Affect Recognition for Multimodal Natural Language Processing

Cognitive Computation -     

Novel Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Feature Tracking (CMR-FT) Analysis for Detection of Myocardial Fibrosis in Pediatric Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Myocardial fibrosis is a risk factor for sudden cardiac death in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) and is conventionally identified by cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMR) using late gadolinium enhancement (LGE). This study evaluates utility of a novel 16-segment CMR feature tracking (CMR-FT) technique for measuring left ventricular (LV) strain (S) and strain rate (SR) on non-contrast cine images to detect myocardial fibrosis in pediatric HCM. We hypothesized that CMR-FT-derived S and SR will accurately differentiate HCM patients with and without myocardial fibrosis. Consecutive children with HCM who underwent CMR with LGE at our institution from 2006 to 2014 were included. Global and regional longitudinal, radial and circumferential S and SR of the LV in 2D and 3D were obtained using a CMR-FT software. Comparisons were made between HCM patients with (+LGE) and without (?LGE) delayed enhancement. Of the 29 HCM patients (mean age 13.5 ± 6.1 years; 52 % males), 11 (40 %) patients (mean age 17.5 ± 8.4 years) had +LGE. Global longitudinal, circumferential and radial S and SR were lower in +LGE compared to ?LGE patients, in both 2D and 3D. Regional analysis revealed lower segmental S and SR in the septum with fibrosis compared to free wall without fibrosis. A global longitudinal S of ≤ ?12.8 had 91 % sensitivity and 89 % specificity for detection of LGE. In pediatric HCM patients with myocardial fibrosis, global LV longitudinal, circumferential and radial S and SR were reduced, specifically in areas of fibrosis. A global longitudinal S of ≤ ?12.8 detected patients with fibrosis with high degree of accuracy. This novel CMR-FT technique may be useful to identify myocardial fibrosis and risk-stratify pediatric HCM without use of contrast agents.     

A comprehensive review on the sources,essentiality and toxicological profile of nickel

This review contains up-to-date knowledge and recent advancements on the essentiality, sources, and toxicological profile of nickel and its different compounds. Nickel is a recognized essential element for several important biological processes like the healthy growth of plants, animals, and soil/water microbes; though an excess amount of nickel intoxicates flora and fauna. Nickel is found to affect the photosynthetic function of higher plants; it can severely degrade soil fertility and causes many chronic diseases in humans. Due to the huge growth in the nickel industry and consumption of nickel-containing products, environmental pollution has become inevitable by the element nickel and also varieties of its by-products through all the phases of making, utilization and dumping. We have focused on the importance of agenda 2030 (UN 17 SDGs) during the preparation of the write-up and have highlighted goals 3, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15 by elaborately discussing associated points. The plausible molecular mechanism of nickel toxicity is presented in simple diagrams. The article elaborates on possible methods for remediation of nickel toxicity and the treatment of nickel dermatitis and nickel cancer. Recent advancements in the understanding of the dual aspects of nickel as beneficial and a carcinogen are the key subject of this article.

This review contains up-to-date knowledge and recent advancements on the essentiality, sources, and toxicological profile of nickel and its different compounds.     

Erratum to: Multilingual Sentiment Analysis: State of the Art and Independent Comparison of Techniques

With the advent of the internet, people actively express their opinions about products, services, events, political parties, etc., in social media, blogs, and website comments. The amount of research work on sentiment analysis is growing explosively. However, the majority of research efforts are devoted to English language data, while a great share of information is available in other languages. We present a state-of-the-art review on multilingual sentiment analysis. More importantly, we compare our own implementation of existing state-of-the-art approaches on common data. Precision observed in our experiments is typically lower than that reported by the original authors, which we attribute to lack of detail in the original presentation of those approaches. Thus, we compare the existing works by what they really offer to the reader, including whether they allow for accurate implementation and for reliable reproduction of the reported results.

     

Biodegradable nanoparticles mimicking platelet binding as a targeted and controlled drug delivery system

This research aims to develop targeted nanoparticles as drug carriers to the injured arterial wall under fluid shear stress by mimicking the natural binding ability of platelets via interactions of glycoprotein Ib-alpha (GPIbα) of platelets with P-selectin of damaged endothelial cells (ECs) and/or with von Willebrand factor (vWF) of the subendothelium. Drug-loaded poly(d,l-lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanoparticles were formulated using a standard emulsion method and conjugated with glycocalicin, the external fraction of platelet GPIbα, via carbodiimide chemistry. Surface-coated and cellular uptake studies in ECs showed that conjugation of PLGA nanoparticles, with GPIb, significantly increased nanoparticle adhesion to P-selectin- and vWF-coated surfaces as well as nanoparticle uptake by activated ECs under fluid shear stresses. In addition, effects of nanoparticle size and shear stress on adhesion efficiency were characterized through parallel flow chamber studies. The observed decrease in bound nanoparticle density with increased particle sizes and shear stresses is also explained through a computational model. Our results demonstrate that the GPIb-conjugated PLGA nanoparticles can be used as a targeted and controlled drug delivery system under flow conditions at the site of vascular injury.     

Estimated cumulative radiation dose from PET/CT in children with malignancies: a 5-year retrospective review

Background  

The increasing use of serial PET/CT scans in the management of pediatric malignancies raises the important consideration of radiation exposure in children.     

Unsupervised Commonsense Knowledge Enrichment for Domain-Specific Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis in natural language text is a challenging task involving a deep understanding of both syntax and semantics. Leveraging the polarity of multiword expressions—or concepts—rather than single words can mitigate the difficulty of such a task as these expressions carry more contextual information than isolated words. Such contextual information is the key to understanding both the syntactic and semantic structure of natural language text and hence is useful in tasks such as sentiment analysis. In this work, we propose a new method to enrich SenticNet (a publicly available knowledge base for concept-level sentiment analysis) with domain-level concepts composed of aspects and sentiment word pairs, along with a measure of their polarity. We process a set of unlabeled texts and, by considering the statistical co-occurrence information, generate a direct acyclic graph (DAG) of concepts. The polarity score of known concepts is propagated and used to compute polarity scores of new concepts. By designing and implementing our exhaustive algorithm, we are able to use a seed set containing only two sentiment words (good and bad). In our evaluation conducted on a dataset of hotel reviews, SenticNet was enriched by a factor of three (from 30,000 to nearly 90,000 concepts). The experiments demonstrate the merit of the concepts discovered by our method at improving sentence-level and aspect-level sentiment analysis tasks. Results of the two-factor ANOVA statistical test showed a confidence level of 95 %, verifying that the improvements are statistically significant.     

Accuracy of electronic apex locator in length determination in the presence of different irrigants: An in vitro study

Determining the root canal length accurately had been a challenge in endodontics. Introduction of apex locators have definitely served as an effective adjuvant to radiographs. This in vitro study had attempted to compare the effectiveness of electronic apex locator in the presence of various canal contents. Comparison of the length determined by apex locators with the radiographic length was also made. The results of the study had shown that the length of root canals can be accurately made irrespective of the canal contents.