26 research outputs found

    Prenatal exposures and exposomics of asthma

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    This review examines the causal investigation of preclinical development of childhood asthma using exposomic tools. We examine the current state of knowledge regarding early-life exposure to non-biogenic indoor air pollution and the developmental modulation of the immune system. We examine how metabolomics technologies could aid not only in the biomarker identification of a particular asthma phenotype, but also the mechanisms underlying the immunopathologic process. Within such a framework, we propose alternate components of exposomic investigation of asthma in which, the exposome represents a reiterative investigative process of targeted biomarker identification, validation through computational systems biology and physical sampling of environmental medi

    Opisthorchiasis-Induced Cholangiocarcinoma: How Innate Immunity May Cause Cancer

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    Innate, inflammatory responses towards persistent Opisthorchis viverrini (OV) infection are likely to contribute to the development of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA), a liver cancer that is rare in the West but prevalent in Greater Mekong Subregion countries in Southeast Asia. Infection results in the infiltration of innate immune cells into the bile ducts and subsequent activation of inflammatory immune responses that fail to clear OV but instead may damage local tissues within the bile ducts. Not all patients infected with OV develop CCA, and so tumourigenesis may be dependent on multiple factors including the magnitude of the inflammatory response that is activated in infected individuals. The purpose of this review is to summarize how innate immune responses may promote tumourigenesis following OV infection and if such responses can be used to predict CCA onset in OV-infected individuals. It also hypothesizes on the role that Helicobacterspp., which are associated with liver fluke infections, may play in activation of the innate the immune system to promote tissue damage and persistent inflammation leading to CCA

    DISCRETE-TIME MARKOVIAN STOCHASTIC PETRI NETS

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    We revisit and extend the original definition of discrete-time stochastic Petri nets, by allowing the firing times to have a “defective discrete phase distribution”. We show that this formalism still corresponds to an underlying discrete-time Markov chain. The structure of the state for this process describes both the marking of the Petri net and the phase of the firing time for of each transition, resulting in a large state space. We then modify the well-known power method to perform a transient analysis even when the state space is infinite, subject to the condition that only a finite number of states can be reached in a finite amount of time. Since the memory requirements might still be excessive, we suggest a bounding technique based on truncation

    Broadband wireless video streaming: achieving unicast and multicast IPTV in a practical manner

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    This paper proposes a versatile IPTV video-streaming scheme that provides high-quality unicast with the aid of repair packets but still supports multicast without repair packets. Prior research on wireless multicast video streaming has addressed the risk of feedback implosion when providing adaptive Forward Error Correction (FEC). This approach has not been adopted by providers, who may either prefer unicast streaming or employ a sufficient level of application-layer FEC to avoid the need for adaptation. Instead in this paper, an adaptive, unicast rateless channel-coding scheme is also run in multicast mode. The paper demonstrates the method and the operating conditions for such a joint unicast/multicast service in terms of data rates and suitable video-content type. Data-partitioned source coding with gradual decoding refresh is adopted in the given scenarios, making for a practical broadband wireless streaming scheme
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