The study was supported by the European Commission (Network of Excellence 'The Control of Embryo Implantation (EMBIC)', FP6-512040, lead researcher: P.S.), and by the Franz Lanyar Foundation of the Medical University of Graz, Austria (Grant #347). None of the authors declared a conflict of interests.
In this co-culture system, key factors considered to be implicated in trophoblast invasion in vivo can also be demonstrated in vitro. Therefore, it may help in finding strategies for the management of diseases associated with deficient trophoblast invasion.
Background: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by executive function (EF) dynamics disturbances.Notwithstanding, current advances in translational neuroscience, no ADHD objective, clinically useful, diagnostic marker is available to date. Objectives: Using a customized definition of EF and a new clinical paradigm, we performed a prospective diagnostic accuracy trial to assess the diagnostic value of several fractal measures from the thinking processes or inferences in a cohort of ADHD children and typically developing controls. Method: We included children from age five to twelve diagnosed with a reference standard based on case history, physical and neurological examination, Conners 3 rd Edition, and DSM-V TM . The index test consisted of a computer-based inference task with a set of eight different instances of the "Battleships" game to be solved. A consecutive series of 18 cases and 18 controls (n = 36) recruited at the primary paediatrics service from the Nelson Marlborough Health in New Zealand underwent the reference standard and the index test. Several fractal measures were obtained from the inference task to produce supervised classification models. Results: Notably, the summarized logistic regression's predicted probabilities from the eight games played by each children yielded a 100% classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity in both a training and an independent testing/validating cohort. Conclusions: From a translational vantage point the expeditious method and the robust results make this technique a promising candidate to develop a screening, diagnostic and monitoring system for ADHD, and may serve to assess other EF disturbances.
Background – The analysis of irregularly shaped tumour ROIs is hindered by the fact that most image analysis methods apart from first-order statistics are compatible only with rectangular ROIs. We thus aimed for the first implementation and testing of the 1-D MRI image analysis method that is fully compatible with irregular ROIs. Method – The retrospective prediction model of osteosarcoma chemoresponsiveness included T2-weighted MRI scans obtained before OsteoSa MAP neoadjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy. Osteosarcoma morphology was quantified by calculating the one- and two-dimensional (1-D, 2-D) Higuchi dimensions (Dh), directionally and non-directionally. Results – The non-directional 1-D Dh reached a predictive AUC of 0.88, while the directional 1-D analysis along 180 radial lines robustly improved the predictive performance, reaching an AUC of 0.95, P<0.001 that is widely considered as nearly ideal. The optimal directional range was between 90o and 97o. Conclusions – We report the first validity testing of the 1-D analysis approach that is fully compatible with irregular ROIs. Such analytical adaptation to ROI shape in MRI has enhanced the osteosarcoma prediction performance over the previously reported standard 2-D analyses. The clinical importance of the early chemoresponsiveness prediction rests on its potential to prolong the survival of chemoresistant patients through personalised treatment adjustments.
The consideration of different scales and the application of fractal methods on digital images is of high importance if real world objects are investigated. In this context the fractal dimension is an important parameter to characterize structures and patterns. An accurate understanding of them is obligatory if significant and comparable results should be obtained. Recently a new method using an image pyramid approach was compared to the very popular Box Counting Method. The intriguing results showed that a trustable value for the fractal dimension could be obtained in much faster computational times compared to traditional Box Counting algorithms. In addition to these results of this new approach, which is only applicable to binary (black/white) images, we present developments toward the application to grey value/color images. Especially the determination of the grey value surface and the interpolation used to downscale the images seem to have major influence on the results achieved.
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