Spontaneous bleeding in a patient with malignant lymphoma: A case of acquired hemophilia

Background: Acquired hemophilia is a rare condition which can be associated with lymphoproliferative disease. Case Report: Eleven yea rs after the diagnosis of immunocytoma had been made, a 72-year-old man developed a high-titer factor VIII inhibitor. At this time, the lymphoma was without significant progress and there was no paraprotein in the serum. Partial thromboplastin time (PTT) was 83 a, factor-VIII clotting activity was <1%, and inhibitor level was 50.4 Bethesda units. The patient presented with spontaneous hematomas in the skin and musculature of the extremities. Following combination chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide, vincristine and prednisolone (COP), there was a prompt disappearance of the inhibitor and normalization of coagulation; however, the patient developed serious infectious complications. When the inhibitor recurred he was treated with low-dose cyclophosphamide and prednisolone. This time there was a more delayed response, but the inhibitor disappeared again completely. Two months after cessation of therapy, there was again relapse. Conclusion: Causal relationship between lymphoma and acquired hemophilia remains speculative. At least in some cases of factor VIII inhibitors associated with malignant disease, immunosuppressive therapy may be sufficient to suppress the inhibitor

MuPix7 - A fast monolithic HV-CMOS pixel chip for Mu3e

The MuPix7 chip is a monolithic HV-CMOS pixel chip, thinned down to 50 \mu m. It provides continuous self-triggered, non-shuttered readout at rates up to 30 Mhits/chip of 3x3 mm^2 active area and a pixel size of 103x80 \mu m^2. The hit efficiency depends on the chosen working point. Settings with a power consumption of 300 mW/cm^2 allow for a hit efficiency >99.5%. A time resolution of 14.2 ns (Gaussian sigma) is achieved. Latest results from 2016 test beam campaigns are shown.Comment: Proceedingsfor the PIXEL2016 conference, submitted to JINST A dangling reference has been removed from this version, no other change

An Integrated Micro- and Macroarchitectural Analysis of the Drosophila Brain by Computer-Assisted Serial Section Electron Microscopy

A new software package allows for dense electron microscopy reconstructions of neuronal networks in the fruit fly brain, and reveals specific differences in microcircuits between insects and vertebrates

TrakEM2 Software for Neural Circuit Reconstruction

A key challenge in neuroscience is the expeditious reconstruction of neuronal circuits. For model systems such as Drosophila and C. elegans, the limiting step is no longer the acquisition of imagery but the extraction of the circuit from images. For this purpose, we designed a software application, TrakEM2, that addresses the systematic reconstruction of neuronal circuits from large electron microscopical and optical image volumes. We address the challenges of image volume composition from individual, deformed images; of the reconstruction of neuronal arbors and annotation of synapses with fast manual and semi-automatic methods; and the management of large collections of both images and annotations. The output is a neural circuit of 3d arbors and synapses, encoded in NeuroML and other formats, ready for analysis

Candidate Gene Screen in the Red Flour Beetle Tribolium Reveals Six3 as Ancient Regulator of Anterior Median Head and Central Complex Development

Several highly conserved genes play a role in anterior neural plate patterning of vertebrates and in head and brain patterning of insects. However, head involution in Drosophila has impeded a systematic identification of genes required for insect head formation. Therefore, we use the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum in order to comprehensively test the function of orthologs of vertebrate neural plate patterning genes for a function in insect head development. RNAi analysis reveals that most of these genes are indeed required for insect head capsule patterning, and we also identified several genes that had not been implicated in this process before. Furthermore, we show that Tc-six3/optix acts upstream of Tc-wingless, Tc-orthodenticle1, and Tc-eyeless to control anterior median development. Finally, we demonstrate that Tc-six3/optix is the first gene known to be required for the embryonic formation of the central complex, a midline-spanning brain part connected to the neuroendocrine pars intercerebralis. These functions are very likely conserved among bilaterians since vertebrate six3 is required for neuroendocrine and median brain development with certain mutations leading to holoprosencephaly

To Be or Not to Be a Flatworm: The Acoel Controversy

Since first described, acoels were considered members of the flatworms (Platyhelminthes). However, no clear synapomorphies among the three large flatworm taxa - the Catenulida, the Acoelomorpha and the Rhabditophora - have been characterized to date. Molecular phylogenies, on the other hand, commonly positioned acoels separate from other flatworms. Accordingly, our own multi-locus phylogenetic analysis using 43 genes and 23 animal species places the acoel flatworm Isodiametra pulchra at the base of all Bilateria, distant from other flatworms. By contrast, novel data on the distribution and proliferation of stem cells and the specific mode of epidermal replacement constitute a strong synapomorphy for the Acoela plus the major group of flatworms, the Rhabditophora. The expression of a piwi-like gene not only in gonadal, but also in adult somatic stem cells is another unique feature among bilaterians. These two independent stem-cell-related characters put the Acoela into the Platyhelminthes-Lophotrochozoa clade and account for the most parsimonious evolutionary explanation of epidermal cell renewal in the Bilateria. Most available multigene analyses produce conflicting results regarding the position of the acoels in the tree of life. Given these phylogenomic conflicts and the contradiction of developmental and morphological data with phylogenomic results, the monophyly of the phylum Platyhelminthes and the position of the Acoela remain unresolved. By these data, both the inclusion of Acoela within Platyhelminthes, and their separation from flatworms as basal bilaterians are well-supported alternatives

Technical design of the phase I Mu3e experiment

The Mu3e experiment aims to find or exclude the lepton flavour violating decay μ→eee at branching fractions above 10−16. A first phase of the experiment using an existing beamline at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) is designed to reach a single event sensitivity of 2⋅10−15. We present an overview of all aspects of the technical design and expected performance of the phase I Mu3e detector. The high rate of up to 108 muon decays per second and the low momenta of the decay electrons and positrons pose a unique set of challenges, which we tackle using an ultra thin tracking detector based on high-voltage monolithic active pixel sensors combined with scintillating fibres and tiles for precise timing measurements