Osteochondritis dissecans of the knee. Pearls and pitfalls of anatomical reduction and secure fixation

Osteochondritis dissecans of the knee is characterized by sterile necrosis of the subchondral bone and typically affects skeletally immature patients. When left untreated, osteochondritis dissecans can lead to early-onset osteoarthritis, resulting in pain and disability. This study shows the pearls and pitfalls of an arthroscopic technique of fixation performed successfully using a bioabsorbable nail for unstable osteochondritis dissecans lesions located in the medial femoral condyle of the knee

Constitutive IP₃ signaling underlies the sensitivity of B-cell cancers to the Bcl-2/IP₃ receptor disruptor BIRD-2

Anti-apoptotic Bcl-2 proteins are upregulated in different cancers, including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), enabling survival by inhibiting pro-apoptotic Bcl-2-family members and inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate (IP3) receptor (IP3R)-mediated Ca2+-signaling. A peptide tool (Bcl-2/IP3R Disruptor-2; BIRD-2) was developed to abrogate the interaction of Bcl-2 with IP3Rs by targeting Bcl-2′s BH4 domain. BIRD-2 triggers cell death in primary CLL cells and in DLBCL cell lines. Particularly, DLBCL cells with high levels of IP3R2 were sensitive to BIRD-2. Here, we report that BIRD-2-induced cell death in DLBCL cells does not only depend on high IP3R2-expression levels, but also on constitutive IP3 signaling, downstream of the tonically active B-cell receptor. The basal Ca2+ level in SU-DHL-4 DLBCL cells was significantly elevated due to the constitutive IP3 production. This constitutive IP3 signaling fulfilled a pro-survival role, since inhibition of phospholipase C (PLC) using U73122 (2.5 µM) caused cell death in SU-DHL-4 cells. Milder inhibition of IP3 signaling using a lower U73122 concentration (1 µM) or expression of an IP3 sponge suppressed both BIRD-2-induced Ca2+ elevation and apoptosis in SU-DHL-4 cells. Basal PLC/IP3 signaling also fulfilled a pro-survival role in other DLBCL cell lines, including Karpas 422, RI-1 and SU-DHL-6 cells, whereas PLC inhibition protected these cells against BIRD-2-evoked apoptosis. Finally, U73122 treatment also suppressed BIRD-2-induced cell death in primary CLL, both in unsupported systems and in co-cultures with CD40L-expressing fibroblasts. Thus, constitutive IP3 signaling in lymphoma and leukemia cells is not only important for cancer cell survival, but also represents a vulnerability, rendering cancer cells dependent on Bcl-2 to limit IP3R activity. BIRD-2 seems to switch constitutive IP3 signaling from pro-survival into pro-death, presenting a plausible therapeutic strategy

Microwave and mechanical properties of quartz/graphene-based polymer nanocomposites

We report microwave spectroscopy studies of graphene-based polymer-matrix composite materials subject to uniaxial elongation. The samples were prepared via shear mixing under the same thermal processing conditions of amorphous styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) with quartz grains on the order of micrometers in size and/or graphene sheets with thickness 10-20 nm and average lateral size 200 mu m. An important result is the observation of a significant increase (up to 25%) in the effective microwave permittivity of hybridized nanocomposites comprising both quartz and graphene compared to the nanocomposites with quartz only. We suggest that the coating of quartz grains by graphene sheets is the most likely origin of this synergetic effect. In all cases, we also observe that the permittivity spectrum is unaffected by strain up to 8%. By examining the mechanical response, it is shown that the elasticity network of SBR polymer chains is significantly affected in the rubbery state by filling SBR with graphene and quartz particles. (C) 2013 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4793411

GPU implementation of Krylov solvers for block-tridiagonal eigenvalue problems

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32149-3_18In an eigenvalue problem defined by one or two matrices with block-tridiagonal structure, if only a few eigenpairs are required it is interesting to consider iterative methods based on Krylov subspaces, even if matrix blocks are dense. In this context, using the GPU for the associated dense linear algebra may provide high performance. We analyze this in an implementation done in the context of SLEPc, the Scalable Library for Eigenvalue Problem Computations. In the case of a generalized eigenproblem or when interior eigenvalues are computed with shift-and-invert, the main computational kernel is the solution of linear systems with a block-tridiagonal matrix. We explore possible implementations of this operation on the GPU, including a block cyclic reduction algorithm.This work was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under grant TIN2013-41049-P. Alejandro Lamas was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport through grant FPU13-06655.Lamas Daviña, A.; Román Moltó, JE. (2016). GPU implementation of Krylov solvers for block-tridiagonal eigenvalue problems. En Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics. Springer. 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-319-32149-3_18S182191Baghapour, B., Esfahanian, V., Torabzadeh, M., Darian, H.M.: A discontinuous Galerkin method with block cyclic reduction solver for simulating compressible flows on GPUs. Int. J. Comput. Math. 92(1), 110–131 (2014)Bientinesi, P., Igual, F.D., Kressner, D., Petschow, M., Quintana-Ortí, E.S.: Condensed forms for the symmetric eigenvalue problem on multi-threaded architectures. Concur. Comput. Pract. Exp. 23, 694–707 (2011)Haidar, A., Ltaief, H., Dongarra, J.: Toward a high performance tile divide and conquer algorithm for the dense symmetric eigenvalue problem. SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 34(6), C249–C274 (2012)Heller, D.: Some aspects of the cyclic reduction algorithm for block tridiagonal linear systems. SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 13(4), 484–496 (1976)Hernandez, V., Roman, J.E., Vidal, V.: SLEPc: a scalable and flexible toolkit for the solution of eigenvalue problems. ACM Trans. Math. Softw. 31(3), 351–362 (2005)Hirshman, S.P., Perumalla, K.S., Lynch, V.E., Sanchez, R.: BCYCLIC: a parallel block tridiagonal matrix cyclic solver. J. Comput. Phys. 229(18), 6392–6404 (2010)Minden, V., Smith, B., Knepley, M.G.: Preliminary implementation of PETSc using GPUs. In: Yuen, D.A., Wang, L., Chi, X., Johnsson, L., Ge, W., Shi, Y. (eds.) GPU Solutions to Multi-scale Problems in Science and Engineering. Lecture Notes in Earth System Sciences, pp. 131–140. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)NVIDIA: CUBLAS Library V7.0. Technical report, DU-06702-001 $$\_$$ v7.0, NVIDIA Corporation (2015)Park, A.J., Perumalla, K.S.: Efficient heterogeneous execution on large multicore and accelerator platforms: case study using a block tridiagonal solver. J. Parallel and Distrib. Comput. 73(12), 1578–1591 (2013)Reguly, I., Giles, M.: Efficient sparse matrix-vector multiplication on cache-based GPUs. In: Innovative Parallel Computing (InPar), pp. 1–12 (2012)Roman, J.E., Vasconcelos, P.B.: Harnessing GPU power from high-level libraries: eigenvalues of integral operators with SLEPc. In: International Conference on Computational Science. Procedia Computer Science, vol. 18, pp. 2591–2594. Elsevier (2013)Seal, S.K., Perumalla, K.S., Hirshman, S.P.: Revisiting parallel cyclic reduction and parallel prefix-based algorithms for block tridiagonal systems of equations. J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 73(2), 273–280 (2013)Stewart, G.W.: A Krylov-Schur algorithm for large eigenproblems. SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl. 23(3), 601–614 (2001)Tomov, S., Nath, R., Dongarra, J.: Accelerating the reduction to upper Hessenberg, tridiagonal, and bidiagonal forms through hybrid GPU-based computing. Parallel Comput. 36(12), 645–654 (2010)Vomel, C., Tomov, S., Dongarra, J.: Divide and conquer on hybrid GPU-accelerated multicore systems. SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 34(2), C70–C82 (2012)Zhang, Y., Cohen, J., Owens, J.D.: Fast tridiagonal solvers on the GPU. In: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. PPopp 2010, pp. 127–136 (2010

Measurement of the microwave effective permittivity in tensile-strained polyvinylidene difluoride trifluoroethylene filled with graphene

We report an interesting effect in the form of a rise (up to 13%) in the permittivity of graphene (GE) filled polyvinylidene difluoride trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE)) subjected to a small uniaxial deformation (up to 7% in the principal direction). Our findings differ from GE-PVDF homopolymer samples that show a decrease of permittivity upon elongation. We argue that the VDF content which controls the spontaneous polarization has a profound effect on the charge storage through the addition of interface density by the GE phase. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC

Quasi-elastic processes of the 48Ca + 120Sn system and the 48Ca nuclear matter density

Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0 (CC-BY).-- et al.We present the results of a high-precision quasi-elastic excitation function measurement for the 48Ca + 120Sn system at θLAB = 160 at near-barrier energies in steps of 1.0 MeV. The corresponding quasi-elastic barrier distribution is derived. A large-scale coupled-channel calculation was performed to investigate the role of several reaction channels in the reaction mechanism. An excellent agreement between theory and data was obtained for the barrier distribution. The first quadrupole vibrations of the 48Ca and 120Sn, the 2n, and the 4He transfers have a strong influence on the reaction mechanism and are responsible for the good agreement achieved. The 1n transfer has a minor importance in the result when compared with the 2n transfer, which suggests that the pairing correlation might play an important role in the 2n-neutron transfer process. However, if the octupole vibration of the projectile is included in the coupling scheme, the agreement with the data gets worse. The comparison of the coupled-channel calculations with experimental data leads to the conclusion that the nuclear matter diffuseness of the 48Ca nucleus is 0.56 fm in agreement with most of the double-magic nuclei. © 2013 American Physical Society.The authors acknowledge the financial support of Fundaçâo de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de Sâo Paulo (FAPESPBrazil), Fundaçâo de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ-Brazil), Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq-Brazil), The Pronex (Brazil), and the European Community FP7—Capacities-Integrated Infrastructure Initiative—Contract No. ENSAR 262010.Peer Reviewe

The Impact of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in the Gene of Toll-Like Receptor-4 in Prostate Cancer

Background: Prostate cancer is one of the major medical problems in male population. Chronic inflammation has an important role in many human cancers and could be involved in the etiology of prostate cancer. Toll-like receptors are important tolls in innate immunity to pathogens. Many environmental factors could predispose for this cancer, however, genetic background of the population cannot be neglected. Objective: To explore the hypothesis that genetic variation in TLR4 gene can influence the individual's susceptibility to prostate cancer. Patients and Methods: A total of 95 outpatient men with histologically-proven prostate cancer as well as 45 apparently healthy men were recruited for this study. Blood samples were taken from each participant from which genomic DNA was extracted and TLR4 gene was PCR-amplified, using specific primers. PCR products were genotyped by direct sequencing. Results: Asp299gly and Thr399Ile SNPs had only two genotypes; the distributions of these genotypes were statistically not significant between prostate cancer patients and controls. At allele levels, the control group had significantly higher frequency in the mutant allele of Thr399Ile SNP (allele T) than prostate cancer patients. On the other hand, the rs11536889 had three genotypes with the mutant homozygous genotype (CC) and the mutant allele were more prevalent in PCa than controls with significant difference (OR=3.433, 95%CI=1.107-10.645, P= 0.033 and OR=2.730, 95%CI= 1.095-6.803, P=0.031 respectively). Conclusion: Allele T of Thr399Ile SNP may have a protective role, while allele C of rs11536889 SNP might increase the risk of prostate cancer