Dual-Stimulus Programmed Multiphase Separation and Organization in Coacervate Droplets.

Stimuli-responsive (multiphase) coacervates deserve significant attention as cell-like entities that can adapt to their environment and undergo morphological reconfiguration. In this study, a tandem-triggered transition system is presented that enables the transformation of single-phase coacervates into multiphase structures through the sequential application of two external stimuli: pH and salt concentration. A polyanion containing acid-labile amide bond is incorporated into the membrane-less coacervates.

Radiomics Quality Score 2.0: towards radiomics readiness levels and clinical translation for personalized medicine.

Radiomics is a tool for medical imaging analysis that could have a relevant role in precision oncology by offering precise quantitative support for clinical decision-making. The Radiomics Quality Score (RQS) is a tool developed to assess the rigour of radiomics studies that has now been widely adopted by researchers. Although RQS version 1.

Item selection for the development and validation of a revised classification criteria for adult and juvenile idiopathic inflammatory myopathies: MyoROC project.

Objective: A revision of the 2017 EULAR-ACR myositis classification criteria, namely EULAR-ACR funded Myositis Revision of Classification (MyoROC) project, is currently underway involving a large international group of experts. In the first phase of this project, we identified additional items to be tested in the criteria.

Methods: We distributed an electronic survey to International Myositis Assessment and Clinical Studies (IMACS) members to identify new items.

Left atrial epicardial adipose tissue volume quantification by CMR aids identification of patients at low risk for left atrial cardiomyopathy.

Background And Aims: The pathophysiologic concept of atrial fibrillation (AF) has evolved towards defining atrial cardiomyopathy, recognizing inflammation-mediated remodeling of the left atrium (LA) as a source for arrhythmogenesis. One feature of atrial cardiomyopathy is the development of fibrosis, with low-voltage zones (LVZ) identified by invasive electroanatomic mapping as an accepted surrogate parameter. A mediator of pathological remodeling is epicardial adipose tissue (EAT).

GeMTeX's De-Identification in Action: Lessons Learned & Devil's Details.

Introduction: In 2024, the GeMTeX project launched the largest ever de-identification campaign for German-language clinical reports, and, as a pilot study, published GraSCCoPHI, the first de-identified German-language gold standard corpus of synthetic discharge summaries.

Methods: GeMTeX's de-identification workflow is described here - including annotation tool management and, pre-annotation experience, such as assembling and training annotation groups and the evolution of guidelines.

Results: We present the project's progress in the first year with respect to de-identification efforts and the challenges we faced during the rollout at six hospital sites in four German states.

From Broad Consent to Patient Engagement: A Framework for Consent Management and Study Oversight.

Introduction: The German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) promotes the use of routine clinical data for research, supported by the broad consent framework to ensure patient engagement. This work proposes a data management process and reference infrastructure to improve transparency by enabling patients to track their consent history and data use in research.

Methods: We analyzed the data provision process at the University Hospital Dresden (UKD) to identify roles and data flows relevant to secondary data use under broad consent.

Systematic Evaluation of Manufacturer Disclosure Statements for Medical Device Security (MDS2) to Strengthen Hospital OT Security Measures - Lessons Learned.

Introduction: The growing number of connected medical devices in hospitals poses serious operational technology (OT) security challenges. Effective countermeasures require a structured analysis of the communication interfaces and security configurations of individual devices.

State Of The Art: Although Manufacturer Disclosure Statements for Medical Device Security (MDS2, Version 2019) offer relevant information, they are rarely integrated into cybersecurity workflows.

Towards a FHIR Specification for Research in Ophthalmology: Designing the EyeMatics Core Data Set for Multi-Centric Data Integration.

Introduction: EyeMatics (Eye disease "treated" with interoperable medical informatics) is a clinical use case in Germany's Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). The objective of EyeMatics is to improve the understanding of the treatment effects of intravitreal injections, the most frequent procedure to treat retinal diseases. To achieve this, as part of the efforts, medical data of multiple hospital sites must be integrated into a local FHIR repositories using a common set of FHIR profiles.

Brainwide Analysis of Functional Connectivity Patterns in Specific Phobia and Its Treatment.

Background: Specific phobia (SP) is a prevalent mental disorder for which exposure-based treatments are the most effective. Little is known about the intrinsic functional connectivity of SP and its modification by treatment. While previous studies were limited to a priori-defined brain regions, we used connectome-wide analyses to capture the full extent of altered functional connectivity.

ATF6 activation alters colonic lipid metabolism causing tumour-associated microbial adaptation.

Endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein responses contribute to cancer development, with activating transcription factor 6 (ATF6) involved in microbiota-dependent tumorigenesis. Here we show the clinical relevance of ATF6 in individuals with early-onset and late colorectal cancer, and link ATF6 signalling to changes in lipid metabolism and intestinal microbiota. Transcriptional analysis in intestinal epithelial cells of ATF6 transgenic mice (nATF6) identifies bacteria-specific changes in cellular metabolism enriched for fatty acid biosynthesis.

Enabling secure and self determined health data sharing and consent management.

Digital health tools generate vast sensitive data not only in clinic but also from apps and wearables. Effective consent management builds trust, increasing willingness for data sharing. We present a novel early-stage conceptual framework, reviewing technologies like blockchain, self-sovereign identity, and de-identified tokens for integration into a consent management system to enable tracking of consent and data utilization.

Molecular Simulations with a Pretrained Neural Network and Universal Pairwise Force Fields.

Machine Learning Force Fields (MLFFs) promise to enable general molecular simulations that can simultaneously achieve efficiency, accuracy, transferability, and scalability for diverse molecules, materials, and hybrid interfaces. A key step toward this goal has been made with the GEMS approach to biomolecular dynamics [Unke et al., Sci.

Medical Expert Knowledge Meets AI to Enhance Symptom Checker Performance for Rare Disease Identification in Fabry Disease: Mixed Methods Study.

Background: Rare diseases, which affect millions of people worldwide, pose a major challenge, as it often takes years before an accurate diagnosis can be made. This delay results in substantial burdens for patients and health care systems, as misdiagnoses lead to inadequate treatment and increased costs. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered symptom checkers (SCs) present an opportunity to flag rare diseases earlier in the diagnostic work-up.

Profiling autoantibodies at baseline and during immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy of renal cell carcinoma patients-exploratory results from TITAN-RCC.

Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) administration profoundly promotes T-cell-mediated antitumor effects, but also frequently causes the development of immune-related adverse events (irAEs) in cancer patients. Previous studies explored the relevance of autoantibodies as predictive biomarkers for irAE development and treatment response, leading to conflicting results. To gain novel insights, we determined the presence of autoantibodies and their predictive value in ICI-treated renal cell carcinoma (RCC) patients.

Limited impact of real-world evidence in medical oncology: How can AI turn the tide.

Real-world evidence (RWE), derived from real-world health data (RWD) generated during routine clinical practice, is increasingly recognized as a valuable complement to traditional clinical trial data in medical oncology. While randomized controlled trials remain the gold standard for evidence-based medicine, they often face limitations due to rising costs, ethical constraints, and the inability to cover all treatment combinations and diverse patient populations. The current impact of RWE is limited by several challenges, including data inconsistency, quality issues, and burdensome data collection processes.

Synthesis of Tetragonal BaTiO Nanoparticles in Methanol.

BaTiO (BT) is an essential material for many applications due to its dielectric, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric properties; nevertheless, it has been reported to possess a "critical size" in the nanoscale below which its outstanding properties are lost and the paraelectric cubic phase is stabilized at room temperature instead of the tetragonal phase. This value depends on multiple factors, mostly resulting from the synthesis route and conditions. Especially, internal stresses are known to promote the loss of tetragonality.

A novel signal peptide toolbox for optimized heterologous expression of yeast pheromones in Bacillus subtilis.

Optimising downstream processes and achieving high product yields are essential for cost-effective and scalable bioproduction, with efficient protein secretion being a critical factor in industrial applications. To address this, we leveraged the widely utilised Sec secretion system of Bacillus subtilis to enhance heterologous protein secretion. Given the lack of reliable in silico tools for predicting optimal combinations of Sec system signal peptides (SPs) with a protein of interest (POI), we aimed to optimise the secretion efficiency of SP-POI pairings by a toolbox approach.

Beyond hostility: exploring facial emotion recognition biases in youths with conduct disorder.

Facial emotion recognition (FER) biases refer to systematic tendencies to recognize specific emotions when processing facial expressions. In youths with conduct disorder (CD), who are characterized by highly impairing antisocial behavior, research on FER biases has focused on hostile attribution biases. This work has shown that youths with CD perceive ambiguous social cues as angry.

Roadmap for Photonics with 2D Materials.

Triggered by advances in atomic-layer exfoliation and growth techniques, along with the identification of a wide range of extraordinary physical properties in self-standing films consisting of one or a few atomic layers, two-dimensional (2D) materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), and other van der Waals (vdW) crystals now constitute a broad research field expanding in multiple directions through the combination of layer stacking and twisting, nanofabrication, surface-science methods, and integration into nanostructured environments. Photonics encompasses a multidisciplinary subset of those directions, where 2D materials contribute remarkable nonlinearities, long-lived and ultraconfined polaritons, strong excitons, topological and chiral effects, susceptibility to external stimuli, accessibility, robustness, and a completely new range of photonic materials based on layer stacking, gating, and the formation of moiré patterns. These properties are being leveraged to develop applications in electro-optical modulation, light emission and detection, imaging and metasurfaces, integrated optics, sensing, and quantum physics across a broad spectral range extending from the far-infrared to the ultraviolet, as well as enabling hybridization with spin and momentum textures of electronic band structures and magnetic degrees of freedom.

Plant traits and associated ecological data from global change experiments and climate gradients in Norway.

Plant functional trait-based approaches are powerful tools to assess the consequences of global environmental changes for plant ecophysiology, population and community ecology, ecosystem functioning, and landscape ecology. Here, we present data capturing these ecological dimensions from grazing, nitrogen addition, and warming experiments conducted along a 821 m a.s.

Ericoid mycorrhizal fungal metacommunity facilitates closely related Rhododendron species coexistence.

The structural and ecological significance of ericoid mycorrhizal (ErM) fungi is well recognized. Yet, it remains unknown whether the coexistence of ericaceous plants is facilitated by their symbioses with ErM fungi. Here, we use Rhododendron (Ericaceae) as a model to investigate how phylogenetic and functional limiting similarity, or facilitation through ErM fungal metacommunity, influences their co-occurrence in mountain ecosystems.

Multi-omic identification of perineurial hyperplasia and lipid-associated nerve macrophages in human polyneuropathies.

Diseases affecting multiple peripheral nerves, termed polyneuropathies (PNPs), are common, mechanistically heterogeneous, and their causes are challenging to identify. Here, we integrated single-nucleus transcriptomics of peripheral nerves from 33 human PNP patients and four controls (365,708 nuclei) with subcellular spatial transcriptomics. We identified nerve cell type markers and uncovered unexpected heterogeneity of perineurial cells.

Endocannabinoid and N-acylethanolamine concentrations in hair of female patients with posttraumatic stress disorder - associations with clinical symptoms and outcomes following multimodal trauma-focused inpatient treatment.

While psychotherapeutic treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show in general good responses in affected individuals, 30-40% of patients show limited improvement. On a biological level, the endocannabinoid system of the body may play a role in the aftermath of trauma, in PTSD, and in extinction processes. This study is a secondary analysis of a randomized-controlled trial including patients with PTSD over the course of trauma-focused inpatient treatment.

A Magnetically Transformable Twisting Millirobot for Cargo Delivery at Low Reynolds Number.

Inspired by bacteria flagella, miniature robots often use a helical shape to propel themselves in fluids at low Reynolds numbers. The helical microstructures in the robots are often rigid and are made by advanced 3D micro-/nanofabrication techniques. However, it remains challenging to fabricate these 3D helical structures without complicated machinery.