BAFF Index and CXCL13 levels in the cerebrospinal fluid associate respectively with intrathecal IgG synthesis and cortical atrophy in multiple sclerosis at clinical onset

Abstract Background B lymphocytes are thought to play a relevant role in multiple sclerosis (MS) pathology. The in vivo analysis of intrathecally produced B cell-related cytokines may help to clarify the mechanisms of B cell recruitment and immunoglobulin production within the central nervous system (CNS) in MS. Methods Paired cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum specimens from 40 clinically isolated syndrome suggestive of MS or early-onset relapsing-remitting MS patients (CIS/eRRMS) and 17 healthy controls (HC) were analyzed for the intrathecal synthesis of IgG (quantitative formulae and IgG oligoclonal bands, IgGOB), CXCL13, BAFF, and IL-21. 3D-FLAIR, 3D-DIR, and 3D-T1 MRI sequences were applied to evaluate white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) lesions and global cortical thickness (gCTh). Results Compared to HC, CIS/eRRMS having IgGOB (IgGOB+, 26 patients) had higher intrathecal IgG indexes ( p \u2009<\u20090.01), lower values of BAFF Index (11.9\u2009\ub1\u20096.1 vs 17.5\u2009\ub1\u20095.2, p \u2009<\u20090.01), and higher CSF CXCL13 levels (27.7\u2009\ub1\u200933.5 vs 0.9\u2009\ub1\u20091.5, p \u2009<\u20090.005). In these patients, BAFF Index but not CSF CXCL13 levels inversely correlated with the intrathecal IgG synthesis ( r \u2009>\u20090.5 and p \u2009<\u20090.05 for all correlations). CSF leukocyte counts were significantly higher in IgGOB+ compared to IgGOB\u2212 ( p \u2009<\u20090.05) and HC ( p \u2009<\u20090.01), and correlated to CSF CXCL13 concentrations ( r 0.77, p \u2009<\u20090.001). The gCTh was significantly lower in patients with higher CSF CXCL13 levels (2.41\u2009\ub1\u20090.1 vs 2.49\u2009\ub1\u20090.1\ua0mm, p \u2009<\u20090.05), while no difference in MRI parameters of WM and GM pathology was observed between IgGOB+ and IgGOB\u2212. Conclusions The intrathecal IgG synthesis inversely correlated with BAFF Index and showed no correlation with CSF CXCL13. These findings seem to indicate that intrathecally synthesized IgG are produced by long-term PCs that have entered the CNS from the peripheral blood, rather than produced by PCs developed in the meningeal follicle-like structures (FLS). In this study, CXCL13 identifies a subgroup of MS patients characterized by ..

Categorical Models for a Semantically Linear Lambda-calculus

This paper is about a categorical approach to model a very simple Semantically Linear lambda calculus, named Sll-calculus. This is a core calculus underlying the programming language SlPCF. In particular, in this work, we introduce the notion of Sll-Category, which is able to describe a very large class of sound models of Sll-calculus. Sll-Category extends in the natural way Benton, Bierman, Hyland and de Paiva's Linear Category, in order to soundly interpret all the constructs of Sll-calculus. This category is general enough to catch interesting models in Scott Domains and Coherence Spaces

Continous Treatment with Ibrutinib in 100 Untreated Patients with TP53 Disrupted Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. A Real-Life Campus CLL Study

Continous Treatment with Ibrutinib in 100 Untreated Patients with TP53 Disrupted Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. A Real-Life Campus CLL Stud

Lambda! Considered Both as a Paradigmatic Language and as a Meta-Language

Intuitionistic Linear Logic (ILL) is a resource-conscious logic. The Curry-Howard Isomorphism (CHI) applied to ILL, generates typed functional-like languages that have primitive constants by means of which the amount of resources (terms), used during the computation, is explicit. \Gamma ! is an untyped functional-like language inspired from a typed language joined at ILL by CHI. We want to use the resource-aware language \Gamma ! both as a paradigmatic programming language and as a meta-language for implementing a fragment of the untyped -calculus fi . For using \Gamma ! in the first way we give an algorithm for automatically assigning formulas of ILL as types to terms of \Gamma ! . Concerning the second kind of use, we introduce a one-step translation Tr from the fragment C of fi that can be typed a la Curry to the typable fragment of \Gamma ! in ILL. Tr preserves the linear-behaved terms of C and is both correct and complete, in a reasonable sense, w.r.t. the..

A Computer Vision System for Monitoring Ice-Cream Freezers

In this paper, we describe a computer vision system aimed at monitoring the evolution of the content of a commercial ice-cream freezer. In particular, the system is able to detect the volume occupied by ice-creams in a basket and to track ice-cream sales. To this end, three modules have been developed performing the detection of the baskets and the products inside them, along with the tracking of the interactions with the freezer to take/drop products. The system comprises four cameras connected to an embedded mini-computer able to communicate with a telemetry system that sends information about the freezer context. Our proposed methods achieve promising results for the basket detection and the product tracking (accuracy around 70-80%) and good results in the volume estimation

Structured Operational Semantics of a fragment of the language Scheme

In this paper we give a big-step structured operational semantics (SOS), in the style of Plotkin, Kahn and Milner, of a significant fragment of the functional programming language Scheme, including quote, eval, quasiquote and unquote. The SOS formalism allows us to discuss incrementally the various features of the language and to keep a low mathematical overhead, thus producing a rigorous account of the semantics of a &quot;real&quot; programming language, which nonetheless has a pedagogical value. More specifically, we formalize four strictly increasing fragments of Scheme, using a number of formal systems which express the evaluation of expressions, the display of output results, and the handling of errors. 1 Introduction In order to use correctly, implement uniformly, or simply understand a programming language, we need a precise and unambiguous (formal) description of its semantics. In the literature, there are various formal language description languages and techniques which can be used ..

A Computer Vision System for the Automatic Inventory of a Cooler

In this paper we describe a system for beverage product recognition through the analysis of cooler shelf images. The extreme objects occlusion, the strong light influence and the poor quality of the images make this task a challenging one. To overcome these limitations, we rely on simple computer vision algorithms, like chamfer and color histogram matching and we introduce simple 3D modeling techniques. In our experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of both detection accuracy and computational time