The efficiency of US elastography in the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules

Aim: To evaluate the efficiency of ultrasound elastography (USE) in the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules. Methods: One hundred thyroid nodules in 100 patients (79 females, 21 males, age range 18-78; mean age = 45.6 years) were evaluated with real-time freehand USE, using Hitachi EUB 7500 equipment and elasticity scores were obtained. The elasticity was scored as follows: Score 1, elasticity in the entire nodule; Score 2, mainly elastic nodule with the presence of inelastic areas not constant during real time examination; Score 3, constant inelastic areas prevalently arranged at the periphery of the nodule; Score 4, constant inelastic areas prevalently arranged at the center of the nodule; Score 5, no elasticity in the nodule. Also mean strain ratio values were calculated for all nodules. Results: Eighty-four (86%) of cases were benign and sixteen (16%) were malignant. Elasticity score 3 and higher and strain ratio higher than 2.485 had statistically significant relation with malignancy (p < 0.05). Conclusions: USE including strain ratio calculations besides subjective evaluation of elasticity scores is an efficient imaging method which may contribute to the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules

Parents' knowledge and behaviour concerning sunning their babies; a cross-sectional, descriptive study

BACKGROUND: For centuries, sunlight has been used for therapeutic purposes. Parents still sun their infants to treat neonatal jaundice, nappy rash or mostly to supply vitamin D for bone development as a consequence of health beliefs. In this study we aimed to assess knowledge and behaviour of parents about benefits of sunlight and sun protection. METHODS: In this study, parents attending to governmental primary healthcare units for their children's routine vaccinations, upon their informed consent, were consecutively enrolled during one month. Data were collected by a semi-structured questionnaire. RESULTS: The mean age of 118 enrolled parents and their babies were 27.9 ± 6.5 years and 8.3 ± 5.8 months, respectively. Most of the participants were mothers (93.2%), housewives (81.4%) with an educational level of ≥6 years (71.2%). Sunlight was considered beneficial for bone development (86.4%), diaper rash (5.9%) and neonatal jaundice (12.7%). In case of neonatal jaundice 72.0% of the participants reported that they would consult a physician. Most of the participants (82.2%) were sunning their babies outdoors. Nearly half (49.7%) of them got this information from medical staff. Fifty two percent of the parents were sunning their babies before 10–11 a.m. and/or after 3 p.m. Only 13.6% of parents reported using sunscreen for their babies, and the majority of them were using sun protecting factor ≥ 15. One forth of the sunscreen users was using sunscreen according to their physicians' advice. CONCLUSION: Most of the participants were aware of the benefits of sunlight; especially for bone development. However they were displaying inappropriate behaviour while sunning their babies for health reasons. More education should be given to parents about the danger of sunlight at primary health care units while advising to sun their babies, if any

A Novel Intravital Method to Evaluate Cerebral Vasospasm in Rat Models of Subarachnoid Hemorrhage: A Study with Synchrotron Radiation Angiography

Precise in vivo evaluation of cerebral vasospasm caused by subarachnoid hemorrhage has remained a critical but unsolved issue in experimental small animal models. In this study, we used synchrotron radiation angiography to study the vasospasm of anterior circulation arteries in two subarachnoid hemorrhage models in rats. Synchrotron radiation angiography, laser Doppler flowmetry-cerebral blood flow measurement, [125I]N-isopropyl-p-iodoamphetamine cerebral blood flow measurement and terminal examinations were applied to evaluate the changes of anterior circulation arteries in two subarachnoid hemorrhage models made by blood injection into cisterna magna and prechiasmatic cistern. Using synchrotron radiation angiography technique, we detected cerebral vasospasm in subarachnoid hemorrhage rats compared to the controls (p<0.05). We also identified two interesting findings: 1) both middle cerebral artery and anterior cerebral artery shrunk the most at day 3 after subarachnoid hemorrhage; 2) the diameter of anterior cerebral artery in the prechiasmatic cistern injection group was smaller than that in the cisterna magna injection group (p<0.05), but not for middle cerebral artery. We concluded that synchrotron radiation angiography provided a novel technique, which could directly evaluate cerebral vasospasm in small animal experimental subarachnoid hemorrhage models. The courses of vasospasm in these two injection models are similar; however, the model produced by prechiasmatic cistern injection is more suitable for study of anterior circulation vasospasm

PROPER: global protein interaction network alignment through percolation matching

Background The alignment of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks enables us to uncover the relationships between different species, which leads to a deeper understanding of biological systems. Network alignment can be used to transfer biological knowledge between species. Although different PI-network alignment algorithms were introduced during the last decade, developing an accurate and scalable algorithm that can find alignments with high biological and structural similarities among PPI networks is still challenging. Results In this paper, we introduce a new global network alignment algorithm for PPI networks called PROPER. Compared to other global network alignment methods, our algorithm shows higher accuracy and speed over real PPI datasets and synthetic networks. We show that the PROPER algorithm can detect large portions of conserved biological pathways between species. Also, using a simple parsimonious evolutionary model, we explain why PROPER performs well based on several different comparison criteria. Conclusions We highlight that PROPER has high potential in further applications such as detecting biological pathways, finding protein complexes and PPI prediction. The PROPER algorithm is available at http://proper.epfl.ch

Intuitionistic Fuzzy Time Series Functions Approach for Time Series Forecasting

Fuzzy inference systems have been commonly used for time series forecasting in the literature. Adaptive network fuzzy inference system, fuzzy time series approaches and fuzzy regression functions approaches are popular among fuzzy inference systems. In recent years, intuitionistic fuzzy sets have been preferred in the fuzzy modeling and new fuzzy inference systems have been proposed based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets. In this paper, a new intuitionistic fuzzy regression functions approach is proposed based on intuitionistic fuzzy sets for forecasting purpose. This new inference system is called an intuitionistic fuzzy time series functions approach. The contribution of the paper is proposing a new intuitionistic fuzzy inference system. To evaluate the performance of intuitionistic fuzzy time series functions, twenty-three real-world time series data sets are analyzed. The results obtained from the intuitionistic fuzzy time series functions approach are compared with some other methods according to a root mean square error and mean absolute percentage error criteria. The proposed method has superior forecasting performance among all methods

Is the use of Tenofovir Dipivoxil fumarate effective and safe in preventing vertical transmission in pregnant women with chronic HBV with high viral load?

OBJECTIVE: In our country, transmission from mother to baby is the most common form of transmission of viral hepatitis B. A high viral load in the mother and HBeAg positivity pose the greatest risk of transmission from mother to baby. The best way to prevent this is to try to eliminate the viral load in the mother by using a strong antiviral such as prenatal TDF in mothers with a high viral load during pregnancy. This study aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of TDF in pregnant women with high viral load. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Seventy patients with hepatitis B e-antigen positive and negative were included in the retrospective study conducted in our clinic. In 35 cases, pregnant women with HBeAg (+) positive chronic HBV and HBV-DNA levels of 107 copies/mL were between 18 and 27 weeks of pregnancy. The pregnant women took 300 mg of TDF per day. There were 35 untreated HBeAg-negative, chronic HBV patients in the control group. Babies born to HBeAg-positive and HBeAg-negative mothers are given an initial dose of 200 IU of hepatitis B immune globulin (HBIG) and 20 g of recombinant hepatitis B vaccine in the first 12 hours after birth, followed by 4, 8, and 24 weeks. HBsAg and HBV-DNA findings were examined in newborn serum 28 weeks after birth. RESULTS: Postpartum 28 weeks, none of the babies born to HBeAg-positive mothers treated with TDF had HBsAg positivity, while 3.5% of babies born to HBeAg-negative mothers and not treated with TDF had HBsAg positivity and immunoprophylaxis failure. There was no statistically significant difference between the treatment and control groups regarding maternal height, weight, gestational age, or congenital malformations (p<0.05). There was no significant difference between the side effects seen in mothers. In the examination performed at the 28th week postpartum, a statistically significant decrease in HBV-DNA levels was observed in mothers who received TDF treatment compared to those who did not (88.5%) (p<0.05). In 31 of the 35 patients receiving TDF treatment, ALT was reported to be normalized in 25 of the 35 patients who did not receive TDF treatment (p<0.05). CONCLUSIONS: It has been observed that the use of TDF, which has a strong efficacy and high barrier, in the second and/or third trimester of pregnancy reduces transmission rates without causing side effects in both the mother and the newborn, thereby preventing vertical transmission of viral hepatitis B from the mother to child

Galectin-1 as a potential diagnostic biomarker in polycystic ovary syndrome

OBJECTIVE: This study was aimed at comparing the routine laboratory parameters and Galectin-1 levels of control and polycystic ovarian syndrome patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS: 88 patients diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome and 88 healthy controls were considered for the study. Age groups of the patients ranged from 18 to 40. Serum TSH, Beta HCG, glucose, insulin, HOMA-IR, Hb1A1c, triglyceride, total cholesterol, LDL FSH, LH, E2, prolactin, testosterone, SHBG, DHESO4, HDL, Gal-1 levels were analyzed for each subject. RESULTS: FSH, LH, LH/FSH, E2, prolactin, testosterone, SHBG, DHESO4, HDL and Gal-1 values of the subjects included in the study were statistically significantly different between the groups (p<0.05). Gal-1 and DHESO4 showed a strong positive connection (p=0.05). The sensitivity of Gal-1 level in PCOS patients was calculated as 0.997 and specificity as 0.716. CONCLUSIONS: High levels of Gal-1 in PCOS patients suggest that it increases due to overexpression in response to inflammation

A new linear & nonlinear artificial neural network model for time series forecasting

Artificial neural network approach is a well-known method that is a useful tool for time series forecasting. Since real life time series can generally contain both linear and nonlinear components, hybrid approaches which can model both these two components have also been proposed in the literature. The hybrid approaches suggested in the literature generally have two phases. In the first phase, linear component of time series is modeled with a linear model. Then, nonlinear component is modeled by utilizing a nonlinear model in the second phase. In two-phase methods, it is assumed that time series has only a linear structure in the first phase. Also, it is assumed that time series has only a nonlinear structure in the second phase. Therefore, this causes model specification error. In order to overcome this problem, a novel neural network model, which consists of both linear and nonlinear structures, is proposed in this study. The proposed model considers that time series has both linear and nonlinear components. Multiplicative and Mc Culloch-Pitts neuron structures are employed for nonlinear and linear parts of the proposed model, respectively. In addition, the modified particle swarm optimization method is used to train the proposed neural network model. In order to show the performance of the proposed approach, it is applied to three real life time series and obtained results are compared to those obtained from other approaches available in the literature. It is observed that the proposed model gives the best forecasts for these three time series

Cysteine conjugate of paracetamol serves as substrate for kidney cysteine S-conjugates beta-lyase: implications for drug-induced acute kidney injury

56th Congress of the European-Societies-of-Toxicology (EUROTOX) - Toxicology of the Next Generation -- SEP 27-OCT 01, 2021 -- ELECTR NETWORK[No Abstract Available]European Soc Toxico

Retention of luting agents used for implant-supported restorations: A comparative In-Vitro study

WOS: 000565286100008PubMed: 32788484Aims: the aim of this study was to compare the retention of different luting agents used with implant-supported restorations. Materials and Methods: A total of 90 custom metal frameworks and copings were prepared and divided into six different luting agent groups (n = 15/group): polycarboxylate cement (PC), resin-modified glass-ionomer cement (RMGIC), two self-adhesive resin cements (SARC), copper-ion zinc-phosphate cement (CZPC), and non-eugenol temporary resin cement (TRC). After sandblasting with 50 mu m Al2O3, the copings were cemented on frameworks and stored in artificial saliva for 48 h at 37 degrees C and thermocycled between 5-55 degrees C for 37,500 cycles. Samples were subjected to tensile testing by a universal testing machine, and data were statistically analyzed. Results: the differences between the retention values of types of cement were significant (P < 0.05). the maximum retention value was calculated for CZPC (755,12 +/- 55 MPa) while the lowest value was for TRC (311,7 +/- 61 Mpa). Conclusion: Neither of the tested cement had superiority over another to ensuring retention. the types of cement presented were meant to be a discretionary guide for the clinician in deciding the amount of the desired retention between castings and abutments