An Internet Portal based on 'Twenty Questions'

An efficient Internet portal should contain a search engine or maybe even a decision support system to supply the user with the information (s)he may be looking for. In this report an intelligent agent is suggested that relates different sites to each other, based on the answers supplied by the users looking for certain information. For this purpose a self-learning system has been made, based on the neural network of the game Twenty Questions, but with a strategy that relates different objects or sites by correlating the list of answers to the questions

Deep Chronnectome Learning via Full Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks for MCI Diagnosis

Brain functional connectivity (FC) extracted from resting-state fMRI (RS-fMRI) has become a popular approach for disease diagnosis, where discriminating subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from normal controls (NC) is still one of the most challenging problems. Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), consisting of time-varying spatiotemporal dynamics, may characterize "chronnectome" diagnostic information for improving MCI classification. However, most of the current dFC studies are based on detecting discrete major brain status via spatial clustering, which ignores rich spatiotemporal dynamics contained in such chronnectome. We propose Deep Chronnectome Learning for exhaustively mining the comprehensive information, especially the hidden higher-level features, i.e., the dFC time series that may add critical diagnostic power for MCI classification. To this end, we devise a new Fully-connected Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network (Full-BiLSTM) to effectively learn the periodic brain status changes using both past and future information for each brief time segment and then fuse them to form the final output. We have applied our method to a rigorously built large-scale multi-site database (i.e., with 164 data from NCs and 330 from MCIs, which can be further augmented by 25 folds). Our method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches with an accuracy of 73.6% under solid cross-validations. We also made extensive comparisons among multiple variants of LSTM models. The results suggest high feasibility of our method with promising value also for other brain disorder diagnoses.Comment: The paper has been accepted by MICCAI201

Time trend occurrence of duodenal intraepithelial lymphocytosis and celiac disease in an open access endoscopic population

Background: Duodenal intraepithelial lymphocytosis (DIL) is a histological finding characterized by the increase of intraepithelial CD3T-lymphocytes over the normal value without villous atrophy, mostly associated to coeliac disease (CD), Helicobacter pylori (Hp) gastritis and autoimmune diseases. Objective: To assess the occurrence of DIL, CD and Hp gastritis in an endoscopic population over a 13 year period. Methods: From 2003 to 2015 we included adult patients who consecutively underwent oesophago-gastro-duodenoscopy (OGD) with duodenal biopsies assessing the overall and annual occurrence of DIL and CD and the prevalence of Hp gastritis. Results: 160 (2.3%) patients with DIL and 275 (3.9%) with CD were detected among 7001 patients. CD occurrence was higher from 2003 to 2011, while since 2012 DIL occurrence gradually increased significantly compared to CD (p = 0.03). DIL patients were more frequently female (p = 0.0006) and underwent OGD more frequently for dyspepsia (p = 0.002) and for indications not related to gastrointestinal symptoms than CD patients (p = 0.0003). Hp gastritis occurred similarly in CD and DIL patients but the latter had higher frequency of atrophic body gastritis (p = 0.005). Conclusions: DIL is a condition increasing in the general endoscopic population mainly diagnosed by chance. Concomitant gastric histological evaluation is able in one third of DIL patients to identify associated possible causes of DIL, such as Hp and atrophic gastritis

A Number-Theoretic Error-Correcting Code

In this paper we describe a new error-correcting code (ECC) inspired by the Naccache-Stern cryptosystem. While by far less efficient than Turbo codes, the proposed ECC happens to be more efficient than some established ECCs for certain sets of parameters. The new ECC adds an appendix to the message. The appendix is the modular product of small primes representing the message bits. The receiver recomputes the product and detects transmission errors using modular division and lattice reduction

Semileptonic decays of the standard Higgs boson

The Higgs boson decay into a pair of real or virtual W bosons, with one of them decaying leptonically, is predicted within the Standard Model to have the largest branching fraction of all Higgs decays that involve an isolated electron or muon, for M_h > 120 GeV. We compute analytically the fully-differential width for this h -> l \nu jj decay at tree level, and then explore some multi-dimensional cuts that preserve the region of large signal. Future searches for semileptonic decays at the Tevatron and LHC, employing fully-differential information as outlined here, may be essential for ruling out or in the Higgs boson and for characterizing a Higgs signal.Comment: 17 pages, 5 .eps figure

Protein disulfide-isomerase interacts with a substrate protein at all stages along its folding pathway

In contrast to molecular chaperones that couple protein folding to ATP hydrolysis, protein disulfide-isomerase (PDI) catalyzes protein folding coupled to formation of disulfide bonds (oxidative folding). However, we do not know how PDI distinguishes folded, partly-folded and unfolded protein substrates. As a model intermediate in an oxidative folding pathway, we prepared a two-disulfide mutant of basic pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (BPTI) and showed by NMR that it is partly-folded and highly dynamic. NMR studies show that it binds to PDI at the same site that binds peptide ligands, with rapid binding and dissociation kinetics; surface plasmon resonance shows its interaction with PDI has a Kd of ca. 10−5 M. For comparison, we characterized the interactions of PDI with native BPTI and fully-unfolded BPTI. Interestingly, PDI does bind native BPTI, but binding is quantitatively weaker than with partly-folded and unfolded BPTI. Hence PDI recognizes and binds substrates via permanently or transiently unfolded regions. This is the first study of PDI's interaction with a partly-folded protein, and the first to analyze this folding catalyst's changing interactions with substrates along an oxidative folding pathway. We have identified key features that make PDI an effective catalyst of oxidative protein folding – differential affinity, rapid ligand exchange and conformational flexibility

New Physics Signals in Longitudinal Gauge Boson Scattering at the LHC

We introduce a novel technique designed to look for signatures of new physics in vector boson fusion processes at the TeV scale. This functions by measuring the polarization of the vector bosons to determine the relative longitudinal to transverse production. In studying this ratio we can directly probe the high energy E^2-growth of longitudinal vector boson scattering amplitudes characteristic of models with non-Standard Model (SM) interactions. We will focus on studying models parameterized by an effective Lagrangian that include a light Higgs with non-SM couplings arising from TeV scale new physics associated with the electroweak symmetry breaking, although our technique can be used in more general scenarios. We will show that this technique is stable against the large uncertainties that can result from variations in the factorization scale, improving upon previous studies that measure cross section alone

Inclusive double-quarkonium production at the Large Hadron Collider

Based on the nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization formalism, we investigate inclusive productions of two spin-triplet S-wave quarkonia pp->2J/psi+X, 2Upsilon+X, and J/psi+Upsilon+X at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The total production rates integrated over the rapidity (y) and transverse-momentum (p_T) ranges |y|<2.4 and p_T<50 GGeV are predicted to be sigma[pp->2J/psi+X] = 22 (35) nb, sigma[pp->2Upsilon+X] = 24 (49) pb, and sigma[pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X] = 7 (13) pb at the center-of-momentum energy sqrt{s} = 7 (14) TeV. In order to provide predictions that can be useful in both small- and large-p_T regions, we do not employ the fragmentation approximation and we include the spin-triplet S-wave color-singlet and color-octet channels for each quarkonium final state at leading order in the strong coupling. The p_T distributions of pp->2J/psi+X and 2Upsilon+X in the low-p_T region are dominated by the color-singlet contributions. At leading order in the strong coupling, the color-singlet channel is absent for pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X. Therefore, the process pp->J/psi+Upsilon+X may provide a useful probe to the color-octet mechanism of NRQCD.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables, version published in JHE