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Severe COVID-19 infections increase the risk of thrombotic events and Intensive Care Units reported increased extracorporeal circuit clotting (ECC) in COVID-19 patients with acute kidney injury. We wished to determine whether hemodialysis (HD) patients with COVID-19 also have increased risk of circuit clotting.We reviewed coagulation studies and HD records, 4 weeks before and after COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction detection in HD patients between April 2020 and June 2021.Sixty-eight (33.5%) of 203 HD patients with COVID-19, 65% male, mean age 64.9 ± 15.3 years, experienced some circuit clotting, and no clotting recorded prior to positive test results. In those who experienced ECC, prothrombin, activated partial thromboplastin or thrombin times were not different, whereas median factor VIII (273 [168-419] vs. 166 [139-225] IU/dl, p 0.001), D-dimers (2654 [1381-6019] vs. 1351 [786-2334] ng/ml, p 0.05), and fibrinogen (5.6 ± 1.4 vs. 4.9 ± 1.4 g/L, p 0.05) were greater. Antithrombin (94 [83-112] vs. 89 [84-103] IU/dl), protein C (102 [80-130] vs. 86 [76-106] IU/dl), protein S (65 [61-75] vs. 65 [52-79] IU/dl) and platelet counts (193 [138-243] vs. 174 [138-229] × 10Extracorporeal circuit clotting was increased within 4 weeks of testing positive for COVID-19. Clotting was associated with increased factor VIII, fibrinogen and D-dimer, suggesting that the risk of circuit clotting was related to the inflammatory response to COVID-19.

Acute kidney injury (AKI) manifests as a major health concern, particularly for the elderly. Understanding AKI-related proteome changes is critical for prevention and development of novel therapeutics to recover kidney function and to mitigate the susceptibility for recurrent AKI or development of chronic kidney disease. In this study, mouse kidneys were subjected to ischemia-reperfusion injury, and the contralateral kidneys remained uninjured to enable comparison and assess injury-induced changes in the kidney proteome. A fast-acquisition rate ZenoTOF 7600 mass spectrometer was introduced for data-independent acquisition (DIA) for comprehensive protein identification and quantification. Short microflow gradients and the generation of a deep kidney-specific spectral library allowed for high-throughput, comprehensive protein quantification. Upon AKI, the kidney proteome was completely remodeled, and over half of the 3,945 quantified protein groups changed significantly. Downregulated proteins in the injured kidney were involved in energy production, including numerous peroxisomal matrix proteins that function in fatty acid oxidation, such as ACOX1, CAT, EHHADH, ACOT4, ACOT8, and Scp2. Injured mice exhibited severely declined health. The comprehensive and sensitive kidney-specific DIA assays highlighted here feature high-throughput analytical capabilities to achieve deep coverage of the kidney proteome and will serve as useful tools for developing novel therapeutics to remediate kidney function.

Growing public awareness about the state of the environment, chemical product safety and new chemical regulatory policies is driving demand for leaders who are able to understand the science underlying environmental challenges and develop innovative solutions. Chalcones belong to the flavonoid family and display several pharmacological activities which are very important. They can be used as an initial compound for synthesis of a lot of compounds. In this research chalcone derivative are made via green chemistry route and analysed their physical and antimicrobial activity.

Comprehensive, reproducible and precise analysis of large sample cohorts is one of the key objectives of quantitative proteomics. Here, we present an implementation of data-independent acquisition using its parallel acquisition nature that surpasses the limitation of serial MS2 acquisition of data-dependent acquisition on a quadrupole ultra-high field Orbitrap mass spectrometer. In deep single shot data-independent acquisition, we identified and quantified 6,383 proteins in human cell lines using 2-or-more peptides/protein and over 7100 proteins when including the 717 proteins that were identified on the basis of a single peptide sequence. 7739 proteins were identified in mouse tissues using 2-or-more peptides/protein and 8121 when including the 382 proteins that were identified based on a single peptide sequence. Missing values for proteins were within 0.3 to 2.1% and median coefficients of variation of 4.7 to 6.2% among technical triplicates. In very complex mixtures, we could quantify 10,780 proteins and 12,192 proteins when including the 1412 proteins that were identified based on a single peptide sequence. Using this optimized DIA, we investigated large-protein networks before and after the critical period for whisker experience-induced synaptic strength in the murine somatosensory cortex 1-barrel field. This work shows that parallel mass spectrometry enables proteome profiling for discovery with high coverage, reproducibility, precision and scalability.

Introduction Laboratory monitoring for factor VIII inhibitors ideally requires samples with the lowest possible factor VIII (FVIII) level, potentially challenging in patients with congenital haemophilia A (CHA) receiving regular prophylaxis and acquired haemophilia A (AHA) patients with endogenous FVIII. Inactivation of FVIII by preheating (preheat treatment, PHT) of patient plasma has been suggested to facilitate monitoring. Aim To evaluate the clinical utility of PHT prior to inhibitor analysis by modified Nijmegen-Bethesda assay (mNBA) in patients with CHA and AHA. Methods Inhibitor screening by mNBA under standard conditions and with PHT at 56°C for 30, 60 and 90 minutes was evaluated. FVIII inhibitor results between 2007 and 2010 without PHT (720 results from 222 CHA and AHA patients), and between 2011 and 2014 post-PHT (1102 results from 302 patients) were available for analysis. Results Of total 1822 results available, 61% were from severe HA patients, 22% from mild and moderate HA and 16% from AHA. Pre-PHT, 74% of samples were analysed by the mNBA, and the remaining 26% were not tested as FVIII levels were >20 IU/dL as per local protocol. Postintroduction of PHT (90 and 60 minutes), 96% of samples received were analysed for an inhibitor. Post-PHT in patients with AHA (n = 26), 69% of samples tested with factor VIII levels >20 IU/dL were found to have detectable inhibitor. Conclusion FVIII inhibitor testing using PHT at 56°C for 60 minutes facilitates inhibitor surveillance of CHA on prophylaxis. Potentially, 30 minutes at 56°C might be equally efficacious. In AHA receiving immunosuppression, monitoring of inhibitor titre after initial factor VIII response might enable personalized immunosuppression.

Comprehensive proteome quantification is crucial for a better understanding of underlying mechanisms of diseases. Liquid chromatography mass spectrometry (LC-MS) has become the method of choice for comprehensive proteome quantification due to its power and versatility. Even though great advances have been made in recent years, full proteome coverage for complex samples remains challenging due to the high dynamic range of protein expression. Additionally, when studying disease regulatory proteins, biomarkers or potential drug targets are often low abundant, such as for instance kinases and transcription factors. Here, we show that with improvements in chromatography and data analysis the single shot proteome coverage can go beyond 10 000 proteins in human tissue. In a testis cancer study, we quantified 11 200 proteins using data independent acquisition (DIA). This depth was achieved with a false discovery rate of 1% which was experimentally validated using a two species test. We introduce the concept of hybrid libraries which combines the strength of direct searching of DIA data as well as the use of large project-specific or published DDA data sets. Remarkably deep proteome coverage is possible using hybrid libraries without the additional burden of creating a project-specific library. Within the testis cancer set, we found a large proportion of proteins in an altered expression (in total: 3351; 1453 increased in cancer). Many of these proteins could be linked to the hallmarks of cancer. For example, the complement system was downregulated which helps to evade the immune response and chromosomal replication was upregulated indicating a dysregulated cell cycle.

In this paper, we construct explicit families of quantum error correcting codes based on cyclic codes. But for a crucial theoretical idea that we introduce here, namely working with a modified symplectic form as the basis of Weyl commutation, these codes would not have been possible — under the standard symplectic form, there are Galois theoretic no-go theorems on cyclic codes [7], [Corollary IV.5, page 651], [6], [Corollary 5.16, page 51] of certain lengths. More importantly, we circumvent the above no-go theorems without disturbing the one crucial property that cyclic codes have — efficient decoding algorithms. Recall that for general codes, efficient decoding algorithms do not exist if some widely believed complexity theoretic assumptions are true hence this is a crucial property to have. Cyclicity is a basis dependent property and for codes that we construct, is only evident in the modified symplectic setting. If we were to recast this code using the standard symplectic form, there would be a basis change on the underlying vector space that disturbs cyclicity. Hence, this change of perspective that we have here is crucial not only in the construction, where we had to circumvent the no-go theorems that we mentioned above, but also in the design of efficient decoding algorithm. Theoretically our result is also tight: we have a complete characterization (Theorem 6) of the codes that we construct here.

In this work we present a new construction of quantum error correcting codes. It is based on the stabilizer formalism but does not use the CSS construction. It takes advantage of the properties of the difference set to construct the code. The technique may also be used to generate the quantum LDPC codes as well as the cyclic codes.

Over the last decade, a wide range of philosophies and management strategies have been embraced by an increasing number of healthcare organizations, with the principal goal of improving productivity and the quality of care while reducing the associated costs. These have had a significant impact on various healthcare services, including the delivery of surgical care. These philosophies and strategies are composed of scientific techniques and methods, a majority of which can be classified under the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) field of study. For the most part, these techniques have proved to be instrumental in engineering radical changes and improvements in the ailing healthcare industry. This research seeks to contribute to the growing efforts on the application of ISE tools in the healthcare industry. First, an attempt is made to illustrate how various techniques can be used to engineer tangible benefits into the processes for surgical care delivery. Axiomatic Design (AD) concepts are leveraged to synthesize redesign changes, which are then applied to a conceptual model of the surgical system. The model is developed using a Petri Net (PN) technique and subsequently validated, verified and analyzed using PN heuristics and Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM). The outcomes of this redesign depict process improvements with the potential to enhance the quality of surgical care while enabling close to 70 % productivity gains. As a result, this research proposes a framework for the systematic redesign of processes, especially when changes need to be tested and verified before implementation. The techniques identified within this framework are ideal for the successful completion of the ‘design’ and ‘plan’ phases when pursuing operations management philosophies like Six-Sigma (SS) and Total Quality Management (TQM).

This article has been withdrawn by the authors. This article did not comply with the editorial guidelines of MCP. Specifically, single peptide based protein identifications of 9-19% were included in the analysis and discussed in the results and conclusions. We wish to withdraw this article and resubmit a clarified, corrected manuscript for review.

In this paper a measure that computes dissimilarity score is proposed that can be used to find out the distance between two face samples. Gradient Binary Pattern are applied over face samples to transform them into some robust representation. Later corner features are extracted and they are tracked using KL-tracking and the number of unsuccessfully tracked corners are counted between each testing and training images. Four publicly available face databases are used for system testing, viz. YALE, BERN, ORL, CALTECH.

This paper serves as a report for the participation of Special Interest Group In Data (SIGDATA), Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in the String Similarity Workshop, EDBT, 2013. We present a novel technique to efficiently process edit distance based string similarity queries. Our technique draws upon some previously conducted works in the field and introduces new methods to tackle the issues therein. We focus on achieving minimum possible execution time while being rather liberal with memory consumption. We propose and support the use of deletion neighborhoods for fast edit distance lookups in dictionaries. Our work emphasizes the power of deletion neighborhoods over other popular finger print based schemes for similarity search queries. Furthermore, we establish that it is possible to reduce the large space requirement of a deletion neighborhood based finger print scheme using simple hashing techniques, thereby making the scheme suitable for practical application. We compare our implementation with the state of the art libraries (Flamingo) and report speed ups of up to an order of magnitude.

Evaluating best strategies across the organization has been a major challenge for healthcare decision makers. The complex nature of patient flow and the unpredictability involved makes discrete event simulation an ideal tool for evaluating strategic decisions in hospital inpatient capacity planning. In this paper, simulation was used to evaluate scenarios pertaining to hospital inpatient capacities. The requirement of additional capacities over the planning horizon was modeled and evaluated. Similarly, the impacts of the opening of a new competing hospital facility were studied.