A negative screen for mutations in calstabin 1 and 2 genes in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Calstabins 1 and 2 bind to Ryanodine receptors regulating muscle excitation-contraction coupling. Mutations in Ryanodine receptors affecting their interaction with calstabins lead to different cardiac pathologies. Animal studies suggest the involvement of calstabins with dilated cardiomyopathy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We tested the hypothesis that calstabins mutations may cause dilated cardiomyopathy in humans screening 186 patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy for genetic alterations in calstabins 1 and 2 genes (<it>FKBP12 </it>and <it>FKBP12.6)</it>. No missense variant was found. Five no-coding variations were found but not related to the disease.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These data corroborate other studies suggesting that mutations in <it>FKBP12 </it>and <it>FKBP12.6 </it>genes are not commonly related to cardiac diseases.</p

Livelihood and vulnerability in the wake of Typhoon Yolanda: lessons of community and resilience

Livelihood strategies that are crafted in ‘extra-ordinary’ post-disaster conditions should also be able to function once some semblance of normalcy has resumed. This article aims to show that the vulnerability experienced in relation to Typhoon Yolanda was, and continues to be, directly linked to inadequate livelihood assets and opportunities. We examine the extent to which various livelihood strategies lessened vulnerability post-Typhoon Yolanda and argue that creating conditions under which disaster survivors have the freedom to pursue sustainable livelihood is essential in order to foster resilience and reduce vulnerability against future disasters. We offer suggestions to improve future relief efforts, including suggestions made by the survivors themselves. We caution against rehabilitation strategies that knowingly or unknowingly, resurrect pre-disaster vulnerability. Strategies that foster dependency, fail to appreciate local political or ecological conditions or undermine cooperation and cohesion in already vulnerable communities will be bound to fail. Some of the livelihood strategies that we observed post-Typhoon Yolanda failed on some or all of these points. It is important for future policy that these failings are addressed

Detection of fonts and characters with hybrid graphic-text plate numbers

Philippine license plates have different plate styles and character fonts making the plate character recognition challenging. This paper focuses on improving the segmentation method to recognize characters of different formats of Philippine license plates. The proposed system comprises of license plate classification, character segmentation and character recognition. License plate series was classified using color level of pixels in the image. Plate characters were segmented using 3-Class Fuzzy Clustering with Thresholding and Connected Component Analysis and were recognized using Template Matching. The system achieved an accuracy of 95% and 70% for the 2003 plate series and 2014 plate series, respectively, having tested 20 license plates from each series. © 2018 IEEE

Soil nutrient detection using genetic algorithm

© 2019 IEEE. Genetic Algorithm is the method used in this study in classifying the qualitative level of the soil nutrients. The data set includes images coming from the result of the soil testing. The extracted features were the HSV values and the LAB values color space. Out of the six extracted features from the data set, the B from LAB color space is the most linear so with that, it is the input of genetic algorithm in identifying the qualitative level of the soil nutrients. For the run of the program using python programming language and pyCharm CE as IDE, the values of each parameters follow: the population size is 10, mutation rate is 0.01, the number of cross over points is 2 and the maximum number of generations is 1000. The population\u27s final best fitness has 98.2609% that proves that Genetic Algorithm is an effective method in classifying the qualitative level of the soil nutrients

Optimization of vehicle classification model using genetic algorithm

This paper focuses on classifying vehicle types into car, van, motorcycle, bus, light truck, multi-axle truck and determine its class based on the Philippine Toll Regulatory Board\u27s vehicle classification. This study utilized DEvol, an open-source tool that uses genetic algorithm for evolving number of filters and nodes, optimizer, activation, dropout rate. The model attained the best accuracy with 78.53% using 9000 images from MIO-TCD dataset. © 2019 IEEE