Clinical Application of Liquid Biopsy in Pancreatic Cancer: A Narrative Review.

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma contributes significantly to global cancer-related deaths, featuring only a 10% survival rate over five years. The quest for novel tumor markers is critical to facilitate early diagnosis and tailor treatment strategies for this disease, which is key to improving patient outcomes. In pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, these markers have been demonstrated to play a crucial role in early identification, continuous monitoring, and prediction of its prognosis and have led to better patient outcomes. Nowadays, biopsy specimens serve to ascertain diagnosis and determine tumor type. However, liquid biopsies present distinct advantages over conventional biopsy techniques. They offer a noninvasive, easily administered procedure, delivering insights into the tumor's status and facilitating real-time monitoring. Liquid biopsies encompass a variety of elements, such as circulating tumor cells, circulating tumor DNA, extracellular vesicles, microRNAs, circulating RNA, tumor platelets, and tumor endothelial cells. This review aims to provide an overview of the clinical applications of liquid biopsy as a technique in the management of pancreatic cancer.

Explainability as the key ingredient for AI adoption in Industry 5.0 settings.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has gained significant attention as a means to address the transparency and interpretability challenges posed by black box AI models. In the context of the manufacturing industry, where complex problems and decision-making processes are widespread, the XMANAI platform emerges as a solution to enable transparent and trustworthy collaboration between humans and machines. By leveraging advancements in XAI and catering the prompt collaboration between data scientists and domain experts, the platform enables the construction of interpretable AI models that offer high transparency without compromising performance. This paper introduces the approach to building the XMANAI platform and highlights its potential to resolve the "transparency paradox" of AI. The platform not only addresses technical challenges related to transparency but also caters to the specific needs of the manufacturing industry, including lifecycle management, security, and trusted sharing of AI assets. The paper provides an overview of the XMANAI platform main functionalities, addressing the challenges faced during the development and presenting the evaluation framework to measure the performance of the delivered XAI solutions. It also demonstrates the benefits of the XMANAI approach in achieving transparency in manufacturing decision-making, fostering trust and collaboration between humans and machines, improving operational efficiency, and optimizing business value.

Prenatal transportation stress did not impact ovarian follicle count for three generations of female Brahman offspring.

As prenatal transportation stress altered behavior and adrenal glucocorticoid secretion of calves, we hypothesized that prenatal transportation stress would decrease ovarian reserve size and negatively impact female offspring fertility. The impact of prenatal transportation stress on ovarian follicle numbers in female offspring for three generations was studied. Brahman cows were transported for 2 h on day 60 ± 5, 80 ± 5, 100 ± 5, 120 ± 5, and 140 ± 5 of gestation. Ovaries were collected from offspring of transported or non-transported dams at multiple ages. Primordial, primary, secondary, and antral follicles were histologically analyzed. Antral follicle numbers were determined by ultrasound in a subset of offspring. Numbers of primordial, primary, secondary, and antral follicles were analyzed using the MIXED procedure, while the CORR procedure of SAS was used to determine the correlation between follicles observed by ultrasonography and histology. There were no differences (P > 0.05) in the number of primordial, primary, secondary, antral, or total follicles observed histologically due to treatment. Younger females had significantly greater numbers of follicles than older females (P < 0.0001). Antral follicles tended to be correlated with total histological ovarian follicles (P = 0.10). There was no difference in the number of antral follicles observed at ultrasound due to treatment (P = 0.3147), or generation (P = 0.6005) when controlling for age at observation. These results show that short-term transportation stress during early- to mid-gestation did not impact fertility as measured by ovarian follicle numbers in female Brahman offspring for three generations.

Hemoperitoneum during Pregnancy: A Rare Case of Spontaneous Rupture of the Uterine Artery.

Spontaneous rupture of the uterine artery is a rare cause of hemoperitoneum during pregnancy. This is a life-threatening condition associated with maternal and fetal mortality. We describe a case of spontaneous rupture of the left uterine artery in a 32-year-old healthy pregnant woman with an uneventful pregnancy.

Association of Transfer RNA Fragments in White Blood Cells With Antibody Response to Bovine Leukemia Virus in Holstein Cattle.

Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) affects cattle health and productivity worldwide, causing abnormal immune function and immunosuppression. Transfer RNA fragments (tRFs) are known to be involved in inhibition of gene expression and have been associated with stress and immune response, tumor growth, and viral infection. The objective of this study was to identify tRFs associated with antibody response to BLV in Holstein cattle. Sera from 14 animals were collected to establish IgG reactivity to BLV by ELISA. Seven animals were seropositive (positive group) and seven were seronegative (negative group) for BLV exposure. Leukocytes from each animal were collected and tRFs were extracted for sequencing. tRF5GlnCTG, tRF5GlnTTG, and tRF5HisGTG, were significantly different between seropositive and seronegative groups (P < 0.0067). In all cases the positive group had a lower number of normalized sequences for tRFs when compared to the negative group. Result suggests that tRF5s could potentially be used as biomarkers to establish exposure of cattle to BLV.