Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct Expansion of Functional Cd25 Ϩ Cd4 Ϩ Regulatory T Cells by Antigen-processing Dendritic Cells

An important pathway for immune tolerance is provided by thymic-derived CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells that suppress other CD25 Ϫ autoimmune disease–inducing T cells. The antigen-presenting cell (APC) requirements for the control of CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ suppressor T cells remain to be identified , hampering their study in experimental and clinical situations. CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells are classically anergic, unable to proliferate in response to mitogenic antibodies to the T cell receptor complex. We now find that CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells can proliferate in the absence of added cytokines in culture and in vivo when stimulated by antigen-loaded dendritic cells (DCs), especially mature DCs. With high doses of DCs in culture, CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ and CD25 Ϫ CD4 ϩ populations initially proliferate to a comparable extent. With current methods, one third of the antigen-reactive T cell receptor transgenic T cells enter into cycle for an average of three divisions in 3 d. The expansion of CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells stops by day 5, in the absence or presence of exogenous interleukin (IL)-2, whereas CD25 Ϫ CD4 ϩ T cells continue to grow. CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cell growth requires DC–T cell contact and is partially dependent upon the production of small amounts of IL-2 by the T cells and B7 costimulation by the DCs. After antigen-specific expansion, the CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells retain their known surface features and actively suppress CD25 Ϫ CD4 ϩ T cell proliferation to splenic APCs. DCs also can expand CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells in the absence of specific antigen but in the presence of exogenous IL-2. In vivo, both steady state and mature antigen-processing DCs induce proliferation of adoptively transferred CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells. The capacity to expand CD25 ϩ CD4 ϩ T cells provides DCs with an additional mechanism to regulate autoimmunity and other immune responses.
Hepatic Glucokinase Is Required for the Synergistic Action of ChREBP and SREBP-1c on Glycolytic and Lipogenic Gene Expression*

Hepatic glucokinase (GK) catalyzes the phosphorylation of glucose to glucose 6-phosphate (G6P), a step which is essential for glucose metabolism in liver as well as for the induction of glycolytic and lipogenic genes. The sterol regulatory element-binding protein-1c (SREBP-1c) has emerged as a major mediator of insulin action on hepatic gene expression, but the extent to which its transcriptional effect is caused by an increased glucose metabolism remains unclear. Through the use of hepatic GK knockout mice (hGK-KO) we have shown that the acute stimulation by glucose of l-pyruvate kinase (l-PK), fatty acid synthase (FAS), acetyl-CoA carboxylase (ACC), and Spot 14 genes requires GK expression. To determine whether the effect of SREBP-1c requires GK expression and subsequent glucose metabolism, a transcriptionally active form of SREBP-1c was overexpressed both in vivo and in primary cultures of control and hGK-KO hepatocytes. Our results demonstrate that the synergistic action of SREBP-1c and glucose metabolism via GK is necessary for the maximal induction of l-PK, ACC, FAS, and Spot 14 gene expression. Indeed, in hGK-KO hepatocytes overexpressing SREBP-1c, the effect of glucose on glycolytic and lipogenic genes is lost because of the impaired ability of these hepatocytes to efficiently metabolize glucose, despite a marked increase in low Km hexokinase activity. Our studies also reveal that the loss of glucose effect observed in hGK-KO hepatocytes is associated with a decreased in the carbohydrate responsive element-binding protein (ChREBP) gene expression, a transcription factor suggested to mediate glucose signaling in liver. Decreased ChREBP gene expression, achieved using small interfering RNA, results in a loss of glucose effect on endogenous glycolytic (l-PK) and lipogenic (FAS, ACC) gene expression, thereby demonstrating the direct implication of ChREBP in glucose action. Together these results support a model whereby both SREBP-1c and glucose metabolism, acting via ChREBP, are necessary for the dietary induction of glycolytic and lipogenic gene expression in liver.
An Analysis of Gene Expression Data using Penalized Fuzzy C-Means Approach

With the rapid advances of microarray technologies, large amounts of high-dimensional gene expression data are being generated, which poses significant computational challenges. A first step towards addressing this challenge is the use of clustering techniques, which is essential in the data mining process to reveal natural structures and identify interesting patterns in the underlying data. A robust gene expression clustering approach to minimize undesirable clustering is proposed. In this paper, Penalized Fuzzy C-Means (PFCM) Clustering algorithm is described and compared with the most representative off-line clustering techniques: K-Means Clustering, Rough K-Means Clustering and Fuzzy C-Means clustering. These techniques are implemented and tested for a Brain Tumor gene expression Dataset. Analysis of the performance of the proposed approach is presented through qualitative validation experiments. From experimental results, it can be observed that Penalized Fuzzy C-Means algorithm shows a much higher usability than the other projected clustering algorithms used in our comparison study. Significant and promising clustering results are presented using Brain Tumor Gene expression dataset. Thus patterns seen in genome-wide expression experiments can be interpreted as indications of the status of cellular processes. In these clustering results, we find that Penalized Fuzzy C-Means algorithm provides useful information as an aid to diagnosis in oncology.
Differences in blood flow between auditory and visual stimuli in the Psychomotor Vigilance Task and GO/NOGO Task

The Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) and the GO/NOGO task are generally applied to measure the ability of sustained attention. Advances in functional brain imaging equipment, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), have resulted in increased application of brain imaging with these tasks. However, several different stimuli are adopted in these tasks, including both auditory and visual stimuli. Therefore, even when a subject performs these tasks, it can be assumed that the activated brain regions would vary when the different stimuli are given. Furthermore, even when a subject performs the tasks with the same sustained attention, the activated brain regions would vary when the configurations of these tasks are different. In this study, the reaction time and changes in blood flow were measured when a subject performed the PVT and GO/NOGO tasks, and so it is possible to discuss (1) the differences between visual and auditory stimuli and (2) the differences between PVT and GO/NOGO tasks. The results indicated increased blood flow at the left side of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the PVT with visual stimulus compared with the auditory stimulus. In the GO/NOGO task, the blood flow associated with visual stimuli increased at the both sides of the inferior temporal gyrus and the right side of the inferior frontal gyrus compared with auditory stimuli. These observations suggested that the configurations of these tasks, such as the PVT and the GO/NOGO tasks, exert influences on the activated brain regions when a subject performs these tasks.
Optimal finite state universal coding of individual sequences

The problem of assigning a probability to the next outcome of an individual binary sequence under the constraint that the universal predictor has a finite number of states, is explored. The two main loss functions that are considered are the square error loss and the self-information loss. Universal prediction w.r. t. the self-information loss can be combined with arithmetic encoding to construct a universal encoder, thus explores the universal coding problem. The performance of randomized time-invariant K-state universal predictors, and provide performance bounds in terms of the number of states K for long enough sequences is analyzed. In the case where the comparison class consists of constant predictors for the square error loss, the tight bounds indicating that the optimal asymptotic expected redundancy is O(1/K) is provided. An upper bound on the coding redundancy of O((log K)/K) and a lower bound of O(1/K) is shown for the self-information loss.
Maternal Glucose at 28 Weeks of Gestation Is Not Associated With Obesity in 2-Year-Old Offspring

OBJECTIVE Diabetes during pregnancy is a strong risk factor for obesity in the offspring, but the age at which this association becomes apparent is unknown. The purpose of this study was to examine the relation of glycemia during pregnancy with anthropometry in offspring of nondiabetic pregnant women from the Belfast U.K. center of the multinational Hyperglycemia and Adverse Pregnancy Outcome (HAPO) Study. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Women from the HAPO Study were invited to participate in follow-up of their offspring aged 2 years. Measurements included height, weight, and thickness of triceps, subscapular, and suprailiac skinfolds. RESULTS A total of 1,165 offspring (73% of eligible children; 598 boys and 567 girls) were seen from ages 22–30 completed months. The only association that reached statistical significance was between categories of maternal 1-h glucose and BMI Z score ≥85th percentile at 2 years (P = 0.017). Overall the correlations between maternal glucose during pregnancy and BMI Z score at age 2 years were weak (fasting glucose r = 0.05, P = 0.08; 1-h glucose r = 0.04, P = 0.22; 2-h glucose r = 0.03, P = 0.36; and area under the curve for glucose r = 0.04, P = 0.18). CONCLUSIONS This study found little association between maternal glucose during pregnancy and obesity in the offspring at this young age. These findings are not unexpected given that study results for young offspring whose mothers had diabetes during pregnancy were indistinguishable from those for normal offspring at this age. It will be interesting to see whether, as these children age, maternal glucose during pregnancy in the ranges included in the HAPO Study will be associated with obesity in their children.
Analysis of uterine activity in nonpregnant women by electrohysterography: A feasibility study

With an overall effectiveness below 30%, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is in urgent need for improvements, especially in view of the increasing trend in postponing childbirth in developed societies. Abnormal contraction of the uterus may underlie impaired fertility and unsuccessful IVF. However, currently, there is no method for quantitative assessment of uterine activity and guidance of dedicated intervention. Analysis of the electrohysterogram (EHG) has been extensively used in pregnancy for quantifying uterine contractions. In this paper, we evaluate, for the first time, the use of EHG analysis for characterizing contractions in women in two different phases of the menstrual cycle, when the uterus is expected to be active and quiescent. In this preliminary study, by estimating the time evolution of the EHG signal energy, we derive the contraction frequency, fC, as a possible marker for quantifying the activity of the uterus and discriminate between active and quiescent status. Ultrasound (US) image sequences are simultaneously recorded and visually analyzed for a qualitative validation of the results. The high correlation (0.91) between fC obtained by EHG and US analysis and the measured different values of fC in the two phases motivate further research to confirm the value of EHG analysis for contraction quantification in nonpregnant women.
Modern medical and surgical management of difficult-to-treat GORD

Approximately 30–40% of patients taking proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) for presumed gastro-oesophageal reflux (GOR) symptoms do not achieve adequate symptom control, especially when no oesophageal mucosal breaks are present at endoscopy and when extra-oesophageal symptoms are concerned. After failure of optimization of medical therapy, a careful work up is mandatory that aims at determining whether symptoms are related to GOR or not. Most patients with refractory symptoms do not have GOR-related symptoms. Some may have symptoms related to weakly acidic reflux and/or oesophageal hypersensitivity. Baclofen is currently the only antireflux compound available as add-on therapy to PPIs, but its poor tolerability limits its use in clinical practice. There is room for pain modulators in patients with hypersensitive oesophagus and functional heartburn. Antireflux surgery is a suitable option in patients responding to medical therapy who want to avoid taking medication or if persisting symptoms can be clearly attributed to poorly controlled GOR.
Unsupervised Speaker Segmentation using Autoassociative Neural Network

In this paper we propose an unsupervised approach to speaker segmentation using autoassociative neural network (AANN). Speaker segmentation aims at finding speaker change points in a speech signal which is an important preprocessing step to audio indexing, spoken document retrieval and multi speaker diarization. The method extracts the speaker specific information from the Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). The speaker change points are detected using the distribution capturing ability of the AANN model. Experiments are carried out on different audio databases, and the method is capable of detecting speaker changes with short duration of speech in an unsupervised manner.
An Automata-Theoretic Approach to Uniform Interpolation and Approximation in the Description Logic EL

We study (i) uniform interpolation for TBoxes that are formulated in the lightweight description logic EL and (ii) EL-approximations of TBoxes formulated in more expressive languages. In both cases, we give model-theoretic characterizations based on simulations and cartesian products, and we develop algorithms that decide whether interpolants and approximants exist. We present a uniform approach to both problems, based on a novel amorphous automaton model called EL automata (EA). Using EAs, we also establish a simpler proof of the known result that conservative extensions of EL-TBoxes can be decided in EXPTIME.
An inquiry into the different perspectives that can be used when eliciting preferences in health.

There are a number of perspectives that an individual could be asked to adopt in studies designed to elicit preferences for use in informing resource allocation decisions in health care. This paper develops a conceptual framework that clearly distinguishes between six different perspectives. It is argued that the appropriate perspective to use depends on normative considerations and the particular policy context to which it will be applied. We suggest a future research agenda that explicitly addresses these considerations and which involves direct empirical investigation into the effect of perspective on preferences.
Text Analysis of User-Generated Contents for Health-care Applications - Case Study on Smoking Status Classification

Text mining techniques have demonstrated a potential to unlock significant patient health information from unstructured text. However, most of the published work has been done using clinical reports, which are difficult to access due to patient confidentiality. In this paper, we present an investigation of text analysis for smoking status classification from User-Generated Contents (UGC), such as online forum discussions. UGC are more widely available, compared to clinical reports. Based on analyzing the properties of UGC, we propose the use of Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) an approach being used for the first time for such a health-related task. We also explore various factors that affect the classification performance. The experimental results and evaluation indicate that the forum classification performs well with the proposed features. It has achieved an accuracy of up to 75% for smoking status prediction. Furthermore, the utilized features set is compact (88 features only) and independent of the dataset size.
Genetically Engineered Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 Synbiotics Reduce Metabolic Effects Induced by Chronic Consumption of Dietary Fructose

Aims To assess protective efficacy of genetically modified Escherichia coli Nissle 1917 (EcN) on metabolic effects induced by chronic consumption of dietary fructose. Materials and Methods EcN was genetically modified with fructose dehydrogenase (fdh) gene for conversion of fructose to 5-keto-D-fructose and mannitol-2-dehydrogenase (mtlK) gene for conversion to mannitol, a prebiotic. Charles foster rats weighing 150–200 g were fed with 20% fructose in drinking water for two months. Probiotic treatment of EcN (pqq), EcN (pqq-glf-mtlK), EcN (pqq-fdh) was given once per week 109 cells for two months. Furthermore, blood and liver parameters for oxidative stress, dyslipidemia and hyperglycemia were estimated. Fecal samples were collected to determine the production of short chain fatty acids and pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) production. Results EcN (pqq-glf-mtlK), EcN (pqq-fdh) transformants were confirmed by restriction digestion and functionality was checked by PQQ estimation and HPLC analysis. There was significant increase in body weight, serum glucose, liver injury markers, lipid profile in serum and liver, and decrease in antioxidant enzyme activity in high-fructose-fed rats. However the rats treated with EcN (pqq-glf-mtlK) and EcN (pqq-fdh) showed significant reduction in lipid peroxidation along with increase in serum and hepatic antioxidant enzyme activities. Restoration of liver injury marker enzymes was also seen. Increase in short chain fatty acids (SCFA) demonstrated the prebiotic effects of mannitol and gluconic acid. Conclusions Our study demonstrated the effectiveness of probiotic EcN producing PQQ and fructose metabolizing enzymes against the fructose induced hepatic steatosis suggesting that its potential for use in treating fructose induced metabolic syndrome.
Local frequency representations for robust multimodal image registration

Automatic registration of multimodal images involves algorithmically estimating the coordinate transformation required to align the data sets. Most existing methods in the literature are unable to cope with registration of image pairs with large nonoverlapping field of view (FOV). We propose a robust algorithm, based on matching dominant local frequency image representations, which can cope with image pairs with large nonoverlapping FOV The local frequency representation naturally allows for processing the data at different scales/resolutions, a very desirable property from a computational efficiency view point. Our algorithm involves minimizing-over all rigid/affine transformations-the integral of the squared error (ISE or L/sub 2/E) between a Gaussian model of the residual and its true density function. The residual here refers to the difference between the local frequency representations of the transformed (by an unknown transformation) source and target data. We present implementation results for image data sets, which are misaligned magnetic resonance (MR) brain scans obtained using different image acquisition protocols as well as misaligned MR-computed tomography scans. We experimently show that our L/sub 2/E-based scheme yields better accuracy over the normalized mutual information.
Denitrification of Secondary Wastewater Using Sawdust

This contribution is devoted to the use of sawdust as materials to improve the efficiency of removing nitrate from the secondary wastewater. Sawdust, a relatively abundant and inexpensive material is being investigated as a porous treatment media to enhance removal of contaminants from wastewater. Successful nitrate removal from secondary wastewater has been demonstrated in a laboratory experiment using columns filled with porous soil material and sawdust and/or bamboo chip served as an organic carbon source. While the availability of organic carbon is one of the most important factors that affects denitrifying activity in soil. A mathematical solute transport model was developed to predict the nitrate degradation processes through a natural filter. The model computes changes in concentration over time caused by the processes of advection, dispersion and biological reactions. Results from a laboratory soil-sawdust and soil-bamboo chip columns experiments were used to verify the simulation results of the model. This study demonstrated that denitrification using sawdust as a carbon source can effectively remove nitrate from secondary wastewater when the carbon source is limiting in the influent secondary wastewater or groundwater.
Efficient Filtering and Routing in a Scalable XML-Based Publish-Subscribe System

This paper introduces YAK – a scalable contentbased publish-subscribe system. YAK employs XML documents and expressive XPath queries as the publication and subscription model. To achieve high scalability, it combines the advantages of content routing in existing publish-subscribe systems and the efficient query indexing technique in the context of XML filtering. The filtering and routing strategy used in YAK exploits the locality of subscribers and therefore dramatically reduces the network communication overhead. Through performance tests, we conclude that our YAK publish-subscribe model is highly scalable, especially when subscriptions exhibit high selectivity and regionalism.
Back to Kyoto? Us Participation and the Linkage between R&D and Climate Cooperation

The US decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and the subsequent outcomes of the Bonn and Marrakech Conferences of the Parties drastically reduce the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol in controlling GHG emissions. The reason is not only the reduced emission abatement in the US. Lower spillover effects on technology and an increase in Russia’s bargaining power were also induced by the US decision. It is therefore crucial to analyse whether an incentive strategy exists that could induce the US to revise its decision and comply with the Kyoto commitments. One solution, occasionally proposed in literature and in actual policymaking, is to link negotiations on climate change control with decisions concerning international R&D cooperation and technology transfers. This paper explores this idea by analysing on the one hand the incentives for the EU, Japan and Russia to adopt an “issue linkage” strategy, and on the other hand the incentives for the US to join a coalition cooperating both on climate change control and on technological innovation. The extended regime in which cooperation takes place on both dimensions (GHG emissions and R&D) will be examined from the view point of countries’ profitability and free-riding incentives. The effectiveness and credibility of the “issue linkage” strategy will thus be assessed.