Fluorescence optical imaging for treatment monitoring in patients with early and active rheumatoid arthritis in a 1-year follow-up period

BACKGROUND: Fluorescence optical imaging (FOI) enables visualization of inflammation in the hands in rheumatic joint diseases with currently a lack of long-term follow-up studies. OBJECTIVE: To investigate FOI for treatment monitoring in a homogenous cohort of patients with early (disease duration  3.2) RA over a period of 12 months. METHODS: Thirty-five RA patients (24 (68.6%) females, mean age 53.3 years (SD 13.6)) were investigated clinically by DAS28, tender joint count (TJC) and swollen joint count (SJC) and by FOI in phases 1-3 and PrimaVistaMode (PVM) before therapy change and after 12 months. The FOI activity score (FOIAS) was calculated based on individual joint scores from 0 to 3 in 30 joints per patient, adding up to a sum score (0-90). RESULTS: We found a statistically significant reduction of FOIAS in phase 1 from baseline (median 5.0, IQR 24.96) to follow-up (median 1.0, IQR 4.0) in all patients (p = 0.0045), both in responders and non-responders according to EULAR response criteria by DAS28. Statistically significant reductions over 12 months were found for median DAS28(ESR) 5.61 to 3.31, TJC 7.0 to 1.0, and SJC 5.0 to 1.0 (each p <  0.001). No statistically significant correlations were detected between the FOIAS change in phase 1 and DAS28(ESR), TJC, or SJC. Correlations between the other phases and clinical outcomes were weak to moderate. CONCLUSION: Reduced early enhancement in FOI phase 1 can be observed in clinically responding and non-responding early RA patients under treatment. Regarding potential marker performance, FOI probably shows a reduction of inflammation more objectively

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PVM AND MPI FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICAL APPLICATIONS IN PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS

This research is aimed to explore each of these two Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) and Message Passing Interface(MPI) vehicles for DPP (Distributed Parallel Processing) considering capability, ease of use, and availability, and compares their distinguishing features and also explores programmer interface and their utilization for solving real world parallel processing applications. This work recommends a potential research issue, that is, to study the feasibility of creating a programming environment that allows access to the virtual machine features of PVM and the message passing features of MPI. PVM and MPI, two systems for programming clusters, are often compared. Each system has its unique strengths and this will remain so in to the foreseeable future. The comparisons usually start with the unspoken assumption that PVM and MPI represent different solutions to the same problem. In this paper we show that, in fact, the two systems often are solving different problems. In cases where the problems do match but the solutions chosen by PVM and MPI are different, we explain the reasons for the differences. Usually such differences can be traced to explicit differences in the goals of the two systems, their origins, or the relationship between their specifications and their implementations. This paper also compares PVM and MPI features, pointing out the situations where one may be favored over the other; it explains the deference’s between these systems and the reasons for such deference’s

CoR's Faster Route over Myrinet

In this paper we concentrate in the efforts made to exploit the performance of Myrinet to build a faster communication route into CoR1. By accessing the Myrinet interface through GM2, we achieved low latency and high bandwidth message passing without the overhead of a higher level protocol stack, system calls or interrupts. CoR is an ongoing project unique in its design goal of combining multithreading, message passing and distributed shared memory with facilities to dynamically select from different transport media and protocols the one that best fits communication and interaction requirements. The ability to mix CoR and PVM calls in the same program brings numerous benefits to the application developer familiar with PVM, notably: 1) new transport communication layers; PvmRouteMyrinet and PvmRouteUdp; 2) migration mechanisms for exploiting fine grain message passing; 3) thread-safe communication PVM API; 4) object-oriented distributed shared memory

Evolutionary biology and computational grids

The global high performance computing community has seen two overarching changes in the past five years. One of these changes was the consolidation toward SMP clusters as the predominant HPC system architecture. The other change was the emergence of computing grids as an important architecture in high performance computing. Several major national and international projects are now underway to develop grid technologies. Computational grids will increase the resources available to the most advanced computational scientists and encourage the use of advanced techniques by researchers who have not traditionally employed such technologies. In the latter camp are bioinformaticists in general and evolutionary biologists in particular, although this situation is changing rapidly.This work was greatly facilitated by IBM Shared University Research grants to Indiana University in 1998 and 1999

Beyond XSPEC: Towards Highly Configurable Analysis

We present a quantitative comparison between software features of the defacto standard X-ray spectral analysis tool, XSPEC, and ISIS, the Interactive Spectral Interpretation System. Our emphasis is on customized analysis, with ISIS offered as a strong example of configurable software. While noting that XSPEC has been of immense value to astronomers, and that its scientific core is moderately extensible--most commonly via the inclusion of user contributed "local models"--we identify a series of limitations with its use beyond conventional spectral modeling. We argue that from the viewpoint of the astronomical user, the XSPEC internal structure presents a Black Box Problem, with many of its important features hidden from the top-level interface, thus discouraging user customization. Drawing from examples in custom modeling, numerical analysis, parallel computation, visualization, data management, and automated code generation, we show how a numerically scriptable, modular, and extensible analysis platform such as ISIS facilitates many forms of advanced astrophysical inquiry.Comment: Accepted by PASP, for July 2008 (15 pages

Learning from the Success of MPI

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Heterogeneous concurrent computing with exportable services

Heterogeneous concurrent computing, based on the traditional process-oriented model, is approaching its functionality and performance limits. An alternative paradigm, based on the concept of services, supporting data driven computation, and built on a lightweight process infrastructure, is proposed to enhance the functional capabilities and the operational efficiency of heterogeneous network-based concurrent computing. TPVM is an experimental prototype system supporting exportable services, thread-based computation, and remote memory operations that is built as an extension of and an enhancement to the PVM concurrent computing system. TPVM offers a significantly different computing paradigm for network-based computing, while maintaining a close resemblance to the conventional PVM model in the interest of compatibility and ease of transition Preliminary experiences have demonstrated that the TPVM framework presents a natural yet powerful concurrent programming interface, while being capable of delivering performance improvements of upto thirty percent