An Early Diagnosis of Thalassemia: A Boon to a Healthy Society

The β-thalassemia is a hereditary blood disorders, characterized by reduced or absent synthesis of the hemoglobin beta chain that cause microcytic hypochromic anemia. An early diagnosis, economical test, awareness programs and prenatal screening will be a milestone for the eradication of this genetic disorder and to reduce burden of the health sector of a country subsequently the economics. Initially, the diagnosis of β-thalassemia depends on the hematological tests with red cell indices that disclosed the microcytic hypochromic anemia. Hemoglobin analysis shows the abnormal peripheral blood smear with nucleated red blood cells, and reduced amounts of hemoglobin A (HbA). In severe anemia, the hemoglobin analysis by HPLC reveals decreased quantities of HbA and increased the level of hemoglobin F (HbF). The decrease level of MCV and MCH are also associated with β-thalassemia. There are various different molecular techniques such as ARMS PCR, allele-specific PCR, Gap PCR, denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis, reverse dot blotting, DGGE, SSCP, HRM, MLPA, sequencing technology and microarray available to identify the globin chain gene mutations. These molecular techniques can be clustered for detection by mutation types and alteration in gene sequences

Comparative study of hematological parameters along with effect of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in different stages of breast cancer

Background: Breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies found among women in India. Haematological parameters have been shown to predict severity, mortality and treatment follow-up in breast cancer patients. The aim of the study was to compare haematological parameters along with effect of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in different stages of breast cancer patients.Methods: Total 235 human subjects were taken in the study. Out of which 100 normal ages matched healthy subjects were considered as controls and 135 breast cancer patients subjects as cases which were further divided into their respective stages according to TNM classification.Results: Estimation of haematological parameters was done by Sysmex Automated Hematology Analyzer Kx-21. The statistical differences between cases and control were determined by using student independent sample t-test.Conclusions: We found hemoglobin level, polymorphs, lymphocytes, monocytes and RBC count were statistically reduce (p<0.05) while other parameters were non-significant as compared to control healthy subjects. We also found deranged haematological parameters in all four stages of breast cancer. The data also indicated that patients which were on combined therapies i.e. radio and chemo have more deranged and decreased levels of haematological parameters as compared to individual therapies

Generation of an expandable intermediate mesoderm restricted progenitor cell line from human pluripotent stem cells.

The field of tissue engineering entered a new era with the development of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), which are capable of unlimited expansion whilst retaining the potential to differentiate into all mature cell populations. However, these cells harbor significant risks, including tumor formation upon transplantation. One way to mitigate this risk is to develop expandable progenitor cell populations with restricted differentiation potential. Here, we used a cellular microarray technology to identify a defined and optimized culture condition that supports the derivation and propagation of a cell population with mesodermal properties. This cell population, referred to as intermediate mesodermal progenitor (IMP) cells, is capable of unlimited expansion, lacks tumor formation potential, and, upon appropriate stimulation, readily acquires properties of a sub-population of kidney cells. Interestingly, IMP cells fail to differentiate into other mesodermally-derived tissues, including blood and heart, suggesting that these cells are restricted to an intermediate mesodermal fate

Semantic Segmentation of Legal Documents via Rhetorical Roles

Legal documents are unstructured, use legal jargon, and have considerable length, making them difficult to process automatically via conventional text processing techniques. A legal document processing system would benefit substantially if the documents could be segmented into coherent information units. This paper proposes a new corpus of legal documents annotated (with the help of legal experts) with a set of 13 semantically coherent units labels (referred to as Rhetorical Roles), e.g., facts, arguments, statute, issue, precedent, ruling, and ratio. We perform a thorough analysis of the corpus and the annotations. For automatically segmenting the legal documents, we experiment with the task of rhetorical role prediction: given a document, predict the text segments corresponding to various roles. Using the created corpus, we experiment extensively with various deep learning-based baseline models for the task. Further, we develop a multitask learning (MTL) based deep model with document rhetorical role label shift as an auxiliary task for segmenting a legal document. The proposed model shows superior performance over the existing models. We also experiment with model performance in the case of domain transfer and model distillation techniques to see the model performance in limited data conditions.Comment: 19 pages, Accepted at Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop, EMNLP 202

Comparative study of hematological parameters along with effect of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in different stages of breast cancer

Background: Breast cancer is one of the most common malignancies found among women in India. Haematological parameters have been shown to predict severity, mortality and treatment follow-up in breast cancer patients. The aim of the study was to compare haematological parameters along with effect of chemotherapy and radiotherapy in different stages of breast cancer patients.Methods: Total 235 human subjects were taken in the study. Out of which 100 normal ages matched healthy subjects were considered as controls and 135 breast cancer patients subjects as cases which were further divided into their respective stages according to TNM classification.Results: Estimation of haematological parameters was done by Sysmex Automated Hematology Analyzer Kx-21. The statistical differences between cases and control were determined by using student independent sample t-test.Conclusions: We found hemoglobin level, polymorphs, lymphocytes, monocytes and RBC count were statistically reduce (p&lt;0.05) while other parameters were non-significant as compared to control healthy subjects. We also found deranged haematological parameters in all four stages of breast cancer. The data also indicated that patients which were on combined therapies i.e. radio and chemo have more deranged and decreased levels of haematological parameters as compared to individual therapies

Metabolomics reveals signature of mitochondrial dysfunction in diabetic kidney disease.

Diabetic kidney disease is the leading cause of ESRD, but few biomarkers of diabetic kidney disease are available. This study used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to quantify 94 urine metabolites in screening and validation cohorts of patients with diabetes mellitus (DM) and CKD(DM+CKD), in patients with DM without CKD (DM-CKD), and in healthy controls. Compared with levels in healthy controls, 13 metabolites were significantly reduced in the DM+CKD cohorts (P≤0.001), and 12 of the 13 remained significant when compared with the DM-CKD cohort. Many of the differentially expressed metabolites were water-soluble organic anions. Notably, organic anion transporter-1 (OAT1) knockout mice expressed a similar pattern of reduced levels of urinary organic acids, and human kidney tissue from patients with diabetic nephropathy demonstrated lower gene expression of OAT1 and OAT3. Analysis of bioinformatics data indicated that 12 of the 13 differentially expressed metabolites are linked to mitochondrial metabolism and suggested global suppression of mitochondrial activity in diabetic kidney disease. Supporting this analysis, human diabetic kidney sections expressed less mitochondrial protein, urine exosomes from patients with diabetes and CKD had less mitochondrial DNA, and kidney tissues from patients with diabetic kidney disease had lower gene expression of PGC1α (a master regulator of mitochondrial biogenesis). We conclude that urine metabolomics is a reliable source for biomarkers of diabetic complications, and our data suggest that renal organic ion transport and mitochondrial function are dysregulated in diabetic kidney disease