ABSTRACT
We report a case illustrating a 39-year-old man with delayed presentation of severe pulmonary valve (PV) stenosis, clinical evidence of congestive right heart failure in the form of enlarged liver, raised jugular venous pressure, and anasarca without cyanosis. Echocardiography (echo) was used both for diagnosis and monitoring this patient as main tool. The contractile reserve of the right ventricle (RV) was evaluated by infusion of dobutamine and diuretic for 4 days before pulmonary balloon valvotomy. Both the tricuspid annular peak systolic excursion and diastolic (diastolic anterograde flow through PV) function of RV improved after percutaneous balloon pulmonary valvotomy. These improvements were clinically apparent by complete resolution of anasarca, pericardial effusion, and normalization albumin-globulin ratio. The periprocedural echo findings were quite unique in this illustration.
ABSTRACT
The challenge for -omics research is to tackle the problem of fragmentation of knowledge by integrating several sources of heterogeneous information into a coherent entity. It is widely recognized that successful data integration is one of the keys to improve productivity for stored data. Through proper data integration tools and algorithms, researchers may correlate relationships that enable them to make better and faster decisions. The need for data integration is essential for present -omics community, because -omics data is currently spread world wide in wide variety of formats. These formats can be integrated and migrated across platforms through different techniques and one of the important techniques often used is XML. XML is used to provide a document markup language that is easier to learn, retrieve, store and transmit. It is semantically richer than HTML. Here, we describe bio warehousing, database federation, controlled vocabularies and highlighting the XML application to store, migrate and validate -omics data.
ABSTRACT
Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness among patients with diabetes mellitus. We evaluated the role of several proteins that are likely to be involved in diabetic retinopathy by employing multiple sequence alignment using ClustalW tool and constructed a phylogram tree using functional protein sequences extracted from NCBI. Phylogram was constructed using Neighbor-Joining Algorithm in bioinformatics approach. It was observed that aldose reductase and nitric oxide synthase are closely associated with diabetic retinopathy. It is likely that vascular endothelial growth factor, pro-inflammatory cytokines, advanced glycation end products, and adhesion molecules that also play a role in diabetic retinopathy may do so by modulating the activities of aldose reductase and nitric oxide synthase. These results imply that methods designed to normalize aldose reductase and nitric oxide synthase activities could be of significant benefit in the prevention and treatment of diabetic retinopathy.
