Celiac disease markers in patients with liver diseases: A single center large scale screening study

AIM:To study the coincidence of celiac disease, we tested its serological markers in patients with various liver diseases.METHODS:Large-scale screening of serum antibodies against tissue transglutaminase (tTG), and deamidated gliadin using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and serum antibodies against endomysium using immunohistochemistry, in patients with various liver diseases (n = 962) and patients who underwent liver transplantation (OLTx, n = 523) was performed. The expression of tTG in liver tissue samples of patients simultaneously suffering from celiac disease and from various liver diseases using immunohistochemistry was carried out. The final diagnosis of celiac disease was confirmed by histological analysis of small-intestinal biopsy. RESULTS:We found that 29 of 962 patients (3%) with liver diseases and 5 of 523 patients (0.8%) who underwent OLTx were seropositive for IgA and IgG anti-tTG antibodies. However, celiac disease was biopsy-diagnosed in 16 patients:4 with autoimmune hepatitis type Ⅰ, 3 with Wilson's disease, 3 with celiac hepatitis, 2 with primary sclerosing cholangitis, 1 with primary biliary cirrhosis, 1 with Budd-Chiari syndrome, 1 with toxic hepatitis, and 1 with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. Unexpectedly, the highest prevalence of celiac disease was found in patients with Wilson's disease (9.7%), with which it is only rarely associated. On the other hand, no OLTx patients were diagnosed with celiac disease in our study. A pilot study of the expression of tTG in liver tissue using immunohistochemistry documented the overexpression of this molecule in endothelial cells and periportal hepatocytes of patients simultaneously suffering from celiac disease and toxic hepatitis, primary sclerosing cholangitis or autoimmune hepatitis type Ⅰ. CONCLUSION:We suggest that screening for celiac disease may be beneficial not only in patients with associated liver diseases, but also in patients with Wilson's disease.

Teaching a robot to use electric tools with regrasp planning

This study presents a straightforward method to teach robots to use tools.Teaching robots is crucial in quickly deploying and reconfiguring robots in next-generation factories.Conventional methods require third-party systems like wearable devices or complicated vision system to capture,analyse,and map human grasps,motion,and tool poses to robots.These systems assume lots of experience from their users.Unlike the conventional methods,this study does not involve learning human motion and skills.Instead,it only learns the object goal poses from the human user whilst employs regrasp planning to generate robot motion.The method is most suitable for a robot to learn the usage of electric tools that can be operated by simply switching on and off.The proposed method is validated using a dual-arm robot with hand-mounted cameras and several tools.Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust,feasible,and simple to teach robots.It can find a collision-free and kino-dynamic feasible grasp sequences and motion trajectories when the goal pose is reachable.The method allows the robot to automatically choose placements or handover considering the surrounding environment as intermediate states to change the pose of the tool and use tools following human demonstrations.