28 research outputs found
Establishment of a monoclonal antibody for human LXRα: Detection of LXRα protein expression in human macrophages
Liver X activated receptor alpha (LXRα) forms a functional dimeric nuclear receptor with RXR that regulates the metabolism of several important lipids, including cholesterol and bile acids. As compared with RXR, the LXRα protein level in the cell is low and the LXRα protein itself is very hard to detect. We have previously reported that the mRNA for LXRα is highly expressed in human cultured macrophages. In order to confirm the presence of the LXRα protein in the human macrophage, we have established a monoclonal antibody against LXRα, K-8607. The binding of mAb K-8607 to the human LXRα protein was confirmed by a wide variety of different techniques, including immunoblotting, immunohistochemistry, and electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). By immunoblotting with this antibody, the presence of native LXR protein in primary cultured human macrophage was demonstrated, as was its absence in human monocytes. This monoclonal anti-LXRα antibody should prove to be a useful tool in the analysis of the human LXRα protein
Identifying Suspicious Regions of Covid-19 by Abnormality-Sensitive Activation Mapping
This paper presents a fully-automated method for the identification of
suspicious regions of a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on chest CT volumes. One
major role of chest CT scanning in COVID-19 diagnoses is identification of an
inflammation particular to the disease. This task is generally performed by
radiologists through an interpretation of the CT volumes, however, because of
the heavy workload, an automatic analysis method using a computer is desired.
Most computer-aided diagnosis studies have addressed only a portion of the
elements necessary for the identification. In this work, we realize the
identification method through a classification task by using a 2.5-dimensional
CNN with three-dimensional attention mechanisms. We visualize the suspicious
regions by applying a backpropagation based on positive gradients to
attention-weighted features. We perform experiments on an in-house dataset and
two public datasets to reveal the generalization ability of the proposed
method. The proposed architecture achieved AUCs of over 0.900 for all the
datasets, and mean sensitivity and specificity . The method can also identify notable lesions pointed out in the
radiology report as suspicious regions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure