Collaborative denoising autoencoder for high glycated haemoglobin prediction.

A pioneering study is presented demonstrating that the presence of high glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) levels in a patient’s blood can be reliably predicted from routinely collected clinical data. This paves the way for performing early detection of Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). This will save healthcare providers a major cost associated with the administration and assessment of clinical tests for HbA1c. A novel collaborative denoising autoencoder framework is used to address this challenge. The framework builds an independent denoising autoencoder model for the high and low HbA1c level, which extracts feature representations in the latent space. A baseline model using just three features: patient age together with triglycerides and glucose level achieves 76% F1-score with an SVM classifier. The collaborative denoising autoencoder uses 78 features and can predict HbA1c level with 81% F1-score

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Sur le développement larvaire de Grouvellinus coyei Allard, 1868 (Coleoptera-Elmidae) récolté dans la Bekaa-Liban

L'étude biométrique des populations larvaires de Grouvellinus coyei récoltées à Chlifa dans la Bekaa-Liban, a permis d'identifier 8 stades larvaires chez cette espèce. Son cycle de développement paraît s'étaler sur plus d'une année, mais devra être précisé ultérieurement

Les stades ailés de Baetis samochai Koch 1981 du Proche-Orient (Insecta : Ephemeroptera)

Les imagos et subimagos mâles et femelles de Baetis samochai Koch, 1981 sont décrites sur du matériel en provenance de la plaine de la Békaa (Liban)

Les Hétéroptères aquatiques du Liban. I. Inventaire faunistique

Un inventaire des Hétéroptères aquatiques du Liban, basé sur des collections récentes et sur la littérature, est donné. Cet inventaire est accompagné de notes faunistiques et biogéographiques sur la base d'une comparaison avec la faune des pays avoisinants