Autoimmune liver disease - are there spectra that we do not know?

Autoimmune liver diseases (AILDs) are common leading causes for liver cirrhosis and terminal stage of liver disease. They have variable prevalence among patients with liver disease and have two major clinical and biochemical presentations. Autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) is the typical example of hepatocellular AILD, but it can also be presented under a cholestatic pattern. AIH has a scoring diagnostic system and respond in most cases to the treatment with prednisolone and azathioprine. Primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) is the second most common AILD, with a cholestatic presentation and characterized by positive antimitochondrial antibody (AMA). It has an excellent response and long term outcome with the administration of ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA). Another AILD that is thought to be a variant of PBC is the autoimmune cholangitis, being a disease that has biochemical and histological features similar to PBC; but the AMA is negative. Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a rare entity of AILD that has a cholestatic presentation and respond poorly to the treatment, with the ultimate progression to advance liver cirrhosis in most patients. Other forms of AILD include the overlap syndromes (OS), which are diseases with mixed immunological and histological patterns of two AILD; the most commonly recognized one is AIH-PBC overlap (AIH-PSC overlap is less common). The treatment of OS involves the trial of UDCA and different immunosuppressants. Here we present three case reports of unusual forms of chronic liver diseases that most likely represent AILD. The first two patients had a cholestatic picture, whereas the third one had a hepatocellular picture at presentation. We discussed their biochemical, immunological and histological features as well as their response to treatment and their outcomes. Then, we compared them with other forms of AILD

A hybrid approach for large knowledge graphs matching

Matching large and heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has been a challenge in the Semantic Web research community. This work highlights a number of limitations with current matching methods, such as: (1) they are highly dependent on string-based similarity measures, and (2) they are primarily built to handle well-formed ontologies. These features make them unsuitable for large, (semi-) automatically constructed KGs with hundreds of classes and millions of instances. Such KGs share a remarkable number of complementary facts, often described using different vocabulary. Inspired by the role of instances in large-scale KGs, we propose a hybrid matching approach. Our method composes an instance-based matcher that casts the schema matching process as a two-way text classification task by exploiting instances of KG classes, and a string-based matcher. Our method is domain-independent and is able to handle KG classes with unbalanced population. Our evaluation on a real-world KG dataset shows that our method obtains the highest recall and F1 over all OAEI 2020 participants

Autoimmune Hepatitis as a Unique Form of an Autoimmune Liver Disease: Immunological Aspects and Clinical Overview

Autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) is a unique form of immune-mediated disease that attacks the liver through a variety of immune mechanisms. The outcomes of AIH are either acute liver disease, which can be fatal, or, more commonly, chronic progressive liver disease, which can lead to decompensated liver cirrhosis if left untreated. AIH has characteristic immunological, and pathological, features that are important for the establishment of the diagnosis. More importantly, most patients with AIH have a favorable response to treatment with prednisolone and azathioprine, although some patients with refractory AIH or more aggressive disease require more potent immune-suppressant agents, such as cyclosporine or Mycophenolate Mofetil. In this paper, we discuss the immunological, pathological and clinical features of AIH, as well as the standard and alternative treatments for AIH

A gold standard dataset for large knowledge graphs matching

In the last decade, a remarkable number of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) were developed, such as DBpedia, NELL and Google knowledge graph. These KGs are the core of many web-based applications such as query answering and semantic web navigation. The majority of these KGs are semi-automatically constructed, which has resulted in a significant degree of heterogeneity. KGs are highly complementary; thus, mapping them can benefit intelligent applications that require integrating different KGs such as recommendation systems and search engines. Although the problem of ontology matching has been investigated and a significant number of systems have been developed, the challenges of mapping large-scale KGs remain significant. In 2018, OAEI has introduced a specific track for KG matching systems. Nonetheless, a major limitation of the current benchmark is their lack of representation of real-world KGs. In this work we introduce a gold standard dataset for matching the schema of large, automatically constructed, less-well structured KGs based on DBpedia and NELL. We evaluate OAEI's various participating systems on this dataset, and show that matching large-scale and domain independent KGs is a more challenging task. We believe that the dataset which we make public in this work makes the largest domain-independent gold standard dataset for matching KG classes

KGMatcher results for OAEI 2021

KGMatcher is a scalable and domain independent matching tool that matches the schema (classes) of larger Knowledge Graphs by following a hybrid matching approach. KGMatcher is composed of an instance-based matcher which only uses annotated instances of knowledge graph classes to generate candidate class alignments, and a stringbased matcher. This year is the first OAEI participation of KGMatcher, and it is the best performing system on the common knowledge graph track. Although KGMatcher results are promising, further improvements of the matching techniques' and matcher combination can be introduced

Liver diseases in pregnancy and outcomes: A retrospective study from Saudi Arabia

Liver diseases unique to pregnancy are common causes of both maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity. We retrospectively studied liver diseases unique to pregnancy, including hyperemesis gravidarum (HG); intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy; eclampsia; preeclampsia; hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes, and a low platelets (HELLP) syndrome; and acute fatty liver of pregnancy. We collected data including maternal age, gestational weeks at presentation and at delivery, mode of delivery, number of parity, and laboratory markers at 0, 1 week, and within 24 hours after delivery; from 112 patients (mean age, 29.8 years) from April 2015 - March 2017. SPSS 22 was used for statistical analysis. We The commonest liver disease in pregnancy was pre-eclampsia followed by HG. HG patients were younger compared with those with eclampsia and preeclampsia (P=0.025). Gestational week at presentation and the week of delivery were significantly greater for preeclampsia/eclampsia and HELLP patients compared to HG. Primigravida represented 42.9% of our patients. Fetal complications were reported in 29 (26%) of cases. Of those, 17 had fetal or neonatal death. Fourteen mothers (12.5%) had ICU admission. Pregnancy related liver diseases are important causes for fetal mortality and morbidity. Maternal age and gestational weeks are important predictors of fetal and maternal outcomes.   Les maladies du foie propres à la grossesse sont des causes courantes de mortalité et de morbidité maternelles et foetales. Nous avons étudié rétrospectivement les maladies du foie propres à la grossesse, y compris l'hyperemesis gravidarum (HG); cholestase intrahépatique de la grossesse; éclampsie; prééclampsie; hémolyse, élévation des enzymes hépatiques et syndrome de bas taux de plaquettes (HELLP); et stéatose hépatique aiguë de la grossesse. Nous avons recueilli des données comprenant l'âge maternel, les semaines de gestation à la présentation et à l'accouchement, le mode d'accouchement, le nombre de parité et les marqueurs de laboratoire à 0, 1 semaine et dans les 24 heures suivant l'accouchement; de 112 patients (âge moyen, 29,8 ans) d'avril 2015 à mars 2017. SPSS 22 a été utilisé pour l'analyse statistique. Nous La maladie hépatique la plus courante pendant la grossesse était la pré-éclampsie suivie de l'HG. Les patients atteints de HG étaient plus jeunes que ceux atteints d'éclampsie et de prééclampsie (P = 0,025). La semaine gestationnelle lors de la présentation et la semaine de l'accouchement étaient significativement plus importantes pour les patients prééclampsie / éclampsie et HELLP par rapport à HG. Primigravida représentait 42,9% de nos patients. Des complications foetales ont été rapportées dans 29 (26%) des cas. Parmi ceux-ci, 17 ont eu un décès foetal ou néonatal. Quatorze mères (12,5%) ont été admises à l'USI. Les maladies hépatiques liées à la grossesse sont des causes importantes de mortalité et de morbidité foetales. L'âge maternel et les semaines de gestation sont des prédicteurs importants des issues foetales et maternelles. &nbsp

Frequency of venous thromboembolism during hajj sessions 2017-2019 in Makkah, Saudi Arabia

Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) includes deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), both are serious health risks. In western countries, VTE affects about 114 to 184 people per 100,000. Asian populations have a significantly lower incidence than western populations. The true incidence of VTE is still not well documented in Saudi Arabia (KSA). There are different major risk factors especially in hajj season that predispose a person to thrombosis. The mortality rate of autopsy-based pulmonary embolism reaches up to 30%. Methods: This single-centered retrospective descriptive study was done in security forces hospital Makkah, Saudi Arabia during hajj period (30 days) for consecutive three-year. All admitted confirmed DVT and PE patients (N=32) of both genders with age >14 years were included. Patients’ data were extracted from the electronic medical record. Data were analysed by SPSS version 23. Results: Deep venous thrombosis (DVT) was developed in 67.7% while 19.3% of patients suffered from pulmonary embolism (PE) out of a total of 32 subjects. Females were more affected by 18 (56.3%) than males by 14 (43.8%). The mean age of patients was 51.78 years (SD ±16.21). A statistically significant association (p<0.005) between provoked VTE status and age, immobility, and history of surgery was seen. There was no mortality documented in this study. Conclusions: This study provides insights into hajj period hospital admitted patients’ frequency of VTE, changing patient profiles, management strategies, and subsequent outcomes in patients with venous thromboembolism. There is a need for greater awareness of VTE prophylaxis about its prevention, especially in hajj season

Results of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2021

The Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) aims at comparing ontology matching systems on precisely defined test cases. These test cases can be based on ontologies of different levels of complexity and use different evaluation modalities (e.g., blind evaluation, open evaluation, or consensus). The OAEI 2021 campaign offered 13 tracks and was attended by 21 participants. This paper is an overall presentation of that campaign