Biology subjects

Chan, Y. H.

Publications and source records attributed to Chan, Y. H..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2019

Trimester-specific Zika virus infection affects placental responses in women

Zika virus (ZIKV) infection during pregnancy is associated with neurologic birth defects, but the effects on placental development are unclear. Full-term placentas from three women, each infected with ZIKV during specific pregnancy trimesters, were harvested for anatomic, immunologic and transcriptomic analysis. In this study, each woman exhibited a unique immune response, but they collectively diverged from healthy controls with raised IL-1RA, IP-10, EGF and RANTES expression, and neutrophil numbers during the acute infection phase. Although ZIKV NS3 antigens co-localized to placental Hofbauer cells, the placentas showed no anatomical defects. Transcriptomic analysis of samples from the placentas revealed that infection during trimester 1 caused a disparate cellular response centered on differential eIF2 signaling, mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative phosphorylation. These findings should translate to improve clinical prenatal screening procedures for virus-infected pregnant patients.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2019

Decoding brain functional connectivity implicated in AD and MCI

Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to extract high level features from neuroimaging data when classifying brain states. Identifying salient features characterizing brain states further refines the focus of clinicians and allows design of better diagnostic systems. We demonstrate this while performing classification of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of patients suffering from Alzheimers Disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and Cognitively Normal (CN) subjects from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). We use a 5-layer feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) to derive relevance scores of input features and show that an empirically selected subset of features improves accuracy scores for patient classification. The common distinctive salient brain regions were in the uncus and medial temporal lobe which closely correspond with previous studies. The proposed methods have cross-modal applications with several neuropsychiatric disorders.

neuroscience↗