ABSTRACT
Chagas disease (CD) is endemic in large parts of Central and South America, as well as in Texas and the southern regions of the United States. Successful parasites, such as the causative agent of CD, Trypanosoma cruzi have adapted to specific hosts during their phylogenesis. In this work, we have assembled an interactive network of the complex relations that occur between molecules within T. cruzi. An expert curation strategy was combined with a text-mining approach to screen 10,234 full-length research articles and over 200,000 abstracts relevant to T. cruzi. We obtained a scale-free network consisting of 1055 nodes and 874 edges, and composed of 838 proteins, 43 genes, 20 complexes, 9 RNAs, 36 simple molecules, 81 phenotypes, and 37 known pharmaceuticals. Further, we deployed an automated docking pipeline to conduct large-scale docking studies involving several thousand drugs and potential targets to identify network-based binding propensities. These experiments have revealed that the existing FDA-approved drugs benznidazole (Bz) and nifurtimox (Nf) show comparatively high binding energies to the T. cruzi network proteins (e.g., PIF1 helicase-like protein, trans-sialidase), when compared with control datasets consisting of proteins from other pathogens. We envisage this work to be of value to those interested in finding new vaccines for CD, as well as drugs against the T. cruzi parasite.
ABSTRACT
Due to COVID-19, demand for Chest Radiographs (CXRs) have increased exponentially. Therefore, we present a novel fully automatic modified Attention U-Net (CXAU-Net) multi-class segmentation deep model that can detect common findings of COVID-19 in CXR images. The architectural design of this model includes three novelties: first, an Attention U-net model with channel and spatial attention blocks is designed that precisely localize multiple pathologies; second, dilated convolution applied improves the sensitivity of the model to foreground pixels with additional receptive fields valuation, and third a newly proposed hybrid loss function combines both area and size information for optimizing model. The proposed model achieves average accuracy, DSC, and Jaccard index scores of 0.951, 0.993, 0.984, and 0.921, 0.985, 0.973 for image-based and patch-based approaches respectively for multi-class segmentation on Chest X-ray 14 dataset. Also, average DSC and Jaccard index scores of 0.998, 0.989 are achieved for binary-class segmentation on the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) CXR dataset. These results illustrate that the proposed model outperformed the state-of-the-art segmentation methods.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: To evaluate the relative efficacy of synthetic nanocrystalline hydroxyapatite (HA) (Ostim®) and microcrystalline HA (Osteogen®) bone grafts in the treatment of human periodontal intrabony defects clinically and radiographically through denta scan. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Ten chronic periodontitis patients with bilateral intrabony periodontal defects of ≥2 mm radiographic defect depth below 55 years of age were selected randomly and treated with synthetic nanocrystalline HA (Ostim®) or synthetic microcrystalline HA (Osteogen®) bone graft. Clinical parameters including probing depth (PD) and clinical attachment level (CAL) were measured preoperatively and postoperatively at 3 and 6 months for each of the defects using an occlusal acrylic stent. Radiographic parameters were measured with the help of denta scan preoperatively and postoperatively at 6 months. RESULTS: At 6 months following therapy, the Osteogen® group showed a reduction in mean PD from 11.10 ± 1.663 to 8.50 ± 0.850 mm and a change in mean CAL from 6.30 ± 1.160 to 3.40 ± 0.516 mm, whereas in the Ostim® group, the mean PD decreased from 11.20 ± 0.919 to 8.30 ± 0.823 mm and mean CAL decreased from 6.10 ± 0.738 to 3.30 ± 0.483 mm. At 6 months following therapy, denta scan showed a reduction in mean intrabony defect depth in the Osteogen® group from 2.54 ± 0.786 to 1.01 ± 0.448 mm, whereas in the Ostim® group, it was 2.71 ± 0.650 mm to 1.12 ± 0.563 mm. CONCLUSION: It was concluded that both the HA bone grafts produced statistically significant reduction in pocket depth, in the depth of osseous lesion, and a statistically significant gain in attachment level, irrespective of their physico-chemical properties.
ABSTRACT
Glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency is the most common enzyme defect in humans. G6PD deficiency is widely distributed in tropical and subtropical parts of the world and a conservative estimate is that at least 500 million people have a G6PD deficient gene. In several of these areas, the frequency of a G6PD deficiency gene may be as high as 20% or more. The vast majority of people with G6PD deficiency remain clinically asymptomatic throughout their lifetime. However, all of them have an increased risk of developing neonatal jaundice and a risk of developing acute hemolytic anemia when challenged by a number of oxidative agents. The most important treatment measure is prevention: Avoidance of the drugs and foods that cause hemolysis.
