Cardiac tamponade as a presentation of primary hypothyroidism in a young woman

Pericardial effusion (PE) as a hypothyroidism associated sign, is something that can be found with relative frequency; nevertheless, cardiac tamponade (CT) as the first sign of this disease may be considered exceptional especially in young patients. We report a 31 years old woman with clinical symptoms and signs of CT that in the forward workshop was diagnosed of primary hypothyroidism as cause of the CT. We shortly describe the case and review the literature, emphasizing the importance of the knowledge of CT trigger factors in myxedematous PE, as well as its usual benign evolution with hormonal treatment, without recurrences of the CT after pericardiocentesis is performed. This justify a conservative approach, in spite of the slow resolution of the PE what can take as long as 1.5 years.     

Electrospun fibers based on porcine plasma: a rheological and morphological study

Iranian Polymer Journal - The present work focuses on the assessment of the ability of porcine plasma protein (PPP) to be electrospun satisfactorily to form fibre mats, and their rheological and...     

Characterization of Urine Stem Cell-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Reveals B Cell Stimulating Cargo

Elucidation of the biological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their potential roles in physiological and pathological processes is an expanding field of research. In this study, we characterized USC–derived EVs and studied their capacity to modulate the human immune response in vitro. We found that the USC–derived EVs are a heterogeneous population, ranging in size from that of micro–vesicles (150 nm–1 μm) down to that of exosomes (60–150 nm). Regarding their immunomodulatory functions, we found that upon isolation, the EVs (60–150 nm) induced B cell proliferation and IgM antibody secretion. Analysis of the EV contents unexpectedly revealed the presence of BAFF, APRIL, IL–6, and CD40L, all known to play a central role in B cell stimulation, differentiation, and humoral immunity. In regard to their effect on T cell functions, they resembled the function of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)–derived EVs previously described, suppressing T cell response to activation. The finding that USC–derived EVs transport a potent bioactive cargo opens the door to a novel therapeutic avenue for boosting B cell responses in immunodeficiency or cancer.     

Interplay between Humoral and CLA+ T Cell Response against Candida albicans in Psoriasis

Candida albicans (CA) infections have been associated with psoriasis onset or disease flares. However, the integrated immune response against this fungus is still poorly characterized in psoriasis. We studied specific immunoglobulins in plasma and the CA response in cocultures of circulating memory CD45RA⁻ cutaneous lymphocyte antigen (CLA)^+/− T cell with autologous epidermal cells from plaque and guttate psoriasis patients (cohort 1, n = 52), and also healthy individuals (n = 17). A complete proteomic profile was also evaluated in plaque psoriasis patients (cohort 2, n = 114) regarding their anti-CA IgA levels. Increased anti-CA IgA and IgG levels are present in the plasma from plaque but not guttate psoriasis compared to healthy controls. CA cellular response is confined to CLA⁺ T cells and is primarily Th17. The levels of anti-CA IgA are directly associated with CLA⁺ Th17 response in plaque psoriasis. Proteomic analysis revealed distinct profiles in psoriasis patients with high anti-CA IgA. C-C motif chemokine ligand 18, chitinase-3-like protein 1 and azurocidin were significantly elevated in the plasma from plaque psoriasis patients with high anti-CA levels and severe disease. Our results indicate a mechanism by which Candida albicans exposure can trigger a clinically relevant IL-17 response in psoriasis. Assessing anti-CA IgA levels may be useful in order to evaluate chronic psoriasis patients.     

Improving retrieval accuracy of Hierarchical Cellular Trees for generic metric spaces

Metric Access Methods (MAMs) are indexing techniques which allow working in generic metric spaces. Therefore, MAMs are specially useful for Content-Based Image Retrieval systems based on features which use non L _p norms as similarity measures. MAMs naturally allow the design of image browsers due to their inherent hierarchical structure. The Hierarchical Cellular Tree (HCT), a MAM-based indexing technique, provides the starting point of our work. In this paper, we describe some limitations detected in the original formulation of the HCT and propose some modifications to both the index building and the search algorithm. First, the covering radius, which is defined as the distance from the representative to the furthest element in a node, may not cover all the elements belonging to the node’s subtree. Therefore, we propose to redefine the covering radius as the distance from the representative to the furthest element in the node’s subtree. This new definition is essential to guarantee a correct construction of the HCT. Second, the proposed Progressive Query retrieval scheme can be redesigned to perform the nearest neighbor operation in a more efficient way. We propose a new retrieval scheme which takes advantage of the benefits of the search algorithm used in the index building. Furthermore, while the evaluation of the HCT in the original work was only subjective, we propose an objective evaluation based on two aspects which are crucial in any approximate search algorithm: the retrieval time and the retrieval accuracy. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the proposal by presenting some actual applications.     

Scandinavian Thins on Top of Cake: New and Improved Algorithms for Stacking and Packing

We show how to compute the smallest rectangle that can enclose any polygon, from a given set of polygons, in nearly linear time; we also present a PTAS for the problem, as well as a linear-time algorithm for the case when the polygons are rectangles themselves. We prove that finding a smallest convex polygon that encloses any of the given polygons is NP-hard, and give a PTAS for minimizing the perimeter of the convex enclosure. We also give efficient algorithms to find the smallest rectangle simultaneously enclosing a given pair of convex polygons.     

Assessment of crowdsourcing and gamification loss in user-assisted object segmentation

There has been a growing interest in applying human computation – particularly crowdsourcing techniques – to assist in the solution of multimedia, image processing, and computer vision problems which are still too difficult to solve using fully automatic algorithms, and yet relatively easy for humans. In this paper we focus on a specific problem – object segmentation within color images – and compare different solutions which combine color image segmentation algorithms with human efforts, either in the form of an explicit interactive segmentation task or through an implicit collection of valuable human traces with a game. We use Click’n’Cut, a friendly, web-based, interactive segmentation tool that allows segmentation tasks to be assigned to many users, and Ask’nSeek, a game with a purpose designed for object detection and segmentation. The two main contributions of this paper are: (i) We use the results of Click’n’Cut campaigns with different groups of users to examine and quantify the crowdsourcing loss incurred when an interactive segmentation task is assigned to paid crowd-workers, comparing their results to the ones obtained when computer vision experts are asked to perform the same tasks. (ii) Since interactive segmentation tasks are inherently tedious and prone to fatigue, we compare the quality of the results obtained with Click’n’Cut with the ones obtained using a (fun, interactive, and potentially less tedious) game designed for the same purpose. We call this contribution the assessment of the gamification loss, since it refers to how much quality of segmentation results may be lost when we switch to a game-based approach to the same task. We demonstrate that the crowdsourcing loss is significant when using all the data points from workers, but decreases substantially (and becomes comparable to the quality of expert users performing similar tasks) after performing a modest amount of data analysis and filtering out of users whose data are clearly not useful. We also show that – on the other hand – the gamification loss is significantly more severe: the quality of the results drops roughly by half when switching from a focused (yet tedious) task to a more fun and relaxed game environment.     

Generic Self-calibration of Central Cameras from Two Rotational Flows

We address the self-calibration of a smooth generic central camera from only two dense rotational flows produced by rotations of the camera about two unknown linearly independent axes passing through the camera centre. We give a closed-form theoretical solution to this problem, and we prove that it can be solved exactly up to a linear orthogonal transformation ambiguity. Using the theoretical results, we propose an algorithm for the self-calibration of a generic central camera from two rotational flows.