541 research outputs found
Aortic Embolism in Cats: Prevalence, Surgical Treatment and Electrocardiography
Aortic embolism (caudal arterial thromboembolism) was diagnosed over a four-year-period in 14 out of 2,000 cats in a hospital clinic population (7/1,000). Including 35 cases reported in the literature, the average age of 50 cats with aortic embolism was 6-8 years (range one to 16 years). Of these, 37 were males and 13 were females. Endocarditis with thrombosis was the most frequently observed cause of aortic embolism, although aortic arteriosclerosis was reported in one cat.
The clinical and pathological features of aortic embolism in five cats are described in this report. In electrocardiograms of four of these, arrhythmias or conduction disturbances were recorded. Intact emboli in the aorta and external iliac arteries were removed by abdominal aortic embolectomy in two cats within hours after the onset of posterior paralysis. Death resulted in one case from cardiac complications and in the other by euthanasia at the later date because of probably recurrent aortic embolism. In the other three cases, multiple sections of the aorta with the embolus in situ were examined, but no microscopic changes in the aortic wall were noted.
Surgical removal of an aortic embolus is technically and economically feasible and is considered the treatment of choice when treatment is requested within hours after the onset of clinical signs. Although embolectomy can yield a good immediate result; the long range justification for such therapy requires further evaluation, since recurrent embolization may develop
On the theory of Gordan-Noether on homogeneous forms with zero Hessian (Improved version)
We give a detailed proof for Gordan-Noether's results in "Ueber die
algebraischen Formen, deren Hesse'sche Determinante identisch verschwindet"
published in 1876 in Mathematische Annahlen. C. Lossen has written a paper in a
similar direction as the present paper, but did not provide a proof for every
result. In our paper, every result is proved. Furthermore, our paper is
independent of Lossen's paper and includes a considerable number of new
observations.
An earlier version of this paper has been printed in Proceedings of the
School of Science of Tokai University, Vol.49, Mar. 2014. In this version, a
serious error has been corrected and some new results have been added
1127-106 Usefulness of tissue doppler imaging for evaluating systolic and diastolic left ventricular function in patients with primary cardiac amyloidosis
A Metabolomics approach for the diagnosis Of SecondAry InfeCtions in COVID-19 (MOSAIC): a study protocol
Background: Critically ill patients with COVID-19 are at an increased risk of developing secondary bacterial infections. These are both difficult to diagnose and are associated with an increased mortality. Metabolomics may aid clinicians in diagnosing secondary bacterial infections in COVID-19 through identification and quantification of disease specific biomarkers, with the aim of identifying underlying causative microorganisms and directing antimicrobial therapy. Methods: This is a multi-centre prospective diagnostic observational study. Patients with COVID-19 will be recruited from critical care units in three Scottish hospitals. Three serial blood samples will be taken from patients, and an additional sample taken if a patient shows clinical or microbiological evidence of secondary infection. Samples will be analysed using LC–MS and subjected to bioinformatic processing and statistical analysis to explore the metabolite changes associated with bacterial infections in COVID-19 patients. Comparisons of the data sets will be made with standard microbiological and biochemical methods of diagnosing infection. Discussion: Metabolomics analyses may provide additional strategies for identifying secondary infections, which might permit faster initiation of specific tailored antimicrobial therapy to critically ill patients with COVID-19
TPS mutational status is a potential marker for risk stratification in Wilms tumour with diffuse anaplasia
Purpose
The presence of diffuse anaplasia in Wilms tumours (DAWT) is associated with TP53 mutations and poor outcome. As patients receive intensified treatment, we sought to identify whetherTP53 mutational status confers additional prognostic information. Patients and Methods
We studied 40 patients with DAWT with anaplasia in the tissue from which DNA was extracted and analysed for TP53 mutations and 17p loss. The majority of cases were profiled by copy number (n = 32) and gene expression (n = 36) arrays. TP53 mutational status was correlated with patient event-free and overall survival, genomic copy number instability and gene expression profiling. Results
From the 40 cases, 22 (55%) had TP53 mutations (2 detected only after deep-sequencing), 20 of which also had 17p loss (91%); 18 (45%) cases had no detectable mutation but three had 17p loss. Tumours with TP53 mutations and/or 17p loss (n = 25) had an increased risk of recurrence as a first event (p = 0.03, hazard ratio (HR), 3.89; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.26–16.0) and death (p = 0.04, HR, 4.95; 95% CI, 1.36–31.7) compared to tumours lackingTP53 abnormalities. DAWT carrying TP53 mutations showed increased copy number alterations compared to those with wild-type, suggesting a more unstable genome (p = 0.03). These tumours showed deregulation of genes associated with cell cycle and DNA repair biological processes. Conclusion
This study provides evidence that TP53 mutational analysis improves risk stratification in DAWT. This requires validation in an independent cohort before clinical use as a biomarker
On sl(2)-equivariant quantizations
By computing certain cohomology of Vect(M) of smooth vector fields we prove
that on 1-dimensional manifolds M there is no quantization map intertwining the
action of non-projective embeddings of the Lie algebra sl(2) into the Lie
algebra Vect(M). Contrariwise, for projective embeddings sl(2)-equivariant
quantization exists.Comment: 09 pages, LaTeX2e, no figures; to appear in Journal of Nonlinear
Mathematical Physic
Atomic Dark Matter
We propose that dark matter is dominantly comprised of atomic bound states.
We build a simple model and map the parameter space that results in the early
universe formation of hydrogen-like dark atoms. We find that atomic dark matter
has interesting implications for cosmology as well as direct detection:
Protohalo formation can be suppressed below for weak scale dark matter due to Ion-Radiation interactions in the
dark sector. Moreover, weak-scale dark atoms can accommodate hyperfine
splittings of order 100 \kev, consistent with the inelastic dark matter
interpretation of the DAMA data while naturally evading direct detection
bounds.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure
An intuitionistic approach to scoring DNA sequences against transcription factor binding site motifs
Background: Transcription factors (TFs) control transcription by binding to specific regions of DNA called transcription factor binding sites (TFBSs). The identification of TFBSs is a crucial problem in computational biology and includes the subtask of predicting the location of known TFBS motifs in a given DNA sequence. It has previously been shown that, when scoring matches to known TFBS motifs, interdependencies between positions within a motif should be taken into account. However, this remains a challenging task owing to the fact that sequences similar to those of known TFBSs can occur by chance with a relatively high frequency. Here we present a new method for matching sequences to TFBS motifs based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS) theory, an approach that has been shown to be particularly appropriate for tackling problems that embody a high degree of uncertainty.
Results: We propose SCintuit, a new scoring method for measuring sequence-motif affinity based on IFS theory. Unlike existing methods that consider dependencies between positions, SCintuit is designed to prevent overestimation of less conserved positions of TFBSs. For a given pair of bases, SCintuit is computed not only as a function of their combined probability of occurrence, but also taking into account the individual importance of each single base at its corresponding position. We used SCintuit to identify known TFBSs in DNA sequences. Our method provides excellent results when dealing with both synthetic and real data, outperforming the sensitivity and the specificity of two existing methods in all the experiments we performed.
Conclusions: The results show that SCintuit improves the prediction quality for TFs of the existing approaches without compromising sensitivity. In addition, we show how SCintuit can be successfully applied to real research problems. In this study the reliability of the IFS theory for motif discovery tasks is proven
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