The combined benefits of dispositional mindfulness and trait self-compassion as potential buffers of the effects of perceived stress on sleep quality in college-aged young adults.

Using a nonclinical sample of 108 undergraduates between the ages of 18 to 25 years old, this cross-sectional study investigated the relationship between dispositional mindfulness (as measured by the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire; Baer et al., 2006) and sleep quality (as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index; Buysse et al., 1989). Second, it evaluated the association between trait self-compassion (as measured by the Self-Compassion Scale; Neff, 2003b) and sleep quality. Third, it aimed to test for an interaction effect between dispositional mindfulness and trait self-compassion as buffers against the adverse effects of perceived stress on sleep quality. Results showed that there was a significant moderate and negative association between dispositional mindfulness and sleep quality (r = -.48, p \u3c .01). Similarly, results showed that there was a significant moderate and negative association between trait self-compassion and sleep quality (r = -.38, p \u3c .01). Taken together, these findings indicate that in this sample of college-aged young adults, higher levels of dispositional mindfulness and trait self-compassion respectively were associated with better sleep quality. This is consistent with previous research examining the associations between dispositional mindfulness and sleep quality (Howell et al., 2008; Lau et al., 2008; Murphy et al., 2012) as well as between trait self-compassion and sleep quality (Brown et al., 2021; Butz & Stalhberg, 2018; Hu et al., 2018). Therefore, the present study\u27s findings add to the extant body of literature demonstrating associations between higher levels of dispositional mindfulness and trait self-compassion respectively with better sleep quality. Contrary to the study\u27s Hypotheses 3a and 3b, the hypothesized three-way interaction among perceived stress, dispositional mindfulness, and trait self-compassion was not supported, given that moderated moderation analyses revealed no significant interaction among these three variables (b = -.001, t(100) = -.53, p = .60, 95% Confidence Interval: [-.006, .004], ΔR2 = .002, ΔF = .28). This indicates that in the current sample, the strength of the association between perceived stress and poor sleep quality did not vary based on participants\u27 levels of dispositional mindfulness and trait self-compassion

Shearlet-based compressed sensing for fast 3D cardiac MR imaging using iterative reweighting

High-resolution three-dimensional (3D) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) is a valuable medical imaging technique, but its widespread application in clinical practice is hampered by long acquisition times. Here we present a novel compressed sensing (CS) reconstruction approach using shearlets as a sparsifying transform allowing for fast 3D CMR (3DShearCS). Shearlets are mathematically optimal for a simplified model of natural images and have been proven to be more efficient than classical systems such as wavelets. Data is acquired with a 3D Radial Phase Encoding (RPE) trajectory and an iterative reweighting scheme is used during image reconstruction to ensure fast convergence and high image quality. In our in-vivo cardiac MRI experiments we show that the proposed method 3DShearCS has lower relative errors and higher structural similarity compared to the other reconstruction techniques especially for high undersampling factors, i.e. short scan times. In this paper, we further show that 3DShearCS provides improved depiction of cardiac anatomy (measured by assessing the sharpness of coronary arteries) and two clinical experts qualitatively analyzed the image quality

A microfluidic-based filtration system to enrich for bone marrow disseminated tumor cells from breast cancer patients

Disseminated tumors cells (DTCs) present in the bone marrow (BM) are believed to be the progenitors of distant metastatic spread, a major cause of mortality in breast cancer patients. To better understand the behavior and therapeutic vulnerabilities of these rare cell populations, unbiased methods for selective cell enrichment are required. In this study, we have evaluated a microfluidic-based filtration system (ParsortixR, Angle PLC), previously demonstrated for use in circulating tumor cell (CTC) capture, to capture BM DTCs. Performance using BM samples was also compared directly to enrichment of CTCs in the peripheral blood (PB) from both metastatic and non-metastatic breast cancer patients. Although the non-specific capture of BM immune cells was significant, the device could routinely achieve significant cytoreduction of BM and PB WBCs and at least 1,000-fold enrichment of DTCs, based on labeled tumor cell spike-in experiments. Detection of previously characterized DTC-associated gene expression biomarkers was greatly enhanced by the enrichment method, as demonstrated by droplet digital PCR assay. Cells eluted from the device were viable and suitable for single cell RNA sequencing experiments. DTCs in enriched BM samples comprised up to 5% of the total cell population, allowing for effective single cell and population-based transcriptional profiling of these rare cells. Use of the Parsortix instrument will be an effective approach to enrich for rare BM DTCs in order to better understand their diverse molecular phenotypes and develop approaches to eradicate these cells to prevent distant disease development in breast cancer patients