Analytical Chemistry
Top medRxiv preprints most likely to be published in this journal, ranked by match strength.
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We present a new method for lung pathology detection in blood plasma, including lung cancer staging. Raman spectroscopy uses inelastically scattered laser light to obtain molecular information in a reagent-free manner. Obtaining Raman spectral data from liquid samples has long proven challenging, but we have developed a novel tool for obtaining spectra from 60 l liquid samples within two minutes: Raman of Well-based Samples (ROWS). With a low-cost ROWS device, we analyzed 372 blood plasma sample...
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BackgroundFatal insulin intoxication remains difficult to diagnose because insulin undergoes rapid degradation after death, limiting the reliability of direct biochemical measurements. This creates diagnostic uncertainty when objective molecular confirmation of insulin excess are required. We hypothesised that insulin excess induces systemic metabolic alterations that persist beyond insulin degradation and can be captured using postmortem metabolomics in a forensic setting. MethodsHigh-resoluti...
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Autologous CAR-T cell therapy has demonstrated remarkable clinical efficacy in hematologic malignancies, yet its broader application remains limited by complex, labor-intensive manufacturing and inconsistent product quality. We describe a novel microfluidic cell separation platform based on Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD), integrated into a fully automated, closed-system instrument (Curate System), capable of processing full leukopacks in under one hour. Compared to Ficoll(R)-based dens...
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Blood-based biomarkers are central to diagnostics, yet current approaches depend on invasive sampling and centralized laboratory infrastructure. At the same time, womens reproductive health remains severely under-monitored: most clinically relevant biomarkers are rarely measured outside fertility clinics, leaving millions without accessible, continuous insight into their reproductive lifespan. Anti-Mullerian hormone (AMH), a key indicator of ovarian reserve and overall reproductive function, sti...
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BackgroundDengue virus (DENV) appears to manipulate several cellular metabolic pathways to permit its replication and immune evasion in the host. Here, we employed high-resolution mass spectrometry (HR-MS) to investigate the serum metabolomic landscape of clinical DENV infection. MethodsSerum specimens from primary dengue (n=11), secondary dengue (n=9) samples, and healthy controls (n=10) were used for untargeted and targeted metabolomic quantification on a Waters Xevo G2-XS QTof Mass Spectrome...
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Frequent blood testing is a routine but burdensome reality for many children, particularly those with chronic, rare, or medically complex conditions. Repeated clinic, hospital, and laboratory visits can disrupt family life, increase stress for children and caregivers, and limit access to timely monitoring and research participation. Despite advances in pediatric care, blood collection has remained largely tethered to in-person clinical settings. This study validates a new model: safe, effective,...
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This small pilot feasibility study shows that reverse phase protein array (RPPA) technology is a useful tool for targeted proteomics analysis in human ovarian follicular fluid. RPPA supplements mass spectrometry approaches that are currently used by providing functional signal transduction data that drive cellular biology. Herein, we present the first report of using RPPA in follicular fluid to elucidate protein signaling pathways. The results show potential associations between follicular fluid...
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Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) is a central biomarker for long-term glycemic control and diabetes management, traditionally quantified using laboratory-intensive chromatographic or immunochemical assays. As the global burden of diabetes continues to rise, there is growing interest in alternative, scalable approaches capable of rapid biochemical assessment. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy offers a reagent-free method that captures molecular signatures of protein glycation, but transla...
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Our previous studies identified three microRNAs (miR-92a-1-5p, miR-375 and miR-148a-3p) potentially associated with prostate cancer (PCa), particularly in advanced stages such as bone-metastatic PCa. To evaluate their clinical diagnostic utility, we isolated extracellular vesicles (EVs) from the plasma of patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and PCa (including localized and bone-metastatic disease). The absolute quantification of these three miRNAs within plasma EVs was performed usi...
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Pathology classification of cancer tumor subtypes and benign tumors can be difficult due to cellular heterogeneity and similar morphological features. Renal Cell Cancer (RCC) poses a major challenge for uropathologists as advanced RCC is often incidentally diagnosed with complex histological characteristics. We hypothesised that molecular profiling of RCC and benign tumor specimen by mass spectrometry with machine learning methods enable accurate tumor classification and identification of candid...
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Influenza A, Influenza B, SARS-CoV-2, Respiratory Syncytial Virus and other respiratory pathogens are an ongoing public health concern. The ability to rapidly identify these viruses early in infection is essential for effective treatment and outbreak control. The AMDI Fast PCR Mini Respiratory Panel (MRP) incorporates sample preparation and real-time RT-PCR for detection of Flu A, Flu B, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV from anterior nasal swab (ANS) specimens in less than 10 minutes at the point of care. We ...
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Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of gynecological cancers and surgery is often necessary for a final diagnosis. Benign cases could be managed more conservatively, avoiding the risks and complications associated with surgery, if accurate diagnostic biomarkers existed. Underlying differences between circulating protein biomarkers and tumor gene expression also restricts interpretation and prioritization of potential biomarkers for diagnosis and potential drug targets. Here, high-throughput affinity...
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BackgroundVision Foundation Models (VFM) have emerged as a promising approach for computational pathology, offering scalable feature representations that may reduce labelled-data requirements and improve robustness to variation in tissue preparation and digitisation. However, VFM decoder and dataset size requirements as well as the performance under real-world domain shifts remain unclear. MethodsWe evaluated six contemporary VFMs on a protocol-variant Prostate Cancer (PCa) dataset comprising 3...
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Stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) are promising biomarkers for predicting therapeutic outcomes in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), with higher sTIL levels correlating with improved chemotherapy response and survival outcomes. Currently, sTILs are manually evaluated by pathologists, which is prone to inter-reader variability. In this study, we have developed an AI-driven TIL segmentation pipeline to process entire diagnostic hematoxylin-and-eosin-stained whole slide images for r...
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Protein expression within oncogenic or suppressive pathways is a hallmark indicator of oncogenesis. While traditional AI models in digital pathology attempt to predict singular proteins, there is a need to predict the downstream expression of proteins to indicate the propagation of signals. RNA expression provides novel information, but does not provide information about the downstream propagation of protein signals or whether those signals are functional. Using Reverse Phase Protein Array (RPPA...
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Microbial keratitis is a sight-threatening corneal infection with varying etiological agents, primarily bacteria and fungi. Assessing and contrasting the virulence factors of microorganisms isolated from a non-contact lens-associated keratitis (NCLAK) and contact lens-associated keratitis (CLAK) is the goal of the current investigation. Samples were collected from over 60 patients and analysed using standard microbiological techniques, including culture, Gram staining, KOH mount, biochemical tes...
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Digitizing large histopathology archives requires processing millions of scanned whole slide images that must be validated rapidly. Automated organ-of-origin classification can accelerate quality control and enable early detection of mislabeled specimens. We developed a deep learning model that classifies the organ of origin from H&E-stained slides using a single low-resolution thumbnail per slide in under one second. For training, we used thumbnails from 16,624 slides from the TCGA and CPTAC ar...
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Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) poses significant clinical challenges due to its rising incidence and potential for metastasis. Histopathologic risk stratification is further limited by substantial inter-observer variability. Unsupervised AI approaches based on content-based image retrieval offer scalable and interpretable decision support for diagnostic pathology. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of image retrieval within histopathology atlases to stratify cSCC tumo...
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IntroductionNon-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) represents the most severe form of male infertility. Current clinical tools have limited ability to predict sperm production or guide surgical sperm retrieval. Conventional B-mode ultrasound provides qualitative grayscale images and cannot characterize testicular microstructure relevant to spermatogenesis. Quantitative ultrasound (QUS) provides objective parameters from raw radiofrequency data, which quantitatively measure tissue heterogeneity. We hy...
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We evaluated the BOSCH Vivalytic MPXV assay using serial dilutions of monkeypox virus clade Ib, a new offshoot of clade I identified in 2023. The assay detected viral DNA down to [~]100 copies/mL demonstrating comparable analytical sensitivity to our in-house reference PCR and to other commercial platform-based mpox molecular assays.