Oral lichen planus (OLP) is a common chronic inflammatory disease of the oral mucosa that causes recurrent pain and discomfort, affecting patients’ quality of life. Accurate diagnosis is essential, given its potential progression to oral cancer. Segmentation masks allow the extraction of regions of interest for oral lesion diagnosis and often outperform full-image AI analysis, while precise lesion delineation remains crucial for assessing lesion extent, long-term monitoring, and clinical decision-making. However, OLP lesion segmentation remains challenging because of diffuse lesion boundaries and the low contrast between affected areas and surrounding healthy mucosa.In this study, we investigate the parameter-efficient adaptation of a foundation vision transformer, DINOv2, for medical image segmentation by combining low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with a DeepLabV3 decoder. A boundary-aware optimization integrating Dice, Cross-Entropy and differentiable Hausdorff losses is used to improve contour precision. The study was conducted on 668 OLP photographs, pixel-level annotated by a single oral medicine specialist. Evaluation included pixel-wise (Dice, IoU), boundary (HD95) and object-level metrics (TP/FP/FN, precision, recall, F1). Results were compared with established baselines.The proposed model achieved a Dice score of 0.8401, an IoU of 0.7734, and an HD95 of 62.68 px, outperforming all supervised CNN and Transformer baselines; for example, it improved over SegFormer MiT-B2 by +0.0283 Dice, +0.0305 IoU, and −8.12 px HD95. To assess robustness in low-data settings, we trained the model on subsets of different sizes and found that it consistently maintained its advantage. These results highlight the importance of calibrating boundary-sensitive loss components and object-level thresholds according to clinical priorities.
Traditionally, the lack of association between the form of a word and its meaning (i.e. arbitrariness) has been considered a fundamental aspect of language. However, this idea has recently been challenged by growing evidence of form-meaning relationships in words from different conceptual domains, such as size, shape, motion, and colour. More recently, several studies have provided evidence of non-arbitrary associations between the acoustic or phonological forms of words and their meanings when conveying emotional concepts. This phenomenon is referred to as affective iconicity. These effects are evident within and across languages through the over-representation of certain phonemes in words denoting positive or negative emotions (e.g., the phoneme/i/tends to occur in positive words in several different languages) or through statistical regularities in the phonetic features of emotional words (e.g., in English, German and Spanish, sibilant sounds tend to be associated with a high degree of emotional activation of a word’s referent). In this article, we review the literature on affective iconicity. Overall, the current findings suggest that non-arbitrary relationships between word forms and affective meanings may have evolved from the capacity to integrate multimodal inputs with affective experiences. This ability could have been advantageous for communicating information relevant to an individual's survival through language. We argue that affective iconicity effects arise from a link between phonetic and phonological forms and schematic representations of affective experiences and states during the lexicalisation of emotional concepts.
Chronic wounds remain as a major clinical and economic challenge, requiring advanced materials that can both support tissue regeneration and effectively prevent infection. Alginate-based dressings are widely used due to their excellent biocompatibility, high absorbency, and gel-forming ability, which help maintain a moist environment favorable for healing. However, these systems inherently lack strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. In this context, the incorporation of lignin, a naturally abundant and phenolic-rich biopolymer, offers a promising strategy to overcome these limitations by introducing intrinsic radical scavenging activity, enhanced antibacterial performance, and improved mechanical strength. In this review, we provide a focused and comprehensive overview of lignin-alginate hydrogels as multifunctional wound dressing materials. Unlike previous reviews that discuss lignin- or alginate-based systems individually, this work specifically emphasizes their synergistic integration and the resulting enhancements in hydrogel performance. We first outline the fundamental properties of hydrogels that make them suitable for wound healing applications, followed by detailed discussions on the individual characteristics of alginate and lignin. Furthermore, recent advances in formulation strategies, crosslinking approaches, and multifunctional design are critically discussed, with a focus on improving mechanical stability, exudate management, and controlled therapeutic release. Finally, key challenges related to reproducibility, large-scale production, and clinical translation are highlighted, along with future perspectives emphasizing sustainability and personalized wound care. According to these data, lignin-alginate hydrogels could be considered as a promising next-generation platform for developing sustainable, effective, and multifunctional wound dressing systems.
A study on the dissimilar interactions of two photovoltaic additives, FK209 or a combination of LiTFSI and TBP dopants, with three structurally different molecular hole-transporting materials (HTMs) previously used in perovskite solar cells (PSCs) is presented. The investigated HTMs are Spiro-OMeTAD and a toroidally delocalized oligotriarylamine-hexaarylbenzene derivative (HAB1), both globular and structurally rigid, as well as a globular but structurally fluxional oligotriarylamine-[60]fullerene hexakis-adduct (FU7). Photophysical characterisation with/without the additives in solution has been performed considering the changes in UV-vis absorption and fluorescence excitation/emission spectra of the HTMs, modulation of their emission quantum yields and lifetimes, analysis of the excited state quenching by the dopants, results of time-resolved fluorescence anisotropy assays accounting for changes in the size of the HTMs behaving as fluorophores, and evaluation of the singlet oxygen production by the HTMs. FK209 efficiently promotes charge transfer by association with the molecular HTMs, as evidenced by the observation of static quenching and variations of their rotational lifetimes due to increased fluorophore sizes; the charge transfer process with the LiTFSI and TBP system is only based on diffusion-controlled dynamic quenching of the excited HTMs, suggesting a weaker interaction, which is modulated by the accessibility of small hydrophobic molecules such as LiTFSI and TBP to the inner domains of the molecular HTMs. Remarkably, Spiro-OMeTAD shows competitive singlet oxygen photosensitisation by energy transfer, with a non-negligible quantum yield of 0.35. This study shows excellent agreement with previously reported results in PSCs, providing a better understanding of the underlying interactions between HTMs and dopants and, in turn, facilitating the optimisation of decisions regarding additives employed in photovoltaic devices.
Biotic homogenization is a process which is particularly relevant in urban environments. We focus on the flora of a large Mediterranean Spanish city, Madrid, located along two different edaphic biogeographical regions, where biogeographical homogenization may occur. Biogeographical homogenization implies anthropogenic biogeographical barrier species crossing. We test whether this type of homogenization has been taking place, and to what extent. Secondly, we attempt to shed light on the relationship between connectivity and biogeographical homogenization for the Madrid flora. We use the public parks system in Madrid to test whether these spaces could foster an unnatural increase in species movements, and therefore a ‘leakage’ in the biogeographical barrier, diluting the barriers among territories and providing increased opportunities for homogenization. We found that biogeographical homogenization is not consistent in urban Madrid. Our results identify the common and generalist flora as the most significant plant sets in terms of diluting the barrier. The biogeographical homogenization caused by specialist flora (calcifuge/calcicole) is asymmetrical, a larger proportion of calcifuge plants became generalists (0.9 versus 0.6 for calcicole plants) and there is a ratio of 4.6:1 of calcifuge to calcicole for plants crossing the border. Our results do not support the assumption that more urban connectivity is related to greater urban homogenization. The biogeographical barrier, together with human-mediated dispersal and the microheterogeneity of urban green areas, are possible factors that may explain this lack of relationship. Biogeographical barriers in cities continue to play a natural role and homogenization is a differential process resulting in distinct effects depending on plant ecology and biogeography. Although urban spaces are highly altered, they host several groups of floras, and they contribute to biogeographical patterns and processes. Hence, there is still room for biological conservation in cities. The use of a comprehensive plant dataset that includes historical records from the 19th century and recent inventory data from the last three years. We define biogeographical homogenization as a special case of homogenization where a rupture on biogeographical barriers that keep territories apart, foster the coexistence of species from different biogeographical origins on both sides of the border. Common flora dilutes urban biogeographical barriers more effectively. Specialist flora causes asymmetrical biogeographical homogenization. No direct relationship was found between urban connectivity and urban biogeographical homogenization. Cities, despite alterations in biota movements and colonization rates, retain biogeographical patterns and processes.
