On August 17, The editors at USA Today had a tough call to make — whether to lead the paper with the fact that Elvis Presley has been dead for 25 years — or go with the story about the exotic virus sweeping west faster than wildfires. Anxiety won out over nostalgia, with Elvis relegated to the cover story in the Weekend section. 'West Nile outbreak expected to worsen,' read the top headline in ...

Cluster analysis has been widely used in various disciplines such as pattern recognition, computer vision, and data mining. In this work we investigate the applicability of two spatial clustering algorithms, namely DBSCAN and STING, to a new problem domain: Color segmentation of skin lesion (tumor) images. Automated segmentation is a key step in the computerized analysis of skin lesion images s...

Cyclic GMP-AMP (cGAMP) synthase (cGAS, a.k.a. MB21D1), a cytosolic DNA sensor, catalyzes formation of the second messenger 2'3'-cGAMP that activates the stimulator of interferon genes (STING) signaling. How the cGAS activity is modulated remains largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that sentrin/SUMO-specific protease 7 (SENP7) interacted with and potentiated cGAS activation. The small ubiquiti...

Two different stages should be considered in the management of bee and wasp stings to the eye. The first is the acute stage of activity of the specific insect venom on the structures the eye. The reaction of the eye to the particular insult is considered here in regard to the anterior and posterior segments of the eye. The second stage is that of the retained intraocular foreign body, the inert...

Fibrosis, driven by inflammation, marks the transition from benign to progressive stages of chronic liver diseases. Although inflammation promotes fibrogenesis, it is not known whether other events, such as hepatocyte death, are required for the development of fibrosis. Interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) regulates hepatocyte apoptosis and production of type I IFNs. In the liver, IRF3 is acti...

DR. XIAO CHI ZHANG: A 92-year-old woman with dementia was brought to the emergency department (ED) from a nursing home for headache and “left eye bulge” after falling backward, striking her head on the ground. While the review of systems was limited due to the patient’s baseline dementia, she only reported occipital headache, left knee pain and denied any eye pain, changes in her vision and sta...