3-Lead to 12-Lead ECG Reconstruction: A Novel AI-based Spatio-Temporal Method

Diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases usually relies on the widely used standard 12-Lead (S12) ECG system. However, such a system could be bulky, too resource-intensive, and too specialized for personalized home-based monitoring. In contrast, clinicians are generally not trained on the alternative proposal, i.e., the reduced lead (RL) system. This necessitates mapping RL to S12. In this context, to improve upon traditional linear transformation (LT) techniques, artificial intelligence (AI) approaches like long short-term memory (LSTM) networks capturing non-linear temporal dependencies, have been suggested. However, LSTM does not adequately interpolate spatially (in 3D). To fill this gap, we propose a combined LSTM-UNet model that also handles spatial aspects of the problem, and demonstrate performance improvement. Evaluated on PhysioNet PTBDB database, our LSTM-UNet achieved a mean R^2 value of 94.37%, surpassing LSTM by 0.79% and LT by 2.73%. Similarly, for PhysioNet INCARTDB database, LSTM-UNet achieved a mean R^2 value of 93.91%, outperforming LSTM by 1.78% and LT by 12.17%.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 Table

Scientometric study of global mucormycosis (black fungus) research

376-388Mucormycosis, a rare infection, caught the attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many COVID-19 and postCOVID-19 patients were infected by the black fungus. This study presents a scientometric review of 6661 research articles related to mucormycosis published from 1947 to 2021 indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. The study analyses the publications quantitatively in terms of growth, collaboration, countries, institutions, journals, keywords, and impact (citation) using the Bib-Excel and visualized in the VOSviewer tool. The highest number of publications on mucormycosis research is from the USA, followed by India, China, Germany, France, and Japan. Most of the research collaborations are among institutions in Europe and the USA. The University of Texas-USA is the most productive institute followed by PGIMER-India. However, the papers from Indian institutes have a significantly lower citation impact than those from the other leading countries. Since most international research is restricted among a few institutes, the international collaboration in mucormycosis research needs to be enhanced for high-quality research. The analysis of author-assigned keywords showed that the studies on the drug isavuconazole to treat mucormycosis are lesser than other major drugs. The research on surgical management of mucormycosis can be improved. Research on the diagnosis methods for mucormycosis and the genetic studies on the causative fungi of the order Mucorales are to be promoted. There are a few studies on Rhizomucor, Lichtheimia, Cunninghamella, Saksenaea, and Apophysomyces, among the several fungi genera that cause mucormycosis. Since mucormycosis is becoming more prevalent and severely affecting a larger population as a post-COVID syndrome, research in this area should be strengthened and new drugs should be explored

An experimental study of Quartets MaxCut and other supertree methods

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Supertree methods represent one of the major ways by which the Tree of Life can be estimated, but despite many recent algorithmic innovations, matrix representation with parsimony (MRP) remains the main algorithmic supertree method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We evaluated the performance of several supertree methods based upon the Quartets MaxCut (QMC) method of Snir and Rao and showed that two of these methods usually outperform MRP and five other supertree methods that we studied, under many realistic model conditions. However, the QMC-based methods have scalability issues that may limit their utility on large datasets. We also observed that taxon sampling impacted supertree accuracy, with poor results obtained when all of the source trees were only sparsely sampled. Finally, we showed that the popular optimality criterion of minimizing the total topological distance of the supertree to the source trees is only weakly correlated with supertree topological accuracy. Therefore evaluating supertree methods on biological datasets is problematic.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results show that supertree methods that improve upon MRP are possible, and that an effort should be made to produce scalable and robust implementations of the most accurate supertree methods. Also, because topological accuracy depends upon taxon sampling strategies, attempts to construct very large phylogenetic trees using supertree methods should consider the selection of source tree datasets, as well as supertree methods. Finally, since supertree topological error is only weakly correlated with the supertree's topological distance to its source trees, development and testing of supertree methods presents methodological challenges.</p

Stress-induced lipocalin-2 controls dendritic spine formation and neuronal activity in the amygdala.

This is a freely-available open access publication. Please cite the published version which is available via the DOI link in this record.Behavioural adaptation to psychological stress is dependent on neuronal plasticity and dysfunction at this cellular level may underlie the pathogenesis of affective disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Taking advantage of genome-wide microarray assay, we performed detailed studies of stress-affected transcripts in the amygdala - an area which forms part of the innate fear circuit in mammals. Having previously demonstrated the role of lipocalin-2 (Lcn-2) in promoting stress-induced changes in dendritic spine morphology/function and neuronal excitability in the mouse hippocampus, we show here that the Lcn-2 gene is one of the most highly upregulated transcripts detected by microarray analysis in the amygdala after acute restraint-induced psychological stress. This is associated with increased Lcn-2 protein synthesis, which is found on immunohistochemistry to be predominantly localised to neurons. Stress-naïve Lcn-2(-/-) mice show a higher spine density in the basolateral amygdala and a 2-fold higher rate of neuronal firing rate compared to wild-type mice. Unlike their wild-type counterparts, Lcn-2(-/-) mice did not show an increase in dendritic spine density in response to stress but did show a distinct pattern of spine morphology. Thus, amygdala-specific neuronal responses to Lcn-2 may represent a mechanism for behavioural adaptation to psychological stress.Marie Curie Excellence Grant from the European Commission.Medical Research Council Project GrantCOST Action ECMNe

DNA Methylation Analysis Identifies Loci for Blood Pressure Regulation.

Genome-wide association studies have identified hundreds of genetic variants associated with blood pressure (BP), but sequence variation accounts for a small fraction of the phenotypic variance. Epigenetic changes may alter the expression of genes involved in BP regulation and explain part of the missing heritability. We therefore conducted a two-stage meta-analysis of the cross-sectional associations of systolic and diastolic BP with blood-derived genome-wide DNA methylation measured on the Infinium HumanMethylation450 BeadChip in 17,010 individuals of European, African American, and Hispanic ancestry. Of 31 discovery-stage cytosine-phosphate-guanine (CpG) dinucleotides, 13 replicated after Bonferroni correction (discovery: N = 9,828, p &lt; 1.0&nbsp;× 10-7; replication: N = 7,182, p&nbsp;&lt;&nbsp;1.6&nbsp;× 10-3). The replicated methylation sites are heritable (h2 &gt; 30%) and independent of known BP genetic variants, explaining an additional 1.4% and 2.0% of the interindividual variation in systolic and diastolic BP, respectively. Bidirectional Mendelian randomization among up to 4,513 individuals of European ancestry from 4 cohorts suggested that methylation at cg08035323 (TAF1B-YWHAQ) influences BP, while BP influences methylation at cg00533891 (ZMIZ1), cg00574958 (CPT1A), and cg02711608 (SLC1A5). Gene expression analyses further identified six genes (TSPAN2, SLC7A11, UNC93B1, CPT1A, PTMS, and LPCAT3) with evidence of triangular associations between methylation, gene expression, and BP. Additional integrative Mendelian randomization analyses of gene expression and DNA methylation suggested that the expression of TSPAN2 is a putative mediator of association between DNA methylation at cg23999170 and BP. These findings suggest that heritable DNA methylation plays a role in regulating BP independently of previously known genetic variants