Vit

One of the less studied in vitro biological activities in the aquatic environment are thyroid hormone receptor beta (TRβ)-mediated agonistic and antagonistic activities and transthyretin (TTR) binding activity. They were measured mostly using active sampling methods, but rarely found. It is unclear if these activities co-occur, and the drivers of the (anti-)TRβ activity are mostly unknown. Therefore, the main aim of the study was to determine (anti-)TRβ activities as well as transthyretin (TTR) binding activity in passive samplers from Czech surface waters in combination with the search for the effect drivers based on liquid chromatography-high resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS) analysis by applying suspect screening...

PURPOSE: Probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) enables visualization of cellular tissue morphology during surgical procedures. To capture high-quality pCLE images during tissue scanning, it is important to maintain close contact between the probe and the tissue, while also keeping the probe perpendicular to the tissue surface. Existing robotic pCLE tissue scanning systems, which rely on macroscopic vision, struggle to accurately place the probe at the optimal position on the tissue surface...

INTRODUCTION: The impact that vitamin D (vit D) has on a variety of medical conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular, oncological, and central nervous system disorders has been a topic of interest for many years now. It is well-known that vit D deficiency is substantially more common in epileptics than in healthy subjects. The current research was piloted to analyse the vit D levels of the blood in newborns with seizures, as well as mothers' vit D status included subjects. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A cross-sectional examination was piloted at a tertiary care center, which had a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)...

BACKGROUND: Intraocular lens (IOL) fixation is performed after intraoperative anterior or total vitrectomy. This study aimed to compare the intraoperative and postoperative complications of these two techniques. METHODS: This retrospective study included 235 eyes that underwent intrascleral fixation surgery at our hospital between July 2014 and January 2021. The eyes were classified into the anterior vitrectomy group (A-vit group; 134 eyes) and the pars plana vitrectomy group (PPV group; 101 eyes)...

Fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose (18 F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) is widely used for the detection, diagnosis, and clinical decision-making in oncological diseases. However, in daily medical practice, it is often difficult to make clinical decisions because of physiological FDG uptake or cancers with poor FDG uptake. False negative clinical diagnoses of malignant lesions are critical issues that require attention. In this study, Vision Transformer (ViT) was used to automatically classify 18 F-FDG PET/CT slices as benign or malignant...


Radiomics and deep learning techniques have become integral in meningioma grading. The combination of these approaches holds the potential to enhance classification accuracy. Given the frequent occurrence of peritumoral edema (PTE) in meningiomas, investigating the potential value of PTE requires further research.
Objectives:
To address the challenge of meningioma grading, this study introduces a unique approach that integrates radiomics and deep learning techniques. The primary focus is on the development of a Transfer Learning-based Meningioma Feature Extraction Model (MFEM), leveraging both Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures...

INTRODUCTION: Invisible ink tattoos (IITs) avoid cosmetic permanence of visible ink tattoos (VITs) while serving as more reliable landmarks for radiation setup than tattooless setups. This trial evaluated patient-reported preference and feasibility of IIT implementation. METHODS AND MATERIALS: In an IRB-approved, single institution, prospective trial, patients receiving proton therapy underwent IIT-based treatment setup. A survey tool assessed patient preference on tattoos using a Likert scale...

To create robust and adaptable methods for lung pneumonia diagnosis and the assessment of its severity using chest X-rays (CXR), access to well-curated, extensive datasets is crucial. Many current severity quantification approaches require resource-intensive training for optimal results. Healthcare practitioners require efficient computational tools to swiftly identify COVID-19 cases and predict the severity of the condition. In this research, we introduce a novel image augmentation scheme as well as a neural network model founded on Vision Transformers (ViT) with a small number of trainable parameters for quantifying COVID-19 severity and other lung diseases...

PURPOSE: Positron Emission Tomography (PET) has been a commonly used imaging modality in broad clinical applications. One of the most important tradeoffs in PET imaging is between image quality and radiation dose: high image quality comes with high radiation exposure. Improving image quality is desirable for all clinical applications while minimizing radiation exposure is needed to reduce risk to patients. METHODS: We introduce PET Consistency Model (PET-CM), an efficient diffusion-based method for generating high-quality full-dose PET images from low-dose PET images...

Green synthesis of metal oxides as a treatment for bone diseases is still exploring. Herein, MgO and Fe2 O3 NPs were prepared from the extract of Hibiscus sabdariffa L. to study their effect on vit D3 , Ca+2 , and alkaline phosphatase enzyme ALP associated with osteoporosis. Computational chemistry was utilized to gain insight into the possible interactions. These oxides were characterized by X-ray diffraction, SEM, FTIR, and AFM. Results revealed that green synthesis of MgO and Fe2 O3 NPs was successful with abundant...

Valuable alkyl lactates can be obtained from (waste) glycerol, through a two-step process that entails (i) the oxidation of glycerol to dihydroxyacetone (DHA) catalyzed by support Au nanoparticles and (ii) a rearrangement of DHA with an alcohol effectively catalyzed by Sn-based heterogeneous catalysts. To solve selectivity and processing issues we propose to run the process as a cascade reaction, in one step, and with a single bifunctional catalyst. Tackling the challenge associated with the preparation of such bifunctional catalysts, here, an aerosol-assisted sol-gel route is exploited...

PURPOSE: Automated endoscopy video analysis is essential for assisting surgeons during medical procedures, but it faces challenges due to complex surgical scenes and limited annotated data. Large-scale pretraining has shown great success in natural language processing and computer vision communities in recent years. These approaches reduce the need for annotated data, which is of great interest in the medical domain. In this work, we investigate endoscopy domain-specific self-supervised pretraining on large collections of data...

Recently, more and more studies have shown that guanylate cyclase, an enzyme that synthesizes cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), plays an important role in bone metabolism. Vericiguat (VIT), a novel oral soluble guanylate cyclase stimulator, directly generates cyclic guanosine monophosphate and reduce the death incidence from cardio-vascular causes or hospitalization. Recent studies have shown beneficial effects of VIT in animal models of osteoporosis, but very little is currently known about the effects of VIT on bone defects in the osteoporotic states...

OBJECTIVE: To compare the clinical and radiographic outcomes following lateral lumbar interbody fusion (LLIF) between direct and indirect decompression in the treatment of patients with degenerative lumbar diseases. METHODS: Patients who underwent single-level LLIF were randomized into 2 groups: direct decompression (group D) and indirect decompression (group I). Clinical outcomes including the Oswestry Disability index and visual analogue scale of back and leg pain were collected...

BACKGROUND: Proton therapy is a form of radiotherapy commonly used to treat various cancers. Due to its high conformality, minor variations in patient anatomy can lead to significant alterations in dose distribution, making adaptation crucial. While cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is a well-established technique for adaptive radiation therapy (ART), it cannot be directly used for adaptive proton therapy (APT) treatments because the stopping power ratio (SPR) cannot be estimated from CBCT images...

Medical images play a vital role in medical analysis by providing crucial information about patients' pathological conditions. However, the quality of these images can be compromised by many factors, such as limited resolution of the instruments, artifacts caused by movements, and the complexity of the scanned areas. As a result, low-resolution (LR) images cannot provide sufficient information for diagnosis. To address this issue, researchers have attempted to apply image super-resolution (SR) techniques to restore the high-resolution (HR) images from their LR counterparts...

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved promising performance in image recognition and gradually serves as a powerful backbone in various vision tasks. To satisfy the sequential input of Transformer, the tail of ViT first splits each image into a sequence of visual tokens with a fixed length. Then, the following self-attention layers construct the global relationship between tokens to produce useful representation for the downstream tasks. Empirically, representing the image with more tokens leads to better performance, yet the quadratic computational complexity of self-attention layer to the number of tokens could seriously influence the efficiency of ViT's inference...

To address the problems of under-segmentation and over-segmentation of small organs in medical image segmentation. We present a novel medical image segmentation network model with Depth Separable Gating Transformer and a Three-branch Attention module (DSGA-Net). Firstly, the model adds a Depth Separable Gated Visual Transformer (DSG-ViT) module into its Encoder to enhance (i) the contextual links among global, local, and channels and (ii) the sensitivity to location information. Secondly, a Mixed Three-branch Attention (MTA) module is proposed to increase the number of features in the up-sampling process...

A digestibility enhancing effect of natural food on stomachless fish model (Cyprinus carpio) was verified by fluorogenic substrate assays of enzymatic activities in experimental pond carp gut flush and planktonic food over a full vegetative season. Then compared with size-matched conspecific grown artificially (tank carp) and an advanced omnivore species possessing true stomach (tilapia, Oreochromis niloticus). Results suggested activities of digestive enzymes (except amylolytic) were significantly higher in pond carp (p ≤ 0...

Gibberellin A3 (GA3 ) is often used as a principal growth regulator to increase plant size. Here, we applied Tween-20 (2%)-formulated GA3 (T1:40 mg/L; T2:70 mg/L) by dipping the clusters at the initial expansion phase of 'Red Globe' grape (Vitis vinifera L.) in 2018 and 2019. Tween-20 (2%) was used as a control. The results showed that GA3 significantly increased fruit cell length, cell size, diameter, and volume. The hormone levels of auxin (IAA) and zeatin (ZT) were significantly increased at 2 h (0 d) -1 d after application (DAA0-1) and remained significantly higher at DAA1 until maturity...