Predicting cytotoxicity of engineered nanoparticles using regularized regression models: an in silico approach.

The widespread application of engineered nanoparticles (NPs) in various industries has demonstrated their effectiveness over the years. However, modifications to NPs' physicochemical properties can lead to toxicological effects. Therefore, understanding the toxicity behaviour of NPs is crucial. In this paper, regularized regression models, such as ridge, LASSO, and elastic net, were constructed to predict the cytotoxicity of various engineered NPs. The dataset utilized in this study was compiled from several journals published between 2010 and 2022. Data exploration revealed missing values, which were addressed through listwise deletion and kNN imputation, resulting in two complete datasets. The ridge, LASSO, and elastic net models achieved F1 scores ranging from 91.81% to 92.65% during internal validation and 92.89% to 93.63% during external validation on Dataset 1. On Dataset 2, the models attained F1 scores between 92.16% and 92.43% during internal validation and 92% and 92.6% during external validation. These results indicate that the developed models effectively generalize to unseen data and demonstrate high accuracy in classifying cytotoxicity levels. Furthermore, the cell type, material, cell source, cell tissue, synthesis method, and coat or functional group were identified as the most important descriptors by the three models across both datasets.

Transmission acoustic microscopy of tissue sections (1 GHz). Histoacoustics and acoustic staining.

The acoustic microstructure of mouse small intestine has been studied with a transmission acoustic microscope working at 1 GHz and the influence of the histologic processing on the microacoustic pattern has been tested. Unstained thin sections provide pictures rich in details and highly contrasted. Gelatin has been used as hydrosoluble embedding medium and has been compared to paraffin. The former embedding procedure retained the viscoelastic properties of the specimen far more and provided the most detailed pictures. Osmiun tetroxide has been used to demonstrate acoustic staining.