Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inhibition of Rat Platelet Aggregation by Mycalolide-B, a Novel Inhibitor of Actin Polymerization with a Different Mechanism of Action from Cytochalasin-D

Summary In vitro effects of mycalolide-B (MB), isolated from marine sponge, were investigated with regard to the activation of rat platelets. Collagen-induced platelet aggregation in platelet-rich plasma (PRP) was slightly but significantly potentiated by lower concentrations of MB (0.3 and 1 μM) but was inhibited by higher concentrations (3 and 10 μM). ADP-induced platelet aggregation in PRP was also significantly prevented by MB (1-10 μM). Potentiation of ADP-induced aggregation by MB (0.3 μM) was hardly observed. G-actin contents, determined by DNase I inhibition assay, were increased in resting washed platelets incubated with MB (3 μM). In contrast, cytochalasin-D (CD) at 3 μM slightly reduced G-actin contents in resting platelets. After platelet aggregation with collagen (3 μg/ml) or ADP (10 μM), G-actin contents in platelets were reduced, indicating de novo actin polymerization. MB (3 μM) and CD (3 μM) abolished both ADP (10 μM)- and collagen (3 μg/ml)-induced platelet aggregation and actin polymerization in washed platelets. MB (1-10 μM) had no effects on intracellular Ca2+ concentrations in ADP (10 μM)-stimulated platelets. [125I]-fibrinogen binding to activated platelets with ADP (10 μM) was inhibited by MB (0.3-3 μM) in a concentration-dependent manner. Thrombin-induced platelet-fibrin clot retraction was inhibited by MB (1 and 10 μM). These results suggest that MB inhibits platelet activation by interfering with actin polymerization through a different mechanism of action from CD. MB may be a useful tool for studying the role of actin polymerization in various cells.
Rank modulation for translocation error correction

We consider rank modulation codes for flash memories that allow for handling arbitrary charge drop errors. Unlike classical rank modulation codes used for correcting errors that manifest themselves as swaps of two adjacently ranked elements, the proposed translocation codes account for more general forms of errors that arise in storage systems. Translocations represent a natural extension of the notion of adjacent transpositions and as such may be analyzed using related concepts in combinatorics and rank modulation coding. Our results include deriving the asymptotic capacity of translocation rank codes, construction techniques for asymptotically good codes and a simple decoding algorithm.
Inhibition of MDM2 by Nilotinib Contributes to Cytotoxicity in Both Philadelphia-Positive and Negative Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Nilotinib is a selective BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase inhibitor related to imatinib that is more potent than imatinib. Nilotinib is widely used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) and Philadelphia-positive (Ph+) acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The present study identifies Mouse double minute 2 homolog (MDM2) as a target of nilotinib. In studying ALL cell lines, we found that the expression of MDM2 in both Philadelphia positive (Ph+) and Philadelphia negative (Ph-) ALL cells was remarkably inhibited by nilotinib, in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Further studies demonstrated that nilotinib inhibited MDM2 at the post-translational level by inducing MDM2 self-ubiquitination and degradation. Nilotinib-mediated MDM2 downregulation did not result in accumulation and activation of p53. Inhibition of MDM2 in nilotinib-treated ALL cells led to downregulation of the anti-apoptotic protein X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein (XIAP), a translational target of MDM2, resulting in activation of caspases. Inhibition of XIAP following nilotinib-mediated downregulation of MDM2 resulted in apoptosis of MDM2-expressing ALL; however, similar nilotinib treatment induced stronger apoptosis in Ph+/MDM2+ ALL than in Ph-/MDM2+ or Ph+/MDM2- ALL. The ALL cells that were Ph-/MDM2- were totally resistant to nilotinib. These results suggested that nilotinib can inhibit MDM2 and induce a p53-independent apoptosis pathway by downregulating XIAP; thus, nilotinib can treat not only Ph+, but also Ph- ALL patients whose cancer cells overexpress MDM2.
Heat‐shock protein 27: A potential biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma identified by serum proteome analysis

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide and ranks second in China. The prognosis of HCC remains dismal mainly because of its late diagnosis, especially in patients with coexisting chronic liver diseases. To identify serum biomarkers for HCC, sera from 20 healthy volunteers, 20 hepatitis B virus (HBV) infected patients and 20 HCC patients were selected for screening study and same number of sera into the same three groups were used for validation study. A strategy including sonication, albumin and immunoglobulin G (IgG) depletion and desalting was optimized for screening differentially expressed proteins of low abundance in serum. By 2‐DE image analysis and MALDI‐TOF‐MS/MS identification, eight proteins including heat‐shock protein 27 (HSP27), alpha‐fetoprotein (AFP), α‐1 antitrypsin, clusterin, caeruloplasmin, haptoglobin α2 chain, tranferrin and transthyretin were found significantly changed among the healthy, HBV and HCC groups. Further validation study by Western blot showed the detection of HSP27 in 90% HCC sera and two HBV sera, but in none of normal sera. Thus, 2‐DE based serum proteome analysis can be useful in the screening of serum biomarkers for HCC and HSP27 could aid in the diagnosis of HCC though further validation is needed.
Credit card fraud detection at merchant side using neural networks

With the growth and widespread of the internet the credit card payment industry has expanded rapidly during the course of time. Most of the companies and industries have transformed their business into online services to provide e-commerce, easy access and communication allowing their customers better efficiency and accessibility. This evolution is of great importance since it has credited towards increased efficiency, and profitability but it also has its own shortcomings. Along with this evolution comes a greater possibility of threats. One of the most crucial challenges in making business on the internet is that neither the card nor the cardholder needs to be present when the purchase is being made. This makes it impossible for the merchant to verify whether the customer making a purchase is the authentic cardholder or not. This makes it easy for a fraudster to carry out a fraudulent transaction anonymously.
Enzymology of the refractory media of the eye. X. Effects of topically administered bradykinin, amine releasers, and pargyline on aqueous humor dynamics.

The topical application of reseipine and the benzoquinolizine Ro 4-1284 to rabbit eyes leads to a significant depression of the intraocular pressure. This reduction is d,ue essentially to a depression of the formation rate and is counteracted by a small drop in facility of ouifiow. As in other biologic systems, the action of reserpine lasts longer and requires lower concentrations than that of the benzoquinolizine. Bradykinin, which is also capable of releasing amines, acts quite differently from these two agents by increasing the facility of outflow of the rabbit eye. Similarly, the rate of outflow in the excised bovine eye is enhanced markedly by this nonapeptide. The combined effects of the monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAO) pargyline and the releasing agents depend a great deal on the sequence of drug application. When reserpine and pargyline are administered together for several days, extremely low values for the formation rate are observed. In most other combinations, the releasers cancel the action of the MAO inhibitor and vice versa. This indicates that, although the actions of reserpine or pargyline alone on the aqueous humor dynamics are quite similar, their mechanisms of action must be profoundly different. The phenomena cannot be interpreted alone in terms of changes of norepinephrine levels in the ciliary body.
The Research and Practice of Fast Handoff Scheme Base on V2V

In VANETs, each vehicle should obtain an IP address for its identification before connecting to the Internet or getting some information from the Internet. Due to the rapid movement of vehicles, each vehicle must perform a handoff procedure between different access points. To ensure that the transmission of packets is not interrupted, the handoff scheme for VANETs is a key design issue. In view of this, we design a V2V-based fast handoff scheme using IP address passing for VANETs in this thesis.
Improvements in Energy Dispersive Diffraction in Respect of Residual Stress Analysis

In residual stress analysis (RSA) using energy dispersive (ED) diffraction care has to be taken of the detector energy stability. For a given detector system it is demonstrated that the energy position decreases significantly with dead time. Correction of the RSA data both in reflection and scanning experiments allows a significant improvement in the reliability of RSA under different conditions. Owing the small diffraction angles in ED experiments, the effect of adjustment errors in reflection geometry is investigated revealing the need of a wide incoming beam combined with high collimation of the secondary beam. The differences in the used absorber materials are shown in respect of sample heating and beam widening due to diffuse scattering.
Effects of continuous positive airway pressure on cardiovascular outcomes in heart failure patients with and without Cheyne-Stokes respiration.

BACKGROUND Continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) improves cardiac function in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) who also have Cheyne-Stokes respiration and central sleep apnea (CSR-CSA). However, the effects of CPAP in CHF patients without CSR-CSA have not been tested, and the long-term effects of this treatment on clinical cardiovascular outcomes are unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a randomized, controlled trial in which 66 patients with CHF (29 with and 37 without CSR-CSA) were randomized to either a group that received CPAP nightly or to a control group. Change in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) from baseline to 3 months and the combined mortality-cardiac transplantation rate over the median 2.2-year follow-up period were compared between the CPAP-treated and control groups. For the entire group of patients, CPAP had no significant effect on LVEF, but it was associated with a 60% relative risk reduction (95% confidence interval, 2% to 64%) in mortality-cardiac transplantation rate in patients who complied with CPAP therapy. Stratified analysis of patients with and without CSR-CSA revealed that those with CSR-CSA experienced both a significant improvement in LVEF at 3 months and a relative risk reduction of 81% (95% confidence interval, 26% to 95%) in the mortality-cardiac transplantation rate of those who used CPAP. CPAP had no significant effect on either of these outcomes in patients without CSR-CSA. CONCLUSIONS CPAP improves cardiac function in CHF patients with CSR-CSA but not in those without it. Although not definitive, our findings also suggest that CPAP can reduce the combined mortality-cardiac transplantation rate in those CHF patients with CSR-CSA who comply with therapy.
An Optimal Transportation Based Univariate Neuroimaging Index

The alterations of brain structures and functions have been considered closely correlated to the change of cognitive performance due to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. In this paper, we introduce a variational framework to compute the optimal transformation (OT) in 3D space and propose a univariate neuroimaging index based on OT to measure such alterations. We compute the OT from each image to a template and measure the Wasserstein distance between them. By comparing the distances from all the images to the common template, we obtain a concise and informative index for each image. Our framework makes use of the Newton’s method, which reduces the computational cost and enables itself to be applicable to large-scale datasets. The proposed work is a generic approach and thus may be applicable to various volumetric brain images, including structural magnetic resonance (sMR) and fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) images. In the classification between Alzheimer’s disease patients and healthy controls, our method achieves an accuracy of 82:30% on the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline sMRI dataset and outperforms several other indices. On FDG-PET dataset, we boost the accuracy to 88:37% by leveraging pairwise Wasserstein distances. In a longitudinal study, we obtain a 5% significance with p-value = 1:13 ×105 in a t-test on FDG-PET. The results demonstrate a great potential of the proposed index for neuroimage analysis and the precision medicine research.
Brucella Control of Dendritic Cell Maturation Is Dependent on the TIR-Containing Protein Btp1

Brucella is an intracellular pathogen able to persist for long periods of time within the host and establish a chronic disease. We show that soon after Brucella inoculation in intestinal loops, dendritic cells from ileal Peyer's patches become infected and constitute a cell target for this pathogen. In vitro, we found that Brucella replicates within dendritic cells and hinders their functional activation. In addition, we identified a new Brucella protein Btp1, which down-modulates maturation of infected dendritic cells by interfering with the TLR2 signaling pathway. These results show that intracellular Brucella is able to control dendritic cell function, which may have important consequences in the development of chronic brucellosis.
Cytokine Induced Killer Cells as Promising Immunotherapy for Solid Tumors

Cytokine-induced killer (CIK) cells are a heterogeneous subset of ex-vivo expanded T lymphocytes which present a mixed T-NK phenotype and are endowed with a MHC-unrestricted antitumor activity. The main functional properties of CIK cells may address some of the main limitations that are currently preventing the successful clinical translation of adoptive immunotherapy strategies. Clinically adequate quantities of immune effectors, sufficient for multiple adoptive infusions, may be obtained based on their relatively easy and inexpensive ex-vivo expansion starting from peripheral blood mononuclear cells. The MHC-unrestricted tumor-killing is mainly based on the interaction between NKG2D molecules on CIK cells and MIC A/B or ULBPs molecules on tumor cells; it has been proved effective against several solid and hematological malignancies and does not require any HLA-restriction increasing the number of patients that might potentially benefit from such approach. Finally, CIK cells present a reduced alloreactivity across HLA-barriers with important clinical implications for their potential use as alternative to conventional Donor Lymphocyte Infusions after allogeneic hemopoietic cell transplant with a reduced risk of GVHD. In the present report we review the main functional characteristics of CIK cells discussing recent findings and future perspectives to improve their antitumor activity and potential clinical applications.
Time-data trade-off in the sparse Fourier transform

It has been shown that the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) can be computed in sublinear time from a sublinear number of samples when the target spectrum is sparse. However, this is usually only expressed qualitatively in terms of the order of number of computations/samples. Here we investigate the explicit time-data tradeoff for the Sparse Fourier Transform (SFT) algorithm proposed by Pawar and Ramchandran using coding theoretic tools. This leads to an optimal oversampling rate and algorithm configuration that minimises computation while keeping the required number of time domain samples close to the minimum value.
Type-D Personality and Cortisol in Survivors of Acute Coronary Syndrome

Objective: To test the hypothesis that Type-D personality is associated with elevated cortisol levels in patients 4 months after an acute coronary syndrome (ACS). Methods: Salivary cortisol profiles were measured at home in 70 coronary heart disease patients (Mean age = 60.90 years, SD = 10.7, 17% female) 4 months after hospitalization for ACS. Eight saliva samples were taken over the course of 1 day. Results: Thirty eight percent of the ACS patients were defined as Type-D. Cortisol profiles showed a typical diurnal pattern, with low levels in the evening, high levels early in the day. Type-D was not related to the cortisol awakening response, but cortisol output the day was higher in Type-D (mean = 4443.3, SD = 2334.1 nmol/l) than non Type-D patients (mean = 3252.0, SD = 1810.2 nmol/l) after adjustment for age, gender, hypertension, Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events risk score, recurrence of cardiac symptoms, previous myocardial infarction, body mass index and concurrent depressed mood (p = .044). Type-D personality accounted for 6% over the variance in cortisol output over the day, after covariates had been taken into account. Conclusion: Type-D personality may be associated with prolonged disruption of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis function in survivors of acute cardiac events and may contribute to biological responses influencing future cardiac morbidity. MI = myocardial infarction; BMI = body mass index; ACS = acute coronary syndrome; CAR = cortisol awakening response; HPA = hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; SD = standard deviation; GRACE = global registry of acute coronary events.
On time-variant distortions in multicarrier transmission with application to frequency offsets and phase noise

Phase noise and frequency offsets are, due to their time-variant behavior, one of the most limiting disturbances in practical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) designs, and therefore, intensively studied by many authors. In this paper, we present a generalized framework for the prediction of uncoded system performance in the presence of time-variant distortions, including the transmitter and receiver pulse shapes, as well as the channel. Therefore, unlike existing studies, our approach can be employed for more general multicarrier schemes. To show the usefulness of our approach, we apply the results to OFDM in the context of frequency offset and Wiener phase noise, yielding improved bounds on the uncoded performance. In particular, we obtain exact formulas for the averaged performance in additive white Gaussian noise and time-invariant multipath channels.
Transformation Based on Generalization of Linear Discriminant Analysis

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been widely used to model speech signals for speech recognition. However, they cannot precisely model the time dependency of feature parameters. In order to overcome this limitation, several researchers have proposed extensions, such as segmental unit input HMM (Nakagawa & Yamamoto, 1996). Segmental unit input HMM has been widely used for its effectiveness and tractability. In segmental unit input HMM, the immediate use of several successive frames as an input vector inevitably increases the number of dimensions. The concatenated vectors may have strong correlations among dimensions, and may include nonessential information. In addition, high-dimensional data require a heavy computational load. Therefore, to reduce dimensionality, a feature transformation method is often applied. Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is widely used to reduce dimensionality and a powerful tool to preserve discriminative information. LDA assumes each class has the same class covariance. However, this assumption does not necessarily hold for a real data set. In order to remove this limitation, several methods have been proposed. Heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis (HLDA) could deal with unequal covariances because the maximum likelihood estimation was used to estimate parameters for different Gaussians with unequal covariances. Heteroscedastic discriminant analysis (HDA) was proposed as another objective function, which employed individual weighted contributions of the classes. The effectiveness of these methods for some data sets has been experimentally demonstrated. However, it is difficult to find one particular criterion suitable for any kind of data set. In this chapter we show that these three methods have a strong mutual relationship, and provide a new interpretation for them. Then, we present a new framework that we call power linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) (Sakai et al., 2007), which can describe various criteria including the discriminant analyses with one control parameter. Because PLDA can describe various criteria for dimensionality reduction, it can flexibly adapt to various environments such as a noisy environment. Thus, PLDA can provide robustness to a speech recognizer in realistic environments. Moreover, the presented technique can combine a discriminative training, such as maximum mutual information (MMI) and minimum phone error (MPE). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the presented technique. O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w . in te ch w eb . o rg
A Novel comprehensive method for real time Video Motion Detection Surveillance

This article describes a comprehensive system for surveillance and monitoring applications. The development of an efficient real time video motion detection system is motivated by their potential for deployment in the areas where security is the main concern. The paper presents a platform for real time video motion detection and subsequent generation of an alarm condition as set by the parameters of the control system. The prototype consists of a mobile platform mounted with RF camera which provides continuous feedback of the environment. The received visual information is then analyzed by user for appropriate control action, thus enabling the user to operate the system from a remote location. The system is also equipped with the ability to process the image of an object and generate control signals which are automatically transmitted to the mobile platform to track the object.
Classification of image distortions using image quality metrics and linear discriminant analysis

Numerous Image Quality Measures (IQMs) have been proposed in the literature. While some are based on structural analysis of images, others rely on the characteristics (or limitations) of the Human Visual System (HVS). However, none of the existing IQMs is shown to be robust across all types of degradations. Indeed, some IQMs are more efficient for a given artifact (such as blurring or blocking) but inefficient for others. In this paper, we propose to circumvent this limitation by adding a preprocessing step before measuring image quality. We propose to detect the type of the degradation contained in the image, then use the most “relevant” IQM for that specific type of degradation. The classification of different degradations is performed using simple Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in terms of classification accuracy across different types of degradations and shown to outperform different IQMs when used independently of the degradation type.
IRSMG: Accelerating Inexact RDF Subgraph Matching on the GPU

Many approaches have been proposed to solve subgraph matching problem based on ﬁlter-and-reﬁne strategy. The eﬃciency of those existing serial approaches relies on the computational capabilities of CPU. In this paper, we propose an RDF subgraph matching algorithm based on type-isomorphism using GPU since GPU has higher computational performance, more scalability, and lower price than CPU. Firstly, we present a concurrent matching model for type-isomorphism so that sub-graph matching can be tackled in a parallel way. Secondly, we develop a parallel algorithm for capturing our proposed concurrent matching model and implement a prototype called IRSMG using GPU. Finally, we evaluate IRSMG on the benchmark datasets LUBM. The experiments show that IRSMG signiﬁcantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms on the CPU.