5 nm Silver Nanoparticles Amplify Clinical Features of Atopic Dermatitis in Mice by Activating Mast Cells

The triggering effect of silver nanoparticles (NPs) on the induction of allergic reactions is evaluated, by studying the activation of mast cells and the clinical features of atopic dermatitis in a mouse model. Granule release is induced in RBL‐2H3 mast cells by 5 nm, but not 100 nm silver NPs. Increases in the levels of reactive oxygen species (hydrogen peroxide and mitochondrial superoxide) and intracellular Ca⁺⁺ in mast cells are induced by 5 nm silver NPs. In a mouse model of atopic dermatitis induced by a mite allergen, the skin lesions are more severe and appear earlier in mice treated simultaneously with 5 nm silver NPs and allergen compared with mice treated with allergen alone or 100 nm silver NPs and allergen. The histological findings reveal that number of tryptase‐positive mast cells and total IgE levels in the serum increase in mice treated with 5 nm silver NPs and allergen. The results in this study indicate that cotreatment with 5 nm silver NPs stimulates mast cell degranulation and induces earlier and more severe clinical alterations in allergy‐prone individuals.     

A new asymptotic analysis of throughput enhancement from selection diversity using a high SNR approach in multiuser systems

This letter presents our study of throughput enhancement achieved by multiuser diversity (MUDiv) in a multiuser system using a new asymptotic approach. The MUDiv gain is evaluated by deriving a new asymptotic formula with a closed form, which is flexible to the number of MUDiv orders. To do this, we simplify a Puiseux series instead of a extreme value theory used in the previous researches. The formula shows that the MUDiv gain is independent of the signal-to-noise ratio, and it is applied to analyze proportional fair scheduling. Finally, this analysis is verified using Monte-Carlo simulations of scheduling algorithms.     

Hybrid Segmentation Scheme for Skin Features Extraction Using Dermoscopy Images

Objective and quantitative assessment of skin conditions is essential for cosmeceutical studies and research on skin aging and skin regeneration. Various handcraft-based image processing methods have been proposed to evaluate skin conditions objectively, but they have unavoidable disadvantages when used to analyze skin features accurately. This study proposes a hybrid segmentation scheme consisting of Deeplab v3+ with an Inception-ResNet-v2 backbone, LightGBM, and morphological processing (MP) to overcome the shortcomings of handcraft-based approaches. First, we apply Deeplab v3+ with an Inception-ResNet-v2 backbone for pixel segmentation of skin wrinkles and cells. Then, LightGBM and MP are used to enhance the pixel segmentation quality. Finally, we determine several skin features based on the results of wrinkle and cell segmentation. Our proposed segmentation scheme achieved a mean accuracy of 0.854, mean of intersection over union of 0.749, and mean boundary F1 score of 0.852, which achieved 1.1%, 6.7%, and 14.8% improvement over the panoptic-based semantic segmentation method, respectively.     

Two-stage person re-identification scheme using cross-input neighborhood differences

The Journal of Supercomputing - Person re-identification aims to identify images of a particular person captured from different cameras or the same camera under different conditions. Person...     

INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS OF ACCIDENT CAUSATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

kACMS (KOSHA Accident Causation Management System) has been developed to control human errors in Korean chemical industries. kACMS is a safety management system using the Korean GFT (general failure type) methodology, which has been found a good approach to eliminating, or at least minimizing human errors. To observe the trend of human errors in the chemical industry, about 5500 near-miss cases have been collected from a Korean chemical plant. The analysis of the collected cases shows that the removal of human errors is the key to preventing these near-miss cases that have the potential to lead to actual accidents.

A Korean petrochemical company applied kACMS in its 9 chemical plants. Fifty-five employees participated in the survey and 12,000 safety data were collected based on a questionnaire. As a result of each survey, the average, best, and worst scores were 85.0, 90.6, and 79.6, respectively. These results led to a thorough investigation of the safety systems of the worst scored plant and directions for improving safety.     

Quantitative Assessment of Environmental Impacts on Life Cycle of Highways

Several representative environmental loads emitted from the life cycle of highways, which form one of the major infrastructure sectors, were estimated. The life cycle of highways was divided into four stages—manufacturing of construction materials, construction, maintenance/repair, and the demolition/recycling stage. Energy consumption in each life cycle stage was quantified, and environmental load was estimated by applying the environmental emissions factor per each energy source. As a result, it is estimated that the most energy was consumed in the manufacturing stage of construction materials, with consumption of 1,525.8 tons of oil equivalent (TOE) per functional unit (1 km and four lanes of highway). Energy consumption in the maintenance and repair stage was also relatively high among the life cycle stages; the next highest consumption was for the construction and demolition stage. Through the whole life cycle of 20 years, 2,676.8 TOE of energy per functional unit was consumed, and this corresponds to SO2, NOx, and CO2 emissions of 62.1 tons, 17.1 tons, and 2,438.5 T-C, respectively.     

Integration of qualitative and quantitative risk assessment methods for gas refinery plants

This paper focuses on the development of an integrated risk assessment system to increase the safety of gas refinery plants. This integration is important in managing the design and the operation of chemical plants and it requires significant time, effort and specialized expertise. We propose a systematic procedure to apply quantitative and qualitative hazard identification methods before constructing the refinery plants. Advantages of this assessment procedure are 1) systematic method in identifying most of the important hazards, 2) complete and rigorous analysis, and 3) reducing budget and time. The qualitative and quantitative assessment method consists of two and three steps, respectively. After these five steps, the risk of the same plant was calculated and analyzed. This method can identify risk and potential hazards from local gas refinery plants effectively and systematically. We applied the integrated qualitative and quantitative risk assessment method to remove the risk of a local gas refinery plant with 160 P&ID sheets. The result of this work confirmed that no residential population existed within the bounds of the 1×10^?6 per annum risk contour. Therefore, the risk to the public from the gas refinery plants should be considered acceptable.     

Reinvestigation of the alkali-metal-induced Ge(111)3 × 1 reconstruction on the basis of boundary structure observations

We have investigated the surface atomic structure of boundary area of Li- and Na-induced Ge(1 1 1)3×1 reconstruction using scanning tunneling microscope. On Li/Ge(1 1 1)3×1, the 3×1 phase was found to be terminated with a single row in the filled-state image and with dimer-like features in the empty-state image. The images of both interior and boundary of the Li/Ge(1 1 1)3×1 surface are compatible with the honeycomb-chain-channel (HCC) model, which has substrate atoms with double bonds and is well established as the structure of AM/Si(1 1 1)3×1 surfaces. In contrast, termination with zigzag double rows at the domain boundary edges was observed in the filled-state images of the Na/Ge(1 1 1)3×1 phase, which is not reconcilable with the HCC structure. The filled-state STM feature of the boundary region of the Na/Ge(1 1 1)3×1 phase supports a structural model not having Ge=Ge double bonds, which was proposed to interpret its empty-state images. The trend of bondings between atoms in the surface layer of the AM-induced 3×1 reconstruction of Si and Ge is discussed in terms of electronegativity differences.     

Non-TZF Protein AtC3H59/ZFWD3 Is Involved in Seed Germination,Seedling Development,and Seed Development,Interacting with PPPDE Family Protein Desi1 in Arabidopsis

Despite increasing reports on the function of CCCH zinc finger proteins in plant development and stress response, the functions and molecular aspects of many non-tandem CCCH zinc finger (non-TZF) proteins remain uncharacterized. AtC3H59/ZFWD3 is an Arabidopsis non-TZF protein and belongs to the ZFWD subfamily harboring a CCCH zinc finger motif and a WD40 domain. In this study, we characterized the biological and molecular functions of AtC3H59, which is subcellularly localized in the nucleus. The seeds of AtC3H59-overexpressing transgenic plants (OXs) germinated faster than those of wild type (WT), whereas atc3h59 mutant seeds germinated slower than WT seeds. AtC3H59 OX seedlings were larger and heavier than WT seedlings, whereas atc3h59 mutant seedlings were smaller and lighter than WT seedlings. Moreover, AtC3H59 OX seedlings had longer primary root length than WT seedlings, whereas atc3h59 mutant seedlings had shorter primary root length than WT seedlings, owing to altered cell division activity in the root meristem. During seed development, AtC3H59 OXs formed larger and heavier seeds than WT. Using yeast two-hybrid screening, we isolated Desi1, a PPPDE family protein, as an interacting partner of AtC3H59. AtC3H59 and Desi1 interacted via their WD40 domain and C-terminal region, respectively, in the nucleus. Taken together, our results indicate that AtC3H59 has pleiotropic effects on seed germination, seedling development, and seed development, and interacts with Desi1 in the nucleus via its entire WD40 domain. To our knowledge, this is the first report to describe the biological functions of the ZFWD protein and Desi1 in Arabidopsis.     

Correction to: Robust facial landmark extraction scheme using multiple convolutional neural networks

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In the original publication, the author name “Seungmin Rho” was incorrectly spelled as “Seumgmin Rho”. The correct author name is given...