Impact of geographical location on timing of diagnosis and overall prognosis in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma maintains a formidable mortality rate with rising incidence despite extensive research efforts. As of 2021 pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States despite its incidence representing only 3% of all cancer diagnoses. Given the high mortality rate, research efforts push to improve prognosis by expanding knowledge and tools in the realms of diagnostics, genetics, development of screening modalities, and targeted treatments. Modifications in treatment algorithms have led to only modest improvements in outcome. Current research efforts focus on primary and secondary prevention aimed at modifications of known environmental and hereditary risk factors. Available studies highlight the relationship between relative geography and cancers; however, there is a paucity of research available on the Social Determinants of Health on access to pancreatic cancer care and outcomes. PROPOSED PROJECT: Data will be extracted from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database and combined with US Census data along with medical record information as relevant over a seven-year period from January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2017. Social Vulnerability Index scores will be derived from the available data as a surrogate for Social Determinant of Health and be assigned to each case of pancreatic cancer from 2010-2017. These scores will be grouped by zip code. Analysis will then be performed to identify the mean stage at time of diagnosis for each zip code. Further analysis will be performed to calculate survival curves for each zip code and cox proportional-hazards will be performed on results to determine statistical significance of SVI with respect to geography. CONCLUSIONS: The proposed study will investigate the impact of geography as a Social Determinant of Health (SDoH) within the United States on the stage at time of diagnosis for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. As a secondary measure, overall survival following diagnosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma will be examined. SIGNIFICANCE: This study will identify the impact of social determinants of health on geography and correlate the impact on outcomes in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma in the United States of America. This study may also identify geographic regions in which the incidence of PDAC is higher than expected which would present a population to investigate for additional screening studies and development of risk prediction models

Qalb ommu

Ġabra ta’ poeżiji u proża li tinkludi: Il-għanja tal-ħamsa u tletin sena ta’ Patri Mattew – Meta lbist il-ġlekk ta’ ħija ta’ George Vella – Tliet poeżiji qosra ta’ John Sciberras – Għada jisbaħ xorta waħda – Ġejjin id-dgħajjes – Il-kotra u ż-żmien – Ferħa bla temma ta’ A. Guillaumier – Qalb ommu ta’ Jos. M. Manara.N/

Analisis Pendapatan Usahatani Pepaya California Di Desa Talawaan Kecamatan Talawaan Kabupaten Minahasa Utara

This study aims to analyze the income of California papaya farming in Talawaan Village, Talawaan District, North Minahasa Regency. This research was conducted from August to October 2021. The data collected in this study were primary data obtained from direct interviews with the famers using a questionnaires. Secondary data was obtained from the Talawaan Village Office and data from literature samples. Based on the results of research, the average income of California papaya farming was Rp. 10.188.686/ha in October 2021. Income earned from the average receipt of Rp. 13.671.329/ha minus the average explicit cost consisting of out of family labor costs, seedlings, fertilizers, kill up, equipment depreciation, and taxes of Rp. 3.482.643/ha. The results of the analysis of agricultural feasibility using the analysis of R/C ratio is 3,9 shows that it is feasible that value of R/C ratio > 1. Thus it is blunted that california papaya farming in Talawaan Village, Talawaan District, North Minahasa Regency deserves to be pursued

Transient Disruption of the Inferior Parietal Lobule Impairs the Ability to Attribute Intention to Action

Although it is well established that fronto-parietal regions are active during action observation, whether they play a causal role in the ability to infer others\u2019 intentions from visual kinematics remains undetermined. In the experiments reported here, we combined offline continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) with computational modeling to reveal and causally probe single-trial computations in the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Participants received cTBS over the left anterior IPL and the left IFG pars orbitalis in separate sessions before completing an intention discrimination task (discriminate intention of observed reach-to-grasp acts) or a kinematic discrimination task unrelated to intention (discriminate peak wrist height of the same acts). We targeted intention-sensitive regions whose fMRI activity, recorded when observing the same reach-to-grasp acts, could accurately discriminate intention. We found that transient disruption of activity of the left IPL, but not the IFG, impaired the observer\u2019s ability to attribute intention to action. Kinematic discrimination unrelated to intention, in contrast, was largely unaffected. Computational analyses of how encoding (mapping of intention to movement kinematics) and readout (mapping of kinematics to intention choices) intersect at the single-trial level revealed that IPL cTBS did not diminish the overall sensitivity of intention readout to movement kinematics. Rather, it selectively misaligned intention readout with respect to encoding, deteriorating mapping from informative kinematic features to intention choices. These results provide causal evidence of how the left anterior IPL computes mapping from kinematics to intention

Getting the Most from Eye-Tracking: User-Interaction Based Reading Region Estimation Dataset and Models

A single digital newsletter usually contains many messages (regions). Users' reading time spent on, and read level (skip/skim/read-in-detail) of each message is important for platforms to understand their users' interests, personalize their contents, and make recommendations. Based on accurate but expensive-to-collect eyetracker-recorded data, we built models that predict per-region reading time based on easy-to-collect Javascript browser tracking data. With eye-tracking, we collected 200k ground-truth datapoints on participants reading news on browsers. Then we trained machine learning and deep learning models to predict message-level reading time based on user interactions like mouse position, scrolling, and clicking. We reached 27\% percentage error in reading time estimation with a two-tower neural network based on user interactions only, against the eye-tracking ground truth data, while the heuristic baselines have around 46\% percentage error. We also discovered the benefits of replacing per-session models with per-timestamp models, and adding user pattern features. We concluded with suggestions on developing message-level reading estimation techniques based on available data.Comment: Ruoyan Kong, Ruixuan Sun, Charles Chuankai Zhang, Chen Chen, Sneha Patri, Gayathri Gajjela, and Joseph A. Konstan. Getting the most from eyetracking: User-interaction based reading region estimation dataset and models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ETRA 23, New York, NY, USA, 2023. Association for Computing Machiner

Lil Dr. Nicolò Zammit, M.D.

Ġabra ta’ poeżiji u proża li tinkludi: Il-Milied ta’ C. Cassar – Storja qasira dwar il-presepju ta’ A. Tabone – Lil Dr. Nicolò Zammit, M.D. ta’ Patri Ġ. Delia – Jum tax-xita f’Mejju ta’ Joe Busuttil.peer-reviewe

Identification of fetal DNA and cells in skin lesions from women with systemic sclerosis

BACKGROUND: Systemic sclerosis is a disease of unknown origin which often occurs in women after their childbearing years. It has many clinical and histopathological similarities to chronic graft-versus-host disease. Recent studies indicate that fetal stem cells can survive in the maternal circulation for many years post partum. This finding suggests that fetal cells persisting in the maternal circulation or tissues could be involved in the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis by initiating a graft-versus-host reaction. METHODS: We used the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to identify Y-chromosome sequences in DNA extracted from peripheral-blood cells and skin lesions from women with systemic sclerosis of recent onset. To confirm the PCR findings, we used fluorescence in situ hybridization of peripheral-blood cells and cells within chronic inflammatory-cell infiltrates in biopsy specimens of affected skin. RESULTS: Y-chromosome sequences were found in DNA from peripheral-blood cells in 32 of 69 women with systemic sclerosis (46 percent), as compared with 1 of 25 normal women (4 percent, P\u3c0.001), and in T lymphocytes from 3 women with systemic sclerosis who had male offspring. Furthermore, Y-chromosome sequences were identified in skin-biopsy specimens from 11 of 19 women with systemic sclerosis (58 percent); 9 of the 11 were known to have carried male fetuses. Nucleated cells containing Y chromosomes were detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization in paraffin-embedded sections of skin lesions from all seven women we tested whose skin-biopsy specimens contained Y-chromosome sequences. CONCLUSIONS: Fetal antimaternal graft-versus-host reactions may be involved in the pathogenesis of systemic sclerosis in some women

A Latency-Aware Real-Time Video Surveillance Demo: Network Slicing for Improving Public Safety

© 2021 IEEE.  Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksWe report the automated deployment of 5G services across a latency-aware, semidisaggregated, and virtualized metro network. We summarize the key findings in a detailed analysis of end-to-end latency, service setup time, and soft-failure detection timeThe research leading to these results has received funding from the EC and BMBF through the METRO-HAUL project (G.A. No. 761727) and OTB-5G+ project (reference No. 16KIS0979K

Determinación de la actividad antifúngica contra Fusarium verticillioides y Aspergillus parasiticus y contenido de verbascósido en extractos de Aloysia citrodora (‘cedrón’)

PosterLa medicina tradicional le atribuye al “cedrón” (Aloysia citrodora Palau) propiedades antiespasmódicas, diuréticas, sedantes, expectorantes, cardíacas, antihistamínicas. Esta especie se encuentra ampliamente distribuida en nuestro país. El verbascósido (acteósido) es uno de los compuestos principales que ha sido encontrado en las hojas de esta planta medicinal. Las propiedades biológicas del mismo son numerosas e incluyen actividades antimicrobianas. Es sabido que en la Argentina Fusarium verticillioides causa la pudrición de la mazorca, una enfermedad que produce pérdidas de calidad en la región productora de maíz; en algunos casos, también puede sintetizar micotoxinas conocidas como fumonisinas que provocan importantes alteraciones en el metabolismo. Por otro lado, la presencia de Aspergillus parasiticus se produce principalmente en los granos de cereales y oleaginosas una vez cosechados. En determinadas condiciones, puede producir micotoxinas denominadas aflatoxinas, potentes cancerígenos hepáticos como así también de riñón, colon y pulmón. Como parte de un estudio para encontrar alternativas a los fungicidas sintéticos para la protección de cultivos, se determinó la actividad antifúngica contra A. parasiticus y F. verticillioides del extracto metanólico de hojas (EHC) y del extracto metanólico obtenido a partir del marco residual posterior a una destilación por arrastre con vapor (EMC) de cedrón. La concentración de verbascósido fue determinada en cada uno de los extractos estudiados. Ambos extractos mostraron actividad antifúngica, siendo la Concentración Mínima Inhibitoria de 333,33 µg/ml de ambos extractos (EHC y EMC) frente a F. verticillioides y de 416,66 µg/ml en el caso de EHC y de 333,33 µg/ml del EMC frente a A. parasiticus. Por otra parte, se valoró el contenido de verbascósido en los extractos obteniéndose como resultado 5,8 mg/ml en EHC y 9,6 mg/ml en EMC. La susceptibilidad observada, permitiría incluir a A. citrodora entre las pocas especies registradas con esta actividad. En futuros estudios, se podrían obtener compuestos de interés para el desarrollo de nuevos productos, ya sea para aplicarlo sobre los granos o en el sitio de almacenamiento de los mismos.EEA Cerro AzulFil: Di Ciaccio, Lucí­a Soledad. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Instituto de Patobiología; ArgentinaFil: Di Leo Lira, Paola. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Departamento de Farmacología. Cátedra de Farmacognosia; ArgentinaFil: Moscatelli, Valeria A. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Bálsamo, Maricel. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Estación Experimental Agropecuaria Cerro Azul; ArgentinaFil: Van Baren, Catalina Maria. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Departamento de Farmacología. Cátedra de Farmacognosia; ArgentinaFil: Salvat, Adriana Elisabeth. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Instituto de Patobiología; ArgentinaFil: Retta, Daiana S. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Departamento de Farmacología. Cátedra de Farmacognosia; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Instituto de Química y Metabolismo del Fármaco; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin