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Glossary of scientific and technical terms in bioengineering and biological engineering
Published in Megh R. Goyal, Scientific and Technical Terms in Bioengineering and Biological Engineering, 2018
Glomerulosclerosis describes the scarring that occurs within the kidneys in the small balls of tiny blood vessels called the glomeruli. The glomeruli assist the kidneys in filtering urine from the blood.
Bioartificial organs
Published in Ronald L. Fournier, Basic Transport Phenomena in Biomedical Engineering, 2017
As shown earlier in Figure 8.3, the functional unit of the kidney is called the nephron. Recall that it consists of two major components, the glomerulus and the renal tubule. The glomerulus is responsible primarily for the selective ultrafiltration of waste products from the blood. It must perform this waste removal function and at the same time retain essential blood components such as albumin. The glomerular filtrate that is formed then passes through the various segments of the renal tubule. The specialized segments of the renal tubule regulate the amount of urine that is formed and its final solute composition. The renal tubule cells therefore have the ability to control both the fluid reabsorption rate and the transport rate of an individual solute. This is accomplished in such a manner so as to maintain homeostasis with regard to the body’s fluid volume and overall composition. Because of the chemical sensing and selective transport ability of the renal tubule, it is unlikely that this sophisticated function could ever be reproduced artificially. Accordingly, artificial kidneys or hemodialyzers will primarily function at the level of simply removing waste products by dialysis.
Applications of Pluripotent Stem Cells in the Therapy and Modeling of Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases
Published in Deepak A. Lamba, Patient-Specific Stem Cells, 2017
Suranjit Mukherjee, Shuibing Chen
In diabetic nephropathy, damages to microvessels of the kidney glomerulus lead to the leak of proteins into the urine and defective filtration of the blood, culminating in complete renal failure. While drugs are currently on the market to help slow the progression of renal failure, kidney transplants are eventually needed for end-stage renal failure. Much like the difficulty in directly accessing and studying retinal degradation in diabetic patients, the location of the kidney glomerulus makes it difficult for it to be directly studied without the use of invasive procedures on patients. Therefore, there is a hope to use iPSC-based disease modeling using hESC/iPSC-derived kidney cell types such as mesangial cells and podocytes to better understand diabetic renal failure, as well as to provide transplant opportunities for patients in need of improved kidney function.
Uncertainty-aware membranous nephropathy classification: A Monte-Carlo dropout approach to detect how certain is the model
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 2023
Paulo Chagas, Luiz Souza, Izabelle Pontes, Rodrigo Calumby, Michele Angelo, Angelo Duarte, Washington Lc-Dos Santos, Luciano Oliveira
Membranous nephropathy (MN) is a common autoimmune glomerular disease, usually associated with the cause of nephrotic syndrome in adults. The main characteristic of MN is the large quantity of immune complex sediments on the epithelial cells, visually indicated by a thickening in the glomerular basement membrane. Figure 1 depicts a normal glomerulus (left) and another one with MN (right), where we can identify the presence of thickened membranes (boundaries of white areas inside the right glomerulus). Distinguishing these visual characteristics is not a trivial task, demanding trained pathologists that do not always reach a consensus. This way, automatic classification approaches can aid pathologists in the decision-making pipeline. By developing deep learning models, computer vision applications have significantly advanced through time and its full potential for diagnostic-driven studies is still being investigated (Lit- jens et al. 2017).
Mouse-to-human transfer learning for glomerulus segmentation
Published in Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 2023
Luiz Souza, Jefferson Silva, Paulo Chagas, Angelo Duarte, Washington LC-dos Santos, Luciano Oliveira
Among many kidney structures, this work focuses on the glomerulus, a roughly spherical network formed by tiny blood capillaries responsible for blood filtration. Given its primary function, the location and segmentation of glomeruli are valuable information extracted from a kidney WSI. Since localising glomeruli is time-consuming and error-prone, a promising alternative arises with the development of an automatic glomerular segmentation approach, providing a fast and reliable supportive tool for the pathologists’ decision-making pipeline. In this context, we highlight the challenge of gathering a large amount of annotated data, which can be even harder to obtain if one considers human biopsies. From thatthis, a question naturally arises: is it possible to segment human glomerulus from WSIs by using a model trained with just mouse glomerular images?
Coordination polymers constructed from 5-nitro-1,2,3-benzenetricarboxylic acid: crystal structures and treatment effect on nephrotic syndrome by regulating intestinal flora and recovering Th17/Treg balances
Published in Inorganic and Nano-Metal Chemistry, 2020
Tingting Qiu, Xin Yi, Lulu Xu, Lifeng Wang, Xihui Hu, Xiaozhong Li
Nephrotic syndrome (NS) is a group of clinical syndromes in which the permeability of the glomerular basement membrane is increased by a variety of causes, resulting in the loss of large amounts of protein from the plasma through the urine.[1,2] NS is a common chronic kidney disease and a major primary disease that could induce the production of renal failure. The etiology and pathogenesis of nephrotic syndrome are complex and involve many factors such as infection, autoimmunity, drugs, genetics, and the environment. The etiology and pathogenesis of NS are still unclear.[3] Although glucocorticoids and immunosuppressive agents can alleviate the symptoms, the side effects and the high recurrence rate limit its application, which may eventually develop into chronic glomerular sclerosis.