Inke Näthke:The ABCs of APC

Näthke investigates the many functions of adenomatous polyposis coli protein and its contribution to human disease

Variational Autoencoders for Feature Exploration and Malignancy Prediction of Lung Lesions

Lung cancer is responsible for 21% of cancer deaths in the UK and five-year survival rates are heavily influenced by the stage the cancer was identified at. Recent studies have demonstrated the capability of AI methods for accurate and early diagnosis of lung cancer from routine scans. However, this evidence has not translated into clinical practice with one barrier being a lack of interpretable models. This study investigates the application Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), a type of generative AI model, to lung cancer lesions. Proposed models were trained on lesions extracted from 3D CT scans in the LIDC-IDRI public dataset. Latent vector representations of 2D slices produced by the VAEs were explored through clustering to justify their quality and used in an MLP classifier model for lung cancer diagnosis, the best model achieved state-of-the-art metrics of AUC 0.98 and 93.1% accuracy. Cluster analysis shows the VAE latent space separates the dataset of malignant and benign lesions based on meaningful feature components including tumour size, shape, patient and malignancy class. We also include a comparative analysis of the standard Gaussian VAE (GVAE) and the more recent Dirichlet VAE (DirVAE), which replaces the prior with a Dirichlet distribution to encourage a more explainable latent space with disentangled feature representation. Finally, we demonstrate the potential for latent space traversals corresponding to clinically meaningful feature changes.Comment: 10 pages (main paper), 5 pages (references), 5 figures, 2 tables, work accepted for BMVC 202

An advanced biomass gasification technology with integrated catalytic hot gas cleaning. Part III: Effects of inorganic species in char on the reforming of tars from wood and agricultural wastes

Char is used directly as a catalyst for the catalytic reforming of tar during gasification. Experiments have been carried out to examine the effects of inorganics in char as a catalyst for the catalytic reforming of tar during the gasification of mallee wood, corn stalk and wheat straw in a pilot plant. The char catalyst was prepared from the pyrolysis of mallee wood at a fast heating rate. The catalytic activities of char and acid-washed char for tar reforming were compared under otherwise identical gasification conditions. For all biomass feedstocks tested for gasification, the tar contents in product gas could be drastically reduced by the catalyst, reaching a tar concentration level well below 100 mg/N m3. The acid-washed char also showed profound activity for tar reforming although its catalytic activity was definitely lower than the raw char. Both catalysts could effectively reform the aromatic ring systems (especially large aromatic ring systems with three or more fused benzene rings) in tars as is revealed using UV-fluorescence spectroscopy. The char itself was also partially gasified. After being used as a catalyst, the condensation of the aromatic rings and the accumulation of inorganic species led to drastic changes in char reactivity with O2 at 400 °C. The inorganic species in char tended to enhance the formation of H2 and CO during the reforming reactions in the catalytic reactor

Formation of nascent char structure during the fast pyrolysis of mallee wood and low-rank coals

The structural evolution of nascent chars during the fast pyrolysis of a wood and two low-rank coals was investigated in this study. Western Australian Collie sub-bituminous coal, Victorian Loy Yang brown coal and Western Australian mallee wood were pyrolysed in a wire-mesh reactor that is capable of providing rapid heating rates (up to 5000 K s−1) and accurate holding time (in increments of 10 ms) at peak temperature. FT-Raman spectroscopy was used to characterise the key structural features of raw fuels and nascent chars. The combined use of a wire-mesh reactor and a FT-Raman spectroscopy has given insights into the structural transformation from coal/biomass to nascent chars. There were insignificant changes in the aromatic ring systems of two coals during the initial fast heating from room temperature to 600 °C. During holding at 600 °C, the changes that occurred in ring systems for the three fuels were different. Mallee wood and Loy Yang coal underwent more changes than Collie coal. In addition, mallee wood had ring condensation during holding at 600 °C up to 30s. However, little growth in large aromatic rings of two coals was observed during holding at 600 °C up to 50 s

A Review on the Scope of Photothermal Therapy–Based Nanomedicines in Preclinical Models of Colorectal Cancer

Oncologic thermal ablation involves the use of hyperthermic temperatures to damage and treat solid cancers. Thermal ablation is being investigated as a method of treatment in colorectal cancers and has the potential to complement conventional anticancer treatments in managing local recurrence and metastatic disease. Photothermal therapy utilizes photosensitive agents to generate local heat and induce thermal ablation. There is growing interest in developing nanotechnology platforms to deliver such photosensitive agents. An advantage of nanomedicines is their multifunctionality, with the capability to deliver combinations of chemotherapeutics and cancer-imaging agents. To date, there have been no clinical studies evaluating photothermal therapy–based nanomedicines in colorectal cancers. This review presents the current scope of preclinical studies, investigating nanomedicines that have been developed for delivering multimodal photothermal therapy to colorectal cancers, with an emphasis on potential clinical applications

Results from a pilot plant using un-promoted potassium carbonate for carbon capture

A pilot plant facility has been designed and built to trial potassium carbonate solvent technology for carbon capture under a range of conditions. The rig is capable of capturing 4 - 10 kg/hr of CO2 from 30 - 55 kg/hr of an air-CO2 mixture, with different packings. A series of trials have been completed with a range of solvent concentrations from 20 wt% to 30 wt% potassium carbonate. The experimental holdup, solvent loading and absorber temperatures have been matched with rate-based simulations in Aspen Plus® software