Antenatal screening and its possible meaning from unborn baby's perspective

In recent decades antenatal screening has become one of the most routine procedure of pregnancy-follow up and the subject of hot debate in bioethics circles. In this paper the rationale behind doing antenatal screening and the actual and potential problems that it may cause will be discussed. The paper will examine the issue from the point of wiew of parents, health care professionals and, most importantly, the child-to-be. It will show how unthoughtfully antenatal screening is performed and how pregnancy is treated almost as a disease just since the emergence of antenatal screening. Genetic screening and ethical problems caused by the procedure will also be addressed and I will suggest that screening is more to do with the interests of others rather than those of the child-to be

Bilkent University at TRECVID 2007

We describe our fourth participation, that includes two high-level feature extraction runs, and one manual search run, to the TRECVID video retrieval evaluation. All of these runs have used a system trained on the common development collection. Only visual information, consisting of color, texture and edge-based low-level features, was used

Properties of 42 Solar-type Kepler Targets from the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal

Recently the number of main-sequence and subgiant stars exhibiting solar-like oscillations that are resolved into individual mode frequencies has increased dramatically. While only a few such data sets were available for detailed modeling just a decade ago, the Kepler mission has produced suitable observations for hundreds of new targets. This rapid expansion in observational capacity has been accompanied by a shift in analysis and modeling strategies to yield uniform sets of derived stellar properties more quickly and easily. We use previously published asteroseismic and spectroscopic data sets to provide a uniform analysis of 42 solar-type Kepler targets from the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal (AMP). We find that fitting the individual frequencies typically doubles the precision of the asteroseismic radius, mass and age compared to grid-based modeling of the global oscillation properties, and improves the precision of the radius and mass by about a factor of three over empirical scaling relations. We demonstrate the utility of the derived properties with several applications.Comment: 12 emulateapj pages, 9 figures, 1 online-only extended figure, 1 table, ApJS accepted (typo corrected in Eq.8

The Top-Dog Index: A New Measurement for the Demand Consistency of the Size Distribution in Pre-Pack Orders for a Fashion Discounter with Many Small Branches

We propose the new Top-Dog-Index, a measure for the branch-dependent historic deviation of the supply data of apparel sizes from the sales data of a fashion discounter. A common approach is to estimate demand for sizes directly from the sales data. This approach may yield information for the demand for sizes if aggregated over all branches and products. However, as we will show in a real-world business case, this direct approach is in general not capable to provide information about each branch's individual demand for sizes: the supply per branch is so small that either the number of sales is statistically too small for a good estimate (early measurement) or there will be too much unsatisfied demand neglected in the sales data (late measurement). Moreover, in our real-world data we could not verify any of the demand distribution assumptions suggested in the literature. Our approach cannot estimate the demand for sizes directly. It can, however, individually measure for each branch the scarcest and the amplest sizes, aggregated over all products. This measurement can iteratively be used to adapt the size distributions in the pre-pack orders for the future. A real-world blind study shows the potential of this distribution free heuristic optimization approach: The gross yield measured in percent of gross value was almost one percentage point higher in the test-group branches than in the control-group branches.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figure

The cBio cancer Genomics portal: An open platform for exploring multidimensional cancer genomics data

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The cBio Cancer Genomics Portal (http://cbioportal.org) is an open-access resource for interactive exploration of multidimensional cancer genomics data sets, currently providing access to data from more than 5,000 tumor samples from 20 cancer studies. The cBio Cancer Genomics Portal significantly lowers the barriers between complex genomic data and cancer researchers who want rapid, intuitive, and high-quality access to molecular profiles and clinical attributes from large-scale cancer genomics projects and empowers researchers to translate these rich data sets into biologic insights and clinical applications. © 2012 American Association for Cancer Research

Tsetse Immune System Maturation Requires the Presence of Obligate Symbionts in Larvae

Tsetse harbors an obligate symbiont, Wigglesworthia glossinidia, that must be present during larval maturation for the fly's immune system to develop and function properly during adulthood

Expression of nicotinamide N-methyltransferase in hepatocellular carcinoma is associated with poor prognosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common tumor in the adult liver, with high relapse and mortality rates despite diverse treatment modalities. In this study, nicotinamide N-methyltransferase (NNMT), a key enzyme in drug metabolism, was investigated as a potential prognostic factor.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Frozen tumors and non-cancerous surrounding tissues from 120 patients with primary HCC were studied. Expressions of NNMT and internal control genes were measured by real-time reverse-transcription PCR (RT-PCR). The relationship of NNMT mRNA level with clinicopathologic parameters and clinical outcome was evaluated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>NNMT mRNA level is markedly reduced in HCCs compared to non-cancerous surrounding tissues (P < 0.0001), and NNMT expression in tumors was significantly correlated with tumor stage (P = 0.010). Moreover, stratification of patients based on tumor NNMT mRNA levels revealed that the patients who expressed higher NNMT mRNA levels tended to have a shorter overall survival (OS) time (P = 0.053) and a significantly shorter disease-free survival (DFS) time (P = 0.016). Both NNMT expression (P = 0.0096) and tumor stage (P = 0.0017) were found to be significant prognostic factors for DFS in a multivariate analysis.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The results of this study indicated that NNMT gene expression is associated with tumor stage and DFS time in HCC cases. Because of the broad substrate specificity of NNMT, which could alter the efficacy and adverse effects of chemotherapy, NNMT merits further investigation regarding its role as a prognostic factor with a larger cohort of HCC patients.</p

The COST292 experimental framework for TRECVID 2007

In this paper, we give an overview of the four tasks submitted to TRECVID 2007 by COST292. In shot boundary (SB) detection task, four SB detectors have been developed and the results are merged using two merging algorithms. The framework developed for the high-level feature extraction task comprises four systems. The first system transforms a set of low-level descriptors into the semantic space using Latent Semantic Analysis and utilises neural networks for feature detection. The second system uses a Bayesian classifier trained with a “bag of subregions”. The third system uses a multi-modal classifier based on SVMs and several descriptors. The fourth system uses two image classifiers based on ant colony optimisation and particle swarm optimisation respectively. The system submitted to the search task is an interactive retrieval application combining retrieval functionalities in various modalities with a user interface supporting automatic and interactive search over all queries submitted. Finally, the rushes task submission is based on a video summarisation and browsing system comprising two different interest curve algorithms and three features