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Background and Objective: Fear of falling is a major problem among people suffering from stroke. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between functional balance (FB) and fear of falling (FOF) in chronic stroke patients with and without history of falling and to identify the best measurement tool for FB which can assess the FOF in these patients. Methods: Eighty-two participants with chronic stroke with the mean age of 54.90 (±11.30) years participated in this non-experimental cross sectional study. They were divided into faller and non-faller groups based on their history of falling during the last month. The FB was measured by Berg Balance Scale (BBS), Dynamic Gait Index (DGI), Tinetti Balance Test, and Functional Reach Test (FRT). The Persian versions of the self-completed Fall Efficacy Scale-International (FES-I) and Activity-specific Balance-Confidence scale (ABC) were used to evaluate FOF. Results: The results of this study showed that the correlation between FES-I with FRT, BBS, DGI and Tinetti Balance Test were -0.38, -0.67, -0.44 and -0.62, in faller group and -0.11, -0.59, -0.31 and -0.24 in non-faller group. The correlation between ABC and FRT, BBS, DGI and Tinetti Balance Test were 0.58, 0.48, 0.68 and 0.57 in faller group and 0.17, 0.55, 0.45 and 0.44 in non-faller group. The results of multiple regression analysis showed that BBS was the best predictor for FOF (which explained 25% and 31% of total variance of FES-I and ABC in faller group as well as 68% and 42% of total variance of FES-I and ABC in non-faller group). Conclusion: The results of this study showed a low to moderate correlation between FB and FOF in both groups of faller and non-faller chronic stroke patients. Furthermore, BBS seems to be the best functional balance measurement to predict FOF in these patients.

A significant correlation between financial news with stock market trends has been explored extensively. However, very little research has been conducted for stock prediction models that utilize news categories, weighted according to their relevance with the target stock. In this paper, we show that prediction accuracy can be enhanced by incorporating weighted news categories simultaneously into the prediction model. We suggest utilizing news categories associated with the structural hierarchy of the stock market: that is, news categories for the market, sector, and stock-related news. In this context, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based Weighted and Categorized News Stock prediction model (WCN-LSTM) is proposed. The model incorporates news categories with their learned weights simultaneously. To enhance the effectiveness, sophisticated features are integrated into WCN-LSTM. These include, hybrid input, lexicon-based sentiment analysis, and deep learning to impose sequential learning. Experiments have been performed for the case of the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) using different sentiment dictionaries and time steps. Accuracy and F1-score are used to evaluate the prediction model. We have analyzed the WCN-LSTM results thoroughly and identified that WCN-LSTM performs better than the baseline model. Moreover, the sentiment lexicon HIV4 along with time steps 3 and 7, optimized the prediction accuracy. We have conducted statistical analysis to quantitatively assess our findings. A qualitative comparison of WCN-LSTM with existing prediction models is also presented to highlight its superiority and novelty over its counterparts., Competing Interests: We have no conflicts of interest to disclose., (Copyright: © 2023 Usmani, Shamsi. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Lung cancers with a mutated epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) are a major contributor to cancer fatalities globally. Targeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) have been developed against EGFR and show encouraging results for survival rate and quality of life. However, drug resistance may affect treatment plans and treatment efficacy may be lost after about a year. Predicting the response to EGFR-TKIs for EGFR-mutated lung cancer patients is a key research area. In this study, we propose a personalized drug response prediction model (PDRP), based on molecular dynamics simulations and machine learning, to predict the response of first generation FDA-approved small molecule EGFR-TKIs, Gefitinib/Erlotinib, in lung cancer patients. The patient's mutation status is taken into consideration in molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Each patient's unique mutation status was modeled considering MD simulation to extract molecular-level geometric features. Moreover, additional clinical features were incorporated into machine learning model for drug response prediction. The complete feature set includes demographic and clinical information (DCI), geometrical properties of the drug-target binding site, and the binding free energy of the drug-target complex from the MD simulation. PDRP incorporates an XGBoost classifier, which achieves state-of-the-art performance with 97.5% accuracy, 93% recall, 96.5% precision, and 94% F1-score, for a 4-class drug response prediction task. We found that modeling the geometry of the binding pocket combined with binding free energy is a good predictor for drug response. However, we observed that clinical information had a little impact on the performance of the model. The proposed model could be tested on other types of cancers. We believe PDRP will support the planning of effective treatment regimes based on clinical-genomic information. The source code and related files are available on GitHub at:   https://github.com/rizwanqureshi123/PDRP/ ., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The new and novel drug molecules are of prime importance against the deadly Mycobacterium tuberculosis owing to its high resistance. The discovery of new drug molecules is cost, time, and efforts intensive in chemical research. Computational approaches, such as virtual screening and Machine Learning represent an effective alternate to predict the active compounds with appreciable accuracy. In this work, we used the true active and in-active drug candidates to train the machine learned models against one of the potent drug targets from Mycobacterium tuberculosis i.e. Pantothenate synthetase (PS). We computed 1444 descriptors from the studied molecules. Initially, twenty descriptors were shortlisted based on their significant Pearson's correlation with the -logIC 50 values. Different combinations of descriptors were used to optimize the number of descriptors. Further to that different Machine Learned models were applied to develop a trained model of active molecules with a reasonable accuracy. The best performed model in terms of prediction of the activity data is proposed as a model of choice to perform the data screening experiments. The current study will help to potentiate the drug discovery process against Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb)., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)