BACKGROUND Genitourinary sarcomas include testicular sarcomas and are the most common subtype of sarcoma within the genitourinary system. Undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma is a subtype of soft tissue sarcomas that may affect the extremities and retroperitoneum. However, the presence within the testicle is rare. Here, we present a case of an undifferentiated testicular pleomorphic sarcoma, which will explore the presentation and treatment of a rare type of testicular cancer. CASE SUMMARY Here we present a 56-year-old male who comes to the urology clinic for left testicular swelling. The patient then underwent left radical orchiectomy via an inguinal approach for a left testicular mass seen on examination and on scrotal ultrasound. Pathology revealed undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (Federation of the French Cancer Centres grade 3), 9.5 cm in size, and it was limited to the testicle. The surgical margins were negative. A follow-up positron emission tomography computed tomography scan was obtained, which showed no evidence of hypermetabolic lymph nodes or masses in the abdomen or pelvis. CONCLUSION Testicular sarcomas are a rare type of soft tissue sarcoma. The standard treatment of the testicular mass usually begins with radical inguinal orchiectomy. Patients with scrotal sarcomas are at high risk of local and distant recurrence, emphasizing the importance of surgical excision and wide margins. There is little studied regarding the integration of radiotherapy and chemotherapy for these cases as neoadjuvant or adjuvant therapies. This case highlights the presentation and treatment of a patient with a rare phenotype of testicular pleomorphic sarcoma treated by radical inguinal orchiectomy. In this study, our patient continued without nodal or distant disease in his initial positron emission tomography computed tomography scan after surgery.
Levi Godard, Jennifer A. Locke, Nathan Hoag
et al.
INTRODUCTION Urology is a surgical subspecialty with a wide scope of practice treating benign, malignant, and emergent disease processes involving the genitourinary system. METHODS We performed an anonymous survey of British Columbian (BC) urologists in 2022 exploring wait times, workload, and burnout. The survey was distributed via email to all urologists in the BC Urological Society. RESULTS There was a 92% completion rate. On average, urologists operate for 9.3 hours per week and 84% of urologists are also operating emergently at least once per week. A typical workday is 10 hours and most urologists spend at least 20% of their lives on call. When on call, urologists are woken up approximately 50% of the time. Burnout rates are over 60% and exceed the national average. Urologic patients are waiting an average of 8.7 months for non-urgent surgery or on waitlists of over 1000 people to see a surgeon. CONCLUSIONS Urologists in BC have long wait times, high workloads, and are experiencing burnout at a high rate. Thus, there is a need for additional urologists within the province.
Stijn J M Niessen, Ellen N. Behrend, F. Fracassi
et al.
Simple Summary To make progress in the field of hormonal diseases in companion animals, it helps when researchers, clinicians, and educators use the same language. Currently, there is no consensus on basic concepts such as what constitutes the correct definition of diseases affecting the adrenal glands, important hormone-producing glands situated next to the kidneys. This publication reports on the second cycle of a novel project called “Agreeing Language in Veterinary Endocrinology” (ALIVE) that brings experts and those interested in the field together to try and achieve consensus on such disease definitions. The cycle’s methods were adapted from previous ones to improve efficiency and were completed successfully, accomplishing a majority-based consensus. It also delivered agreement on diagnostic criteria for adrenal diseases in companion animals. It is hoped the work will improve education, diagnosis, and treatment in this field, ultimately leading to improvements in the quality of life of animals suffering from adrenal disease.
Background Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is an important cause of acute respiratory infection (ARI) in older adults. Vaccines that protect against severe RSV infection are now available. Aim We aimed to describe the incidence, presentation, severity and clinical outcomes of RSV-associated ARI in hospitalised older adults using a new Hospital-based ARI Sentinel Surveillance (HARISS) system in England in the winter prior to RSV vaccine introduction. Methods Adults aged [≥]65 years from seven hospitals admitted for [≥]24 hours with symptomatic ARI were included. Three groups were identified: RSV positive; influenza positive; negative for RSV, influenza and SARS-CoV-2. We estimated the hospitalisation rate of RSV-associated ARI compared to influenza-associated ARI and assessed clinical outcomes using Poisson regression and mortality using Cox regression across groups. Results This surveillance study included 2743 adults. During the 2023/4 season the hospitalisation rate for RSV-associated ARI was 58.3 per 100,000, compared to 114.6 per 100,000 for influenza-associated ARI. Hospitalisation rates increased with age. Exacerbation of chronic illness including lung disease, heart disease or frailty was a frequent cause of admission in RSV-associated ARI, with a combined incidence of 33.1 per 100,000. The majority of adults with RSV-associated ARI had at least one comorbidity (81%); a high proportion with immunosuppression (26%). Symptoms and clinical outcomes including mortality were similar between RSV- and influenza-associated ARI; 30-day mortality 10.6% vs 8.7% (adjusted hazard ratio 0.85,95% confidence interval 0.6-1.2). Conclusion In England, RSV infection is a common cause of hospitalisation in older adults. Symptoms at presentation, severity and clinical outcomes, including mortality, are comparable to influenza.
Alberto Pliego Marugán, Jesús M. Pinar-Pérez, Fausto Pedro García Márquez
Efficient maintenance has always been essential for the successful application of engineering systems. However, the challenges to be overcome in the implementation of Industry 4.0 necessitate new paradigms of maintenance optimization. Machine learning techniques are becoming increasingly used in engineering and maintenance, with reinforcement learning being one of the most promising. In this paper, we propose a gamma degradation process together with a novel maintenance model in which repairs are increasingly imperfect, i.e., the beneficial effect of system repairs decreases as more repairs are performed, reflecting the degradational behavior of real-world systems. To generate maintenance policies for this system, we developed a reinforcement-learning-based agent using a Double Deep Q-Network architecture. This agent presents two important advantages: it works without a predefined preventive threshold, and it can operate in a continuous degradation state space. Our agent learns to behave in different scenarios, showing great flexibility. In addition, we performed an analysis of how changes in the main parameters of the environment affect the maintenance policy proposed by the agent. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be appropriate and to significatively improve long-run cost as compared with other common maintenance strategies.
Stefan Lenz, Arsenij Ustjanzew, Marco Jeray
et al.
Tumor documentation in Germany is largely done manually, requiring reading patient records and entering data into structured databases. Large language models (LLMs) could potentially enhance this process by improving efficiency and reliability. This evaluation tests eleven different open source LLMs with sizes ranging from 1-70 billion model parameters on three basic tasks of the tumor documentation process: identifying tumor diagnoses, assigning ICD-10 codes, and extracting the date of first diagnosis. For evaluating the LLMs on these tasks, a dataset of annotated text snippets based on anonymized doctors' notes from urology was prepared. Different prompting strategies were used to investigate the effect of the number of examples in few-shot prompting and to explore the capabilities of the LLMs in general. The models Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Mistral NeMo 12 B performed comparably well in the tasks. Models with less extensive training data or having fewer than 7 billion parameters showed notably lower performance, while larger models did not display performance gains. Examples from a different medical domain than urology could also improve the outcome in few-shot prompting, which demonstrates the ability of LLMs to handle tasks needed for tumor documentation. Open source LLMs show a strong potential for automating tumor documentation. Models from 7-12 billion parameters could offer an optimal balance between performance and resource efficiency. With tailored fine-tuning and well-designed prompting, these models might become important tools for clinical documentation in the future. The code for the evaluation is available from https://github.com/stefan-m-lenz/UroLlmEval. We also release the dataset as a new valuable resource that addresses the shortage of authentic and easily accessible benchmarks in German-language medical NLP.
Franco Oberti, Stefano Di Carlo, Alessandro Savino
The Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol, essential for automotive embedded systems, lacks inherent security features, making it vulnerable to cyber threats, especially with the rise of autonomous vehicles. Traditional security measures offer limited protection, such as payload encryption and message authentication. This paper presents a novel Intrusion Detection System (IDS) designed for the CAN environment, utilizing Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) to detect anomalies indicative of cyber attacks. A RISC-V-based CAN receiver is simulated using the gem5 simulator, processing CAN frame payloads with AES-128 encryption as FreeRTOS tasks, which trigger distinct HPC responses. Key HPC features are optimized through data extraction and correlation analysis to enhance classification efficiency. Results indicate that this approach could significantly improve CAN security and address emerging challenges in automotive cybersecurity.
Manuela Daniela Danu, George Marica, Constantin Suciu
et al.
The rapidly increasing volume of electronic health record (EHR) data underscores a pressing need to unlock biomedical knowledge from unstructured clinical texts to support advancements in data-driven clinical systems, including patient diagnosis, disease progression monitoring, treatment effects assessment, prediction of future clinical events, etc. While contextualized language models have demonstrated impressive performance improvements for named entity recognition (NER) systems in English corpora, there remains a scarcity of research focused on clinical texts in low-resource languages. To bridge this gap, our study aims to develop multiple deep contextual embedding models to enhance clinical NER in the cardiology domain, as part of the BioASQ MultiCardioNER shared task. We explore the effectiveness of different monolingual and multilingual BERT-based models, trained on general domain text, for extracting disease and medication mentions from clinical case reports written in English, Spanish, and Italian. We achieved an F1-score of 77.88% on Spanish Diseases Recognition (SDR), 92.09% on Spanish Medications Recognition (SMR), 91.74% on English Medications Recognition (EMR), and 88.9% on Italian Medications Recognition (IMR). These results outperform the mean and median F1 scores in the test leaderboard across all subtasks, with the mean/median values being: 69.61%/75.66% for SDR, 81.22%/90.18% for SMR, 89.2%/88.96% for EMR, and 82.8%/87.76% for IMR.
Background and objective: Radical cystectomy (RC) in bladder cancer patients is associated with considerable short-term morbidity. Although RC is known to impair health-related quality of life (HRQOL), the impact of complication severity on HRQOL in the long term remains unclear. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between perioperative cumulative complication burden and HRQOL after RC using data from a prospective registry, given the limited existing evidence. Methods: The Comprehensive Outcome Measures and Perioperative Morbidity After CystecTomy (COMPACT) registry (DRKS00024929) prospectively collects standardized data on perioperative morbidity and longitudinal patient-reported outcome measures. The study includes patients undergoing open RC with pelvic lymph node dissection and urinary diversion for bladder cancer. According to the European Association of Urology guidelines, 90-d morbidity was assessed using both the Clavien-Dindo classification (CDC) and the Comprehensive Complication Index (CCI). HRQOL was measured at baseline and 3, 6, and 12 mo using the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy—Bladder—Cystectomy (FACT-BL-CYS) scores (range 0–168). Patients treated between 2020 and 2022 were included. Multivariable linear regression was used to evaluate the associations of 90-d CDC grade ≥IIIb (ie, “major complications”) and 90-d CCI with the 6-mo FACT-BL-CYS total score, adjusting for clinical and pathological confounders. Key findings and limitations: Among 82 patients, one (1.2%) had no complications, and 47 (57%) had CDC grade ≤II, 22 (27%) grade III, and 11 (13%) grade IV complications. The 90-d mortality rate was 1.2%. The median 90-d CCI was 35 (interquartile range [IQR] 26–45). The median 6-mo FACT-BL-CYS total score was 119 (IQR 90–142). Only comorbidity (age-adjusted Charlson index) was significantly associated with HRQOL (coefficient: –4.76, p = 0.02); neither CDC ≥IIIb (p = 0.7) nor CCI (p = 0.2) was significant. Limitations include uncertainty in effect sizes due to the low number of major complications. Conclusions and clinical implications: Open RC is associated with a high rate of perioperative complications when assessed with standardized methods. However, our findings suggest that their impact on HRQOL at 6 mo is limited. HRQOL appears to be more closely related to age-adjusted comorbidity. These insights should inform preoperative counseling and guide individualized postoperative care planning. Patient summary: We looked at whether complications after bladder removal surgery (radical cystectomy) affect patients’ quality of life. We found that most patients have complications, but these usually do not reduce quality of life 6 mo after surgery. Instead, pre-existing health conditions had a stronger impact on recovery.
Diseases of the genitourinary system. Urology, Neoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
Syphilis continues to pose a major global public health concern, with more than 7 million cases reported worldwide in 2022, and its incidence continues to rise in numerous regions. In Korea, the shift from sentinel to universal notification in 2024 has revealed a markedly greater disease burden, particularly among men who have sex with men and among younger adults, underscoring changing epidemiological patterns and the urgent need for revised control strategies. In urological practice, syphilis presents with a wide range of often misleading symptoms, including painless genital ulcers, urethritis, and sexual dysfunction, that frequently resemble other genitourinary disorders and complicate diagnostic evaluation. Accurate identification relies on integrating a thorough clinical assessment with serologic testing while remaining alert to diagnostic challenges such as early latent infection, serofast states, and human immunodeficiency virus coinfection. Penicillin G remains the mainstay of therapy, with treatment regimens tailored to the stage of disease and to the presence or absence of central nervous system involvement. Effective partner notification, targeted screening, and consistent follow-up are essential to prevent reinfection and limit further transmission. At a public health level, a multifaceted strategy—strengthened surveillance systems, focused testing in high-risk populations, and embedding syphilis screening within broader sexually transmitted infection care frameworks—is critical to curbing its resurgence. In summary, prompt recognition, adherence to evidence-based management, and coordinated public health measures, together with ongoing advances in diagnostics and prevention, remain fundamental to reducing the continued spread of syphilis and mitigating its impact on both individual and population health.
Abstract Background The Hispanic and Latinx population comprises over 60 million individuals in the United States, representing approximately 18 percent of the total population. Cancer is the leading cause of death in this group. Despite the disease burden, Latinx individuals remain underrepresented in cancer clinical trials, accounting for only 2.3 to 3.9 percent of participants in therapeutic studies. This disparity limits the applicability of research findings and contributes to inequities in outcomes. Barriers such as limited awareness, language discordance, mistrust in the medical system, and structural inequities impact participation. Culturally tailored educational interventions may help address these gaps. This investigator-initiated trial aims to investigate whether a brief, bilingual educational video can improve willingness to participate in clinical trials among Latinx adults diagnosed with genitourinary (GU) malignancies. Methods This is investigator-initiated, randomized, controlled, multi-center trial conducted. Eligible participants are adults aged 18 or older with a histologically confirmed diagnosis of a GU malignancy, including prostate, bladder, kidney, testicular, or penile cancer, or with tumor markers consistent with metastatic germ cell neoplasia. All participants must speak either English or Spanish and be attending their first consultation in Medical Oncology, Radiation Oncology, or Urology. Patients are randomized in a 1 to 1 ratio to either the experimental or control arm (Figure 1). Randomization is stratified by cancer type (prostate versus non-prostate) and language preference (English versus Spanish) to ensure balance across key variables. In the experimental arm, participants watch a 10-minute culturally adapted video in their preferred language. The video was developed in collaboration with clinicians, patient advocates, and community partners. It explains the purpose, risks, and benefits of clinical trials, emphasizes ethical protections, and highlights the importance of Latinx representation in research. Immediately afterward, participants complete the 31-item Attitudes and Intention to Enroll in Therapeutic Clinical Trials (AIET) questionnaire. This validated tool assesses willingness to participate in trials and explores attitudes across six domains, including fear, mistrust, privacy concerns, and knowledge gaps. In the control arm, participants complete the AIET questionnaire without viewing the video. After the survey, they are offered the opportunity to watch the video to ensure equitable access to educational content. The primary endpoint is the proportion of Latinx participants who express willingness to participate in a clinical trial, based on responses to item 31 of the AIET questionnaire. Based on prior data, a baseline willingness of 15 percent is assumed. The study is powered to detect an increase to 35 percent with a sample size of 110 participants (55 per arm), using a one-sided alpha of 0.1 and 80 percent power. Secondary endpoints include the proportion of Latinx participants who enroll in a clinical trial within six months of the intervention and changes in AIET subscale scores that reflect trust, perceived fairness, and understanding of clinical research. Additional questions assess general clinical trial literacy. Exploratory analyses will examine the same outcomes in non-Latinx participants. Statistical comparisons will be made using Fisher’s exact test and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests. Proportions will be reported with exact 95 percent confidence intervals. Significance & Vision The study is currently open to enrollment and is designed to inform scalable, culturally responsive strategies to improve equity in clinical trial participation for Latinx patients with cancer. Trial Schema
Background: Distinguishing between organ-confined disease and extraprostatic extension (EPE) is crucial for the treatment of patients with prostate cancer. EPE is associated with an increased risk of biochemical recurrence, positive surgical margins, and metastatic disease. An MRI-based EPE scoring system was developed by Mehralivand in 2019; however, it has not been adopted in the Urology community. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the association of MRI-based EPE scoring with the pathologic EPE (pEPE) after radical prostatectomy. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review on a prospectively collected database of male patients who underwent a prostate MRI with EPE scoring by a trained genitourinary radiologist and subsequent robotic radical prostatectomy at our institution from September 2020 to December 2022. The associations between MRI EPE (mEPE) score and the presence of EPE on surgical pathology (pEPE) were examined using multivariable logistic regression. Results: A total of 194 patients met inclusion criteria with a median age of 63 years and prostate specific antigen (PSA) 7 ng/mL. Among those with mEPE score 3, 96% had pEPE. Those patients with an mEPE score ≥2 had an increased risk of pEPE compared with those with mEPE score 0 (odds ratio 3.79; 95% confidence interval 1.28–11.3) Furthermore, those with an mEPE score 3 were significantly more likely to have pEPE compared with those with mEPE score 0, 1 and 2 independently. Conclusion: MRI EPE is a straightforward tool that strongly correlates with the presence of pEPE. If validated prospectively, this scoring system could assist in counseling patients regarding nerve-sparing approach.
Timely detection of illnesses is vital to prevent severe infections and ensure effective treatment, as it's always better to prevent diseases than to cure them. Sadly, many patients remain undiagnosed until their conditions worsen, resulting in high death rates. Expert systems offer a solution by automating early-stage diagnoses using a fuzzy rule-based approach. Our study gathered data from various sources, including hospitals, to develop an expert system aimed at identifying early signs of diseases, particularly heart conditions. The diagnostic process involves collecting and processing test results using the expert system, which categorizes disease risks and aids physicians in treatment decisions. By incorporating expert systems into clinical practice, we can improve the accuracy of disease detection and address challenges in patient management, particularly in areas with limited medical resources.
Plant disease recognition is a critical task that ensures crop health and mitigates the damage caused by diseases. A handy tool that enables farmers to receive a diagnosis based on query pictures or the text description of suspicious plants is in high demand for initiating treatment before potential diseases spread further. In this paper, we develop a multimodal plant disease image retrieval system to support disease search based on either image or text prompts. Specifically, we utilize the largest in-the-wild plant disease dataset PlantWild, which includes over 18,000 images across 89 categories, to provide a comprehensive view of potential diseases relating to the query. Furthermore, cross-modal retrieval is achieved in the developed system, facilitated by a novel CLIP-based vision-language model that encodes both disease descriptions and disease images into the same latent space. Built on top of the retriever, our retrieval system allows users to upload either plant disease images or disease descriptions to retrieve the corresponding images with similar characteristics from the disease dataset to suggest candidate diseases for end users' consideration.
Abstract Background It is unclear whether short-term blood pressure variability (BPV) is associated with target organ damage in patients with non-dialysis chronic kidney disease (CKD). Methods A cross-sectional, single-center study was conducted among 3442 non-dialysis CKD patients hospitalized in the department of Nephrology of the Fifth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University from November 2017 to July 2022 and collected the demographic, laboratory, clinic blood pressure, ambulatory blood pressure data, and short-term BPV assessed by the weighted standard deviation (wSD) derived from ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM). Multivariate logistic analyses were used to evaluate the independent effects between short-term BPV and subclinical target organ damage, including left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH), abnormal carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT), low estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and albuminuria. Results The average age of the participants was 47.53 ± 14.06 years and 56% of participants were male. The baseline eGFR was 69 mL/min/1.73 m2. Based on the tertile distribution of wSD according to equal numbers, patients were divided into three categories with T1(< 9.66 mmHg), T2(9.66–12.23 mmHg), and T3(> 12.23 mmHg) of SBPV; T1(< 8.17 mmHg), T2(8.17–9.93 mmHg), and T3(> 9.93 mmHg) of DBPV. The participants with the higher wSD group had a higher prevalence of target organ damage than their counterparts (P-trend < 0.05). An increasing trend in short-term variability was present with advancing CKD stages (P-trend < 0.001). Multivariate logistic analyses results showed that the odds ratio (OR) of SBP wSD was (1.07 [1.03,1.11], P < 0.001) for LVH, (1.04 [1.01,1.07, P = 0.029) for abnormal CIMT, (1.05 [1.02,1.08], P = 0.002) for low eGFR, and (1.06 [1.02,1.09], P = 0.002) for albuminuria; The OR of DBP wSD was (1.07 [1.02,1.12], P = 0.005) for LVH, (1.05 [1.01,1.09], P = 0.028) for abnormal CIMT, (1.05 [1.01,1.09], P = 0.022) for low eGFR, and (1.05 [1.01,1.10], P = 0.025) for albuminuria when adjusted for confounding factors and mean BP. Conclusions In conclusion, short-term BPV is associated with target organ damage, and irresponsible of average blood pressure levels, in Chinese non-dialysis CKD participants.
Background and objective: It is widely accepted that the value of treatments for incurable metastatic cancer depends on their ability to improve overall survival (OS), quality of life (QoL), or both. Progression-free survival (PFS) is frequently used as a primary endpoint because of challenges in accurately assessing OS and QoL. The perceived value of extending PFS when there is uncertainty regarding the benefit to OS/QoL may vary between clinicians and patients. The aim of our study was to measure patient and clinician perspectives on what defines a clinically meaningful PFS benefit. Methods: We conducted an observational study using a self-administered questionnaire. Participants included patients with advanced prostate cancer (PC) and medical oncology clinicians treating patients with PC. The questionnaire presented a hypothetical scenario of metastatic castrate-resistant PC (mCRPC). Participants were asked about their willingness to undergo or prescribe treatment offering PFS benefits despite uncertain OS outcomes. Participants specified the minimum extension of PFS (ePFSmin) beyond the estimated 18-mo duration outlined in the scenario while considering varying toxicity levels. Key findings and limitations: Between April and May 2024, 54 patient responses and 27 clinician responses were received. Some 50/54 patient participants (92.6%) and 22/27 clinician participants (81.5%) expressed willingness to accept a prospective treatment associated with longer PFS but uncertain OS benefit. For treatment with no or mild toxicity, the median ePFSmin for treatment acceptance was >12 mo for patient participants and 3–6 mo for clinician participants. For treatment with severe toxicity, 40.7% of patients and 51.9% of clinicians would not accept treatment; the ePFSmin for treatment acceptance was 3–6 mo for patient participants and >12 mo for clinician participants. Conclusions and clinical implications: Most patients and clinicians are open to mCRPC treatment with evidence of PFS benefits despite OS uncertainty. Patients needed longer PFS extension to justify treatment but were more accepting of side effects and placed greater importance on a prostate-specific antigen or radiological response than clinicians. The relationship between ePFSmin and treatment acceptance according to toxicity levels for patients was unclear, limited by the nature of the self-administered questionnaires. Patient summary: We surveyed patients and doctors about their views on an imaginary treatment for advanced prostate cancer that could delay disease progression but with no certainty about whether it would extend life expectancy. Both patients and doctors were open to this treatment, but patients expected a longer delay in disease progression than doctors before being willing to accept this imaginary treatment. Many patients and doctors would also not consider the treatment if it caused severe side effects.
Diseases of the genitourinary system. Urology, Neoplasms. Tumors. Oncology. Including cancer and carcinogens
Muhammad Zubair Khan, Oleg E. Peil, Apoorva Sharma
et al.
In the rapidly expanding field of two-dimensional materials, magnetic monolayers show great promise for the future applications in nanoelectronics, data storage, and sensing. The research in intrinsically magnetic two-dimensional materials mainly focuses on synthetic iodide and telluride based compounds, which inherently suffer from the lack of ambient stability. So far, naturally occurring layered magnetic materials have been vastly overlooked. These minerals offer a unique opportunity to explore air-stable complex layered systems with high concentration of local moment bearing ions. We demonstrate magnetic ordering in iron-rich two-dimensional phyllosilicates, focusing on mineral species of minnesotaite, annite, and biotite. These are naturally occurring van der Waals magnetic materials which integrate local moment baring ions of iron via magnesium/aluminium substitution in their octahedral sites. Due to self-inherent capping by silicate/aluminate tetrahedral groups, ultra-thin layers are air-stable. Chemical characterization, quantitative elemental analysis, and iron oxidation states were determined via Raman spectroscopy, wavelength disperse X-ray spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Superconducting quantum interference device magnetometry measurements were performed to examine the magnetic ordering. These layered materials exhibit paramagnetic or superparamagnetic characteristics at room temperature. At low temperature ferrimagnetic or antiferromagnetic ordering occurs, with the critical ordering temperature of 38.7 K for minnesotaite, 36.1 K for annite, and 4.9 K for biotite. In-field magnetic force microscopy on iron bearing phyllosilicates confirmed the paramagnetic response at room temperature, present down to monolayers.