The BILAG index: a reliable and valid instrument for measuring clinical disease activity in systemic lupus erythematosus

The British Isles Lupus Assessment Group (BILAG) index is a computerized index for measuring clinical disease activity in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which was developed according to the principle of the physician's 'intention to treat'. The index allocates separate alphabetic scores to each of eight organ-based systems; a total score is not calculated. This study demonstrated good between-rater reliability for the BILAG index for each organ-based system. There was no evidence of bias between observers. The BILAG index had good overall sensitivity (87%) and specificity (99%) when compared with the 'gold standard' criterion (starting or increasing disease-modifying therapy). There were high positive predictive values overall (80%), and for each organ-based system, with the exception of the neurological system.     

Anisotropic thin films formation rate on PEDOT : PSS layer with high azimuthal anchoring

Oriented organic layers have great potential for organic electronics devices because of the unique modification of material properties without extensive chemical synthesis. Such layers can be prepared by wet coating of anisotropic organic molecules on top of specific surface of alignment layer. One of the most important parameter that indicates alignment properties of the surface is the anchoring energy. In this paper, we investigate azimuthal anchoring energy of pure and glycerol‐doped PEDOT : PSS layers and study the influence of the alignment layer preparation on the order parameter of the top wet‐coated oriented organic emitter. We confirm that the azimuthal anchoring energy increase leads to improvement of both dichroic ratio and contrast ratio of polarized emitter layer rod‐coated on top of the PEDOT : PSS. Suggested mechanism of anisotropic emitter formation at wet deposition grounds possibility of linear deposition rate of 2 m/s on top of PEDOT : PSS layer with obtained azimuthal anchoring above >10^?4 J/m².     

Biocompatible surface modification of poly(ethylene terephthalate) focused on pathogenic bacteria: Promising prospects in biomedical applications

Poly(ethylene terephthalate)—PET, is one of the most common polyesters, widely used in biomedical applications ranging from catheters to stents, vascular grafts, heart valves, sutures, and scaffolds. PET surface modification is necessary to impart desired properties for biomedical applications, making the polymer biocompatible, noncytotoxic and antibacterial that can preferably resist biofilm formation caused by pathogenic bacteria. A novel approach to anticorrosive wet chemical surface modification of PET by insertion of alkyl and hydroxyl groups was achieved by using Grignard reagents and confirmed by several different characterization methods including Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), water contact angle (WCA) measurement, free surface energy (FSE) measurement, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and atomic force microscopy (AFM). High antibacterial efficiency against four different types of biofilm active, pathogenic bacterial strains namely: Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, methicillin‐resistant S. aureus (MRSA), and Pseudomonas aeruginosa was established on the modified PET surface. Biocompatibility higher than 84% of the modified samples has been proved. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2017 , 134, 44990.     

Building the essential resources for Finnish: the Turku Dependency Treebank

In this paper, we present the final version of a publicly available treebank of Finnish, the Turku Dependency Treebank. The treebank contains 204,399 tokens (15,126 sentences) from 10 different text sources and has been manually annotated in a Finnish-specific version of the well-known Stanford Dependency scheme. The morphological analyses of the treebank have been assigned using a novel machine learning method to disambiguate readings given by an existing tool. As the second main contribution, we present the first open source Finnish dependency parser, trained on the newly introduced treebank. The parser achieves a labeled attachment score of 81 %. The treebank data as well as the parsing pipeline are available under an open license at http://bionlp.utu.fi/.     

Arsenolipids in marine oils and fats: A review of occurrence,chemistry and future research needs

Numerous studies have focused on arsenic in marine organisms, and relatively high natural levels of the element have been reported in marine samples. Despite their seemingly consistent presence in marine oils and fats, there is currently only limited knowledge available on arsenic compounds that exhibit lipid soluble characteristics, the arsenolipids, in contrast to the water-soluble arsenic species. The development of analytical techniques has, however, renewed the interest in these arsenic species and significant novel findings have been published in the last couple of years. The aim of this review is to present current knowledge on the occurrence and chemistry of arsenolipids in marine oils, and to identify future research needs. The occurrence of arsenolipids and their relevance in marine organisms will be discussed, in addition to their relevance for consumers and industry, with respect to feed and food safety and legislative issues. Analytical techniques, including techniques in the early work on arsenolipids in addition to methods employed today, and relevant sample preparation will be discussed.     

Impairment of Hypoxia-Induced CA IX by Beta-Blocker Propranolol—Impact on Progression and Metastatic Potential of Colorectal Cancer Cells

The coexistence of cancer and other concomitant diseases is very frequent and has substantial implications for treatment decisions and outcomes. Beta-blockers, agents that block the beta-adrenergic receptors, have been related also to cancers. In the model of multicellular spheroids formed by colorectal cancer cells we described a crosstalk between beta-blockade by propranolol and tumour microenvironment. Non-selective beta-blocker propranolol decreased ability of tumour cells to adapt to hypoxia by reducing levels of HIF1α and carbonic anhydrase IX in 3D spheroids. We indicated a double action of propranolol in the tumour microenvironment by inhibiting the stability of HIF1α, thus mediating decrease of CA IX expression and, at the same time, by its possible effect on CA IX activity by decreasing the activity of protein kinase A (PKA). Moreover, the inhibition of β-adrenoreceptors by propranolol enhanced apoptosis, decreased number of mitochondria and lowered the amount of proteins involved in oxidative phosphorylation (V-ATP5A, IV-COX2, III-UQCRC2, II-SDHB, I-NDUFB8). Propranolol reduced metastatic potential, viability and proliferation of colorectal cancer cells cultivated in multicellular spheroids. To choose the right treatment strategy, it is extremely important to know how the treatment of concomitant diseases affects the superior microenvironment that is directly related to the efficiency of anti-cancer therapy     

Exploitation of patent information in R&D output analysis for policymaking

Scientometrics - This paper provides an insight into the growing importance and conditions of studying R&D output and impacts as well as the internationalisation of R&D. Focusing on...     

Modeling the appearance of metal‐like packaging printing

A study of the agreement between a visual assessment and the measurement of the reflectivity of printed metallic inks was performed. A psychophysical property for this percept was identified as visual brilliance. The visual judgments of a series of printed panels were compared with measurements from various types of specular reflectance instruments. The results showed that gloss does not linearly follow the appearance of highly reflective specular surfaces. It was observed that the visual assessment of brilliance was highly correlated to the normalized hemispherical diffuse reflectance factor difference. Further, visual brilliance could be mapped to a logarithmic function of the luminous specular reflectance factor and the measurement scale of log(Y) agreed with the scale of hemispherical diffuse reflectance. It was, thus, concluded that either of these measures may be utilized to establish aims and tolerances for production control of the reproduction of foil‐like prints. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 42, 38–49, 2017     

The Role of a Natural Language Conversational Interface in Online Sales: A Case Study

This paper describes the evaluation of a natural language dialog-based navigation system (HappyAssistant) that helps users access e-commerce sites to find relevant information about products and services. The prototype system leverages technologies in natural language processing and human-computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with websites, especially for less experienced users. The result of a comparative study shows that users prefer the natural language-enabled navigation two to one over the menu driven navigation. In addition, the study confirmed the efficiency of using natural language dialog in terms of the number of clicks and the amount of time required to obtain the relevant information. In the case study, as compared to the menu driven system, the average number of clicks used in the natural language system was reduced by 63.2% and the average time was reduced by 33.3%.