Shortening arthrodesis of three wrist bones

We report an autopsy case of atypical presenile dementia. Shibayama, Kosaka and others had reported similar autopsy cases. These cases had the following common pathologic characteristics: circumscribed cerebral atrophy, diffuse neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) noted in the cerebral cortex with few senile plaques (SPs), and pathological calcification. We propose the term "dementia with cerebral calcification and tangles" (DCCT) for this atypical presenile dementia. Our patient, who was female and died at the age of 65 years, also exhibited these characteristics. Her clinical diagnosis was Alzheimer's disease. She had developed apparent dementia at the age of 55. Psychological and neurological symptoms such as memory impairment, speech disturbance and abnormal behavior slowly progressed. Gradually, she had become bedridden in her own home. When she was 65 years old, she was admitted because of pneumonia, and died soon after. In the pathologic examination of our patient, the brain weight was 850 g, and severe cerebral atrophy predominant in the temporal lobe was noted. Microscopically, diffuse and numerous NFTs were also found in the cerebral cortex and brain stem. Some NFTs were observed in the dentate nucleus of the cerebellum. However, SPs were seldom noted. Calcifications were also found in the putamen, globus pallidus and cerebellar cortex. NFTs in our case had developed without the formation of SPs. The degree of the NFT formation was correlated to the extent of cerebral cortical atrophy and neuron loss. Therefore, we suspect that NFTs with neuron loss strongly contribute to clinical symptoms such as dementia. The distribution of NFTs resembles that in patients with Alzheimer's disease, they are more prominent in the temporal lobe in our case. Although there has not been any discussion about the findings of glial cells and neuropils in DCCT, our detailed examination showed argyrophilic structures in glial cells and in neuropils. Most of the glial cells appeared to be oligodendrocytes. Calcification is also a prominent characteristic of DCCT. Using analytical electron microscopy, we examined the area of calcification in the globus pallidus and cerebellum, and found an accumulation of both Fe and Ca. The role of calcification in the pathogenesis, however, remains unclear. It is very important to examine cases of atypical presenile dementia clinicopathologically, in order to study the correlation between NFTs and SPs in neurological disease, and to understand their pathogenetic significance.     

DeepSketch 3

Freehand sketches are a simple and powerful tool for communication. They are easily recognized across cultures and suitable for various applications. In this paper, we use deep convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), state-of-the-art in the field of sketch recognition, to address several applications of automatic sketch processing: complete and partial sketch recognition, sketch retrieval using query-by-example (QbE), and sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) i.e the retrieval of images using a QbE paradigm but where the query is a sketch. We first focus on improving sketch recognition. For this purpose we compare different ConvNet architectures, training paradigms and data fusion schemes. This enabled us to outperform previous state-of-the-art in two large scale benchmarks for sketch classification. We achieved a mean average accuracy of 79.18% for the TU-Berlin sketch benchmark and 93.02% for the sketchy database. For partial sketch recognition, we were able to produce a system that achieves a mean average accuracy of 52.58% with only 40% of the strokes. We then conduct a comprehensive study of ConvNets features to enhance sketch retrieval and image retrieval, using a kNN similarity search paradigm in the ConvNet feature space. For the sketch retrieval tasks, we compare the performance obtained with features extracted from various depths (ConvNet layers) using one of the best performing model from the previous work. For the sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR), a sketch query is used to retrieve images of objects that belong to the same category, or even with a shape and pose close to the sketch query. The main challenge in the field of SBIR is to obtain efficient cross-domain features for sketch-image similarity measure. For this, besides comparing features extracted from different depth, we additionally compare different training approaches (some novel) for the ConvNets applied to sketches and images. Eventually, our best SBIR system achieves state-of-the-art results on the sketchy database (close to 40% recall at k = 1).

     

STAMINA: a competition to encourage the development and assessment of software model inference techniques

Models play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of software systems, but are often neglected during the development process due to the considerable manual effort required to produce them. In response to this problem, numerous techniques have been developed that seek to automate the model generation task with the aid of increasingly accurate algorithms from the domain of Machine Learning. From an empirical perspective, these are extremely challenging to compare; there are many factors that are difficult to control (e.g. the richness of the input and the complexity of subject systems), and numerous practical issues that are just as troublesome (e.g. tool availability). This paper describes the StaMinA (State Machine Inference Approaches) competiton, that was designed to address these problems. The competition attracted numerous submissions, many of which were improved or adapted versions of techniques that had not been subjected to extensive empirical evaluations, and had not been evaluated with respect to their ability to infer models of software systems. This paper shows how many of these techniques substantially improve on the state of the art, providing insights into some of the factors that could underpin the success of the best techniques. In a more general sense it demonstrates the potential for competitions to act as a useful basis for empirical software engineering by (a) spurring the development of new techniques and (b) facilitating their comparative evaluation to an extent that would usually be prohibitively challenging without the active participation of the developers.     

Joint reversible watermarking and progressive compression of 3D meshes

A new reversible 3D mesh watermarking scheme is proposed in conjunction with progressive compression. Progressive 3D mesh compression permits a progressive refinement of the model from a coarse to a fine representation by using different levels of detail (LoDs). A reversible watermark is embedded into all refinement levels such that (1) the refinement levels are copyright protected, and (2) an authorized user is able to reconstruct the original 3D model after watermark extraction, hence reversible. The progressive compression considers a connectivity-driven algorithm to choose the vertices that are to be refined for each LoD. The proposed watermarking algorithm modifies the geometry information of these vertices based on histogram bin shifting technique. An authorized user can extract the watermark in each LoD and recover the original 3D mesh, while an unauthorized user which has access to the decompression algorithm can only reconstruct a distorted version of the 3D model. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to several attack scenarios while maintaining a good compression ratio.     

Characterization of active-site aromatic residues in xylanase A from Streptomyces lividans

The role of four aromatic residues (W85, Y172, W266 and W274)in the structure–function relationship in xylanase A fromStreptomyces lividans (XlnA) was investigated by site-directedmutagenesis where each residue was subjected to three substitutions(W85A/H/F; W266A/H/F; W274A/H/F and Y172A/F/S). These four aminoacids are highly conserved among family 10 xylanases and structuraldata have implicated them in substrate binding at the activesite. Far-UV circular dichroism spectroscopy was used to showthat the overall structure of XlnA was not affected by any ofthese mutations. High-performance liquid chromatographic analysisof the hydrolysis products of birchwood xylan and xylopentaoseshowed that mutation of these aromatic residues did not alterthe enzyme's mode of action. As expected, though, it did reducethe affinity of XlnA for birchwood xylan. A comparison of thekinetic parameters of different mutants at the same positiondemonstrated the importance of the aromatic nature of W85, Y172and W274 in substrate binding. Replacement of these residuesby a phenylalanine resulted in mutant proteins with a K_M closerto that of the wild-type protein in comparison with the othermutations analyzed. The kinetic analysis of the mutant proteinsat position W266 indicated that this amino acid is importantfor both substrate binding and efficient catalysis by XlnA.These studies also demonstrated the crucial role of these activesite aromatic residues for the thermal stability of XlnA.     

Dairy products and inflammation: A review of the clinical evidence

Inflammation is a major biological process regulating the interaction between organisms and the environment, including the diet. Because of the increase in chronic inflammatory diseases, and in light of the immune-regulatory properties of breastfeeding, the ability of dairy products to modulate inflammatory processes in humans is an important but unresolved issue. Here, we report a systematic review of 52 clinical trials investigating inflammatory markers in relation to the consumption of dairy products. An inflammatory score (IS) was defined to quantitatively evaluate this interaction. The IS was significantly positive for the entire data set, indicating an anti-inflammatory activity in humans. When the subjects were stratified according to their health status, the IS was strongly indicative of an anti-inflammatory activity in subjects with metabolic disorders and of a pro-inflammatory activity in subjects allergic to bovine milk. Stratifying the data by product categories associated both low-fat and high-fat products, as well as fermented products, with an anti-inflammatory activity. Remarkably, the literature is characterized by a large gap in knowledge on bioavailability of bioactive nutrients. Future research should thus better combine food and nutritional sciences to adequately follow the fate of these nutrients along the gastrointestinal and metabolic axes.     

Selective linear dimerization of 1,3-butadiene by palladium compounds immobilized into 1-n-butyl-3-methyl imidazolium ionic liquids

Summary Palladium (II) compounds (palladium dichloride, acetate and acetylacetonate) in conjunction with triphenylphosphine dissolved in 1-butyl-methyl imidazolium tetrafluoroborate, hexafluorophosphate or trifluoromethanesulfonate are able to dimerize butadiene into 1,3,6-octatriene in a typical two-phase catalytic reaction with 100% selectivity. The reaction product is easily separated from the reaction mixture by simple decantation, and the recovered ionic liquid catalyst solution can be reused several times without significant changes in catalytic activity or selectivity. Received: 24 November 1997/Revised version: 5 January 1998/Accepted: 7 January 1998     

Structural stability of photodegradable poly(l-lactic acid)/PE/TiO2 nanocomposites through TiO2 nanospheres and TiO2 nanotubes incorporation

Photodegradation of PLA/PE, PLA/PE/TiO₂ nanospheres and PLA/PE/TiO₂ nanotubes was obtained under simulated sunlight. The nanocomposites were analyzed by infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and tensile-deformation measurements. TiO₂ nanospheres and TiO₂ nanotubes were found to present different effects on the crystallinity of PLA and a straight correlation between structural organization and photostability was observed. According to the results, TiO₂ promotes the degradation of PLA and PE, affecting the organizational level of the polymers. By adding TiO₂ nanoparticles to the PLA/PE films, vibration modes characteristic of degradation products were promptly observed and the lifetime of the polymer decreased when compared to the PLA/PE without TiO₂ nanoparticles. Mechanical measurements showed an improvement of the mechanical properties when adding the TiO₂ nanoparticles.