Ultrasound-Guided Lumbar Transforaminal Epidural Injection: A Narrative Review.

Transforaminal epidural steroid injection is often administered to patients with radiculopathy under fluoroscopic guidance, although it has disadvantages of radiation hazards and requirement of a special area to perform the block. To avoid these disadvantages, ultrasound-guided transforaminal injection (USTFI) has recently been described and is continually developed. This review article describes the indexed articles published on USTFI and ultrasound-guided selective nerve block (SNRB) to evaluate current evidence on best approach to perform the block. Through literature search, eight articles and one case report on USTFI and five articles on ultrasoundguided SNRB were found. Most of the studies have utilized parasagittal orientation of curvilinear probe to perform the block. Nevertheless, with the present literature, it is difficult to come to any conclusion. Further studies with larger sample size and description of dye spread patterns are recommended to come to a more definite conclusion.

An improved three-factor authentication scheme for patient monitoring using WSN in remote health-care system.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE:  Wireless sensor network-based remote health-care systems are becoming popular day by day with the rapid growth of Internet technologies and the proliferation of Internet-based application. A remote health-care system always demands a flexible and secure mechanism since any misuse of health-care related data leads to the risk of a patient's life. To make patient-related information more secure, we further consider that the patient related all the communication must be anonymous and untraceable to prevent traffic analysis. This particular approach makes the healthcare system more secure and suitable for real-time scenario. METHODS:  Recently, a three-factor mutual authentication scheme in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is suggested by Challa et al. to deal with the security of the remote health-care system. They believe that their scheme is suitable and ensure the security of the remote health-care system. However, the authors of this article have found that their scheme suffers from sensor node capture attack; user identity reveals attack, session key leak attack, and message modification attack. Further, their scheme designs improper user revocation phase and re-registration phase, which produces the risk of illegal use of smartcard by a legitimate user. So, in this paper, the authors have given an enhanced mechanism for developing a three-factor secure mutual authentication scheme to attain effectively the security of the remote health-care system for patient monitoring. Further, the proper revocation and re-registration of users have been incorporated to support some additional securities in a case when the user lost his/her smartcard or smartcard is stolen. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS:  Testing with the BAN logic model affirms the accuracy of mutual authentication of the scheme designed in this paper. Also, the output of the AVISPA simulation depicts that the enhanced scheme efficiently tackle the active and passive attacks. Further, the comparative studies of our scheme with state-of-the-art schemes are also acceptable in terms of different security aspects.

Interaction of aliphatic cap group in inhibition of histone deacetylases by cyclic tetrapeptides.

Inhibitors of histone deacetylases (HDACs) are a promising class of anticancer agents that effect gene regulation. To know the interaction of aliphatic cap groups with HDACs, cyclic tetrapeptide and bicyclic peptide disulfide hybrids were synthesized without aromatic ring in their macrocyclic framework. Benzene ring of l-Phe in chlamydocin was replaced with several aliphatic amino acids and also a fused bicyclic tetrapeptide was synthesized by ring closing metathesis using Grubb's first generation catalyst. The inhibitory activities of the cyclic peptides against histone deacetylase enzymes were evaluated, which demonstrated most of them are interesting candidates as anticancer agents.

Discovery and characterization of a peptide motif that specifically recognizes a non-native conformation of human IgG induced by acidic pH conditions.

In therapeutic antibody preparation, acidic pH conditions are generally used for elution from Protein A affinity column of IgG or for its viral inactivation. Exposing IgG to low pH conditions induces conformational changes, leading to its functional damage or loss, although the mechanisms have not been fully elucidated. In this study using random peptide T7 phage display libraries, we isolated a unique and novel peptide motif that specifically recognized the non-native conformer (acid conformer) of human IgG that was generated by the low pH treatment, but not the native conformer. We examined the generation conditions and biochemical properties of acid conformer using the peptide motif as an affinity ligand. The acid conformer was easily generated at acidic pH (25 degrees C). The peptides isolated here could contribute to the elucidation of the mechanisms of antibody dysfunction or aggregation during acid exposure as well as storage of human IgG.