This letter documents a search for flavour-changing neutral currents (FCNCs), which are strongly suppressed in the Standard Model, in events with a photon and a top quark with the ATLAS detector. The ...analysis uses data collected in pp collisions at s=13 TeV during Run 2 of the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1. Both FCNC top-quark production and decay are considered. The final state consists of a charged lepton, missing transverse momentum, a b-tagged jet, one high-momentum photon and possibly additional jets. A multiclass deep neural network is used to classify events either as signal in one of the two categories, FCNC production or decay, or as background. No significant excess of events over the background prediction is observed and 95% CL upper limits are placed on the strength of left- and right-handed FCNC interactions. The 95% CL bounds on the branching fractions for the FCNC top-quark decays, estimated (expected) from both top-quark production and decay, are B(t→uγ)<0.85(0.88−0.25+0.37)×10−5 and B(t→cγ)<4.2(3.40−0.95+1.35)×10−5 for a left-handed tqγ coupling, and B(t→uγ)<1.2(1.20−0.33+0.50)×10−5 and B(t→cγ)<4.5(3.70−1.03+1.47)×10−5 for a right-handed coupling.
A search for a narrow scalar resonance decaying into an opposite-sign muon pair produced in events with and without b-tagged jets is presented in this paper. The search uses 36.1 fb-1 of $ ...\sqrt{s}=13 $ TeV proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. No significant excess of events above the expected Standard Model background is observed in the investigated mass range of 0.2 to 1.0 TeV. The observed upper limits at 95% confidence level on the cross section times branching ratio for b-quark associated production and gluon-gluon fusion are between 1.9 and 41 fb and 1.6 and 44 fb respectively, which is consistent with expectations. Figure not available: see fulltext..
The occurrence of liver abnormalities in Psoriatic Arthritis (PsA) has gained significant recognition. Identifying key factors at the clinical and molecular level can help to detect high-risk ...patients for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in PsA.
to investigate the influence of PsA and cumulative doses of methotrexate on liver function through comprehensive in vivo and in vitro investigations.
A cross-sectional study involving 387 subjects was conducted, 200 patients with PsA, 87 NAFLD-non-PsA patients, and 100 healthy donors (HDs), age and sex-matched. Additionally, a retrospective longitudinal study was carried out, including 83 PsA patients since initiation with methotrexate. Detailed clinical, and laboratory parameters along with liver disease risk were analyzed. In vitro, experiments with hepatocyte cell line (HEPG2) were conducted.
PsA patients present increased liver disease risk associated with the presence of cardiometabolic comorbidities, inflammatory markers, onychopathy, and psoriasis. The treatment with PsA serum on hepatocytes encompassed inflammatory, fibrotic, cell stress, and apoptotic processes. At the molecular level, methotrexate impacts liver biology, although the cumulative doses did not affect those alterations, causing any potential damage to liver function at the clinical level. Finally, anti-PDE-4 or anti-JAK decreased the inflammatory profile induced by PsA serum on hepatocytes.
1)This study identifies the complex link between liver disease risk, comorbidities, and disease-specific features in PsA patients. 2)Methotrexate dose in PsA patients had no significant effect on liver parameters, confirmed by hepatocyte in vitro studies. 3)Anti-PDE-4 and anti-JAK therapies show promise in reducing PsA serum-induced hepatocyte activation, potentially aiding liver complication management.
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Recurrence after colorectal cancer resection is rarely documented in the general population while a key clinical determinant for patient survival. We identified 8785 patients with colorectal cancer ...diagnosed between 2010 and 2013 and clinically followed up to 2020 in 15 cancer registries from seven European countries (Bulgaria, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, France, Italy, and Spain). We estimated world age‐standardized net survival using a flexible cumulative excess hazard model. Recurrence rates were calculated for patients with initially resected stage I, II, or III cancer in six countries, using the actuarial survival method. The proportion of nonmetastatic resected colorectal cancers varied from 58.6% to 78.5% according to countries. The overall 5‐year net survival by country ranged between 60.8% and 74.5%. The absolute difference between the 5‐year survival extremes was 12.8 points for stage II (Bulgaria vs Switzerland), 19.7 points for stage III (Bulgaria vs. Switzerland) and 14.8 points for Stage IV and unresected cases (Bulgaria vs. Switzerland or France). Five‐year cumulative rate of recurrence among resected patients with stage I–III was 17.7%. As compared to the mean of the whole cohort, the risk of developing a recurrence did not differ between countries except a lower risk in Italy for both stage I/II and stage III cancers and a higher risk in Spain for stage III. Survival after colorectal cancer differed across the concerned European countries while there were slight differences in recurrence rates. Population‐based collection of cancer recurrence information is crucial to enhance efforts for evidence‐based management of colorectal cancer follow up.
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Although a key clinical determinant for patient survival, recurrence after colorectal cancer resection is rarely documented in the general population. Within the EUROCARE project, this population‐based study compared the 5‐year recurrence and survival rates after colorectal cancer resection across several European countries according to stage at diagnosis. Survival after colorectal cancer differed across the European countries, while slight differences were found in recurrence rates. The study may provide healthcare planners with relevant information to improve cancer control.
Despite the importance of dispersal behavior in the eco-evolutionary responses of species to global environmental change, its role in the invasion dynamic of stowaway invaders has been poorly ...studied, especially in low-mobile species (i.e. with direct development). Here we use peracarid crustaceans as a target group to understand the role that local dispersal plays in the initial stages of the stowaway pathway in species inhabiting transport hubs (specifically marinas). Thus, we performed field experiments to quantitatively explore differences in species’ propensity to disperse when comparing species with low and high invasion potential (considered here as the ability for successful anthropogenic dispersal). At the community level, we found that widespread introduced species (with high potential for invasion; HPI) exhibited higher propensity for local dispersal than closely related species that fail to spread (with low potential for invasion; LPI). From a functional perspective, high invasion potential, in synergy with omnivorous feeding and a tube-dweller lifestyle, was instrumental in determining differences in trait composition between assemblages that vary in their natural tendency to disperse. In addition to anthropogenic dispersal on ships, we show that unaided dispersal may play a crucial role at the beginning of the stowaway pathway, even in low-mobile species. Knowledge of dispersal behavior should be more fully integrated into research on managing the risk of this growing invasion pathway. This may help to predict rates of spread and provide new insights into the proximate causes of stowaway organisms’ invasion success.
In spite of the high importance of mobile epifauna in all marine habitats, their patterns of colonization and succession in marine caves have not been studied until now. In the present study, we used ...artificial substrates deployed at 4 positions along an environmental gradient of a ~100 m long cave system, and retrieved at different times (1.5, 3 and 6 mo), to explore the changes in abundance, species richness, and community structure of the epifauna. All inner cave stations showed significantly lower species richness and abundance. Despite different dispersal modes, the dominant species detected were able to quickly (<1.5 mo) colonize the inner parts of the cave, yet their abundances were significantly higher outside the cave throughout the whole study. This suggests that environmental factors such as trophic supply or light intensity, rather than isolation, are probably the main factors responsible for the observed differences among cave positions. We also detected a gradient in the rate of community development, with communities outside the cave developing much earlier than those situated in the innermost parts. Finally, high temporal stability of communities was observed within the cave, which is likely related to more stable environmental conditions—a hypothesis supported by our detection of a dampening of the thermal oscillations within the cave. The low rates of community development and turnover observed inside marine caves supports the consideration of these habitats being very sensitive to natural and human-induced environmental disturbances, and hence a top priority for conservation.
Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancer and one of the leading causes of death among men, with almost 1.41 million new cases and around 375,000 deaths in 2020. Artificial ...Intelligence algorithms have had a huge impact on medical image analysis, including digital histopathology, where Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used to provide a fast and accurate diagnosis, supporting experts in this task. To perform an automatic diagnosis, prostate tissue samples are first digitized into gigapixel-resolution whole-slide images. Due to the size of these images, neural networks cannot use them as input and, therefore, small subimages called patches are extracted and predicted, obtaining a patch-level classification. In this work, a novel patch aggregation method based on a custom Wide & Deep neural network model is presented, which performs a slide-level classification using the patch-level classes obtained from a CNN. The malignant tissue ratio, a 10-bin malignant probability histogram, the least squares regression line of the histogram, and the number of malignant connected components are used by the proposed model to perform the classification. An accuracy of 94.24% and a sensitivity of 98.87% were achieved, proving that the proposed system could aid pathologists by speeding up the screening process and, thus, contribute to the fight against PCa.
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•A custom Wide & Deep model for patch-aggregation in prostate cancer Whole-Slide Images is presented.•The proposed approach allows obtaining a global slide-level class from patch-level results.•It provides a fast screening method for PCa detection at slide level, while also benefiting from the patch-level resolution.•This solution could aid pathologists by speeding up the process of discriminating between positive and negative PCa cases.
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