Publicaties

Objective: Cost-of-illness studies in Adult Congenital Heart Disease (ACHD) have mainly been limited to hospitalizations. This is the first paper to provide a comprehensive overview from a societal perspective including inpatient and outpatient medical costs, and absenteeism- and unemployment-related societal costs. Methods: A retrospective longitudinal (2006-2015) database analysis was performed in Belgium combining administrative and clinical ...

Precipitation in mountain regions is highly variable and poorly measured, posing important challenges to water resource management. Traditional methods to estimate precipitation include in-situ gauges, Doppler weather radars, satellite radars and radiometers, numerical modeling and reanalysis products. Each of these methods is unable to adequately capture complex orographic precipitation. Here, we propose a novel approach to characterize ...

The human neural retina is a complex tissue with abundant alternative splicing and more than 10% of genetic variants linked to inherited retinal diseases (IRDs) alter splicing. Traditional short-read RNA-sequencing methods have been used for understanding retina-specific splicing but have limitations in detailing transcript isoforms. To address this, we generated a proteogenomic atlas that combines PacBio long-read RNA-sequencing data with mass ...

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) hold immense promise for regenerative medicine, with their capacity for self-renewal and differentiation into any cell type of the adult body. However, several challenges remain before their broad clinical use, one of them being their proneness to genomic instability and the acquisition of copy number variants (CNV). Some CNV confer a selective advantage to the cells, leading to a rapid take-over of the ...

This chapter describes the workflow to implement deep sequencing into standard phage display experiments on protein libraries. By harvesting the power of high throughput of these techniques, it allows for comprehensive analysis of the naïve library and library evolution in response to selection by ligand binding. The mutagenized target region of the protein variants encoded by the phage pool is analyzed by Illumina paired-end sequencing. ...

INTRODUCTION: Current available systemic therapies for advanced cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) are of limited effectiveness and prognosis is poor. Recently, introduction of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies led to a better understanding of the genetic pathophysiology and, consequently, identification of molecular alterations for targeted treatment. AIM: To determine the proportion of actionable alterations using extensive molecular ...

Pathogenic missense variants in SLFN14, which encode an RNA endoribonuclease protein that regulates ribosomal RNA (rRNA) degradation, are known to cause inherited thrombocytopenia (TP) with impaired platelet aggregation and adenosine triphosphate secretion. Despite mild laboratory defects, the patients displayed an obvious bleeding phenotype. However, the function of SLFN14 in megakaryocyte (MK) and platelet biology remains unknown. This study ...

For many years, bibliometrics have made their entrance into research evaluation and monitoring of research. The h-index launched in 2005 is one of the most widely used but also most criticized indicators. While its simplicity, ease of calculation and synthetic character stand at the origin of its success, serious questions have been raised around the comparison between disciplines and around the possibility to capture a researcher’s oeuvre into ...

Background: Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods: This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist ...

Tropical peatlands are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on Earth, and their water storage dynamics strongly control these carbon stocks. The hydrological functioning of tropical peatlands differs from that of northern peatlands, which has not yet been accounted for in global land surface models (LSMs). Here, we integrated tropical peat-specific hydrology modules into a global LSM for the first time, by utilizing the peatland-specific model ...