Clonality in hepatocellular carcinoma: analysis of methylation pattern of polymorphic X-chromosome-linked phosphoglycerate kinase gene in females

Analysis of X-chromosome inactivation patterns in women has been used to assess the clonality of various tumors. In this report, we analyzed 27 liver tumors in women, including 18 samples obtained by the performance of ultrasonically guided thin-needle biopsies. By analysis of the heterogeneity of phosphoglycerate kinase gene, 11 of 27 (41%) cases were found to be heterozygous at the gene. Of these informative 11 cases with liver tumors, 7 cases were "large" tumors (> 25 mm in diameter) and 4 cases were "small" tumors (< 25 mm in diameter). All 7 large tumors showed monoclonal patterns by the phosphoglycerate kinase gene analysis. Of the 4 small tumors, 2 showed monoclonal, and 2 showed polyclonal patterns. The 2 with monoclonal patterns were pathologically diagnosed as hepatocellular carcinoma despite their small sizes (20 mm and 23 mm). Of the two with polyclonal patterns, the smallest one (15 mm) was diagnosed as benign adenomatous hyperplasia, and the other as hepatocellular carcinoma heavily infiltrated by lymphocytes. These data suggest that analysis of the methylation pattern of the phosphoglycerate kinase gene may be helpful on rare occasions in elucidating the nature of liver tumors but must in fact be used in conjunction with histological appearances to avoid errors secondary to inflammatory infiltrates.     

Bounded Rationality,Group Formation and the Emergence of Trust: An Agent-Based Economic Model

Computational Economics - It is possible to model trust as an investment game, where a player in order to receive a reward or a better outcome, accepts a certain risk of defection by another...     

Evolution of the trappin multigene family in the Suidae

The purpose of the study was to examine the effects of manipulating lung volume (LV) on phonatory and articulatory kinematic behavior during sentence production in healthy adults. Five men and five women repeated the sentence "I sell a sapapple again" under five LV conditions. These included (1) speaking normally, (2) speaking after exhaling most of the air from the lungs, (3) speaking at end expiratory level (EEL), (4) speaking after a maximal inhalation, and (5) speaking after a maximal inhalation while attempting to maintain as normal a mode of speech as possible. From a multichannel recording, measures were made of LV, sound pressure level (SPL), fundamental frequency (F0) and semitone standard deviation (STSD), and upper and lower lip displacements and peak velocities. When compared with the reference condition, the sentence was spoken significantly more quickly at the lowest LV. SPL increased significantly for the high LV condition, as did the women's F0 and STSD. Upper lip displacements and peak velocities generally decreased for LVs other than the reference condition. Lower lip movements showed inconsistent changes as a function of LV. Adjustments to the LV for speech led to SPL and F0 changes consistent with a coordinated control of the respiratory system and the larynx. However, less consistent effects were observed in the articulatory kinematic measures, possibly because of a less direct biomechanical and neural control linkage between respiratory and articulatory structures.     

Nitric oxide decomposition in air by using nonthermal plasmaprocessing with additives and catalyst

Catalyst (copper-coated zeolite catalyst, i.e., Cu-ZSM-5) was used to enhance NO_x removal plasma chemical reactions. Two kinds of hydrocarbons (2-propane-1-ol, 2-propanol) were added to the synthesized flue gas before the nonthermal plasma process, and their effects on NO_x removal characteristics were investigated. Enhancement effects of NO_x removal by the nonthermal plasma process with hydrocarbons as the additives were confirmed. Usually, the catalyst's working temperature is much higher than the room temperature. A catalytic reactor was installed after the plasma reactor. Catalytic effects on NO_x removal characteristics disappeared when the synthesized flue gas temperature was increased (~250°C). When the synthesized flue gas temperature was at room temperature, about 90% NO _x removal efficiency was realized with a combination of hydrocarbons, the catalytic reactor, and the pulsed discharge plasma     

Anisotropy in the resistive superconducting transition under magnetic fields in single crystal Pb2Sr2Ho0.5Ca0.5Cu3O8

Anisotropie properties of the single crystal Pb₂Sr₂Ho_0.5Ca_0.5Cu₃O₈ have been investigated by measuring the electrical resistivity in theab-planeρ _ab (H, θ,T), which depends on the angleθ between theab-plane and the magnetic-field direction, in various constant fieldsH perpendicular to the current direction. All the angle-dependent values ofρ _ab (H, θ,T) at a constant temperature are scaled to be on one curve as a function of reduced field. The anisotropic parameter γ≡(m _c ^* /m _ab ^* )^1/2 is estimated as 12–13, which is larger than that of YBa₂Cu₃O₇ and much smaller than that of Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O₈. It has been concluded that the anisotropy does not always depend on the thickness of the blocking layer but seems to depend on the overlap of the electronic wave functions along thec-axis. Anisotropy in the pinning potential has also been discussed from the resistive tail in the temperature dependence ofρ _ab (H,θ,T).     

Parametric estimation of affine deformations of planar shapes

We consider the estimation of affine transformations aligning a known 2D shape and its distorted observation. The classical way to solve this registration problem is to find correspondences between the shapes and then compute the transformation parameters from these landmarks. Here we propose a novel approach where the exact transformation is obtained as the solution of a polynomial system of equations. The method has been tested on synthetic as well as on real images and its robustness in the presence of segmentation errors and additive geometric noise has also been demonstrated. We have successfully applied the method for the registration of hip prosthesis X-ray images. The advantage of the proposed solution is that it is fast, easy to implement, has linear time complexity, works without established correspondences and provides an exact solution regardless of the magnitude of transformation.     

Dynamic defocus and occlusion compensation of projected imagery by model-based optimal projector selection in multi-projection environment

This paper presents a novel model-based approach of dynamic defocus and occlusion compensation method in a multi-projection environment. Conventional defocus compensation research applies appearance-based method, which needs a point spread function (PSF) calibration when either position or orientation of an object to be projected is changed, thus cannot be applied to interactive applications in which the object dynamically moves. On the other hand, we propose a model-based method in which PSF and geometric calibrations are required only once in advance, and projector’s PSF is computed online based on geometric relationship between the projector and the object without any additional calibrations. We propose to distinguish the oblique blur (loss of high-spatial-frequency components according to the incidence angle of the projection light) from the defocus blur and to introduce it to the PSF computation. For each part of the object surfaces, we select an optimal projector that preserves the largest amount of high-spatial-frequency components of the original image to realize defocus-free projection. The geometric relationship can also be used to eliminate the cast shadows of the projection images in multi-projection environment. Our method is particularly useful in the interactive systems because the movement of the object (consequently geometric relationship between each projector and the object) is usually measured by an attached tracking sensor. This paper describes details about the proposed approach and a prototype implementation. We performed two proof-of-concept experiments to show the feasibility of our approach.     

Design of discrete time adaptive PID control systems with parallel feedforward compensator

This paper deals with the design of an adaptive PID control system with a parallel feedforward compensator (PFC) for discrete-time SISO systems and its application to water level control of a 3-tank system. The proposed method utilizes the characteristics of almost strict positive realness (ASPR) of the controlled plant. A conventional design scheme of a PFC which realizes an ASPR augmented controlled plant is also proposed. Further it is shown that the introduction of an internal model improves the control performance of the control system with the PFC. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed through water level control experiments on a three-tank SISO system.     

An Interactive Design System of Free‐Formed Bamboo‐Copters

We present an interactive design system for designing free‐formed bamboo‐copters, where novices can easily design free‐formed, even asymmetric bamboo‐copters that successfully fly. The designed bamboo‐copters can be fabricated using digital fabrication equipment, such as a laser cutter. Our system provides two useful functions for facilitating this design activity. First, it visualizes a simulated flight trajectory of the current bamboo‐copter design, which is updated in real time during the user's editing. Second, it provides an optimization function that automatically tweaks the current bamboo‐copter design such that the spin quality—how stably it spins—and the flight quality—how high and long it flies—are enhanced. To enable these functions, we present non‐trivial extensions over existing techniques for designing free‐formed model airplanes [ UKSI14 ], including a wing discretization method tailored to free‐formed bamboo‐copters and an optimization scheme for achieving stable bamboo‐copters considering both spin and flight qualities.     

Estimation of a nonvisible field-of-view mobile target incorporating optical and acoustic sensors

This paper presents a nonvisible field-of-view (NFOV) target estimation approach that incorporates optical and acoustic sensors. An optical sensor can accurately localize a target in its field-of-view whereas the acoustic sensor could estimate the target location over a much larger space, but only with limited accuracy. A recursive Bayesian estimation framework where observations of the optical and acoustic sensors are probabilistically treated and fused is proposed in this paper. A technique to construct the observation likelihood when two microphones are used as the acoustic sensor is also described. The proposed technique derives and stores the interaural level difference of observations from the two microphones for different target positions in advance and constructs the likelihood through correlation. A parametric study of the proposed acoustic sensing technique in a controlled test environment, and experiments with an NFOV target in an actual indoor environment are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique.