A System for Accessible Artificial Intelligence

While artificial intelligence (AI) has become widespread, many commercial AI systems are not yet accessible to individual researchers nor the general public due to the deep knowledge of the systems required to use them. We believe that AI has matured to the point where it should be an accessible technology for everyone. We present an ongoing project whose ultimate goal is to deliver an open source, user-friendly AI system that is specialized for machine learning analysis of complex data in the biomedical and health care domains. We discuss how genetic programming can aid in this endeavor, and highlight specific examples where genetic programming has automated machine learning analyses in previous projects.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Genetic Programming Theory and Practice 2017 worksho

Long noncoding RNAs: a missing link in osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a systemic disease that results in loss of bone density and increased fracture risk, particularly in the vertebrae and the hip. This condition and associated morbidity and mortality increase with population ageing. Long noncoding (lnc) RNAs are transcripts longer than 200 nucleotides that are not translated into proteins, but play important regulatory roles in transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation. Their contribution to disease onset and development is increasingly recognized. Herein, we present an integrative revision on the studies that implicate lncRNAs in osteoporosis and that support their potential use as therapeutic tools. Firstly, current evidence on lncRNAs involvement in cellular and molecular mechanisms linked to osteoporosis and its major complication, fragility fractures, is reviewed. We analyze evidence of their roles in osteogenesis, osteoclastogenesis, and bone fracture healing events from human and animal model studies. Secondly, the potential of lncRNAs alterations at genetic and transcriptomic level are discussed as osteoporosis risk factors and as new circulating biomarkers for diagnosis. Finally, we conclude debating the possibilities, persisting difficulties, and future prospects of using lncRNAs in the treatment of osteoporosis.This project has been supported by Portuguese funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia/Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior in the framework of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-031402—R2Bone, under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through ERDF. Authors would like to thank to FCT DL 57/2016/CP1360/CT0008 (M.I.A.) and SFRH/BD/112832/2015 (J.H.T)

Being Deaf in Mainstream Schools: The Effect of a Hearing Loss in Children’s Playground Behaviors

Naturalistic playground observations are a rich source of information when studying the social interactions of preschool children. On the playground, children can interact with their peers, explore different places and activities, and engage in different types of play. For deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children, interactions at a playground can be more difficult because of the large number of auditory stimuli surrounding them. Constraints in the access to the social world on the playground might hamper DHH children's interactions with their typically hearing (TH) peers, activities, and play. This pilot study aimed to examine the playground behaviors of preschool DHH children across three aspects: social levels, type of activities, and play choices. For this purpose, 12 preschool DHH children were observed during recess time, and their behaviors were coded and compared to their 85 TH peers. The preliminary findings indicate that DHH children spend less time in social interactions compared to their TH peers and that they still face difficulties when socially engaging with their TH peers. These findings suggest that interventions should focus on three aspects: the physical environment awareness of TH peers about communicating with DHH children, and the use of exercise play to facilitate social interactions between DHH children and their TH peers.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The systemic immune response to collagen-induced arthritis and the impact of bone injury in inflammatory conditions

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic disease that affects the osteoarticular system, associated with bone fragility and increased risk of fractures. Herein, we aimed to characterize the systemic impact of the rat collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) model and explore its combination with femoral bone defect (FD). The impact of CIA on endogenous mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSC) was also investigated. CIA induction led to enlarged, more proliferative, spleen and draining lymph nodes, with altered proportion of lymphoid populations. Upon FD, CIA animals increased the systemic myeloid cell proportions, and their expression of co-stimulatory molecules CD40 and CD86. Screening plasma cytokine/chemokine levels showed increased tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), Interleukin (IL)-17, IL-4, IL-5, and IL-12 in CIA, and IL-2 and IL-6 increased in CIA and CIA+FD, while Fractalkine and Leptin were decreased in both groups. CIA-derived MSC showed lower metabolic activity and proliferation, and significantly increased osteogenic and chondrogenic differentiation markers. Exposure of control-MSC to TNF-a partially mimicked the CIA-MSC phenotype in vitro. In conclusion, inflammatory conditions of CIA led to alterations in systemic immune cell proportions, circulating mediators, and in endogenous MSC. CIA animals respond to FD, and the combined model can be used to study the mechanisms of bone repair in inflammatory conditions.This research was funded by the project NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000012, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and AO Foundation-Switzerland (project S-15-83S). J.H.T, A.M.S, M.B.G, M.I.A and C.C were supported by FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, through the fellowships SFRH/BD/112832/2015, SFRH/BD/85968/2012, PD/BD/135489/2018, DL 57/2016/CP1360/CT0008 and DL 57/2016/CP1360/CT0004, respectively

Lysosomal acidification dysfunction in microglia: an emerging pathogenic mechanism of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration

Microglia are the resident innate immune cells in the brain with a major role in orchestrating immune responses. They also provide a frontline of host defense in the central nervous system (CNS) through their active phagocytic capability. Being a professional phagocyte, microglia participate in phagocytic and autophagic clearance of cellular waste and debris as well as toxic protein aggregates, which relies on optimal lysosomal acidification and function. Defective microglial lysosomal acidification leads to impaired phagocytic and autophagic functions which result in the perpetuation of neuroinflammation and progression of neurodegeneration. Reacidification of impaired lysosomes in microglia has been shown to reverse neurodegenerative pathology in Alzheimer's disease. In this review, we summarize key factors and mechanisms contributing to lysosomal acidification impairment and the associated phagocytic and autophagic dysfunction in microglia, and how these defects contribute to neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. We further discuss techniques to monitor lysosomal pH and therapeutic agents that can reacidify impaired lysosomes in microglia under disease conditions. Finally, we propose future directions to investigate the role of microglial lysosomal acidification in lysosome-mitochondria crosstalk and in neuron-glia interaction for more comprehensive understanding of its broader CNS physiological and pathological implications

"Detachment of the carinal hook following endobronchial intubation with a double lumen tube"

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Carinal hooks increases difficulty at endotracheal intubation. Amputation of the carinal hook during passage and malpositioning of the tube to the hook are some of the potential problems related with left-sided Carlens double lumen tube (DLT). This article reports an amputation of the hook during a difficult selective intubation and aimed at calling the attention to complications associated with DLTs and the importance of fiberoptic bronchoscopy.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 68 year-old woman was scheduled for right-sided thoracotomy in whom blind DLT insertion was performed. Narrowed trachea causes difficulty in rotating the DLT 90° counter-clockwise. After carinal hook was noticed upon visual inspection of the DLT, fiberoptic bronchoscopy was used to remove the missing part (with the use of forceps) from the right mainstem bronchus.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Insertion of DLTs with carinal hook is associated with technical problems and potentially life-threatening hazards have discouraged their use. Fiberoptic evaluation and repositioning solves most of the problems. Although amputation of the carinal hook has not been previously reported, clinicians should be alert. This case report emphasizes the utility of the fiberoptic bronchoscopy in the operating theatre for placement, positioning and inspection of the carinal hook DLT.</p

Deep Lesion Graphs in the Wild: Relationship Learning and Organization of Significant Radiology Image Findings in a Diverse Large-scale Lesion Database

Radiologists in their daily work routinely find and annotate significant abnormalities on a large number of radiology images. Such abnormalities, or lesions, have collected over years and stored in hospitals' picture archiving and communication systems. However, they are basically unsorted and lack semantic annotations like type and location. In this paper, we aim to organize and explore them by learning a deep feature representation for each lesion. A large-scale and comprehensive dataset, DeepLesion, is introduced for this task. DeepLesion contains bounding boxes and size measurements of over 32K lesions. To model their similarity relationship, we leverage multiple supervision information including types, self-supervised location coordinates and sizes. They require little manual annotation effort but describe useful attributes of the lesions. Then, a triplet network is utilized to learn lesion embeddings with a sequential sampling strategy to depict their hierarchical similarity structure. Experiments show promising qualitative and quantitative results on lesion retrieval, clustering, and classification. The learned embeddings can be further employed to build a lesion graph for various clinically useful applications. We propose algorithms for intra-patient lesion matching and missing annotation mining. Experimental results validate their effectiveness.Comment: Accepted by CVPR2018. DeepLesion url adde

Impact of HIV on inpatient mortality and complications in stroke in Thailand: a National Database Study.

The co-existence of stroke and HIV has increased in recent years, but the impact of HIV on post-stroke outcomes is poorly understood. We examined the impact of HIV on inpatient mortality, length of acute hospital stay and complications (pneumonia, respiratory failure, sepsis and convulsions), in hospitalized strokes in Thailand. All hospitalized strokes between 1 October 2004 and 31 January 2013 were included. Data were obtained from a National Insurance Database. Characteristics and outcomes for non-HIV and HIV patients were compared and multivariate logistic and linear regression models were constructed to assess the above outcomes. Of 610 688 patients (mean age 63·4 years, 45·4% female), 0·14% (866) had HIV infection. HIV patients were younger, a higher proportion were male and had higher prevalence of anaemia (P < 0·001) compared to non-HIV patients. Traditional cardiovascular risk factors, hypertension and diabetes, were more common in the non-HIV group (P < 0·001). After adjusting for age, sex, stroke type and co-morbidities, HIV infection was significantly associated with higher odds of sepsis [odds ratio (OR) 1·75, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1·29-2·4], and inpatient mortality (OR 2·15, 95% CI 1·8-2·56) compared to patients without HIV infection. The latter did not attenuate after controlling for complications (OR 2·20, 95% CI 1·83-2·64). HIV infection is associated with increased odds of sepsis and inpatient mortality after acute stroke