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Antiseptics, especially those containing ethanol, are toxic to the ocular surface. Here, we report a 5-year-old girl with antiseptic-related eye injury following an uneventful bilateral tonsillectomy under general anesthesia. Before surgery, her eyes were protected and disinfection of perioral skin with ethanol-containing chlorhexidine followed. Whitening of the lower half of her right ocular surface was found after the surgery, and this indicated severe chemical burn. Prompt irrigation with normal saline, instillation of topical medication, and application of amniotic membrane containing device were performed, which led to a satisfactory result. Toxic eye injury could happen in head and neck surgeries under general anesthesia. Causes of ocular injury include improper eye protection, head positions leading to accumulation of excessive antiseptics, and improper usage of ethanol-containing antiseptics for skin preparation. The use of ethanol-free antiseptic solutions in the peri-ocular region and proper protection of eyes may reduce the risk of severe ocular surface injury in nonocular surgeries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To determine the role of IQ-domain GTPase-activating protein1 (IQGAP-1) in tight junctions of human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs) and its effect against P. aeruginosa (PAK) invasion.Material and Methods: Primary human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs), immortalized HCECs, and IQGAP-1 RNA knockdown HCECs (siHCECs) were used. Confocal microscopy, transepithelial electrical resistance (TER), trypan blue exclusion assay and gentamicin invasion assay were done.Results: In primary and immortalized HCECs, IQGAP-1 co-localized with zonular occludin-1 (ZO-1) and actin. Enhanced actin and ZO-1 aggregation were seen in siHCECs. IQGAP-1 knockdown significantly increased TER of immortalized HCECs (P < .0001). Cell viability after PAK infection increased for siHCECs for up to 4 h after infection. PAK intracellular invasion was significantly lowered by 50% in siHCECs at 1 h post-infection.Conclusion: IQGAP-1 knockdown increased the strength and integrity of tight junctions and may provide an early protective effect against P. aeruginosa invasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractPurposeMethodsResultsConclusionsTo examine the performance of deep-learning models that predicts the visual acuity after cataract surgery using preoperative clinical information and color fundus photography (CFP).We retrospectively collected the age, sex, and logMAR preoperative best corrected visual acuity (preoperative-BCVA) and CFP from patients who underwent cataract surgeries from 2020 to 2021 at National Taiwan University Hospital. Feature extraction of CFP was performed using a pre-existing image classification model, Xception. The CFP-extracted features and pre-operative clinical information were then fed to a downstream neural network for final prediction. We assessed the model performance by calculating the mean absolute error (MAE) between the predicted and the true logMAR of postoperative BCVA. A nested 10-fold cross-validation was performed for model validation.A total of 673 fundus images from 446 patients were collected. The mean preoperative BCVA and postoperative BCVA was 0.60 ± 0.39 and 0.14 ± 0.18, respectively. The model using age and sex as predictors achieved an MAE of 0.121 ± 0.016 in postoperative BCVA prediction. The inclusion of CFP as additional predictor in the model (predictors: age, sex and CFP) did not further improve the predictive performance (MAE = 0.120 ± 0.023, p = 0.375), while adding the preoperative BCVA as an additional predictor resulted in a 4.13% improvement (predictors: age, sex and preoperative BCVA, MAE = 0.116 ± 0.016, p = 0.013).Our multimodal models including both CFP and clinical information achieved excellent accuracy in predicting BCVA after cataract surgery, while the learning models input with only clinical information performed similarly. Future studies are needed to clarify the effects of multimodal input on this task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To determine the role of IQ-domain GTPase-activating protein1 (IQGAP-1) in tight junctions of human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs) and its effect against P. aeruginosa (PAK) invasion., Material and Methods: Primary human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs), immortalized HCECs, and IQGAP-1 RNA knockdown HCECs (siHCECs) were used. Confocal microscopy, transepithelial electrical resistance (TER), trypan blue exclusion assay and gentamicin invasion assay were done., Results: In primary and immortalized HCECs, IQGAP-1 co-localized with zonular occludin-1 (ZO-1) and actin. Enhanced actin and ZO-1 aggregation were seen in siHCECs. IQGAP-1 knockdown significantly increased TER of immortalized HCECs ( P < .0001). Cell viability after PAK infection increased for siHCECs for up to 4 h after infection. PAK intracellular invasion was significantly lowered by 50% in siHCECs at 1 h post-infection., Conclusion: IQGAP-1 knockdown increased the strength and integrity of tight junctions and may provide an early protective effect against P. aeruginosa invasion.