The pathophysiology of vestibular schwannoma (VS) pseudoprogression after Gamma Knife radiosurgery (GKRS) remains unclear. Radiological features in pretreatment magnetic resonance images may help ...predict VS pseudoprogression. This study used VS radiological features quantified using an automated segmentation algorithm to predict pseudoprogression after GKRS treatment.
This is a retrospective study comprising 330 patients with VS who received GKRS. After image preprocessing and T2W/contrast-enhanced T1-weighted image (CET1W) image generation, with fuzzy C-means clustering, VSs were segmented into solid and cystic components and classified as solid and cystic. Relevant radiological features were then extracted. The response to GKRS was classified into "nonpseudoprogression" and "pseudoprogression/fluctuation". The Z test for two proportions was used to compare solid and cystic VS for the likelihood of pseudoprogression/fluctuation. Logistic regression was used to assess the correlation between clinical variables and radiological features and response to GKRS.
The likelihood of pseudoprogression/fluctuation after GKRS was significantly higher for solid VS compared with cystic VS (55% vs 31%, P < .001). For the entire VS cohort, multivariable logistic regression revealed that a lower mean tumor signal intensity (SI) in T2W/CET1W images was associated with pseudoprogression/fluctuation after GKRS ( P = .001). For the solid VS subgroup, a lower mean tumor SI in T2W/CET1W images ( P = .035) was associated with pseudoprogression/fluctuation after GKRS. For the cystic VS subgroup, a lower mean SI of the cystic component in T2W/CET1W images ( P = .040) was associated with pseudoprogression/fluctuation after GKRS.
Pseudoprogression is more likely to occur in solid VS compared with cystic VS. Quantitative radiological features in pretreatment magnetic resonance images were associated with pseudoprogression after GKRS. In T2W/CET1W images, solid VS with a lower mean tumor SI and cystic VS with a lower mean SI of cystic component were more likely to have pseudoprogression after GKRS. These radiological features can help predict the likelihood of pseudoprogression after GKRS.
The global pandemic presents a critical threat to humanity, with no effective rapid‐response solutions for early‐stage virus dissemination. This study aims to create an AI‐driven entry‐blocker design ...system (AIEB) to fabricate inhalable virus‐like nanocatchers (VLNCs) fused with entry‐blocking peptides (EBPs) to counter pandemic viruses and explore therapeutic applications. This work focuses on developing angiotensin‐converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)‐mimic domain‐fused VLNCs (ACE2@VLNCs) using AIEB and analyzing their interaction with the SARS‐CoV‐2 receptor binding domain (RBD), demonstrating their potential to hinder SARS‐CoV‐2 infection. Aerosol‐based tests show ACE2@VLNCs persist over 70 min in the air and neutralize pseudoviruses within 30 min, indicating their utility in reducing airborne virus transmission. In vivo results reveal ACE2@VLNCs mitigate over 67% of SARS‐CoV‐2 infections. Biosafety studies confirm their safety, causing no damage to eyes, skin, lungs, or trachea, and not eliciting significant immune responses. These findings offer crucial insights into pandemic virus prevention and treatment, highlighting the potential of the ACE2@VLNCs system as a promising strategy against future pandemics.
This study presents AI‐driven entry‐blocker design system (AIEB), an AI system for designing fusion proteins and predicting virus entry blockers, with a focus on pandemic management and drug development. It successfully created angiotensin‐converting enzyme 2 (ACE2)‐mimic nanocatchers targeting SARS‐CoV‐2, reducing airborne transmission and infection rates, demonstrating a new preventive approach ininfection control.
In this study, aramid fiber (Kevlar® 29 fiber) and carbon fiber were added into concrete in a hybrid manner to enhance the static and impact mechanical properties. The coupling agent presence on the ...surface of carbon fibers was spotted in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) graphs. The carbon fiber with a coupling agent affected the mechanical strength of the reinforced concrete. At 1% fiber/cement weight percentage, the hybrid fiber-reinforced concrete (HFRC) prepared using Kevlar fiber and carbon fiber of 12 and 24 mm in length under different mix proportions was investigated to determine the maximum mechanical strengths. From the test results, the mechanical strength of the HFRC attained better performance than that of the concrete with only Kevlar or carbon fibers. Foremost, the mix proportion of Kevlar/carbon fiber (50–50%) significantly improved the compressive, flexural, and splitting tensile strengths. Under different impact energies, the impact resistance of the HFRC specimen was much higher than that of the benchmark specimen, and the damage of the HFRC specimens was examined with an optical microscope to identify slippage or rupture failure of the fiber in concrete.
ALDH2 gene is coded for the aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), which is an enzyme involved in alcohol metabolism. Compared to normal aldehyde dehydrogenases, a homozygous point mutation on exon 12 from G ...to A significantly reduces its efficiency. In this study, we have reported the generation of IBMS-iPSC-021-04, IBMS-iPSC-022-01, and IBMS-iPSC-023-03 as induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines carrying the homozygous form of ALDH2 with the rs671 genetic polymorphism (E487K mutation). These cell lines were characterized in terms of pluripotency and differentiation potential. They serve as useful platforms to study alcohol metabolism and other chronic diseases associated with alcohol consumption.
Abstract
Objectives
HCQ, which is known to decrease SLE activity, may have a protective effect on survival, but this has not been proven in Asia. This study aimed to determine whether HCQ treatment ...is associated with increased survival in patients with SLE.
Methods
We designed this prospective SLE cohort study using data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. The participants were divided into HCQ and control groups according to whether HCQ was prescribed during the first year after an SLE diagnosis. The primary outcome was mortality 1 year after inclusion. In the subgroup analysis, these participants were divided based on medication possession ratio (MPR) in the first year into non-users, MPR <40%, 40% ⩽ MPR < 80% and MPR ⩾80% subgroups to explore the relationship between survival and HCQ adherence.
Results
A total of 12 443 patients were eligible for the analysis. After propensity score matching, we included 2287 patients in each group. During a mean follow-up of 7.6 years, there were 169 events in the HCQ group (7.4%) and 248 events in the control group (10.8%). The risk of mortality in the HCQ group was lower than that in the control group (hazard ratio = 0.68; 95% CI: 0.56, 0.82). The subgroup analysis revealed that the survival protective effect was associated with HCQ adherence.
Conclusion
Patients with SLE who received HCQ had lower mortality rates due to any cause than those who did not. The survival benefit could be augmented by HCQ adherence.
The increasing internationalization of Higher Education Institutions has facilitated universities from East Asian countries like Taiwan, Korea, and China to value university rankings more in ...enhancing their admissions and reputation. Especially when Taiwan and China are all considered belonging to Chinese social community, returnee doctorates are assumed to possess international experience that is theoretically helpful to improve their research productivity and university employers generally prefer foreign-trained doctorates. However, there is little research to prove that returnee doctorates are more productive than local doctorates because of more frequent international mobility. This research examines a University in Taiwan, a prominent academic research university, credible for its research productivity. From the perspective of bibliometrics, this study used the Scopus International Academic Database to identify publications, citations, and Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) as credible indicators of research productivity, controlling for personal background, doctoral training, international mobility, and research collaboration. We hope that the differences in research productivity between local and returnee doctorates can be measured more comprehensively and objectively. The results of this study found that there is a significant difference in the higher FWCI score of research publications between local and returnee doctorates, and further found that there is a significant positive relationship between local doctorates, published papers during doctoral studies, prestige of supervisors, and international and domestic research collaboration on research productivity. Those that identified international mobility in careers had a stronger impact on research productivity compared to those of the doctorate educating stage, and both international and domestic research collaboration were important for research productivity. The results based on empirical analysis broke the myths of returnee doctorate corresponding to high research productivity in this study, and can serve as a reference for faculty recruitment and research environment enhancement in research-oriented universities in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Policy implications are also discussed.
For the state-of-the-art speech enhancement (SE) techniques, a spectrogram is usually preferred than the respective time-domain raw data, since it reveals more compact presentation together with ...conspicuous temporal information over a long time span. However, two problems can cause distortions in the conventional nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)-based SE algorithms. One is related to the overlap-and-add operation used in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT)-based signal reconstruction, and the other is concerned with directly using the phase of the noisy speech as that of the enhanced speech in signal reconstruction. These two problems can cause information loss or discontinuity when comparing the clean signal with the reconstructed signal. To solve these two problems, we propose a novel SE method that adopts discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) and NMF. In brief, the DWPT is first applied to split a time-domain speech signal into a series of subband signals. Then, we exploit NMF to highlight the speech component for each subband. These enhanced subband signals are joined together via the inverse DWPT to reconstruct a noise-reduced signal in time domain. We evaluate the proposed DWPT-NMF-based SE method on the Mandarin hearing in noise test (MHINT) task. Experimental results show that this new method effectively enhances speech quality and intelligibility and outperforms the conventional STFT-NMF-based SE system.
This research investigated real-time fingertip detection in frames captured from the increasingly popular wearable device, smart glasses. The egocentric-view fingertip detection and character ...recognition can be used to create a novel way of inputting texts. We first employed Unity3D to build a synthetic dataset with pointing gestures from the first-person perspective. The obvious benefits of using synthetic data are that they eliminate the need for time-consuming and error-prone manual labeling and they provide a large and high-quality dataset for a wide range of purposes. Following that, a modified Mask Regional Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) is proposed, consisting of a region-based CNN for finger detection and a three-layer CNN for fingertip location. The process can be completed in 25 ms per frame for 640×480 RGB images, with an average error of 8.3 pixels. The speed is high enough to enable real-time “air-writing”, where users are able to write characters in the air to input texts or commands while wearing smart glasses. The characters can be recognized by a ResNet-based CNN from the fingertip trajectories. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this novel methodology.
Kawasaki disease (KD) is a form of acute systemic vasculitis syndrome that predominantly occurs in children under the age of 5 years. Its etiology has been postulated due to not only genetic factors ...but also the presence of foreign antigens or infectious agents. To evaluate possible associations between Kawasaki disease (KD) and COVID-19, we investigated humoral responses of KD patients against S-protein variants with SARS-CoV-2 variant protein microarrays. In this study, plasma from a cohort of KD (
N
= 90) and non-KD control (non-KD) (
N
= 69) subjects in categories of unvaccinated-uninfected (pre-pandemic), SARS-CoV-2 infected (10-100 days after infection), and 1-dose, 2-dose, and 3-dose BNT162b2 vaccinated (10-100 days after vaccination) was collected. The principal outcomes were non-KD-KD differences for each category in terms of anti-human/anti-His for binding antibodies and neutralizing percentage for surrogate neutralizing antibodies. Binding antibodies against spikes were lower in the KD subjects with 1-dose of BNT162b2, and mean differences were significant for the P.1 S-protein (non-KD-KD, 3401; 95% CI, 289.0 to 6512;
P
= 0.0252), B.1.617.2 S-protein (non-KD-KD, 4652; 95% CI, 215.8 to 9087;
P
= 0.0351) and B.1.617.3 S-protein (non-KD-KD, 4874; 95% CI, 31.41 to 9716;
P
= 0.0477). Neutralizing antibodies against spikes were higher in the KD subjects with 1-dose of BNT162b2, and mean percentage differences were significant for the 1-dose BNT162b2 B.1.617.3 S-protein (non-KD-KD, −22.89%; 95% CI, −45.08 to −0.6965;
P
= 0.0399), B.1.1.529 S-protein (non-KD-KD, −25.96%; 95% CI, −50.53 to −1.376;
P
= 0.0333), BA.2.12.1 S-protein (non-KD-KD, −27.83%; 95% CI, −52.55 to −3.115;
P
= 0.0195), BA.4 S-protein (non-KD-KD, −28.47%; 95% CI, −53.59 to −3.342;
P
= 0.0184), and BA.5 S-protein (non-KD-KD, −30.42%; 95% CI, −54.98 to −5.869;
P
= 0.0077). In conclusion, we have found that KD patients have a comparable immunization response to healthy individuals to SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 immunization.
CoVariant arrays consist of spike variants of SARS-CoV-2. We profiled plasma neutralizing and binding antibodies in Kawasaki disease and healthy with unvaccinated, vaccinated, or infected with CoVariant arrays to compare their humoral responses.
This study aimed to assess the feasibility of utilizing geopolymer for repairing reinforced concrete beams. Three types of beam specimens were fabricated: benchmark specimens without any grooves, ...rectangular-grooved beams, and square-grooved beams. The repair materials employed included geopolymer material, and epoxy resin mortar, while carbon fiber sheets were used as reinforcement in select cases. The repair materials were applied to the rectangular and square-grooved specimens, with the carbon fiber sheets attached to the tension side of the specimens. To evaluate the flexural strength of the concrete specimens, a third-point loading test was conducted. The test results indicated that the geopolymer exhibited higher compressive strength and shrinkage rate compared to the epoxy resin mortar. Furthermore, the specimens reinforced with carbon fiber sheets demonstrated even greater strength than the benchmark specimens. In terms of flexural strength under cyclic third-point loading tests, the carbon fiber-reinforced specimens exhibited the ability to withstand over 200 cycles of repeated loading at 0.8 times the ultimate load. In contrast, the benchmark specimens could only withstand seven cycles. These findings highlight that the use of carbon fiber sheets not only enhances compressive strength but also improves resistance to cyclic loading.
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