Systemic Associations with Residual Subretinal Fluid after Ranibizumab in Diabetic Macular Edema

Purpose. To investigate the impact of systemic diseases on the occurrence of subretinal fluid (SRF) in diabetic macular edema (DME) and prognostic factors for residual SRF following three consecutive monthly intravitreal ranibizumab. Methods. Ninety-seven eyes from 68 patients with DME who completed 3 consecutive monthly injections of ranibizumab were enrolled. Systemic parameters mainly included chronic kidney disease (CKD), hypertension, HbA1c, and insulin dependence. Renal parameters for CKD were serum creatinine, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and serum albumin. Ocular factors were baseline central macular thickness (CMT), severity of diabetic retinopathy (DR), and status of panretinal photocoagulation (PRP). Results. Chronic kidney disease had significant correlation with baseline SRF (R=0.397, p<0.001 after partial correlation with adjustment for age and DR severity). As for CKD, lower serum albumin, but not eGFR or serum creatinine, was associated with baseline presence of SRF (p=0.026, p=0.08 and p=0.53, resp., after adjustment for age and DR severity). Overall, lower eGFR and lower HbA1c values, contrary to popular belief, predicted the presence of residual SRF following intravitreal injections (p=0.016 and p<0.001, resp.). Conclusions. Tight sugar control and poorer baseline kidney function may slow the resorption of SRF after anti-VEGF injections in patients with DME in the short term

Effects of ranibizumab on human corneal endothelial cells

AbstractPurposeThis study aims to evaluate corneal endothelial changes occurring over a 3-month period after intravitreal injections of ranibizumab in patients with wet age-related macular degeneration.MethodsThis is a prospective case series. A total of 29 patients (29 eyes) received a 0.5-mg intravitreal injection of ranibizumab. Specular microscopy, including measurement of central corneal thickness and endothelial cell count, was performed on each patient prior to and after completing three intravitreal injections.ResultsAll patients received three intravitreal injections and were followed up for a mean of 3 months. There was no significant change in corneal thickness (p = 0.32) or endothelial cell density (p = 0.38) after ranibizumab injections.ConclusionIntravitreal ranibizumab injections (0.5 mg) have no harmful effects on corneal endothelial cells

Tetra­butyl­ammonium bis­[4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-(3,7-dimethyl-1H-4,2,1-benzothiaza­siline-1,1-di­yl)dibenzene­thiol­ato]vanadium(III) acetonitrile tetra­solvate

In the title compound, [N(C4H9)4][V(C23H21NS3Si)2]·4CH3CN, the VIII atom (site symmetry ) is coordinated by two N,S,S′-tridentate 4,4′-dimethyl-2,2′-(3,7-dimethyl-1H-4,2,1-benzothiaza­siline-1,1-di­yl)dibenzene­thiol­ate ligands in a distorted trans-VN2S4 octa­hedral geometry. The complete cation is generated by crystallographic twofold symmetry, with the V atom lying on the rotation axis. The unusual ligand arose from nucleophilic attack on the coordinated nitrile by the thiol­ate precursor and reduction of nitrile to the imidate

Effects of human parvovirus B19 VP1 unique region protein on macrophage responses

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Activity of secreted phospholipase A (sPLA2) has been implicated in a wide range of cellular responses. However, little is known about the function of human parvovirus B19-VP1 unique region (VP1u) with sPLA2 activity on macrophage.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To investigate the roles of B19-VP1u in response to macrophage, phospholipase A2 activity, cell migration assay, phagocytosis activity, metalloproteinase assay, RT-PCR and immunoblotting were performed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In the present study, we report that migration, phagocytosis, IL-6, IL-1β mRNA, and MMP9 activity are significantly increased in RAW264.7 cells by B19-VP1u protein with sPLA2 activity, but not by B19-VP1uD175A protein that is mutated and lacks sPLA2 activity. Additionally, significant increases of phosphorylated ERK1/2 and JNK proteins were detected in macrophages that were treated with B19-VP1u protein, but not when they were treated with B19-VP1uD175A protein.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Taken together, our experimental results suggest that B19-VP1u with sPLA2 activity affects production of IL-6, IL-1β mRNA, and MMP9 activity, possibly through the involvement of ERK1/2 and JNK signaling pathways. These findings could provide clues in understanding the role of B19-VP1u and its sPLA2 enzymatic activity in B19 infection and B19-related diseases.</p

Dish Discovery via Word Embeddings on Restaurant Reviews

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a novel framework for automatic dish discovery via word embeddings on restaurant reviews. We collect a dataset of user reviews from Yelp and parse the reviews to extract dish words. Then, we utilize the processed reviews as training texts to learn the embedding vectors of words via the skip-gram model. In the paper, a nearestneighbor like score function is proposed to rank the dishes based on their learned representations. We brief some analyses on the preliminary experiments and present a web-based visualization at http://clip.csie.org/yelp/. Keywords dish discovery, word embeddings, dish-word extraction BACKGROUND With the growth of social media, corporations, such as Yelp, have accumulated a great number of user generated content (UGC). In the literature, some studies have been conducted with a perspective of finding critical information hidden in the content METHODOLOGY Copyright held by the author(s). RecSys 2016 Poster Proceedings, September 15-19, 2016, USA, Boston. Our methodology mainly consists of three parts: 1) dishword recognition, 2) word embedding learning, and 3) dish score calculation. As alluded to earlier, UGC usually incorporates a degree of noise and different language usages; therefore, extracting dish names from user reviews is a complicated task. For example, observed from the dataset, users tend not to write the full name of a dish in their reviews; instead, the last word or the last two words are often written in the reviews. To grapple with this issue, we use regular expressions (regexps) to extract dish names from the user reviews. However, this also give rise to an issue that a certain dish in a restaurant may be of the same name in other restaurants, which may induce the problem of ambiguity and lower the accuracy of matching the correct dish name. So, we attach a dish name with its restaurant name to solve the ambiguity problem. We then utilize the collection of processed reviews as training texts to learn embeddings of each word in the reviews via a continuous space language model, the skip-gram model. After the training phase, each word (including every dish) is represented by an n-dimensional vector (called the embedding of this word). Inspired by the k-nearest neighbors algorithm, we define the score for every dish d as: where , m is the total number of positive sentiment words considered, λi (i = 1, · · · , m) is a weighting parameter. In addition, si denotes the i-nearest positive sentiment words of the given dish d, and w d , ws i ∈ R n are the vector representations of the dish d and the sentiment word si, respectively. In an extreme case (1) of λm = 1 and λi = 0 for i = 1, · · · , m − 1, this score function implements the concept of the average Euclidean distance between a dish and all the positive sentiment words; while in the case (2) λ1 = 1 and λi = 0 for i = 2, · · · , m, the scored is obtained with the closest positive sentiment words to the dish. EXPERIMENTS Our preliminary experiments involve a real-world restaurant review dataset collected from Yelp Data Challenge

The role of echocardiographic study in patients with chronic kidney disease

Despite the recent enormous advances in medicine, high mortality and morbidity rates among the chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients remain an important but unresolved issue. Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of mortality and morbidity in patients with CKD. Abnormal left ventricular geometry and functions are common in this patient group and have been proven to be correlated with a high cardiovascular mortality/morbidity and all-cause mortality. For this reason, echocardiographic study plays an important role in evaluating cardiac structure and functions as well as in stratifying prognostic risk. We here summarize the reported findings on the usefulness of echocardiographic methodologies and identify their roles in diagnostic and prognostic clinical approaches