Virtual assistants are involved in the daily activities of humans such as managing calendars, making appointments, and providing wake-up calls. They provide a conversational service to customers around-the-clock and make their daily life manageable. With this emerging trend, many well-known companies launched their own virtual assistants that manage the daily routine activities of customers. In the healthcare sector, virtual medical assistants also provide a list of relevant diseases linked to a specific symptom. Due to low accuracy and uncertainty, these generated recommendations are untrusted and may lead to hypochondriasis. In this study, we proposed a Medical Instructed Real-time Assistant (MIRA) that listens to the user’s chief complaint and predicts a specific disease. Instead of informing about the medical condition, the user is referred to a nearby appropriate medical specialist. We designed an architecture for MIRA that considers the limitations of existing virtual medical assistants such as weak authentication, lack of understanding multiple intent statements about a specific medical condition, and uncertain diagnosis recommendations. To implement the designed architecture, we collected the chief complaints along with the dialogue corpora of real patients. Then, we manually validated these data under the supervision of medical specialists. We then used these data for natural language understanding, disease identification, and appropriate response generation. For the prototype version of MIRA, we considered the cases of glaucoma (eye disease) and diabetes (an autoimmune disease) only. The performance measure of MIRA was evaluated in terms of accuracy (89%), precision (90%), sensitivity (89.8%), specificity (94.9%), and F-measure (89.8%). The task completion was calculated using Cohen’s Kappa $(k=0.848)$ that categorizes MIRA as ‘Almost Perfect’. Furthermore, the voice-based authentication identifies the user effectively and prevent against masquerading attack. Simultaneously, the user experience shows relatively good results in all aspects based on the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) benchmark data. The experimental results show that MIRA efficiently predicts a disease based on chief complaints and supports the user in decision making.

To describe the protective effect of anthocyanin from black soybean in human lens epithelial cell line (HLE-B3) under H2O2-induced oxidative stress. Cytotoxicity of anthocyanin and H2O2 were determined by Cell Counting Kit-8 test. Viability of HLE-B3 cells under various H2O2 concentration (0, 50 and 100 μM) with or without pretreatment of anthocyanin (0, 50, 100 and 200 μg/ml) was measured. After quantifying the percentage of the apoptosis by Annexin V assay and APO-BrdU TUNEL assay, we conducted western blot and immunostaining of apoptosis-related molecules; Bcl2, BAD, BAX, p53 and caspase-3. To confirm the effect of anthocyanin on an ex vivo model, its effect on cultures of the lenses of porcine were examined. Anthocyanin reduced cell death of HLE-B3 under H2O2-induced oxidative stress in a dose-dependent manner. In Annexin V analysis, anthocyanin protected HLE-B3 cells from apoptosis. H2O2 increased the expression of BAX, BAD, p53 and caspase-3 in a time-dependent manner, those of which anthocyanin significantly decreased. On the other hand, Bcl2 was increased from anthocyanin-treated lens cells. And in anthocyanin-treated lens organ culture, transparency was maintained. This study showed that anthocyanin protects HLE-B3 cells under oxidative stress from apoptosis, and the mechanism of the effect is related to the intrinsic pathway of apoptosis. Anthocyanin has a potential in prevention of cataract.

Purpose: To evaluate the effect of dexamethasone intravitreal implant for macular edema (ME) following branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) in Korean patients. Methods: We performed a prospective, open-label, multicenter study of 71 patients with ME for < 3 months. Retreatment was allowed ≥4 months from the last injection. Results: At 6 and 12 months, mean ± SD best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) improvement was 18.6 ± 12.9 and 15.3 ± 15.0 letters, respectively. Approximately 70% of maximum treatment response was observed after 1 week. Over the 12-month period, 32 and 49% of patients received 1 and 3 injections, respectively, with a mean ± SD interval of 20.0 ± 5.0 weeks. Patients who required 3 injections had higher central retinal thickness (CRT) and larger macular nonperfusion at baseline compared to those requiring only 1 injection. Adverse events included increased intraocular pressure (35%) and newly diagnosed cataract (16%). Conclusions: Intravitreal dexamethasone treatment with an interval of ≥4 months provides rapid and significantly better improvement in BCVA and CRT in patients with BRVO-associated ME.

Although blockchain is acknowledged as one of the most important technologies to lead the fourth industrial revolution, major technical challenges regarding security breach and privacy issues remain. This issue is particularly sensitive in applied medical fields where personal health information is handled within the network. In addition, contemporary blockchain-converged solutions do not consider restricted medical data regulations that are still obstacles in many countries worldwide. This implies a crucial need for a system or solution that is suitable for the healthcare sector. Therefore, this article proposes the development of a dynamic consent medical blockchain system called DynamiChain, based on a ruleset management algorithm for handling health examination data. Moreover, medical blockchain-related studies were systematically reviewed to prove the novelty of DynamiChain. The proposed system was implemented in a scenario where the exercise management healthcare company provided health management services based on data obtained from the data provider’s hospital. The proposed research is envisioned to provide a widely compatible blockchain medical system that could be applied in future healthcare fields.

Purpose: To determine the impact of β-1,3-glucan isolated from Euglena gracilis on corneal epithelial cell migration and on wound healing in a rat alkali burn model. Methods: Immortalized human corneal epithelial cells (HCECs) were cultured in media with 50, 100 and 200 μg/mL laminarin (β-1,3- and β-1,6-glucans), β-1,3-glucan and hyaluronic acid (HA)-conjugated β-1,3-glucan; Dulbecco’s modified Eagle’s medium (DMEM)/nutrient mixture F-12 (negative control) and serum containing DMEM/nutrient mixture F-12 (positive control). Migration assays were conducted via the manual scraping of HCECs. Next, alkali injuries were induced using 1 N NaOH in 40 eyes of 40 Sprague-Dawley male rats. The injury-only group (n = 10) received topical phosphate-buffered saline four times a day for 2 d. The study groups received 200 μg/mL topical laminarin (n = 10), β-1,3-glucan (n = 10) and β-1,3-glucan HA (n = 10). Using slit-lamp biomicroscopy, injured corneas were evaluated in terms of re-epithelialization and opacity, and tissue sections were histologically analyzed. Results: Migration assay rates were enhanced as laminarin and β-1,3-glucan increased, compared to negative control cells (all p < 0.05). In the comparison between β-1,3-glucan and its HA conjugate form, β-1,3-glucan–HA showed more enhanced migration rate than β-1,3-glucan (p < 0.05). In rat alkali burn model, wound-healing ratio was greatest in β-1,3-glucan–HA groups (96.0 ± 4.1%), followed by β-1,3-glucan (86.0 ± 6.5%), laminarin (67.0 ± 7.5%) and injury-only group (54.0 ± 6.5%) (p < 0.0001; ANOVA). The opacity score was also lowest in β-1,3-glucan–HA groups (3.0 ± 0.75), followed by β-1,3-glucan (3.4 ± 0.5), laminarin (3.7 ± 0.8) and injury-only group (4.7 ± 0.46) (p < 0.0001; ANOVA) Histologically, relatively fewer polymorphonuclear leukocytes infiltrated the corneal stroma in the β-1,3-glucan and β-1,3-glucan–HA groups, compared to the injury-only group. Conclusions: β-1,3-Glucan, particularly when conjugated with HA, promoted epithelial wound healing in vitro and suppressed the acute inflammatory reaction in corneal alkali burns.