Translational aspects of cardiac cell therapy.

Cell therapy has been intensely studied for over a decade as a potential treatment for ischaemic heart disease. While initial trials using skeletal myoblasts, bone marrow cells and peripheral blood stem cells showed promise in improving cardiac function, benefits were found to be short-lived likely related to limited survival and engraftment of the delivered cells. The discovery of putative cardiac 'progenitor' cells as well as the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells has led to the delivery of cells potentially capable of electromechanical integration into existing tissue. An alternative strategy involving either direct reprogramming of endogenous cardiac fibroblasts or stimulation of resident cardiomyocytes to regenerate new myocytes can potentially overcome the limitations of exogenous cell delivery. Complimentary approaches utilizing combination cell therapy and bioengineering techniques may be necessary to provide the proper milieu for clinically significant regeneration. Clinical trials employing bone marrow cells, mesenchymal stem cells and cardiac progenitor cells have demonstrated safety of catheter based cell delivery, with suggestion of limited improvement in ventricular function and reduction in infarct size. Ongoing trials are investigating potential benefits to outcome such as morbidity and mortality. These and future trials will clarify the optimal cell types and delivery conditions for therapeutic effect

Band Collapse and the Quantum Hall Effect in Graphene

The recent Quantum Hall experiments in graphene have confirmed the theoretically well-understood picture of the quantum Hall (QH) conductance in fermion systems with continuum Dirac spectrum. In this paper we take into account the lattice, and perform an exact diagonalization of the Landau problem on the hexagonal lattice. At very large magnetic fields the Dirac argument fails completely and the Hall conductance, given by the number of edge states present in the gaps of the spectrum, is dominated by lattice effects. As the field is lowered, the experimentally observed situation is recovered through a phenomenon which we call band collapse. As a corollary, for low magnetic field, graphene will exhibit two qualitatively different QHE's: at low filling, the QHE will be dominated by the "relativistic" Dirac spectrum and the Hall conductance will be odd-integer; above a certain filling, the QHE will be dominated by a non-relativistic spectrum, and the Hall conductance will span all integers, even and odd.Comment: 10 page

DPF-Nutrition: Food Nutrition Estimation via Depth Prediction and Fusion

A reasonable and balanced diet is essential for maintaining good health. With the advancements in deep learning, automated nutrition estimation method based on food images offers a promising solution for monitoring daily nutritional intake and promoting dietary health. While monocular image-based nutrition estimation is convenient, efficient, and economical, the challenge of limited accuracy remains a significant concern. To tackle this issue, we proposed DPF-Nutrition, an end-to-end nutrition estimation method using monocular images. In DPF-Nutrition, we introduced a depth prediction module to generate depth maps, thereby improving the accuracy of food portion estimation. Additionally, we designed an RGB-D fusion module that combined monocular images with the predicted depth information, resulting in better performance for nutrition estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this was the pioneering effort that integrated depth prediction and RGB-D fusion techniques in food nutrition estimation. Comprehensive experiments performed on Nutrition5k evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of DPF-Nutrition

Legendrian mean curvature flow in η\eta-Einstein Sasakian manifolds

Recently, there are a great deal of work done which connects the Legendrian isotopic problem with contact invariants. The isotopic problem of Legendre curve in a contact 3-manifold was studies via the Legendrian curve shortening flow which was introduced and studied by K. Smoczyk. On the other hand, in the SYZ Conjecture, one can model a special Lagrangian singularity locally as the special Lagrangian cones in C^{3}. This can be characterized by its link which is a minimal Legendrian surface in the 5-sphere. Then in these points of view, in this paper we will focus on the existence of the long-time solution and asymptotic convergence along the Legendrian mean curvature flow in higher dimensional {\eta}-Einstein Sasakian (2n+1)-manifolds under the suitable stability condition due to the Thomas-Yau conjecture.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0906.5527 by other author

Quantitative Test of SO(5) Symmetry in the Vortex State of Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4Nd_{1.85}Ce_{0.15}CuO_4

By numerically solving models with competing superconducting and antiferromagnetic orders, we study the magnetic field dependence of the antiferromagnetic moment in both the weak and strong field regimes. Through a omparison with the neutron scattering results of Kang et al and Matsuura et al.on $Nd_{1.85}Ce_{0.15}CuO_4$, we conclude that this system is close to a SO(5) symmetric critical point. We also make a quantitative prediction on increasing the upper critical field $B_{c2}$ and the superconducting transition temperature $T_c$ by applying an in-plane magnetic field.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures v3: final version PRL 92, 107002 (2004