[Budd-Chiari syndrome, review and illustration]. / Budd-Chiari Syndrom, Review und Illustration der Bildgebung.

Budd-Chiari syndrome is a rare vascular disorder characterized by obstruction of the hepatic venous outflow. Various diseases causing coagulopathy play a role in aetiology, such as myeloproliferative disorders. Acute vascular occlusion may lead to acute phlebitis with fever. The classic triad of acute liver failure may be present with ascites, hepatomegaly, and abdominal pain. However, subacute courses of disease were also observed. Because of the variable symptoms and severity extent, depending on the acuity of the course and the extent of the affected vessels, diagnosis is often difficult. Sonography, as a ubiquitously available and cost-effective diagnostic tool, plays a leading role. Doppler ultrasonography can be used to visualize hemodynamics in particular. In acute thrombotic occlusion, the affected hepatic veins usually cannot or only partially be visualized. In non-occluding thrombi, turbulent flow patterns may develop in the area of venous outflow obstruction, and flow velocity is then increased in the area of stenosis. Contrast enhanced ultrasound offers even better specificity of diagnosis. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging can directly visualize thrombi and the cause of obstruction. Once the diagnosis is confirmed, anticoagulation must be initiated, but therapy of the underlying disease must also be started. If symptom-controlling measures are not sufficient, angioplasty/stenting to reopen short-segment stenoses or implantation of a TIPSS device may be considered. Liver transplantation remains ultima ratio. As studies on the precision of diagnostic methods are controversial, the characteristics of imaging for BCS are therefore summarized in this review on the basis of several illustrating case reports.

VueBox® for quantitative analysis of contrast-enhanced ultrasound in liver tumors1.

Dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US) enables quantification of tumor perfusion. VueBox is a platform independent external software using DICOM cine loops which objectively provides various DCE-US parameters of tumor vascularity. This review summaries its use for diagnosis and treatment monitoring of liver tumors. The existing literature provides evidence on the successful application of Vuebox based DCE-US for characterization and differential diagnosis of focal liver lesions, as well as on its use for monitoring of local ablative therapies and of modern systemic treatment in oncology.

Astrocyte Infection during Rabies Encephalitis Depends on the Virus Strain and Infection Route as Demonstrated by Novel Quantitative 3D Analysis of Cell Tropism.

Although conventional immunohistochemistry for neurotropic rabies virus (RABV) usually shows high preference for neurons, non-neuronal cells are also potential targets, and abortive astrocyte infection is considered a main trigger of innate immunity in the CNS. While in vitro studies indicated differences between field and less virulent lab-adapted RABVs, a systematic, quantitative comparison of astrocyte tropism in vivo is lacking. Here, solvent-based tissue clearing was used to measure RABV cell tropism in infected brains. Immunofluorescence analysis of 1 mm-thick tissue slices enabled 3D-segmentation and quantification of astrocyte and neuron infection frequencies. Comparison of three highly virulent field virus clones from fox, dog, and raccoon with three lab-adapted strains revealed remarkable differences in the ability to infect astrocytes in vivo. While all viruses and infection routes led to neuron infection frequencies between 7-19%, striking differences appeared for astrocytes. Whereas astrocyte infection by field viruses was detected independent of the inoculation route (8-27%), only one lab-adapted strain infected astrocytes route-dependently [0% after intramuscular (i.m.) and 13% after intracerebral (i.c.) inoculation]. Two lab-adapted vaccine viruses lacked astrocyte infection altogether (0%, i.c. and i.m.). This suggests a model in which the ability to establish productive astrocyte infection in vivo functionally distinguishes field and attenuated lab RABV strains.

The Effect of Magnification and Contrast on Reading Performance in Different Types of Simulated Low Vision.

Low vision therapy, such as magnifiers or contrast enhancement, is widely used. Scientific evidence proving its efficacy is scarce however. The objective of this study was to investigate whether the benefits of magnification and contrast enhancement depended on the origin of low vision. For this purpose we measured reading speed with artificially induced low vision in 12 healthy subjects in conditions of a simulated central scotoma, blurred vision and oscillopsia. Texts were either blurred, set in motion or blanked at the gaze position by using eye tracking and gaze contingent display. The simulated visual impairment was calibrated such that all types of low vision caused equal reading impairment. We then tested the effect of magnification and contrast enhancement among the different types of low vision. We found that reading speed improved with increasing magnification and with higher contrast in all conditions. The effect of magnification was significantly different in the three low vision conditions: The gain from magnification was highest in simulated blur and least in central scotoma. Magnification eventually led to near normal reading speed in all conditions. High contrast was less effective than high magnification and the effect of contrast enhancement was similar in all low vision conditions. From these results we conclude that the type of low vision determines the benefit that can be expected from magnification. Contrast enhancement leads to similar improved reading speed in all low vision types. We provide evidence that supports the use of low vision aids.

'Sciencenet'--towards a global search and share engine for all scientific knowledge.

SUMMARY: Modern biological experiments create vast amounts of data which are geographically distributed. These datasets consist of petabytes of raw data and billions of documents. Yet to the best of our knowledge, a search engine technology that searches and cross-links all different data types in life sciences does not exist. We have developed a prototype distributed scientific search engine technology, 'Sciencenet', which facilitates rapid searching over this large data space. By 'bringing the search engine to the data', we do not require server farms. This platform also allows users to contribute to the search index and publish their large-scale data to support e-Science. Furthermore, a community-driven method guarantees that only scientific content is crawled and presented. Our peer-to-peer approach is sufficiently scalable for the science web without performance or capacity tradeoff. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The free to use search portal web page and the downloadable client are accessible at: http://sciencenet.kit.edu. The web portal for index administration is implemented in ASP.NET, the 'AskMe' experiment publisher is written in Python 2.7, and the backend 'YaCy' search engine is based on Java 1.6.