scholarly journals Viability Assessment in Liver Transplantation—What Is the Impact of Dynamic Organ Preservation?

Biomedicines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Rebecca Panconesi ◽  
Mauricio Flores Carvalho ◽  
Matteo Mueller ◽  
David Meierhofer ◽  
Philipp Dutkowski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Liver Function ◽  
Organ Preservation ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Intensive Care Treatment ◽  
Viability Assessment ◽  
Great Opportunity ◽  
Continuous Increase ◽  
Diagnostic Time ◽  
The Impact

Based on the continuous increase of donor risk, with a majority of organs classified as marginal, quality assessment and prediction of liver function is of utmost importance. This is also caused by the notoriously lack of effective replacement of a failing liver by a device or intensive care treatment. While various parameters of liver function and injury are well-known from clinical practice, the majority of specific tests require prolonged diagnostic time and are more difficult to assess ex situ. In addition, viability assessment of procured organs needs time, because the development of the full picture of cellular injury and the initiation of repair processes depends on metabolic active tissue and reoxygenation with full blood over several hours or days. Measuring injury during cold storage preservation is therefore unlikely to predict the viability after transplantation. In contrast, dynamic organ preservation strategies offer a great opportunity to assess organs before implantation through analysis of recirculating perfusates, bile and perfused liver tissue. Accordingly, several parameters targeting hepatocyte or cholangiocyte function or metabolism have been recently suggested as potential viability tests before organ transplantation. We summarize here a current status of respective machine perfusion tests, and report their clinical relevance.

Mechanisms of liver damage in COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (19) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
T. V. Pinchuk ◽  
N. V. Orlova ◽  
T. G. Suranova ◽  
T. I. Bonkalo
Keyword(s):  
Hepatocellular Carcinoma ◽  
Liver Transplantation ◽  
Risk Factor ◽  
Liver Disease ◽  
Liver Function ◽  
Liver Damage ◽  
The World ◽  
Coronavirus Infection ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Analyze Data

At the end of 2019, a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was discovered in China, causing the coronavirus infection COVID-19. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic poses a major challenge to health systems around the world. There is still little information on how infection affects liver function and the significance of pre-existing liver disease as a risk factor for infection and severe COVID-19. In addition, some drugs used to treat the new coronavirus infection are hepatotoxic. In this article, we analyze data on the impact of COVID-19 on liver function, as well as on the course and outcome of COVID-19 in patients with liver disease, including hepatocellular carcinoma, or those on immunosuppressive therapy after liver transplantation.

Clinical Pharmacokinetic Studies in Pregnant Women and the Relevance of Pharmacometric Tools

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 483-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Dallmann ◽  
Paola Mian ◽  
Johannes Van den Anker ◽  
Karel Allegaert
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Women ◽  
Clinical Pharmacokinetic ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Pharmacokinetic Studies ◽  
Full Potential ◽  
Pbpk Models ◽  
Pregnancy And Postpartum ◽  
Population Pk ◽  
The Impact

Background: In clinical pharmacokinetic (PK) studies, pregnant women are significantly underrepresented because of ethical and legal reasons which lead to a paucity of information on potential PK changes in this population. As a consequence, pharmacometric tools became instrumental to explore and quantify the impact of PK changes during pregnancy. Methods: We explore and discuss the typical characteristics of population PK and physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models with a specific focus on pregnancy and postpartum. Results: Population PK models enable the analysis of dense, sparse or unbalanced data to explore covariates in order to (partly) explain inter-individual variability (including pregnancy) and to individualize dosing. For population PK models, we subsequently used an illustrative approach with ketorolac data to highlight the relevance of enantiomer specific modeling for racemic drugs during pregnancy, while data on antibiotic prophylaxis (cefazolin) during surgery illustrate the specific characteristics of the fetal compartments in the presence of timeconcentration profiles. For PBPK models, an overview on the current status of reports and papers during pregnancy is followed by a PBPK cefuroxime model to illustrate the added benefit of PBPK in evaluating dosing regimens in pregnant women. Conclusions: Pharmacometric tools became very instrumental to improve perinatal pharmacology. However, to reach their full potential, multidisciplinary collaboration and structured efforts are needed to generate more information from already available datasets, to share data and models, and to stimulate cross talk between clinicians and pharmacometricians to generate specific observations (pathophysiology during pregnancy, breastfeeding) needed to further develop the field.

Perspectives on the Situation

2018 ◽  
pp. 66-96
Author(s):  
Harry T. Reis ◽  
John G. Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The Impact

This chapter reviews major theoretical positions on the influence of situations for the understanding of both personality and social–psychological processes. We review the history and current status of this topic, and we describe in some detail two recent theories that seem particularly amenable toward resolving the disparate approaches that this distinction often engenders. Broadly considered, our position is that personality and situations must be considered interacting factors, but in a theoretically specific way. The concept of affordance—that situations provide opportunities for the expression of certain personality traits—is central to our analysis. We also discuss several issues that personality and social psychologists might profitably consider to provide better grounding for theories and research about the impact of situations on behavior.

scholarly journals The Impact of Ex Situ Heart Perfusion in Pediatric Transplantation: An Analysis of the UNOS Registry

2021 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. S39
Author(s):  
J. Conway ◽  
Y. Hong ◽  
T. Pidborochynski ◽  
M. Khan ◽  
D.H. Freed
Keyword(s):  
Ex Situ ◽  
Pediatric Transplantation ◽  
Heart Perfusion ◽  
The Impact

scholarly journals Minimization of the Line Resistance Impact on Memdiode-Based Simulations of Multilayer Perceptron Arrays Applied to Pattern Recognition

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Fernando Leonel Aguirre ◽  
Nicolás M. Gomez ◽  
Sebastián Matías Pazos ◽  
Félix Palumbo ◽  
Jordi Suñé ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pattern Recognition ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Multilayer Perceptrons ◽  
Spice Simulation ◽  
Large Dataset ◽  
High Line ◽  
Calibration Algorithm ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Line Resistance

In this paper, we extend the application of the Quasi-Static Memdiode model to the realistic SPICE simulation of memristor-based single (SLPs) and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) intended for large dataset pattern recognition. By considering ex-situ training and the classification of the hand-written characters of the MNIST database, we evaluate the degradation of the inference accuracy due to the interconnection resistances for MLPs involving up to three hidden neural layers. Two approaches to reduce the impact of the line resistance are considered and implemented in our simulations, they are the inclusion of an iterative calibration algorithm and the partitioning of the synaptic layers into smaller blocks. The obtained results indicate that MLPs are more sensitive to the line resistance effect than SLPs and that partitioning is the most effective way to minimize the impact of high line resistance values.

The presence of liver cirrhosis is a strong negative predictor of survival for patients admitted to the intensive care unit – Cirrhosis in intensive care patients

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Bojunga ◽  
Mireen Friedrich-Rust ◽  
Alica Kubesch ◽  
Kai Henrik Peiffer ◽  
Hannes Abramowski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Intensive Care Unit ◽  
Liver Cirrhosis ◽  
Intensive Care ◽  
Hospital Mortality ◽  
Intensive Care Treatment ◽  
Matched Cohort ◽  
Care Treatment ◽  
Cirrhotic Patients ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Cirrhotic Group

Abstract Background and Aims Liver cirrhosis is a systemic disease that substantially impacts the body’s physiology, especially in advanced stages. Accordingly, the outcome of patients with cirrhosis requiring intensive care treatment is poor. We aimed to analyze the impact of cirrhosis on mortality of intensive care unit (ICU) patients compared to other frequent chronic diseases and conditions. Methods In this retrospective study, patients admitted over three years to the ICU of the Department of Medicine of the University Hospital Frankfurt were included. Patients were matched for age, gender, pre-existing conditions, simplified acute physiology score (SAPS II), and therapeutic intervention scoring system (TISS). Results A total of 567 patients admitted to the ICU were included in the study; 99 (17.5 %) patients had liver cirrhosis. A total of 129 patients were included in the matched cohort for the sensitivity analysis. In-hospital mortality was higher in cirrhotic patients than non-cirrhotic patients (p < 0.0001) in the entire and matched cohort. Liver cirrhosis remained one of the strongest independent predictors of in-hospital mortality (entire cohort p = 0.001; matched cohort p = 0.03) along with dialysis and need for transfusion in the multivariate logistic regression analysis. Furthermore, in the cirrhotic group, the need for kidney replacement therapy (p < 0.001) and blood transfusion (p < 0.001) was significantly higher than in the non-cirrhotic group.  Conclusions In the presented study, liver cirrhosis was one of the strongest predictors of in-hospital mortality in patients needing intensive care treatment along with dialysis and the need for ventilation. Therefore, concerted efforts are needed to improve cirrhotic patients’ outcomes, prevent disease progression, and avoid complications with the need for ICU treatment in the early stages of the disease.

scholarly journals MOCVD Grown HgCdTe Heterostructures for Medium Wave Infrared Detectors

Coatings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 611
Author(s):  
Waldemar Gawron ◽  
Jan Sobieski ◽  
Tetiana Manyk ◽  
Małgorzata Kopytko ◽  
Paweł Madejczyk ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Buffer Layer ◽  
Infrared Detectors ◽  
Lattice Mismatch ◽  
Layer Growth ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Organic Chemical ◽  
Infrared Band ◽  
Donor And Acceptor ◽  
Wide Range

This paper presents the current status of medium-wave infrared (MWIR) detectors at the Military University of Technology’s Institute of Applied Physics and VIGO System S.A. The metal–organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technique is a very convenient tool for the deposition of HgCdTe epilayers, with a wide range of compositions, used for uncooled infrared detectors. Good compositional and thickness uniformity was achieved on epilayers grown on 2-in-diameter, low-cost (100) GaAs wafers. Most growth was performed on substrates, which were misoriented from (100) by between 2° and 4° in order to minimize growth defects. The large lattice mismatch between GaAs and HgCdTe required the usage of a CdTe buffer layer. The CdTe (111) B buffer layer growth was enforced by suitable nucleation procedure, based on (100) GaAs substrate annealing in a Te-rich atmosphere prior to the buffer deposition. Secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) showed that ethyl iodide (EI) and tris(dimethylamino)arsenic (TDMAAs) were stable donor and acceptor dopants, respectively. Fully doped (111) HgCdTe heterostructures were grown in order to investigate the devices’ performance in the 3–5 µm infrared band. The uniqueness of the presented technology manifests in a lack of the necessity of time-consuming and troublesome ex situ annealing.

Tourism research for the GCC region: Current status and future research directions

2021 ◽  
pp. 135481662199996
Author(s):  
Ali Salman Saleh ◽  
Charbel Bassil ◽  
Arsalan Safari
Keyword(s):  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Current Status ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Research Directions ◽  
Regional Tourism ◽  
Research Theme ◽  
Tourism Sector ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
Meta Analyses ◽  
The Impact

Tourism in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries has recently been considered by policymakers as a new avenue for economic diversification. Despite the considerable literature concerning the impact of tourism worldwide, only a limited number of studies have looked at the tourism sector in the GCC region or analyzed its economic, sociocultural, and environmental impacts. This article therefore conducts a systematic review of the state of the literature related to tourism in the GCC region. It provides effective insights about the current status, gaps, and challenges and proposes future research directions in this area for academics, practitioners, and policymakers with an interest in regional tourism development. The preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses approach was used to identify and select the papers. Some 23 papers were identified and analyzed. The majority of these studies focused on the United Arab Emirates, specifically the Dubai emirate. We found the most dominant research theme to be tourism planning.

scholarly journals Structural Changes in French VF Treatment Wetland Porous Media during the Rest Period: An Ex Situ Study Using X-ray Tomography

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 389
Author(s):  
German Dario Martinez-Carvajal ◽  
Laurent Oxarango ◽  
Jérôme Adrien ◽  
Pascal Molle ◽  
Nicolas Forquet
Keyword(s):  
Porous Media ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Rest Period ◽  
Treatment Wetlands ◽  
Ex Situ ◽  
Initial Value ◽  
Treatment Wetland ◽  
X Ray ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Deposit Layer

Clogging constitutes a major operational issue for treatment wetlands. The rest period is a key feature of French Vertical Flow (VF) treatment wetlands and serves to mitigate clogging. An ex-situ drying experiment was performed to mimic the rest period and record structural changes in the porous media using X-ray Computed Tomography (CT). Samples containing the deposit and gravel layers of a first stage French VF treatment wetland were extracted and left to dry in a control environment. Based on CT scans, three phases were identified (voids, biosolids, and gravels). The impact of the rest period was assessed by means of different pore-scale variables. Ultimately, the volume of biosolids had reduced to 58% of its initial value, the deposit layer thickness dropped to 68% of its initial value, and the void/biosolid specific surface area ratio increased from a minimum value of 1.1 to a maximum of 4.2. Cracks greater than 3 mm developed at the uppermost part of the deposit layer, while, in the gravel layer, the rise in void volume corresponds to pores smaller than 2 mm in diameter. Lastly, the air-filled microporosity is estimated to have increased by 0.11 v/v.

67 Current Status and Future Prospective of the Use of Plant Bioactive Compounds in Dairy and Beef Cattle

2021 ◽  
Vol 99 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 132-132
Author(s):  
Sergio Calsamiglia ◽  
Maria Rodriguez-Prado ◽  
Gonzalo Fernandez-Turren ◽  
Lorena Castillejos
Keyword(s):  
Beef Cattle ◽  
Essential Oils ◽  
Average Daily Gain ◽  
Rumen Fermentation ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
In Vivo Studies ◽  
Current Status ◽  
The Impact

Abstract In the last 20 years there has been extensive in vitro research on the effects of plant extracts and essential oils on rumen microbial fermentation. The main objectives have been to improve energy metabolism through a reduction in methane emissions and an increase in propionate production; and to improve protein metabolism by reducing proteolysis and deamination. While the positive results from in vitro studies has stimulated the release of commercial products based on blends of essential oils, there is limited in vivo evidence on the rumen fermentation and production performance effects. A literature search was conducted to select in vivo studies where information on rumen fermentation and animal performance was reported. For dairy cattle, we identified 37 studies of which 21 were adequate to test production performance. Ten studies reported increases and 3 decreases in milk yield. For beef cattle, we identified 20 studies with rumen fermentation profile and 22 with performance data. Average daily gain improved in 7 and decreased in 1 study. Only 1 out of 16 studies reported an improvement in feed efficiency. Data indicate that out of more than 500 products tested in vitro, only around 20 have been tested in vivo in different mixtures and doses. The use of statistical approaches will allow to describe the conditions, doses and responses in dairy and beef cattle performance. The search for postruminal effects offers another alternative use. Evidence for effects on the intestinal and systemic effects on the immune system and antioxidant status (i.e., capsicum, garlic, eugenol, cinnamaldehyde curcuma, catechins, anethol or pinene), and in the modulation of metabolic regulation (capsicum, cinnamaldehyde, curcuma or garlic) may open the opportunity for future applications. However, stability of the product in the GI tract, description of the mechanisms of action and the impact of these changes on performance needs to be further demonstrated.

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