Early detection of skin cancer, particularly melanoma, is crucial to enable advanced treatment. Due to the rapid growth in the number of skin cancers, there is a growing need of computerised analysis for skin lesions. The state-of-the-art public available datasets for skin lesions are often accompanied with a very limited amount of segmentation ground truth labeling. Also, the available segmentation datasets consist of noisy expert annotations reflecting the fact that precise annotations to represent the boundary of skin lesions are laborious and expensive. The lesion boundary segmentation is vital to locate the lesion accurately in dermoscopic images and lesion diagnosis of different skin lesion types. In this work, we propose the fully automated deep learning ensemble methods to achieve high sensitivity and high specificity in lesion boundary segmentation. We trained the ensemble methods based on Mask R-CNN and DeeplabV3+ methods on ISIC-2017 segmentation training set and evaluate the performance of the ensemble networks on ISIC-2017 testing set and PH2 dataset. Our results showed that the proposed ensemble methods segmented the skin lesions with Sensitivity of 89.93% and Specificity of 97.94% for the ISIC-2017 testing set. The proposed ensemble method Ensemble-A outperformed FrCN, FCNs, U-Net, and SegNet in Sensitivity by 4.4%, 8.8%, 22.7%, and 9.8% respectively. Furthermore, the proposed ensemble method EnsembleS achieved a specificity score of 97.98% for clinically benign cases, 97.30% for the melanoma cases, and 98.58% for the seborrhoeic keratosis cases on ISIC-2017 testing set, exhibiting better performance than FrCN, FCNs, U-Net, and SegNet.

The isomeric heterogeneity of glycans poses a great challenge for their analysis. While combining ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) with tandem mass spectrometry is a powerful means for identifying and characterizing glycans, it has difficulty distinguishing the subtlest differences between isomers. Cryogenic infrared spectroscopy provides an additional dimension for glycan identification that is extremely sensitive to their structure. Our approach to glycan analysis combines ultrahigh-resolution IMS-IMS using structures for lossless ion manipulation (SLIM) with cryogenic infrared spectroscopy. We present here the design of a SLIM board containing a series of on-board traps in which we perform collision-induced dissociation (CID) at pressures in the millibar range. We characterize the on-board CID process by comparing the fragments generated from a pentapeptide to those obtained on a commercial tandem mass spectrometer. We then apply our new technique to study the mobility and vibrational spectra of CID fragments from two human milk oligosaccharides. Comparison of both the fragment drift times and IR spectra with those of suitable reference compounds allows us to identify their specific isomeric form, including the anomericity of the glycosidic linkage, demonstrating the power of this tool for glycan analysis.

This study was conducted on the left Achilles tendon in five clinically normal dogs. The Achilles tendon was surgically exposed and severed 3-4 cm proximal to the point of its insertion. Tenorrhaphy was undertaken by the application of three sutures on the various tendon units of the Achilles tendon using single locking-loop sutures with polyamide no. 1-0. The superficial digital flexor tendon was sutured with catgut using two horizontal mattress sutures. No ultrasound therapy was used in the animals of group I (control). Ultrasound therapy was given to the animals of group II (treated) starting from the third day post-operatively at 0.5 W/cm2 for 10 min daily for 10 days. A cortical screw was used for immobilization of the tibiotarsal joint which was removed 4 weeks after tenorrhaphy. Post-operatively, healing of the Achilles tendon was monitored using clinical observations, ultrasonography, gross and histomorphological observations at various intervals up to 120 days in both groups. Clinically, the dogs showed significant lameness for the first 4-5 days, which disappeared earlier in the ultrasound-treated (group II) animals than the controls (group I). Extension and flexion of the hock joint were found to be near normal at 6 weeks after the repair of the Achilles tendon. Ultrasonography showed anechoic to hypo-echoic echo-texture on days 3 and 7 after repair. By day 40, the echo-texture started to improve to hypo-echoic in group II, but in group I anechoic areas were still observed. However, the tendon showed near normal mottled hypo- to hyper-echoic texture in both groups by day 120. Gross observations suggested that the Achilles tendon in group II showed comparatively fewer adhesions than in group I animals. Histologically, in group II (treated), on day 40, the union was comparatively better without any inflammatory reaction. Bundle formation had begun in the ultrasound-treated animals which was not observed in the control animals. By day 90, more compact parallel bundle formation had taken place with minimum cellularity. Bundle formation was in its advanced stage in the treated animals. By day 120, the tendon tissue was comparatively acellular and looking like a normal tendon. The use of the cortical screw provided good immobilization and ultrasound therapy at 0.5 W/cm2 enhanced the Achilles tendon healing in dogs.

While glycans are present on the surface of cells in all living organisms and play key roles in most biological processes, their isomeric complexity makes their structural characterization challenging. Of...

A new approach for analysis of cleaved glycans.