Prevalence of scarred and dysfunctional myocardium in patients with heart failure of ischaemic origin: a cardiovascular magnetic resonance study

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) with late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) can provide unique data on the transmural extent of scar/viability. We assessed the prevalence of dysfunctional myocardium, including partial thickness scar, which could contribute to left ventricular contractile dysfunction in patients with heart failure and ischaemic heart disease who denied angina symptoms. METHODS: We invited patients with ischaemic heart disease and a left ventricular ejection fraction < 50% by echocardiography to have LGE CMR. Myocardial contractility and transmural extent of scar were assessed using a 17-segment model. RESULTS: The median age of the 193 patients enrolled was 70 (interquartile range: 63-76) years and 167 (87%) were men. Of 3281 myocardial segments assessed, 1759 (54%) were dysfunctional, of which 581 (33%) showed no scar, 623 (35%) had scar affecting ≤50% of wall thickness and 555 (32%) had scar affecting > 50% of wall thickness. Of 1522 segments with normal contractile function, only 98 (6%) had evidence of scar on CMR. Overall, 182 (94%) patients had ≥1 and 107 (55%) patients had ≥5 segments with contractile dysfunction that had no scar or ≤50% transmural scar suggesting viability. CONCLUSIONS: In this cohort of patients with left ventricular systolic dysfunction and ischaemic heart disease, about half of all segments had contractile dysfunction but only one third of these had > 50% of the wall thickness affected by scar, suggesting that most dysfunctional segments could improve in response to an appropriate intervention

Spontaneous corneal melting in pregnancy: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To report a case of spontaneous corneal melting in pregnancy. We reviewed the literature on corneal melting and the effect of pregnancy on cornea and collagen containing tissues.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 29-year-old woman who underwent radial keratotomy in both eyes followed by trabeculectomy in her left eye developed corneal melting in the same eye, in her seventh month of pregnancy. Despite screening, no infectious or immune mediated condition could be identified. She was managed conservatively with cyanoacrylate glue, bandage contact lens, lubricants and antibiotics.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>It may not always be possible to find the underlying cause of corneal melting but the more common underlying causes should be ruled out by proper investigations. Pregnancy with its host of hormonal changes could potentially have some effect on corneal collagen leading to corneal melting in compromised corneas.</p

Gender Detection on Social Networks using Ensemble Deep Learning

Analyzing the ever-increasing volume of posts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter requires improved information processing methods for profiling authorship. Document classification is central to this task, but the performance of traditional supervised classifiers has degraded as the volume of social media has increased. This paper addresses this problem in the context of gender detection through ensemble classification that employs multi-model deep learning architectures to generate specialized understanding from different feature spaces

Revealing the footprints of squark gluino production through Higgs search experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV and 14 TeV

The invariant mass distribution of the di-photons from the decay of the lighter scalar Higgs boson(h) to be carefully measured by dedicated h search experiments at the LHC may be distorted by the di-photons associated with the squark-gluino events with much larger cross sections in Gauge Mediated Supersymmetry Breaking (GMSB) models. This distortion if observed by the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at 7 TeV or 14 TeV, would disfavour not only the standard model but various two Higgs doublet models with comparable h - masses and couplings but without a sector consisting of new heavy particles decaying into photons. The minimal GMSB (mGMSB) model constrained by the mass bound on h from LEP and that on the lightest neutralino from the Tevatron, produce negligible effects. But in the currently popular general GMSB(GGMSB) models the tail of the above distribution may show statistically significant excess of events even in the early stages of the LHC experiments with integrated luminosity insufficient for the discovery of h. We illustrate the above points by introducing several benchmark points in various GMSB models - minimal as well as non-minimal. The same conclusion follows from a detailed parameter scan in a simplified GGMSB model recently employed by the CMS collaboration to interpret their searches in the di-photon + \etslash channel. Other observables like the effective mass distribution of the di-photon + X events may also reveal the presence of new heavy particles beyond the Higgs sector. The contamination of the h mass peak and simple remedies are also discussed.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, title and organization of the paper is changed, detailed parameter scan in a simplified GGMSB model is added, conclusions and old numerical results remain unchange

Concepts of patients with alopecia areata about their disease

BACKGROUND: Alopecia areata (AA) is a common and chronic skin disease with an unknown etiology. It may significantly affect the patient quality of life. This study was designed to evaluate the illness perception in patients with AA. METHODS: A questionnaire consisting of 25 questions about causes, timeline, consequences and control of disease were given to 80 patients with AA attending a skin clinic in Tehran, Iran. The impact of age, gender, duration of disease, education, extent of disease and family history of AA were also assessed. RESULTS: Eighty patients (38 male and 42 female) with a mean age of 27.5 years (SD = 9.3) and disease duration of 7.8 years (SD = 7.7) completed the questionnaire. 76.9% of the patients believed that the role of stress was the cause of disease. 17.1 % believed genetic background to be the main cause, this found to be more frequent in patients with positive family history of AA. More than half of patients believed that their illness had major consequences on their lives and 40% of patients believed that their illness would be likely to be permanent rather than temporary, more in patients with longer duration of disease. Only 57.5% of patients considered their treatments to be effective. CONCLUSION: AA may considerably affect various aspects of patients' lives. The patient knowledge about the causes and course of this disease is limited

A giant adrenal lipoma presenting in a woman with chronic mild postprandial abdominal pain: a case report

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Adrenal lipomas are rare, small, benign, non-functioning tumors, which must be histopathologically differentiated from other tumors such as myelolipomas or liposarcomas. They are usually identified incidentally during autopsy, imaging, or laparotomy. Occasionally, they may present acutely due to complications such as abdominal pain from retroperitoneal bleeding, or systemic symptoms of infection. We report a giant adrenal lipoma (to the best of our knowledge, the second largest in the literature) clinically presenting with chronic mild postprandial pain.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>A 54-year-old Caucasian woman presented several times over a period of 10 years to various emergency departments complaining of long-term mild postprandial abdominal pain. Although clinical examinations were unrevealing, an abdominal computed tomography scan performed at her most recent presentation led to the identification of a large lipoma of the left adrenal gland, which occupied most of the retroperitoneal space. Myelolipoma was ruled out due to the absence of megakaryocytes, immature leukocytes, or erythrocytes. Liposarcoma was ruled out due to the absence of lipoblasts. The size of the lipoma (16 × 14 × 7 cm) is, to the best of our knowledge, the second largest reported to date. After surgical resection, our patient was relieved of her symptoms and remains healthy six years postoperatively.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Physicians should be aware that differential diagnosis of mild chronic abdominal pain in patients presenting in emergency rooms may include large adrenal lipomas. When initial diagnostic investigation is not revealing, out-patient specialist evaluation should be planned to enable appropriate further investigations.</p

Stabilising touch interactions in cockpits, aerospace, and vibrating environments

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018. Incorporating touch screen interaction into cockpit flight systems is increasingly gaining traction given its several potential advantages to design as well as usability to pilots. However, perturbations to the user input are prevalent in such environments due to vibrations, turbulence and high accelerations. This poses particular challenges for interacting with displays in the cockpit, for example, accidental activation during turbulence or high levels of distraction from the primary task of airplane control to accomplish selection tasks. On the other hand, predictive displays have emerged as a solution to minimize the effort as well as cognitive, visual and physical workload associated with using in-vehicle displays under perturbations, induced by road and driving conditions. This technology employs gesture tracking in 3D and potentially eye-gaze as well as other sensory data to substantially facilitate the acquisition (pointing and selection) of an interface component by predicting the item the user intents to select on the display, early in the movements towards the screen. A key aspect is utilising principled Bayesian modelling to incorporate and treat the present perturbation, thus, it is a software-based solution that showed promising results when applied to automotive applications. This paper explores the potential of applying this technology to applications in aerospace and vibrating environments in general and presents design recommendations for such an approach to enhance interactions accuracy as well as safety

Random Amino Acid Mutations and Protein Misfolding Lead to Shannon Limit in Sequence-Structure Communication

The transmission of genomic information from coding sequence to protein structure during protein synthesis is subject to stochastic errors. To analyze transmission limits in the presence of spurious errors, Shannon's noisy channel theorem is applied to a communication channel between amino acid sequences and their structures established from a large-scale statistical analysis of protein atomic coordinates. While Shannon's theorem confirms that in close to native conformations information is transmitted with limited error probability, additional random errors in sequence (amino acid substitutions) and in structure (structural defects) trigger a decrease in communication capacity toward a Shannon limit at 0.010 bits per amino acid symbol at which communication breaks down. In several controls, simulated error rates above a critical threshold and models of unfolded structures always produce capacities below this limiting value. Thus an essential biological system can be realistically modeled as a digital communication channel that is (a) sensitive to random errors and (b) restricted by a Shannon error limit. This forms a novel basis for predictions consistent with observed rates of defective ribosomal products during protein synthesis, and with the estimated excess of mutual information in protein contact potentials