625 research outputs found
Evaluation of transforming growth factor and vascular endothelial growth factor polymorphisms in Taiwan Chinese patients with pterygium
[[abstract]]PURPOSE. Pterygium is an invasive and highly vascularized growth, thought to arise from activated and proliferating limbal epithelial stem cells. Epidemiologic studies have found the increase of active angiogenic and epithelial growth factors in pterygia, and implicated that these molecules could be involved directly or indirectly in the pathogenesis of pterygia as causative factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the association of polymorphisms of transforming growth factor (TGF) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) with pterygium.
METHODS. A total of 133 pterygium patients and 105 volunteers without pterygium were enrolled in this study. Polymerase chain reaction based restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis was used to resolve the TGF-beta 1-509 and VEGF-460 genotypes.
RESULTS. There was no significant difference in the allele frequency or genotype of TGF-beta 1-509 or VEGF-460 between total pterygium and the control group. No interaction between TGF-beta 1-509 and VEGF-460 was found either.
CONCLUSIONS. These results indicate that TGF-beta 1-509 and VEGF-460 polymorphisms were not highly associated with the pathology of pterygium. However, it may still be worthwhile to continue to search for angiogenic gene polymorphisms in order to predict the development of pterygium
Pengembangan Metode Bangkitan Dan Tarikan Perjalanan Berdasarkan Citra Quickbird
As a basic model, trip generation model aims to obtain the number of movement generated by each origin and the one attracted to each destination zone. Based on the movement, trip generation model is categorized into home-based trip generation and non home-originated/destinated trip attraction. Given that the different types of activities attract trips with different characteristics, it can be concluded that land use management determines the movement and activities. Remote sensing imagery has been extensively used in various research themes including land use management or land use and detailed land utility. As one of the remote sensing imageries, Quickbird imagery is advantageous with its high spatial resolution which is 0.61 cm. Therefore, it is interesting to apply the 0.61 cm spatial resolution to the trip generation model to estimate the number of trips at the trip generation. This aims is to minimize field activities which are high cost, extensive workers, and relatively time consuming
Smooth analysis of the condition number and the least singular value
Let \a be a complex random variable with mean zero and bounded variance.
Let be the random matrix of size whose entries are iid copies of
\a and be a fixed matrix of the same size. The goal of this paper is to
give a general estimate for the condition number and least singular value of
the matrix , generalizing an earlier result of Spielman and Teng for
the case when \a is gaussian.
Our investigation reveals an interesting fact that the "core" matrix does
play a role on tail bounds for the least singular value of . This
does not occur in Spielman-Teng studies when \a is gaussian.
Consequently, our general estimate involves the norm .
In the special case when is relatively small, this estimate is nearly
optimal and extends or refines existing results.Comment: 20 pages. An erratum to the published version has been adde
SESAME: Semantic Editing of Scenes by Adding, Manipulating or Erasing Objects
Recent advances in image generation gave rise to powerful tools for semantic
image editing. However, existing approaches can either operate on a single
image or require an abundance of additional information. They are not capable
of handling the complete set of editing operations, that is addition,
manipulation or removal of semantic concepts. To address these limitations, we
propose SESAME, a novel generator-discriminator pair for Semantic Editing of
Scenes by Adding, Manipulating or Erasing objects. In our setup, the user
provides the semantic labels of the areas to be edited and the generator
synthesizes the corresponding pixels. In contrast to previous methods that
employ a discriminator that trivially concatenates semantics and image as an
input, the SESAME discriminator is composed of two input streams that
independently process the image and its semantics, using the latter to
manipulate the results of the former. We evaluate our model on a diverse set of
datasets and report state-of-the-art performance on two tasks: (a) image
manipulation and (b) image generation conditioned on semantic labels
Association of Alpha B-Crystallin Genotypes with Oral Cancer Susceptibility, Survival, and Recurrence in Taiwan
BACKGROUND: Alpha B-crystallin (CRYAB) is a protein that functions as "molecular chaperone" in preserving intracellular architecture and cell membrane. Also, CRYAB is highly antiapoptotic. Abnormal CRYAB expression is a prognostic biomarker for oral cancer, while its genomic variations and the association with carcinogenesis have never been studied. METHODOLOGY/FINDING: Therefore, we hypothesized that CRYAB single nucleotide polymorphisms may be associated with oral cancer risk. In this hospital-based study, the association of CRYAB A-1215G (rs2228387), C-802G (rs14133) and intron2 (rs2070894) polymorphisms with oral cancer in a Taiwan population was investigated. In total, 496 oral cancer patients and 992 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were genotyped and analyzed. A significantly different frequency distribution was found in CRYAB C-802G genotypes, but not in A-1215G and intron2 genotypes, between the oral cancer and control groups. The CRYAB C-802G G allele conferred an increased risk of oral cancer (Pâ=â1.49Ă10(-5)). Patients carrying CG/GG at CRYAB C-802G were of lower 5-year survival and higher recurrence rate than those of CC (P<0.05). CONCLUSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Our results provide the first evidence that the G allele of CRYAB C-802G is correlated with oral cancer risk and this polymorphism may be a useful marker for oral cancer recurrence and survival prediction for clinical reference
The Effect of Galaxy Interactions on Molecular Gas Properties
© 2018. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.Galaxy interactions are often accompanied by an enhanced star formation rate (SFR). Since molecular gas is essential for star formation, it is vital to establish whether and by how much galaxy interactions affect the molecular gas properties. We investigate the effect of interactions on global molecular gas properties by studying a sample of 58 galaxies in pairs and 154 control galaxies. Molecular gas properties are determined from observations with the JCMT, PMO, and CSO telescopes and supplemented with data from the xCOLD GASS and JINGLE surveys at 12CO(1-0) and 12CO(2-1). The SFR, gas mass (), and gas fraction (f gas) are all enhanced in galaxies in pairs by âŒ2.5 times compared to the controls matched in redshift, mass, and effective radius, while the enhancement of star formation efficiency (SFE âĄSFR/) is less than a factor of 2. We also find that the enhancements in SFR, and f gas, increase with decreasing pair separation and are larger in systems with smaller stellar mass ratio. Conversely, the SFE is only enhanced in close pairs (separation <20 kpc) and equal-mass systems; therefore, most galaxies in pairs lie in the same parameter space on the SFR- plane as controls. This is the first time that the dependence of molecular gas properties on merger configurations is probed statistically with a relatively large sample and a carefully selected control sample for individual galaxies. We conclude that galaxy interactions do modify the molecular gas properties, although the strength of the effect is dependent on merger configuration.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Rewriting a Deep Generative Model
A deep generative model such as a GAN learns to model a rich set of semantic
and physical rules about the target distribution, but up to now, it has been
obscure how such rules are encoded in the network, or how a rule could be
changed. In this paper, we introduce a new problem setting: manipulation of
specific rules encoded by a deep generative model. To address the problem, we
propose a formulation in which the desired rule is changed by manipulating a
layer of a deep network as a linear associative memory. We derive an algorithm
for modifying one entry of the associative memory, and we demonstrate that
several interesting structural rules can be located and modified within the
layers of state-of-the-art generative models. We present a user interface to
enable users to interactively change the rules of a generative model to achieve
desired effects, and we show several proof-of-concept applications. Finally,
results on multiple datasets demonstrate the advantage of our method against
standard fine-tuning methods and edit transfer algorithms.Comment: ECCV 2020 (oral). Code at https://github.com/davidbau/rewriting. For
videos and demos see https://rewriting.csail.mit.edu
Foliations of Isonergy Surfaces and Singularities of Curves
It is well known that changes in the Liouville foliations of the isoenergy
surfaces of an integrable system imply that the bifurcation set has
singularities at the corresponding energy level. We formulate certain
genericity assumptions for two degrees of freedom integrable systems and we
prove the opposite statement: the essential critical points of the bifurcation
set appear only if the Liouville foliations of the isoenergy surfaces change at
the corresponding energy levels. Along the proof, we give full classification
of the structure of the isoenergy surfaces near the critical set under our
genericity assumptions and we give their complete list using Fomenko graphs.
This may be viewed as a step towards completing the Smale program for relating
the energy surfaces foliation structure to singularities of the momentum
mappings for non-degenerate integrable two degrees of freedom systems.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figure
Shape optimization for the generalized Graetz problem
We apply shape optimization tools to the generalized Graetz problem which is a convection-diffusion equation. The problem boils down to the optimization of generalized eigen values on a two phases domain. Shape sensitivity analysis is performed with respect to the evolution of the interface between the fluid and solid phase. In particular physical settings, counterexamples where there is no optimal domains are exhibited. Numerical examples of optimal domains with different physical parameters and constraints are presented. Two different numerical methods (level-set and mesh-morphing) are show-cased and compared
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