690 research outputs found
Can a Correct Diagnosis Be Established Using the Teledermatology Method?
Teledermatology is a remote method of diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of the patient with visual communication technologies. It has been a research subject for many years, but its reliabili-ty has not been fully explained. With the emergence of the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic in 2019, the need for teledermatolo-gy increased. This study aimed to evaluate the reliability of telederma-tology. Material and Method: A total of 595 lesions of 546 patients who visited the dermatology outpatient clinic were included in the study. Two physicians evaluated the patients, one face-to-face and the other via multimedia messaging, and the diagnoses were compared with each other. Diagnoses were in total agreement if the first diagnoses were the same, in partial agreement if the second and third diagno-ses were the same, and in no agreement if all diagnoses differed. The first diagnoses of Physicians 1 and 2 matched in 468 (total agreement rate: 76.8%) patients, and the second and third diagnoses matched in 44 and 8 patients, respectively (partial agreement rate: 8.7%). There was no agreement in the diagnoses of 75 patients (12.7%). In total, an agreement was reached in 520 patients (87.3%). Common diseases in dermatology practice, such as papulopustular and urticarial lesions, nails and hair diseases, infectious diseases, erythematous squamous diseases, those with pruritus, and skin malignancies, were diagnosed teledermatologically at a high rate of accuracy. In contrast, eczematous diseases, premalignant lesions, and other groups of diseases were less accurately diagnosed. In the last year, the importance of teledermatology has greatly increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. Our study shows that the store and forward (asynchronous) method of teledermatology can diagnose dermatological diseases with a high rate of accuracy
Recovering from Privacy-Preserving Masking with Large Language Models
Model adaptation is crucial to handle the discrepancy between proxy training
data and actual users data received. To effectively perform adaptation, textual
data of users is typically stored on servers or their local devices, where
downstream natural language processing (NLP) models can be directly trained
using such in-domain data. However, this might raise privacy and security
concerns due to the extra risks of exposing user information to adversaries.
Replacing identifying information in textual data with a generic marker has
been recently explored. In this work, we leverage large language models (LLMs)
to suggest substitutes of masked tokens and have their effectiveness evaluated
on downstream language modeling tasks. Specifically, we propose multiple
pre-trained and fine-tuned LLM-based approaches and perform empirical studies
on various datasets for the comparison of these methods. Experimental results
show that models trained on the obfuscation corpora are able to achieve
comparable performance with the ones trained on the original data without
privacy-preserving token masking.Comment: Submitted to ICASS
Surpassing the repeaterless bound with a photon-number encoded measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution protocol
Decoherence is detrimental to quantum key distribution (QKD) over large
distances. One of the proposed solutions is to use quantum repeaters, which
divide the total distance between the users into smaller segments to minimise
the effects of the losses in the channel. However, the secret key rates that
repeater protocols can achieve are fundamentally bounded by the separation
between each neighbouring node. Here we introduce a
measurement-device-independent protocol which uses high-dimensional states
prepared by two distant trusted parties and a coherent total photon number
detection for the entanglement swapping measurement at the repeater station. We
present an experimentally feasible protocol that can be implemented with
current technology as the required states reduce down to the single-photon
level over large distances. This protocol outperforms the existing
measurement-device-independent and twin-field QKD protocols by surpassing the
fundamental limit of the repeaterless bound for the pure-loss channel at a
shorter distance and achieves a higher transmission distance in total when
experimental imperfections are considered
Pitfalls of an Automated Dermoscopic Analysis System in the Differential Diagnosis of Melanocytic Lesions
Dermoscopy plays an important role in the diagnosis of pigmented lesions, particularly in the differential diagnosis of early-stage melanoma. Dermoscopy systems that aim to enable automatic “unmanned-without physician” diagnosis are becoming increasingly common. We aimed to investigate the reliability and weaknesses of diagnosis programs. Furthermore, we attempted to determine whether such programs are superior to diagnosis by a physician, compared to histopathological assessment. The images stored in the DermoGenius ultra-computerized dermoscopy system of the Dermoscopy Unit between January 2008 and December 2008 were surveyed retrospectively. Dermoscopic images made prior to excision of 77 lesions from 51 patients verified by histopathology were reviewed. Nineteen patients were men and 32 were women. Mean age was 35.5 years. Diagnosis by a clinician or automatic analysis revealed that 23 (30%) of the lesions were atypical (dysplastic) nevi, 22 (29%) were compound nevi, 10 (13%) were dermal nevi, 8 (10%) were malignant melanomas, 7 (9%) were common nevi, 6 (7%) were junctional nevi, and 1 (1%) was a blue nevus. Compared to histopathological diagnosis, considered the gold standard, the sensitivity of the automated analysis program was 96.6%, its specificity 14.9%, and its diagnostic accuracy 47%. For the clinician, the values were 100% for sensitivity, 66.7% for specificity, and 95% for diagnostic accuracy.Based on histopathological results, the diagnostic accuracy of the physician was higher than that of the automatic analysis program. Therefore, errors are inevitable when an inexperienced physician assesses patients according to automatic program results.</p
A foreign body response-on-a-chip platform
Understanding the foreign body response (FBR) and desiging strategies to modulate such a response represent a grand challenge for implant devices and biomaterials. Here, the development of a microfluidic platform is reported, i.e., the FBR?on?a?chip (FBROC) for modeling the cascade of events during immune cell response to implants. The platform models the native implant microenvironment where the implants are interfaced directly with surrounding tissues, as well as vasculature with circulating immune cells. The study demonstrates that the release of cytokines such as monocyte chemoattractant protein 1 (MCP?1) from the extracellular matrix (ECM)?like hydrogels in the bottom tissue chamber induces trans?endothelial migration of circulating monocytes in the vascular channel toward the hydrogels, thus mimicking implant?induced inflammation. Data using patient?derived peripheral blood mononuclear cells further reveal inter?patient differences in FBR, highlighting the potential of this platform for monitoring FBR in a personalized manner. The prototype FBROC platform provides an enabling strategy to interrogate FBR on various implants, including biomaterials and engineered tissue constructs, in a physiologically relevant and individual?specific manner
Demographic characteristics, aetiology, and assessment of treatment options in leukocytoclastic vasculitis
A b s t r a c t Introduction: Vasculitides are a heterogeneous group of diseases characterized by inflammation of the blood vessel walls. Etiological factors include infections, drugs, connective tissue diseases, and malignancies. Aim: To examine the demographic characteristics, etiological factors, and treatment options in 75 patients with leukocytoclastic vasculitis. Material and methods: The study included 75 patients diagnosed with leukocytoclastic vasculitis at our clinic. The patients' medical records were reviewed to determine their age, sex, presence of systemic symptoms, possible etiological factors, laboratory results, types of cutaneous lesions, locations of the lesions, treatment options, and disease course. Results: There were 43 women and 32 men. Cutaneous lesions affected only the lower limbs in 60 of the 75 patients (80%) and usually presented as palpable purpura (64%, n = 48). Arthralgia (26.7%, n = 20) was the most frequent extracutaneous symptom. Of the patients with secondary vasculitis, the most common causes were infections and drugs. The mean age of the patients with Henoch-Schönlein purpura was 26.8 years. There was no significant association between age and renal, gastrointestinal, or joint involvement. Conclusions: The most common form of vasculitis in our study was cutaneous leukocytoclastic vasculitis. In most of the patients it appeared to be idiopathic. Among drugs, antibiotics were the most common etiological factor. In 4 patients, the cutaneous leukocytoclastic vasculitis behaved like the paraneoplastic syndrome
AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study
: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery
Study of the decay
The decay is studied
in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of TeV
using data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5
collected by the LHCb experiment. In the system, the
state observed at the BaBar and Belle experiments is
resolved into two narrower states, and ,
whose masses and widths are measured to be where the first uncertainties are statistical and the second
systematic. The results are consistent with a previous LHCb measurement using a
prompt sample. Evidence of a new
state is found with a local significance of , whose mass and width
are measured to be and , respectively. In addition, evidence of a new decay mode
is found with a significance of
. The relative branching fraction of with respect to the
decay is measured to be , where the first
uncertainty is statistical, the second systematic and the third originates from
the branching fractions of charm hadron decays.Comment: All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and
additional information, are available at
https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-028.html (LHCb
public pages
Measurement of the ratios of branching fractions and
The ratios of branching fractions
and are measured, assuming isospin symmetry, using a
sample of proton-proton collision data corresponding to 3.0 fb of
integrated luminosity recorded by the LHCb experiment during 2011 and 2012. The
tau lepton is identified in the decay mode
. The measured values are
and
, where the first uncertainty is
statistical and the second is systematic. The correlation between these
measurements is . Results are consistent with the current average
of these quantities and are at a combined 1.9 standard deviations from the
predictions based on lepton flavor universality in the Standard Model.Comment: All figures and tables, along with any supplementary material and
additional information, are available at
https://cern.ch/lhcbproject/Publications/p/LHCb-PAPER-2022-039.html (LHCb
public pages
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