Upregulated Expression of Activation-Induced Cytidine Deaminase in Ocular Adnexal Marginal Zone Lymphoma with IgG4-Positive Cells

Immunoglobulin G4-related disease (IgG4-RD) is a systemic disorder characterized by tissue fibrosis and intense lymphoplasmacytic infiltration, causing progressive organ dysfunction. Activation-induced cytidine deaminase (AID), a deaminase normally expressed in activated B-cells in germinal centers, edits ribonucleotides to induce somatic hypermutation and class switching of immunoglobulin. While AID expression is strictly controlled under physiological conditions, chronic inflammation has been noted to induce its upregulation to propel oncogenesis. We examined AID expression in IgG4-related ophthalmic disease (IgG4-ROD; n = 16), marginal zone lymphoma with IgG4-positive cells (IgG4+ MZL; n = 11), and marginal zone lymphoma without IgG4-positive cells (IgG4- MZL; n = 12) of ocular adnexa using immunohistochemical staining. Immunohistochemistry revealed significantly higher AID-intensity index in IgG4-ROD and IgG4+ MZL than IgG4- MZL (p < 0.001 and = 0.001, respectively). The present results suggest that IgG4-RD has several specific causes of AID up-regulation in addition to inflammation, and AID may be a driver of oncogenesis in IgG4-ROD to IgG4+ MZL.     

Split Enzyme-Based Biosensors for Structural Characterization of Soluble and Insoluble β-Glucans

β-Glucan is widely distributed in various plants and microorganisms and is composed of β-1,3-linked d-glucose units. It may have a branched short or long side chain of glucose units with β-1,6- or β-1,4-linkage. Numerous studies have investigated different β-glucans and revealed their bioactivities. To understand the structure-function relationship of β-glucan, we constructed a split-luciferase complementation assay for the structural analysis of long-chain β-1,6-branched β-1,3-glucan. The N- and C-terminal fragments of luciferase from deep-sea shrimp were fused to insect-derived β-1,3-glucan recognition protein and fungal endo-β-1,6-glucanase (Neg1)-derived β-1,6-glucan recognition protein, respectively. In this approach, two β-glucan recognition proteins bound to β-glucan molecules come into close proximity, resulting in the assembly of the full-length reporter enzyme and induction of transient luciferase activity, indicative of the structure of β-glucan. To test the applicability of this assay, β-glucan and two β-glucan recognition proteins were mixed, resulting in an increase in the luminescence intensity in a β-1,3-glucan with a long polymer of β-1,6-glucan in a dose-dependent manner. This simple test also allows the monitoring of real-time changes in the side chain structure and serves as a convenient method to distinguish between β-1,3-glucan and long-chain β-1,6-branched β-1,3-glucan in various soluble and insoluble β-glucans.     

Principled analytic classifier for positive-unlabeled learning via weighted integral probability metric

Machine Learning - We consider the problem of learning a binary classifier from only positive and unlabeled observations (called PU learning). Recent studies in PU learning have shown superior...     

A wide view auto‐stereoscopic 3D display with an eye‐tracking system for enhanced horizontal viewing position and viewing distance

This paper describes the development of auto‐stereoscopic three‐dimensional (3D) display with an eye‐tracking system for not only the X‐axis (right–left) and Y‐axis (up–down) plane directions but also the Z‐axis (forward–backward) direction. In the past, the eye‐tracking 3D system for the XY‐axes plane directions that we had developed had a narrow 3D viewing space in the Z‐axis direction because of occurrence of 3D crosstalk variation on screen. The 3D crosstalk variation on screen was occurred when the viewer's eye position moved back and forth along the Z‐axis direction. The reason was that the liquid crystal (LC) barrier pitch was fixed and the LC barrier was able to control the only barrier aperture position. To solve this problem, we developed the LC barrier that is able to control the barrier pitch as well as the barrier aperture position in real time, corresponding to the viewer's eye position. As a result, the 3D viewing space has achieved to expand up to 320–1016 mm from the display surface in the Z‐axis direction and within a range of ±267 mm in the X‐axis direction. In terms of the Y‐axis direction, the viewing space is not necessary to be considered, because of a stripe‐shaped parallax barrier.     

Fabrication of sub-micron structures for MEMS using deep X-ray lithography

Fabrication techniques of microstructures with high resolution and high aspect ratio are necessary for practical microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) that have high performance and integration. In order to fabricate microstructures with sub-micron resolution and high aspect ratio, deep X-ray lithography has been investigated using the compact synchrotron radiation (SR) light source called “AURORA”. An X-ray mask for sub-micron deep X-ray lithography, which is composed of 1 μm thick Au as absorbers, 2 μm thick SiC as a membrane and 625 μm thick Si as a frame, was designed. In preliminary experiments, the following results were achieved: EB resist microstructures with an aspect ratio of 22 corresponding with 0.07 μm width and 1.3 μm height were formed; a 10 μm thick PMMA resist containing no warp was formed by direct polymerization, enabling more precise gap control.     

Silicon IC compatible LIGA mask-fabrication process

 This paper describes a technique for fabricating a LIGA mask that offers good compatibility with the silicon IC process. X-ray exposure can be eliminated from the LIGA mask-fabrication process, so that LIGA masks can be fabricated with existing silicon IC process equipment. A gold absorber pattern, 2 μm wide and 10 μm thick, has been successfully fabricated by combining a three-layer resist-patterning process with the electroplating process. Improvements in both the mask structure and fabrication process alleviate the problems of dust in a cleanroom and contamination in the etching chamber. Received: 25 August 1997/Accepted: 23 September 1997     

Real-time exploration of a multi-robot rescue system in disaster areas

A system procedure is proposed for a multi-robot rescue system that performs real-time exploration over disaster areas. Real-time exploration means that every robot exploring the area always has a communication path to human operators standing by at a base station and that the communication path is configured by ad hoc wireless networking. Real-time exploration is essential in multi-robot systems for USAR (urban search and rescue) because operators must communicate with every robot to support the victim detection process and ad hoc networking is suitable to configure a communication path among obstacles. The proposed system procedure consists of the autonomous classification of robots into search and relay types and behavior algorithms for each class of robot. Search robots explore the areas and relay robots act as relay terminals between search robots and the base station. The rule of the classification and the behavior algorithm refer to the forwarding table of each robot constructed for ad hoc networking. The table construction is based on DSDV (destination-sequenced distance vector) routing that informs each robot of its topological position in the network and other essentials. Computer simulations are executed with a specific exploration strategy of search robots. The results show that a multi-robot rescue system can perform real-time exploration with the proposed system procedure and reduce exploration time in comparison with the case where the proposed scheme is not adopted.     

Study on fabrication of 3-D microstructures by synchrotron radiation based on pixels exposed lithography

We report research on the development of a method of fabricating three-dimensional microstructures that uses synchrotron radiation light. Some research on three-dimensional processing methods using SR lithography has already been reported. They have involved techniques of applying exposure energy distributions to resist surfaces. Complicated energy distributions need to be applied to resist surfaces to fabricate arbitrary three-dimensional structures. However, we devised a new method that made it possible to fabricate arbitrary three-dimensional microstructures by using a mask with pattern created function. The advantages of this method are that it is suitable for rapid prototyping and it reduces the fabrication time and cost since it is not necessary to fabricate conventional photolithographic masks. Our research involved a basic experiment on this method of fabrication where we succeeded in fabricating a free-form surface by exposing it through an overlapping array of pixels that created a single aperture. Moreover, the pixel size could be made smaller than the aperture size by overlapping adjoining pixels.     

Fast computation of computer-generated hologram using Xeon Phi coprocessor

We report fast computation of computer-generated holograms (CGHs) using Xeon Phi coprocessors, which have massively x86-based processors on one chip, recently released by Intel. CGHs can generate arbitrary light wavefronts, and therefore, are promising technology for many applications: for example, three-dimensional displays, diffractive optical elements, and the generation of arbitrary beams. CGHs incur enormous computational cost. In this paper, we describe the implementations of several CGH generating algorithms on the Xeon Phi, and the comparisons in terms of the performance and the ease of programming between the Xeon Phi, a CPU and graphics processing unit (GPU).