Vit

BACKGROUND: 7 Tesla (7T) apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps derived from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) demonstrate improved image quality and spatial resolution over 3 Tesla (3T) ADC maps. However, 7T magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) currently suffers from limited clinical unavailability, higher cost, and increased susceptibility to artifacts. PURPOSE: To address these issues, we propose a hybrid CNN-transformer model to synthesize high-resolution 7T ADC maps from multimodal 3T MRI...

Aim: To evaluate the behavior of oral keratinocytes in the presence of Vitamin C (Vit C) and its anti-inflammatory potential. Materials & methods: Oral keratinocytes were initially exposed to 0.1-2.5 mM of Vit C and the metabolic activity and cell migration were evaluated using MTS assay and Ibidi culture inserts, respectively. After, the cells were challenged with Candida albicans and inflammatory markers were analyzed by qPCR. Results: The treatment was not cytotoxic, and the highest concentrations increased the metabolic activity at 24 h...

In this paper, we introduce in-depth the analysis of CNNs and ViT architectures in medical images, with the goal of providing insights into subsequent research direction. In particular, the origins of deep neural networks should be explainable for medical images, but there has been a paucity of studies on such explainability in the aspect of deep neural network architectures. Therefore, we investigate the origin of model performance, which is the clue to explaining deep neural networks, focusing on the two most relevant architectures, such as CNNs and ViT...

The morphological analysis and volume measurement of the hippocampus are crucial to the study of many brain diseases. Therefore, an accurate hippocampal segmentation method is beneficial for the development of clinical research in brain diseases. U-Net and its variants have become prevalent in hippocampus segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI) due to their effectiveness, and the architecture based on Transformer has also received some attention. However, some existing methods focus too much on the shape and volume of the hippocampus rather than its spatial information, and the extracted information is independent of each other, ignoring the correlation between local and global features...

AIM: We aimed to investigate the possible cardioprotective effects of paricalcitol (PR), its vitamin D receptor agonist, and vitamin D3 (VIT-D3) on an experimental model of doxorubicin (DX) cardiotoxicity by 99mTc-PYP scintigraphy, electrocardiographic (ECG) and biochemical methods. METHOD: Forty-two male Wistar/Albino rats (250‒300 g; aged 10‒12 weeks) were randomly separated into six groups, namely into control (CN), doxorubicin (DX), paricalcitol (PR), vitamin D3 (VIT-D3), paricalcitol + doxorubicin (PR+DX), and vitamin D3 + doxorubicin (VIT-D3+DX) groups...

In this study, the effects of vitamin D3 (Vit. D) and a stinging nettle [ Urtica dioica  L. (UD)] extract were examined using histopathological and immunohistochemical methods in the stomach tissues of an experimentally created rat model of Crohn's disease (CD). The CD model was created using trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS). The animals in the study were divided into control, TNBS, TNBS+Vit. D, and TNBS+UD groups. At the end of the experiment, the animals were euthanised and their stomach tissues were evaluated for necrosis, degeneration, apoptosis, and inflammation...

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been used for a wide variety of deep learning applications, especially in computer vision. For medical image processing, researchers have identified certain challenges associated with CNNs. These challenges encompass the generation of less informative features, limitations in capturing both high and low-frequency information within feature maps, and the computational cost incurred when enhancing receptive fields by deepening the network. Transformers have emerged as an approach aiming to address and overcome these specific limitations of CNNs in the context of medical image analysis...

PURPOSE: The aim of this neurophysiological study was to retrospectively analyze visual evoked potentials (VEPs) acquired during an examination for diagnosing optic nerve involvement in patients with Lyme neuroborreliosis (LNB). Attention was focused on LNB patients with peripheral facial palsy (PFP) and optic nerve involvement. METHODS: A total of 241 Czech patients were classified as having probable/definite LNB (193/48); of these, 57 were younger than 40 years, with a median age of 26...

Mercury (Hg) stable isotope ratios supplemented by Hg solid speciation data were determined in soils in a former Fe-Hg mining/smelting area (Jedová hora, Czech Republic, Central Europe). The dominant Hg phase in the studied soils was found to be cinnabar (HgS). A secondary form of soil Hg(II) was represented by Hg weakly and strongly bound to mineral (micro)particles, as revealed by thermo-desorption analysis. These Hg species probably play a key role in local soil Hg processes and biogeochemical cycling...

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer among women, and its diagnosis requires the accurate identification and classification of histological features for effective patient management. Artificial intelligence, particularly through deep learning, represents the next frontier in cancer diagnosis and management. Notably, the use of convolutional neural networks and emerging Vision Transformers (ViT) has been reported to automate pathologists' tasks, including tumor detection and classification, in addition to improving the efficiency of pathology services...

The synergy of long-range dependencies from transformers and local representations of image content from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has led to advanced architectures and increased performance for various medical image analysis tasks due to their complementary benefits. However, compared with CNNs, transformers require considerably more training data, due to a larger number of parameters and an absence of inductive bias. The need for increasingly large datasets continues to be problematic, particularly in the context of medical imaging, where both annotation efforts and data protection result in limited data availability...

Vitamin D (Vit D) is a fat-soluble molecule acting like a hormone, and it is involved in several biological mechanisms such as gene expression, calcium homeostasis, bone metabolism, immune modulation, viral protection, and neuromuscular functions. Vit D deficiency can lead to chronic hypocalcemia, hyperparathyroidism, and many other pathological conditions; in this context, low and very low levels of 25-hydroxy-vitamin D (25-OH-D) were found to be associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 infection and the likelihood of many severe diseases...

The determination of the potential role and advantages of artificial intelligence-based models in the field of surgery remains uncertain. This research marks an initial stride towards creating a multimodal model, inspired by the Video-Audio-Text Transformer, that aims to reduce negative occurrences and enhance patient safety. The model employs text and image embedding state-of-the-art models (ViT and BERT) to assess their efficacy in extracting the hidden and distinct features from the surgery video frames...

Landmark-based geometric morphometrics (GM) was used to examine, for the first time, spontaneous hybridization between Alnus incana (L.) Moench and Alnus rohlenae Vít, Douda and Mandák, and to assess inter- and intrapopulation variability in leaf shape, leaf size and venation in natural populations in Serbia (Western Balkans). Two geographically distant (30 km) and two close (1.2 km) populations were selected to examine hybridization. The variability in leaf shapes was assessed by canonical variate analysis and linear discriminant analysis performed on the symmetric component of variation...

Endoscopic pathological findings of the gastrointestinal tract are crucial for the early diagnosis of colorectal cancer (CRC). Previous deep learning works, aimed at improving CRC detection performance and reducing subjective analysis errors, are limited to polyp segmentation. Pathological findings were not considered and only convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are not able to handle global image feature information, were utilized. This work introduces a novel vision transformer (ViT)-based approach for early CRC detection...

Background: Barrett's esophagus and esophageal adenocarcinoma cases are increasing as gastroesophageal reflux disease increases. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and linked color imaging (LCI), our aim was to establish a method of diagnosis for short-segment Barrett's esophagus (SSBE). Methods: We retrospectively selected 624 consecutive patients in total at our hospital, treated between May 2017 and March 2020, who experienced an esophagogastroduodenoscopy with white light imaging (WLI) and LCI. Images were randomly chosen as data for learning from WLI: 542 (SSBE+/- 348/194) of 696 (SSBE+/- 444/252); and LCI: 643 (SSBE+/- 446/197) of 805 (SSBE+/- 543/262)...

Visual transformers (ViTs) are widely used in various visual tasks, such as fine-grained visual classification (FGVC). However, the self-attention mechanism, which is the core module of visual transformers, leads to quadratic computational and memory complexity. The sparse-attention and local-attention approaches currently used by most researchers are not suitable for FGVC tasks. These tasks require dense feature extraction and global dependency modeling. To address this challenge, we propose a dual-dependency attention transformer model...

The recurrence of low-stage lung cancer poses a challenge due to its unpredictable nature and diverse patient responses to treatments. Personalized care and patient outcomes heavily rely on early relapse identification, yet current predictive models, despite their potential, lack comprehensive genetic data. This inadequacy fuels our research focus-integrating specific genetic information, such as pathway scores, into clinical data. Our aim is to refine machine learning models for more precise relapse prediction in early-stage non-small cell lung cancer...

We aimed to examine the responses of pollution biomarkers in feral fish from Astyanax genus collected at three hydrographic regions in southern Brazil and the capacity of these tools to differentiate between various levels of contamination. To achieve this, levels of organochlorine pesticides (liver), as well as the biomarkers AChE (muscle and brain), TBARS (liver), and EROD (liver) were assessed. Collections were conducted in four municipalities (Alegrete, Caraá, Lavras, and Santa Vitória) during 1 year, encompassing winter and summer...

Parkinson's disease (PD) has been linked to a vast array of vitamins among which vitamin B12 (Vit B12) is the most relevant and often investigated specially in the context of intrajejunal levodopa infusion therapy. Vit B12 deficiency, itself, has been reported to cause acute parkinsonism. Nevertheless, concrete mechanisms through which B12 deficiency interacts with PD in terms of pathophysiology, clinical manifestation and progression remains unclear. Recent studies have suggested that Vit B12 deficiency along with the induced hyperhomocysteinemia are correlated with specific PD phenotypes characterized with early postural instability and falls and more rapid motor progression, cognitive impairment, visual hallucinations and autonomic dysfunction...