Imagerie IRTF tridimensionnelle pour l'étude de l'insuffisance rénale chronique

CKD (Chronic Kidney Disease) is one of the worst public diseases in developing countries. The stages of CKD are mainly based on measured or estimated GFR (Glomerular Filtration Rate). However, this method is not sensitive enough on early stages of the pathology and thus do not offer accurate diagnostic value. Early detection and treatment can often limit or avoid the chronicity effects of the disease. This thesis focuses on the development of FTIR microscopy as a diagnostic tool for the identification by histopathology at glomerulus level of the kidney in CKD model. We developed a technique of 3D reconstruction for the FTIR imaging of biochemical components changes in glomeruli for identifying the pathological marker of CKD. The curve-fitting and spectral clustering are applied on the FTIR microscopy analysis to distinguish between healthy and pathological glomeruli of a kidney. Then, the glomerular microvasculatureis highlighted to reveal the morphological abnormalities by perfusing contrast agents into blood vessels. With advanced 3D statistical methods and 3D image visualization by microscopy, FTIR spectro-imaging can be used as a functional technique to determine the morphological and molecular changes occurring along CKD development.L’insuffisance rénale chronique (IRC) et l’une des pires maladies chroniques dans les pays développés. Les grades de l’IRC sont principalement basés sur la mesure ou l’estimation du taux de filtration rénale (GFR). Cependant, cette méthode est peu sensible sur les premiers stades de la pathologie et n’apporte donc pas de valeur diagnostique. La détection de la pathologie à des stades précoces et son traitement peuvent éviter ou limiter les effets délétères de la chronicité. Cette thèse se penche sur le développement de la microscopie IRTF en tant qu’outil diagnostic pour l’identification par histopathologie à l’échelle du glomérule dans un modèle d’IRC. Nous avons développé la technique de reconstruction 3D pour l’imagerie IRTF des modifications biochimiques à l’échelle du glomérule pour déterminer des marqueurs de l’IRC. La déconvolution spectrale et le clustering sont appliqués après analyses IRTF pour distinguer les modèles sains et pathologiques. Ensuite, la microvasculature glomérulaire est révélée par agent de contraste pour en déterminer les anomalies morphologiques. Grâce aux résultats obtenus en 3D et l’utilisation de méthodes statistiques avancées, la microscopie IRTF est utilisée comme une technique fonctionnelle pour déterminer les modifications morphologiques et moléculaires apparaissant au cours du développement de l’IRC

Are systematic reviews up-to-date at the time of publication?

BACKGROUND: Systematic reviews provide a synthesis of evidence for practitioners, for clinical practice guideline developers, and for those designing and justifying primary research. Having an up-to-date and comprehensive review is therefore important. Our main objective was to determine the recency of systematic reviews at the time of their publication, as measured by the time from last search date to publication. We also wanted to study the time from search date to acceptance, and from acceptance to publication, and measure the proportion of systematic reviews with recorded information on search dates and information sources in the abstract and full text of the review. METHODS: A descriptive analysis of published systematic reviews indexed in Medline in 2009, 2010 and 2011 by three reviewers, independently extracting data. RESULTS: Of the 300 systematic reviews included, 271 (90%) provided the date of search in the full-text article, but only 141 (47%) stated this in the abstract. The median (standard error; minimum to maximum) survival time from last search to acceptance was 5.1 (0.58; 0 to 43.8) months (95% confidence interval = 3.9 to 6.2) and from last search to first publication time was 8.0 (0.35; 0 to 46.7) months (95% confidence interval = 7.3 to 8.7), respectively. Of the 300 reviews, 295 (98%) stated which databases had been searched, but only 181 (60%) stated the databases in the abstract. Most researchers searched three (35%) or four (21%) databases. The top-three most used databases were MEDLINE (79%), Cochrane library (76%), and EMBASE (64%). CONCLUSIONS: Being able to identify comprehensive, up-to-date reviews is important to clinicians, guideline groups, and those designing clinical trials. This study demonstrates that some reviews have a considerable delay between search and publication, but only 47% of systematic review abstracts stated the last search date and 60% stated the databases that had been searched. Improvements in the quality of abstracts of systematic reviews and ways to shorten the review and revision processes to make review publication more rapid are needed

A Temporal Frequent Itemset-Based Clustering Approach For Discovering Event Episodes From News Sequence

When performing environmental scanning, organizations typically deal with a numerous of events and topics about their core business, relevant technique standards, competitors, and market, where each event or topic to monitor or track generally is associated with many news documents. To reduce information overload and information fatigues when monitoring or tracking such events, it is essential to develop an effective event episode discovery mechanism for organizing all news documents pertaining to an event of interest. In this study, we propose the time-adjoining frequent itemset-based event-episode discovery (TAFIED) technique. Based on the frequent itemset-based hierarchical clustering (FIHC) approach, our proposed TAFIED further considers the temporal characteristic of news articles, including the burst, novelty, and temporal proximity of features in an event episode, when discovering event episodes from the sequence of news articles pertaining to a specific event. Using the traditional feature-based HAC, HAC with a time-decaying function (HAC+TD), and FIHC techniques as performance benchmarks, our empirical evaluation results suggest that the proposed TAFIED technique outperforms all evaluation benchmarks in cluster recall and cluster precision

KINETIC AND EMG ANALYSIS OF THE NEW DEDIGN STEPWISE LOADING SYSTEM

The great muscle strength and power are important factors for successful sport performance. Many strength coaches instructed their athletes to move the weight for developing muscle strength. However, most weight training systems consist of lifting a steady load, this having the drawback of nol accounting for the change in strength with the change in muscle length. In order to solve this problem, this study developed a stepwise weight training system using linkage which is capable of increasing the load in isotonic contraction, then compared kinetics and muscle activation between the stepwise contraction and the traditional isotonic contraction. The results showed that both the normalized peak tension and the angle of peak tension of the stepwise contraction were significantly larger than traditional isotonic contraction. The normalized impulse and the integrated EMG of the stepwise contraction was more than traditional isotonic contraction but not reached the significance The findings suggest that stepwise loading system can provide greater stimulus to muscle training effect than traditional weight training systems

Structural study in Highly Compressed BiFeO3 Epitaxial Thin Films on YAlO3

We report a study on the thermodynamic stability and structure analysis of the epitaxial BiFeO3 (BFO) thin films grown on YAlO3 (YAO) substrate. First we observe a phase transition of MC-MA-T occurs in thin sample (<60 nm) with an utter tetragonal-like phase (denoted as MII here) with a large c/a ratio (~1.23). Specifically, MII phase transition process refers to the structural evolution from a monoclinic MC structure at room temperature to a monoclinic MA at higher temperature (150oC) and eventually to a presence of nearly tetragonal structure above 275oC. This phase transition is further confirmed by the piezoforce microscopy measurement, which shows the rotation of polarization axis during the phase transition. A systematic study on structural evolution with thickness to elucidate the impact of strain state is performed. We note that the YAO substrate can serve as a felicitous base for growing T-like BFO because this phase stably exists in very thick film. Thick BFO films grown on YAO substrate exhibit a typical "morphotropic-phase-boundary"-like feature with coexisting multiple phases (MII, MI, and R) and a periodic stripe-like topography. A discrepancy of arrayed stripe morphology in different direction on YAO substrate due to the anisotropic strain suggests a possibility to tune the MPB-like region. Our study provides more insights to understand the strain mediated phase co-existence in multiferroic BFO system.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Journal of Applied Physic

Recombinant lipidated dengue-4 envelope protein domain III elicits protective immunity

AbstractThe combination of recombinant protein antigens with an immunostimulator has the potential to greatly increase the immunogenicity of recombinant protein antigens. In the present study, we selected the dengue-4 envelope protein domain III as a dengue vaccine candidate and expressed the protein in lipidated form using an Escherichia coli-based system. The recombinant lipidated dengue-4 envelope protein domain III folded into the proper conformation and competed with the dengue-4 virus for cellular binding sites. Mice immunized with lipidated dengue-4 envelope protein domain III without exogenous adjuvant had higher frequencies of dengue-4 envelope protein domain III-specific B cells secreting antibodies than mice immunized with the nonlipidated form. Importantly, lipidated dengue-4 envelope protein domain III-immunized mice demonstrated a durable neutralizing antibody response and had reduced viremia levels after challenge. The study demonstrates that lipidated dengue-4 envelope protein domain III is immunogenic and may be a potential dengue vaccine candidate. Furthermore, the lipidation strategy can be applied to other serotypes of dengue virus

The Influence of Relationship Quality between Manufacturer and Retailer on Future Collaboration—A Case Study of Customer Electronic Product Channel in Taiwan

[[abstract]]This study explores the collaboration between upstream manufacturer brands and first-line retailers in Taiwan’s 3C product market, which is influenced by several factors. Both parties are motivated by profit and thus, strive for mutual cooperation in the business environment. Whether influencing factors exist between the retailer and manufacturer is a crucial issue. This study investigates 308 customer electronics retailers in Taiwan. Focusing on relationship quality, relational trust, and retailer satisfaction with the brand, we explore the possibility of future collaboration between retailers and manufacturer brands. The study results indicate the relationship quality between retailers and manufacturers has a significant impact on the relationship of trust. Both the relationship quality between retailers and manufacturers and the relational trust between the retailers and manufacturers have significant impacts on the retailer’s satisfaction with the manufacturer. Retailer satisfaction has a direct impact on the future collaboration between retailers and manufacturers. Compared with customers with high expectations, customers with low expectations have a higher effect on the relationship between retailer satisfaction with the brand manufacturer and the future collaboration between retailers and manufacturers.[[notice]]補正完

Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis in Multimodal Context

Multimodal corpora have become an essential language resource for language science and grounded natural language processing (NLP) systems due to the growing need to understand and interpret human communication across various channels. In this paper, we first present our efforts in building the first Multimodal Corpus for Languages in Taiwan (MultiMoco). Based on the corpus, we conduct a case study investigating the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH), specifically examining whether the hand gestures co-occurring with speech constants facilitate lexical retrieval or serve other discourse functions. With detailed annotations on eight parliamentary interpellations in Taiwan Mandarin, we explore the co-occurrence between speech constants and non-verbal features (i.e., head movement, face movement, hand gesture, and function of hand gesture). Our findings suggest that while hand gestures do serve as facilitators for lexical retrieval in some cases, they also serve the purpose of information emphasis. This study highlights the potential of the MultiMoco Corpus to provide an important resource for in-depth analysis and further research in multimodal communication studies