mercury in the Crab Carcinus maenas

Carcinus maenas is an invasive species of recognised economical and ecological importance in which mercury accumulation could be a pathway for bioamplification through food webs. Little information is available about differential accumulation between crab sexes and morphotypes. Taking this in mind, a set of different industrial discharge scenarios were investigated in 96-h laboratory experiments for assessing the accumulation of inorganic mercury from contaminated seawater into the tissues of C. maenas. Three groups of crabs (green males, green and red females) where exposed to 5, 50 and 250 μg Hg L −1. Differences among sexes, morphotypes and tissues were detected, depending on the mercury concentration. The muscle did not show differential accumulation between sexes or morphotypes. For mercury exposed crabs, the contaminant was accumulated preferably in the gills (more than 75%) while, in control experiments, it was in the internal organs, muscle and hepatopancreas, and gills corresponded to less than 31% of the total mercury quantified. The different tissue contamination seems dependent on the major pathway of exposure, diet or water. Mercury accumulation by the crab was a rapid process and could represent a risk for the environment only after 96 h. In a scenario of a discharge point of 250 μgL −1, all tissues of crabs exposed would attain a very close, or even exceed the threshold concentration value for human consumption (0.5 mg kg−1).The present work was supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) through a PhD grant awarded to Sónia Costa (SFRH/BD/31247/2006) and through the Research Project MERCOAST (PTDC/MAR/101906/ 2008). The authors are indebted to all colleagues who assisted in the field and laboratory work.publishe

Doubly Optimized Calibrated Support Vector Machine (DOC-SVM): An Algorithm for Joint Optimization of Discrimination and Calibration

Historically, probabilistic models for decision support have focused on discrimination, e.g., minimizing the ranking error of predicted outcomes. Unfortunately, these models ignore another important aspect, calibration, which indicates the magnitude of correctness of model predictions. Using discrimination and calibration simultaneously can be helpful for many clinical decisions. We investigated tradeoffs between these goals, and developed a unified maximum-margin method to handle them jointly. Our approach called, Doubly Optimized Calibrated Support Vector Machine (DOC-SVM), concurrently optimizes two loss functions: the ridge regression loss and the hinge loss. Experiments using three breast cancer gene-expression datasets (i.e., GSE2034, GSE2990, and Chanrion's datasets) showed that our model generated more calibrated outputs when compared to other state-of-the-art models like Support Vector Machine ([Image: see text] = 0.03, [Image: see text] = 0.13, and [Image: see text]<0.001) and Logistic Regression ([Image: see text] = 0.006, [Image: see text] = 0.008, and [Image: see text]<0.001). DOC-SVM also demonstrated better discrimination (i.e., higher AUCs) when compared to Support Vector Machine ([Image: see text] = 0.38, [Image: see text] = 0.29, and [Image: see text] = 0.047) and Logistic Regression ([Image: see text] = 0.38, [Image: see text] = 0.04, and [Image: see text]<0.0001). DOC-SVM produced a model that was better calibrated without sacrificing discrimination, and hence may be helpful in clinical decision making

Methicillin-susceptible, non-multiresistant methicillin-resistant and multiresistant methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections: a clinical, epidemiological and microbiological comparative study

Abstract Non-multiresistant methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus\ud aureus (nmMRSA) infections are emerging worldwide\ud and are often community-associated. This prospective\ud case–cohort study compares features of 96 nmMRSA\ud clinical isolates with 96 matched multiresistant MRSA\ud (mMRSA) and 192 matched methicillin-susceptible S.\ud aureus (MSSA) clinical isolates. Seventy-four percent of\ud nmMRSA infections were healthcare-associated. nmMRSA\ud infections were much more likely to involve skin and soft\ud tissue (skin and soft tissue infections; SSTIs) and were\ud much less likely to be treated appropriately with antibiotics\ud than MSSA or mMRSA infections. Panton-Valentine\ud leukocidin (PVL) genes were detected in 55% of\ud nmMRSA, 16% of MSSA and 2% of mMRSA isolates.\ud Independent of the methicillin-resistance phenotype, 59%\ud of PVL-positive SSTIs presented as furunculosis compared\ud to only 10% of PVL-negative SSTIs. Patients with PVLpositive\ud infections were much younger than patients with\ud PVL-negative infections. The proportion of PVL-positive\ud infections peaked in the 10–29 years old age group,\ud followed by a linear decline