3D Printed Polycaprolactone/Gelatin/Bacterial Cellulose/Hydroxyapatite Composite Scaffold for Bone Tissue Engineering

Three-dimensional (3D) printing application is a promising method for bone tissue engineering. For enhanced bone tissue regeneration, it is essential to have printable composite materials with appealing properties such as construct porous, mechanical strength, thermal properties, controlled degradation rates, and the presence of bioactive materials. In this study, polycaprolactone (PCL), gelatin (GEL), bacterial cellulose (BC), and different hydroxyapatite (HA) concentrations were used to fabricate a novel PCL/GEL/BC/HA composite scaffold using 3D printing method for bone tissue engineering applications. Pore structure, mechanical, thermal, and chemical analyses were evaluated. 3D scaffolds with an ideal pore size (~300 µm) for use in bone tissue engineering were generated. The addition of both bacterial cellulose (BC) and hydroxyapatite (HA) into PCL/GEL scaffold increased cell proliferation and attachment. PCL/GEL/BC/HA composite scaffolds provide a potential for bone tissue engineering applications

A pigmented calcifying cystic odontogenic tumor associated with compound odontoma: a case report and review of literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Pigmented intraosseous odontogenic lesions are rare with only 47 reported cases in the English literature. Among them, pigmented calcifying cystic odontogenic tumor, formerly known as calcifying odontogenic cyst, is the most common lesion with 20 reported cases.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A case of pigmented calcifying cystic odontogenic tumor associated with odontoma occurring at the mandibular canine-premolar region of a young Japanese boy is presented with radiographic, and histological findings. Special staining, electron microscopic study and immunohistochemical staining were also done to characterize the pigmentation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The pigments in the lesion were confirmed to be melanin by Masson-Fontana staining and by transmission electron microscopy. The presence of dendritic melanocytes within the lesion was also demonstrated by S-100 immunostaining.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The present case report of pigmented calcifying cystic odontogenic tumor associated with odontoma features a comprehensive study on melanin and melanocytes, including histochemical, immunohistochemical and transmission electron microscopic findings.</p

The International Deep Brain Stimulation Registry and Database for Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: How Does It Work?

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a neuropsychiatric disease characterized by a combination of motor and vocal tics. Deep brain stimulation (DBS), already widely utilized for Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, is an emerging therapy for select and severe cases of TS that are resistant to medication and behavioral therapy. Over the last two decades, DBS has been used experimentally to manage severe TS cases. The results of case reports and small case series have been variable but in general positive. The reported interventions have, however, been variable, and there remain non-standardized selection criteria, various brain targets, differences in hardware, as well as variability in the programming parameters utilized. DBS centers perform only a handful of TS DBS cases each year, making large-scale outcomes difficult to study and to interpret. These limitations, coupled with the variable effect of surgery, and the overall small numbers of TS patients with DBS worldwide, have delayed regulatory agency approval (e.g., FDA and equivalent agencies around the world). The Tourette Association of America, in response to the worldwide need for a more organized and collaborative effort, launched an international TS DBS registry and database. The main goal of the project has been to share data, uncover best practices, improve outcomes, and to provide critical information to regulatory agencies. The international registry and database has improved the communication and collaboration among TS DBS centers worldwide. In this paper we will review some of the key operation details for the international TS DBS database and registry

Breast cancer response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy: predictive markers and relation with outcome

The aim of this study was to provide a better insight into breast cancer response to chemotherapy. Chemotherapy improves outcome in breast cancer patients. The effect of cytotoxic treatment cannot be predicted for individual patients. Therefore, the identification of tumour characteristics associated with tumour response and outcome is of great clinical interest. We studied 97 patients, who received anthracycline-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Tumour samples were taken prior to and after chemotherapy. We quantified the response to chemotherapy clinically and pathologically and determined histological and molecular tumour characteristics. We assessed changes in the expression of Bcl-2, ER, P53 HER2 and Ki-67. Association with response and outcome was tested for all parameters. The experimental results showed 15 clinical (17%) and three (3%) pathological complete remissions. There were 18 (20%) clinical vs 29 (33%) pathological nonresponders. The expression of most markers was similar before and after chemotherapy. Only Ki-67 was significantly decreased after chemotherapy. Factors correlated with response were: large tumour size, ER negativity, high Ki-67 count and positive P53 status. Tumour response and marker expression did not predict disease-free or overall survival. In conclusion, clinical and pathological response assessments are poorly associated. Proliferation decreases significantly after chemotherapy. ER negativity and a high proliferation index are associated with better response. HER2 status does not predict response, and outcome is not related to tumour response

Dislexia e ensino-aprendizagem de língua portuguesa : um estudo de caso

Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, 2013.Esta pesquisa trata da dislexia e do ensino-aprendizagem de Língua Portuguesa para disléxicos, com base em um estudo de caso com estudante disléxico da rede pública de ensino do Plano Piloto. Dentre as questões abordadas, estão as definições da dislexia, seus tipos e possíveis tratamentos, além da discussão do espaço que tal distúrbio de aprendizagem tem na educação, a sugestão de inclusão da dislexia na Educação Especial e, consequentemente, nas salas de recursos e a adequação da metodologia de ensino, baseada na exploração dos gêneros textuais e dos multiletramentos, dentro da perspectiva Sociointeracionista de Vygotsky e da proposta de professor libertador, de Paulo Freire

Human malarial disease: a consequence of inflammatory cytokine release

Malaria causes an acute systemic human disease that bears many similarities, both clinically and mechanistically, to those caused by bacteria, rickettsia, and viruses. Over the past few decades, a literature has emerged that argues for most of the pathology seen in all of these infectious diseases being explained by activation of the inflammatory system, with the balance between the pro and anti-inflammatory cytokines being tipped towards the onset of systemic inflammation. Although not often expressed in energy terms, there is, when reduced to biochemical essentials, wide agreement that infection with falciparum malaria is often fatal because mitochondria are unable to generate enough ATP to maintain normal cellular function. Most, however, would contend that this largely occurs because sequestered parasitized red cells prevent sufficient oxygen getting to where it is needed. This review considers the evidence that an equally or more important way ATP deficency arises in malaria, as well as these other infectious diseases, is an inability of mitochondria, through the effects of inflammatory cytokines on their function, to utilise available oxygen. This activity of these cytokines, plus their capacity to control the pathways through which oxygen supply to mitochondria are restricted (particularly through directing sequestration and driving anaemia), combine to make falciparum malaria primarily an inflammatory cytokine-driven disease

Image-based analysis and long-term clinical outcomes of deep brain stimulation for Tourette syndrome: a multisite study

BACKGROUND: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) can be an effective therapy for tics and comorbidities in select cases of severe, treatment-refractory Tourette syndrome (TS). Clinical responses remain variable across patients, which may be attributed to differences in the location of the neuroanatomical regions being stimulated. We evaluated active contact locations and regions of stimulation across a large cohort of patients with TS in an effort to guide future targeting. METHODS: We collected retrospective clinical data and imaging from 13 international sites on 123 patients. We assessed the effects of DBS over time in 110 patients who were implanted in the centromedial (CM) thalamus (n=51), globus pallidus internus (GPi) (n=47), nucleus accumbens/anterior limb of the internal capsule (n=4) or a combination of targets (n=8). Contact locations (n=70 patients) and volumes of tissue activated (n=63 patients) were coregistered to create probabilistic stimulation atlases. RESULTS: Tics and obsessive-compulsive behaviour (OCB) significantly improved over time (p0.05). The median time was 13 months to reach a 40% improvement in tics, and there were no significant differences across targets (p=0.84), presence of OCB (p=0.09) or age at implantation (p=0.08). Active contacts were generally clustered near the target nuclei, with some variability that may reflect differences in targeting protocols, lead models and contact configurations. There were regions within and surrounding GPi and CM thalamus that improved tics for some patients but were ineffective for others. Regions within, superior or medial to GPi were associated with a greater improvement in OCB than regions inferior to GPi. CONCLUSION: The results collectively indicate that DBS may improve tics and OCB, the effects may develop over several months, and stimulation locations relative to structural anatomy alone may not predict response. This study was the first to visualise and evaluate the regions of stimulation across a large cohort of patients with TS to generate new hypotheses about potential targets for improving tics and comorbidities

Unsupervised morphological segmentation of tissue compartments in histopathological images

Algorithmic segmentation of histologically relevant regions of tissues in digitized histopathological images is a critical step towards computer-assisted diagnosis and analysis. For example, automatic identification of epithelial and stromal tissues in images is important for spatial localisation and guidance in the analysis and characterisation of tumour micro-environment. Current segmentation approaches are based on supervised methods, which require extensive training data from high quality, manually annotated images. This is often difficult and costly to obtain. This paper presents an alternative data-independent framework based on unsupervised segmentation of oropharyngeal cancer tissue micro-arrays (TMAs). An automated segmentation algorithm based on mathematical morphology is first applied to light microscopy images stained with haematoxylin and eosin. This partitions the image into multiple binary ‘virtual-cells’, each enclosing a potential ‘nucleus’ (dark basins in the haematoxylin absorbance image). Colour and morphology measurements obtained from these virtual-cells as well as their enclosed nuclei are input into an advanced unsupervised learning model for the identification of epithelium and stromal tissues. Here we exploit two Consensus Clustering (CC) algorithms for the unsupervised recognition of tissue compartments, that consider the consensual opinion of a group of individual clustering algorithms. Unlike most unsupervised segmentation analyses, which depend on a single clustering method, the CC learning models allow for more robust and stable detection of tissue regions. The proposed framework performance has been evaluated on fifty-five hand-annotated tissue images of oropharyngeal tissues. Qualitative and quantitative results of the proposed segmentation algorithm compare favourably with eight popular tissue segmentation strategies. Furthermore, the unsupervised results obtained here outperform those obtained with individual clustering algorithms

Investigating large-scale brain dynamics using field potential recordings: Analysis and interpretation

New technologies to record electrical activity from the brain on a massive scale offer tremendous opportunities for discovery. Electrical measurements of large-scale brain dynamics, termed field potentials, are especially important to understanding and treating the human brain. Here, our goal is to provide best practices on how field potential recordings (EEG, MEG, ECoG and LFP) can be analyzed to identify large-scale brain dynamics, and to highlight critical issues and limitations of interpretation in current work. We focus our discussion of analyses around the broad themes of activation, correlation, communication and coding. We provide best-practice recommendations for the analyses and interpretations using a forward model and an inverse model. The forward model describes how field potentials are generated by the activity of populations of neurons. The inverse model describes how to infer the activity of populations of neurons from field potential recordings. A recurring theme is the challenge of understanding how field potentials reflect neuronal population activity given the complexity of the underlying brain systems