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Breast Cancer : Basic and Clinical... Feb 2011The objective of this study was to determine if measurements of breast morphology computed from three-dimensional (3D) stereophotogrammetry are equivalent to traditional...
The objective of this study was to determine if measurements of breast morphology computed from three-dimensional (3D) stereophotogrammetry are equivalent to traditional anthropometric measurements obtained directly on a subject using a tape measure. 3D torso images of 23 women ranged in age from 36 to 63 who underwent or were scheduled for breast reconstruction surgery were obtained using a 3dMD torso system (3Q Technologies Inc., Atlanta, GA). Two different types (contoured and line-of-sight distances) of a total of nine distances were computed from 3D images of each participant. Each participant was photographed twice, first without fiducial points marked (referred to as unmarked image) and second with fiducial points marked prior to imaging (referred to as marked image). Stereophotogrammetry was compared to traditional direct anthropometry, in which measurements were taken with a tape measure on participants. Three statistical analyses were used to evaluate the agreement between stereophotogrammetry and direct anthropometry. Seven out of nine distances showed excellent agreement between stereophotogrammetry and direct anthropometry (both marked and unmarked images). In addition, stereophotogrammetry from the unmarked image was equivalent to that of the marked image (both line-of-sight and contoured distances). A lower level of agreement was observed for some measures because of difficulty in localizing more vaguely defined fiducial points, such as lowest visible point of breast mound, and inability of the imaging system in capturing areas obscured by the breast, such as the inframammary fold. Stereophotogrammetry from 3D images obtained from the 3dMD torso system is effective for quantifying breast morphology. Tools for surgical planning and evaluation based on stereophotogrammetry have the potential to improve breast surgery outcomes.
PubMed: 21494398
DOI: 10.4137/BCBCR.S6352 -
The Korean Journal of Gastroenterology... Jan 2021Fascioliasis is a zoonotic disease caused by that infects mainly cattle, sheep, and goats. Humans can be infected by water or aquatic plants contaminated with...
Fascioliasis is a zoonotic disease caused by that infects mainly cattle, sheep, and goats. Humans can be infected by water or aquatic plants contaminated with metacercariae. The authors encountered two cases of infection. One patient reported abdominal discomfort with marked eosinophilia. The other patient had chest discomfort with marked eosinophilia. The abdominal CT images revealed hypodense lesions in the liver. The ultrasonography-guided liver biopsy findings in both patients were indicative of parasitic infections. Serological tests confirmed the definite diagnoses. Both patients were treated with a single dose of triclabendazole, which is the treatment of choice for fascioliasis. These findings suggest that a diagnosis of fascioliasis, particularly in the acute phase, should be considered in patients with abdominal pain, marked eosinophilia, and hypodense hepatic lesions on CT.
Topics: Adult; Aged; Antiplatyhelmintic Agents; Fascioliasis; Female; Humans; Liver Abscess; Triclabendazole
PubMed: 33495431
DOI: 10.4166/kjg.2020.152 -
PLoS Computational Biology Mar 2020Calcium imaging has been widely used for measuring spiking activities of neurons. When using calcium imaging, we need to extract summarized information from the raw...
Calcium imaging has been widely used for measuring spiking activities of neurons. When using calcium imaging, we need to extract summarized information from the raw movie beforehand. Recent studies have used matrix deconvolution for this preprocessing. However, such an approach can neither directly estimate the generative mechanism of spike trains nor use stimulus information that has a strong influence on neural activities. Here, we propose a new deconvolution method for calcium imaging using marked point processes. We consider that the observed movie is generated from a probabilistic model with marked point processes as hidden variables, and we calculate the posterior of these variables using a variational inference approach. Our method can simultaneously estimate various kinds of information, such as cell shape, spike occurrence time, and tuning curve. We apply our method to simulated and experimental data to verify its performance.
Topics: Action Potentials; Algorithms; Animals; Calcium; Calcium Signaling; Computer Simulation; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Mice; Models, Neurological; Models, Theoretical; Neurons; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
PubMed: 32163407
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007650 -
The Journal of Experimental Medicine Jul 19131. Doses of less than six milligrams of hematin and, under certain conditions, larger doses may cause a slight rise of blood pressure. 2. Large doses of hematin cause a...
1. Doses of less than six milligrams of hematin and, under certain conditions, larger doses may cause a slight rise of blood pressure. 2. Large doses of hematin cause a profound and prolonged fall of blood pressure. The principal factor in this fall of blood pressure is the marked dilatation of the splanchnic vessels. The splanchnic dilatation either does not occur at all or but very slightly if the splanchnic nerves are cut. The splanchnic dilatation is partly compensated for by a marked constriction of cutaneous vessels and it seems probable that the cutaneous constriction is active and not simply passive to the splanchnic engorgement. 3. Hematin acts upon the cardio-inhibitory center causing a marked slowing of the rate of heart-beat, and in large doses produces a typical vagal pulse or even marked irregularities in the amplitude and rhythm of the pulse. Under hematin the heart at first shows great loss of tone but later the tone increases beyond the normal. The cardiac output for a time is greatly diminished. 4. In the large doses employed by us, hematin depresses the respiratory center and death under hematin is due to paralysis of this center.
PubMed: 19867680
DOI: 10.1084/jem.18.1.107 -
BioRxiv : the Preprint Server For... Feb 2023(Cb) is an obligate intracellular pathogen in nature and the causative agent of acute Q fever as well as chronic diseases. In an effort to identify genes and proteins...
(Cb) is an obligate intracellular pathogen in nature and the causative agent of acute Q fever as well as chronic diseases. In an effort to identify genes and proteins crucial to their normal intracellular growth lifestyle, we applied a "Reverse evolution" approach where the avirulent Nine Mile Phase II strain of Cb was grown for 67 passages in chemically defined ACCM-D media and gene expression patterns and genome integrity from various passages was compared to passage number one following intracellular growth. Transcriptomic analysis identified a marked downregulation of the structural components of the type 4B secretion system (T4BSS), the general secretory (sec) pathway, as well as 14 out of 118 previously identified genes encoding effector proteins. Additional downregulated pathogenicity determinants genes included several chaperones, LPS, and peptidoglycan biosynthesis. A general marked downregulation of central metabolic pathways was also observed, which was balanced by a marked upregulation of genes encoding transporters. This pattern reflected the richness of the media and diminishing anabolic and ATP-generation needs. Finally, genomic sequencing and comparative genomic analysis demonstrated an extremely low level of mutation across passages, despite the observed Cb gene expression changes following acclimation to axenic media.
PubMed: 36798183
DOI: 10.1101/2023.02.06.527305 -
Journal of Geometric Analysis 2021A is a 5-dimensional manifold together with a contact distribution and a bundle of twisted cubics compatible with the conformal symplectic form on . The simplest...
A is a 5-dimensional manifold together with a contact distribution and a bundle of twisted cubics compatible with the conformal symplectic form on . The simplest contact twisted cubic structure is referred to as the ; its symmetry group is the exceptional group . In the present paper we equip the contact Engel structure with a smooth section , which "marks" a point in each fibre . We study the local geometry of the resulting structures , which we call . Equivalently, our study can be viewed as a study of foliations of by curves whose tangent directions are everywhere contained in . We provide a complete set of local invariants of marked contact Engel structures, we classify all homogeneous models with symmetry groups of dimension up to local equivalence, and we prove an analogue of the classical Kerr theorem from Relativity.
PubMed: 34720563
DOI: 10.1007/s12220-020-00545-5 -
Frontiers in Psychology 2024This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers...
This study examines online processing and offline judgments of subject-verb person agreement with a focus on how this is impacted by markedness in heritage speakers (HSs) of Italian. To this end, 54 adult HSs living in Germany and 40 homeland Italian speakers completed a self-paced reading task (SPRT) and a grammaticality judgment task (GJT). Markedness was manipulated by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person marked subjects with third-person unmarked verbs and vice versa. Crucially, person violations with 1st person subjects (e.g., * "I plays the guitar") yielded significantly shorter RTs in the SPRT and higher accuracy in the GJT than the opposite error type (e.g., "the journalist go out often"). This effect is consistent with the claim that when the first element in the dependency is marked (first person), the parser generates stronger predictions regarding upcoming agreeing elements. These results nicely align with work from the same populations investigating the impact of morphological markedness on grammatical gender agreement, suggesting that markedness impacts agreement similarly in two distinct grammatical domains and that sensitivity to markedness is more prevalent for HSs.
PubMed: 38550649
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1321614 -
Journal of Inflammation (London,... May 2010Severe trauma can induce pathophysiological responses that have marked inflammatory components. The development of systemic inflammation following severe thermal injury...
BACKGROUND
Severe trauma can induce pathophysiological responses that have marked inflammatory components. The development of systemic inflammation following severe thermal injury has been implicated in immune dysfunction, delayed wound healing, multi-system organ failure and increased mortality.
METHODS
In this study, we examined the impact of thermal injury-induced systemic inflammation on the healing response of a secondary wound in the MRL/MpJ mouse model, which was anatomically remote from the primary site of trauma, a wound that typically undergoes scarless healing in this specific strain. Ear-hole wounds in MRL/MpJ mice have previously displayed accelerated healing and tissue regeneration in the absence of a secondary insult.
RESULTS
Severe thermal injury in addition to distal ear-hole wounds induced marked local and systemic inflammatory responses in the lungs and significantly augmented the expression of inflammatory mediators in the ear tissue. By day 14, 61% of the ear-hole wounds from thermally injured mice demonstrated extensive inflammation with marked inflammatory cell infiltration, extensive ulceration, and various level of necrosis to the point where a large percentage (38%) had to be euthanized early during the study due to extensive necrosis, inflammation and ear deformation. By day 35, ear-hole wounds in mice not subjected to thermal injury were completely closed, while the ear-hole wounds in thermally injured mice exhibited less inflammation and necrosis and only closed partially (62%). Thermal injury resulted in marked increases in serum levels of IL-6, TNFalpha, KC (CXCL1), and MIP-2alpha (CXCL2). Interestingly, attenuated early ear wound healing in the thermally injured mouse resulted in incomplete tissue regeneration in addition to a marked inflammatory response, as evidenced by the histological appearance of the wound and increased transcription of potent inflammatory mediators.
CONCLUSION
These findings suggest that the observed systemic inflammatory response of a severe thermal injury undoubtedly has an adverse effect on wound healing and tissue regeneration.
PubMed: 20500883
DOI: 10.1186/1476-9255-7-25 -
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) Dec 2021The quantum search algorithm is one of the milestones of quantum algorithms. Compared with classical algorithms, it shows quadratic speed-up when searching marked states...
The quantum search algorithm is one of the milestones of quantum algorithms. Compared with classical algorithms, it shows quadratic speed-up when searching marked states in an unsorted database. However, the success rates of quantum search algorithms are sensitive to the number of marked states. In this paper, we study the relation between the success rate and the number of iterations in a quantum search algorithm of given λ=M/N, where is the number of marked state and is the number of items in the dataset. We develop a robust quantum search algorithm based on Grover-Long algorithm with some uncertainty in the number of marked states. The proposed algorithm has the same query complexity ON as the Grover's algorithm, and shows high tolerance of the uncertainty in the ratio M/N. In particular, for a database with an uncertainty in the ratio M±MN, our algorithm will find the target states with a success rate no less than 96%.
PubMed: 34945955
DOI: 10.3390/e23121649 -
Marked paraneoplastic basophilia accompanying eosinophilia in a cat with alimentary T-cell lymphoma.JFMS Open Reports 2017A 5-year-old male neutered domestic shorthair cat was referred with a history of persistent pyrexia, pica, soft faeces, inappetence, intermittent vomiting,...
CASE SUMMARY
A 5-year-old male neutered domestic shorthair cat was referred with a history of persistent pyrexia, pica, soft faeces, inappetence, intermittent vomiting, mild-to-moderate granulocytosis and mild hypercalcaemia. No significant improvement was noted after antibiotic and corticosteroid treatment, except that the hypercalcaemia resolved. Physical examination, including thoracic auscultation, and abdominal and peripheral lymph node palpation, were unremarkable. On admission, haematology revealed moderate leukocytosis (36.8 × 10/l) with moderate-to-marked eosinophilia (21.3 × 10/l) and marked basophilia (4.04 × 10/l), the latter identified microscopically. Lymphocytes were markedly decreased (0.37 × 10/l). Blood smear examination revealed 58% eosinophils, 28% neutrophils, 11% basophils, 2% monocytes, 1% lymphocytes and marked, diffuse platelet clumping. Biochemistry abnormalities indicated mild pancreatitis, dehydration and anorexia with mildly increased pancreatic lipase, mild hypernatraemia (157 mmol/l), a moderate decrease in urea (3.1 mmol/l) and a slight decrease in phosphate (1.32 mmol/l). Ultrasound and radiographic imaging revealed enlargement of the mesenteric lymph nodes. Fine-needle aspiration, a Tru-cut biopsy and immunohistochemistry were performed. Cytological examination revealed ~65-75% lymphocytes (~80% were larger than a neutrophil), ~25-35% eosinophils and occasional basophils. Lymphocytes had single, small (<1/3 red blood cells), prominent nucleoli and increased pale, mildly vacuolated cytoplasm. On histopathology, cells were monomorphic, large, with prominent nucleoli, and mild, multifocal, staining for T-cell marker CD3. Smaller cells were strongly CD3-positive. Cells were negative for B-cell marker CD45R.
RELEVANCE AND NOVEL INFORMATION
This is the most severe case of paraneoplastic basophilia reported with feline alimentary T-cell lymphoma with accompanying eosinophilia and lymph node infiltration. Feline basophil prevalence is reported for the first time.
PubMed: 28975036
DOI: 10.1177/2055116917730180