The GeneMANIA Cytoscape plugin brings fast gene function prediction capabilities to the desktop. GeneMANIA identifies the most related genes to a query gene set using a guilt-by-association approach. ...The plugin uses over 800 networks from six organisms and each related gene is traceable to the source network used to make the prediction. Users may add their own interaction networks and expression profile data to complement or override the default data. Availability and Implementation: The GeneMANIA Cytoscape plugin is implemented in Java and is freely available at http://www.genemania.org/plugin/. Contact: gary.bader@utoronto.ca; quaid.morris@utoronto.ca
Purpose
This study examines the long-term outcomes of paediatric Morquio (MPS IVA) patients undergoing cervical spine surgery and evaluates the factors that impacting this.
Methods
A retrospective ...review was performed on all MPS IVA patients undergoing cervical spine surgery, since the introduction of standardised neuroradiological screening. The impact of preoperative neurological status, growth, genotype and radiological status on outcome is assessed, whilst long-term surgical, radiological and neurological outcomes are documented.
Results
Twenty-six of the eighty-two MPS IVA patients (31%) reviewed underwent cervical spine surgery at a median age of 6.1 years (range, 1.45 to 15.24). Preoperatively, cord signal change was seen in 11 patients with 5 being myelopathic; however, 6 clinically manifesting patients had no overt cord signal change. Postoperatively, none of the 14 preoperatively clinically asymptomatic patients followed long term progressed neurologically during a median follow-up of 77.5 months (range = 18–161). Of the ten preoperatively clinically symptomatic patients who were followed up for the same duration, seven continued to deteriorate, two initially improved and one remained stable. Radiological follow-up performed for a median duration of 7 years (range = 0.5–16) has shown a degree of stenosis at the level immediately caudal to the termination of the graft in 76% of patients, though only one has become clinically symptomatic and required revision.
Conclusions
Once clinically elicitable neurological signs become evident in patients with MPS IVA, they tend to progress despite surgical intervention. Referring clinicians should also not be falsely reassured by the lack of T2 spinal cord signal change but should consider surgical intervention in the face of new clinical symptomology or radiological signs of progressive canal stenosis or instability.
The RNA-Binding Protein DataBase (RBPDB) is a collection of experimental observations of RNA-binding sites, both in vitro and in vivo, manually curated from primary literature. To build RBPDB, we ...performed a literature search for experimental binding data for all RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) with known RNA-binding domains in four metazoan species (human, mouse, fly and worm). In total, RPBDB contains binding data on 272 RBPs, including 71 that have motifs in position weight matrix format, and 36 sets of sequences of in vivo-bound transcripts from immunoprecipitation experiments. The database is accessible by a web interface which allows browsing by domain or by organism, searching and export of records, and bulk data downloads. Users can also use RBPDB to scan sequences for RBP-binding sites. RBPDB is freely available, without registration at http://rbpdb.ccbr.utoronto.ca/.
As the US healthcare system restructured to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, medical training was significantly disrupted. During the peak of the crisis, three surgical trainees in different stages ...of their residency shared their experiences and concerns on how this pandemic affected their training. The article is intended to generate discussion on the concerns of derailment and stagnation of surgical training and difficulties faced at all levels of surgical training to perform clinical duties and fulfill academic responsibilities during the early months of the COVID pandemic.
Transplant patients are at the risk of serious sequelae from medical and surgical intervention. The incidence and burden of emergency general surgery (EGS) in transplant patients are scarcely known. ...This study aims to identify predictors of outcomes in transplant patients with EGS needs.
The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (2007-2011) was queried for adult patients (aged ≥16 y) who underwent abdominal visceral transplantation. These were further queried for a secondary diagnosis of an American Association for the Surgery of Trauma–defined EGS condition. Outcome measures included mortality, complications, length of stay, and cost of care. Propensity scores were used to match patients across baseline characteristics. Multivariate analysis was used to further adjust propensity score quintiles and hospital-level characteristics.
A total of 35,573 transplant patients were identified. Of these, 30% (n = 10,676) developed an EGS condition. Most common EGS conditions were resuscitation (7.7%), intestinal obstruction (7.3%), biliary conditions (3.9%), and hernias (3.2%). Patients with public insurance, those in the highest income quartile, and those treated at larger hospitals had a lower likelihood of developing an EGS condition (P < 0.05). Patients with an EGS condition had a ninefold higher likelihood of mortality and a threefold higher likelihood of developing complications (odds ratio 95% confidence interval (CI): 9.21 1.80-10.89 and 3.17 3.02-3.34, respectively). Transplant patients after EGS had a longer risk-adjusted length of stay and cost of index hospitalization (Absolute difference 95% CI: 12.70 12.14-13.26 and $57,797 55,415-60,179, respectively).
Transplant patients fare poorly after developing an EGS condition. The results of this study will help in identifying at-risk patients and determining outcomes.
Introduction Urolithiasis is a common disorder worldwide with an increasing prevalence and high recurrence rate. This makes preventive measures like dietary modification an essential part of patient ...care. This study focuses on gauging the perception of dietary habits favoring kidney stone formation. Materials and methods A cross-sectional questionnaire-based study was conducted at Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan. For nine food items and 14 beverages, respondents chose one of four options with regards to their relationship with stone formation, i.e. “increasing”, “decreasing”, “no effect”, and “do not know”. Responses were matched against evidence from the literature to generate correct and incorrect responses, thereby gauging perception for individual items. Results Seven hundred and three participants including 69 (9.6%) with a prior history of kidney stones, were recruited for the study. Participants with a personal history of kidney stone disease were older (odds ratio {OR}: 1.042 CI 1.020-1.064) with a significantly higher family history of stones (OR: 2.151 CI: 1.472-3.144). The majority were managed medically (87%) but never received dietary counseling (57%). Water, soft drinks, and tomatoes were the only three items out of 23 that were correctly identified by >50% of the participants with regards to their effect on stone formation. Responses did not differ significantly between those with stone disease and those without. Conclusion There is a lack of awareness among the general population, including individuals with a prior history of kidney stones regarding dietary prevention of kidney stone disease. This demonstrates a lack of existing dietary counseling thus necessitating the need for incorporating it at a mass level.
Background In this study, we aimed to translate and validate the 19-item version of the Bristol Female Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms (Bristol FLUTS) Questionnaire in Urdu among women experiencing ...urinary incontinence at a tertiary care hospital in Karachi, Pakistan. Methodology A cross-sectional validation study was conducted in the urology clinic at Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, Pakistan, between April and September 2021. After forward and backward translation of the Bristol FLUTS questionnaire, content validation was done by six experts, followed by the administration of the questionnaire to 10 respondents in the pilot phase of the study. In total, 207 participants were approached to fill the final version of the translated questionnaire. Overall, 188 respondents filled out the questionnaire, including 94 women with urinary incontinence and 94 women from the community to test construct validity. Finally, 30 women with urinary incontinence were asked to fill the form again two weeks later to determine test-retest reliability. Cronbach's alpha was employed to assess the internal consistency of the questionnaire. Results The questionnaire displayed good content validity for reliability (content validity index: 0.84) and clarity (0.89). The scores reported by cases were significantly higher than the controls in all but the sexual function domain, suggesting good construct validity. Cronbach's alpha of 0.81 signified good internal consistency, and a Pearson's coefficient of 0.993 (p < 0.001) comparing responses at baseline and after two weeks indicated good test-retest reliability. Conclusions The Urdu translation of the Bristol FLUTS is a valid and reliable questionnaire that can be used in the clinical setting.
The Controller Area Network (CAN) is being widely used in real-time control applications such as automobiles, aircraft, and automated factories. In this pacer, we present the mixed traffic scheduler ...(MTS) for CAN, which provides higher schedulability than fixed-priority schemes like deadline-monotonic (DM) while incurring less overhead than dynamic earliest-deadline (ED) scheduling. We also describe how MTS can be implemented on existing CAN network adapters such as Motorola's TouCAN. In previous work, we had shown MTS to be far superior to DM in schedulability performance. In this paper, we present implementation overhead measurements showing that processing needed to support MTS consumes only about 5 to 6 percent of CPU time. Considering its schedulability advantage, this makes MTS ideal for use in control applications.
To enter new markets and remain competitive in the existing markets, companies need to shift their focus from traditional means and ways to some innovative approaches. Though the paper industry in ...India has improved remarkably on its technological and environmental issues, yet it shows a low rate of innovation. The present paper attempts to review the industry in the perspective of technological innovations and investigates empirically the role of innovations in performance improvement and pollution control. Multivariate analysis of variance and discriminant function analysis are applied for data processing. The findings reveal that the mean scores on the factors, such as sales, quality, and flexibility, are higher for the good innovators than those for the poor innovators. Conversely, the factors which are likely to be reduced as a result of innovations, such as time, cost, emissions, and disposal of waste, have shown higher means for the poor innovators.
•A novel hybrid load shedding technique is proposed in this paper.•Proposed technique is based on localize voltage and globalized frequency.•The proposed strategy is implemented through simulation on ...PSCAD/EMTDC.•Improved voltage and frequency stability of power system.•Load priority strategy is used for UFLS.
Load shedding is a control action to maintain the stability of power system by disconnecting the load in case of electricity shortfall. For the safe operation of electrical power system, it is necessary that frequency and voltage should be within the specific range. In this paper, a novel load shedding technique is proposed based on globalized frequency and localized voltage (GBLV). The proposed strategy is implemented through simulation on PSCAD/EMTDC. Simulations results reveal that the proposed schemes are successfully catering the decline in frequency and voltage by performing adaptive load shedding to sustain the stability of power system.
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