Successful Treatment of Infectious Endocarditis Associated Glomerulonephritis Mimicking C3 Glomerulonephritis in a Case with No Previous Cardiac Disease

We report a 42-year-old man with subacute infectious endocarditis (IE) with septic pulmonary embolism, presenting rapidly progressive glomerulonephritis and positive proteinase 3-anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (PR3-ANCA). He had no previous history of heart disease. Renal histology revealed diffuse endocapillary proliferative glomerulonephritis with complement 3- (C3-) dominant staining and subendothelial electron dense deposit, mimicking C3 glomerulonephritis. Successful treatment of IE with valve plastic surgery gradually ameliorated hypocomplementemia and renal failure; thus C3 glomerulonephritis-like lesion in this case was classified as postinfectious glomerulonephritis. IE associated glomerulonephritis is relatively rare, especially in cases with no previous history of valvular disease of the heart like our case. This case also reemphasizes the broad differential diagnosis of renal involvement in IE

Electronic properties of Cs2TCNQ3 crystals grown under magnetic field

The influence of magnetic field on the crystallization process has been examined in Cs2TCNQ3 (TCNQ = tetracyaniquinodimethane), a strongly Coulomb-correlated organic semiconductor. The crystal structure is unaffected by the magnetic field, while the electric, magnetic and optical properties change markedly if the magnetic field higher than a threshold (～ 4 T) is applied during the crystal growth. The high-field crystals exhibit a very weak but distinct spontaneous magnetization with the exceedingly high Curie temperature of ～ 420 K. The infrared and visible spectroscopy data show that this novel ferromagnetism concurs with the renormalization of the π* state of TCNQ radical anions, TCNQ-

Faster R-CNN-Based Glomerular Detection in Multistained Human Whole Slide Images

The detection of objects of interest in high-resolution digital pathological images is a key part of diagnosis and is a labor-intensive task for pathologists. In this paper, we describe a Faster R-CNN-based approach for the detection of glomeruli in multistained whole slide images (WSIs) of human renal tissue sections. Faster R-CNN is a state-of-the-art general object detection method based on a convolutional neural network, which simultaneously proposes object bounds and objectness scores at each point in an image. The method takes an image obtained from a WSI with a sliding window and classifies and localizes every glomerulus in the image by drawing the bounding boxes. We configured Faster R-CNN with a pretrained Inception-ResNet model and retrained it to be adapted to our task, then evaluated it based on a large dataset consisting of more than 33,000 annotated glomeruli obtained from 800 WSIs. The results showed the approach produces comparable or higher than average F-measures with different stains compared to other recently published approaches. This approach could have practical application in hospitals and laboratories for the quantitative analysis of glomeruli in WSIs and, potentially, lead to a better understanding of chronic glomerulonephritis