Increased levels of anti-glycan antibodies in patients with cystic fibrosis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The prevalence of Crohn's disease (CD) is increased in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). Anti-Saccharomyces cerevisiae antibodies (ASCA) have been suggested as a screening tool to detect CD in CF. Recently, several new anti-glycan antibodies have been reported in CD.</p> <p>Materials and methods</p> <p>The sera of 119 CF patients of various age groups were prospectively screened for ASCA type IgG (gASCA), anti-laminaribioside carbohydrate IgG antibodies (ALCA), anti-chitobioside carbohydrate IgA antibodies (ACCA), and anti-mannobioside carbohydrate IgG antibodies (AMCA). The frequency of these anti-glycan antibodies was then compared in patients with CD, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis and healthy volunteers.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A significant number of CF patients were positive for gASCA (51.3% [41.6-60.6]) and up to three other anti-glycan antibodies concurrently. Serum levels of anti-glycan antibodies in CF and CD were not related to parameters of inflammation. Despite the well-documented difference in clinical course between male and female CF patients no gender difference of anti-glycan antibodies was found. In contrast, there was a significant positive correlation between anti-glycan markers and age in CF patients.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our findings demonstrate for the first time the increased frequency of a panel of anti-glycan antibodies in CF and provide a link between the presence of these serological biomarkers and patient's age. Anti-glycan antibody profiling may therefore become a valuable tool in the care of patients with CF.</p

Parsing User Queries using Context Free Grammars

In legal information retrieval, query cooking can significantly improve recall and precision. Context free grammars can be used to effectively parse user queries, even if the number of items torecognize is high and recognition patterns are complicated

Distributed controller design for a class of sparse singular systems with privacy constraints

In the current research on distributed control of interconnected large-scale dynamical systems an often neglected issue is the desire to ensure privacy of subsystems. This gives motivation for the presented distributed controller design method which requires communication and the exchange of model data only with direct neighbors. Thus, no global system knowledge is required. An important property of many large-scale systems is the presence of algebraic conservation constraints, for example in terms of energy or mass flow. Therefore, the presented controller design takes these constraints explicitly into account while preserving the sparsity structure of the distributed system necessary for a distributed design. The computation is based on the simulation of the system states and of adjoint states. The control objective is represented by the finite horizon linear quadratic cost functional

When Offline Stores Reduce Online Returns

Among the dark sides of contemporary multi-channel retailing are the vast amounts of product returns, especially in the online channel. High product returns not only put pressure on the retailers' profitability, but also come at high societal and environmental costs. A central question then is whether multi-channel retailers can use their offline stores to help reduce product returns in the online channel without harming online sales. In an empirical study, we address this issue using data from a large Dutch shoe retailer. We develop a novel spatial model to estimate the influence of proximate retail stores on customers' online shopping behavior, while controlling for spatial and customer heterogeneity. Results demonstrate that an increased offline channel presence indeed reduces online returns, depending on the product's risk profile, without significantly lowering online sales. Offline stores can thus be an effective and appealing way for retailers to mitigate the negative impact of online shopping related to product returns

Human-Robot Team Interaction Through Wearable Haptics for Cooperative Manipulation

The interaction of robot teams and single human in teleoperation scenarios is beneficial in cooperative tasks, for example the manipulation of heavy and large objects in remote or dangerous environments. The main control challenge of the interaction is its asymmetry, arising because robot teams have a relatively high number of controllable degrees of freedom compared to the human operator. Therefore, we propose a control scheme that establishes the interaction on spaces of reduced dimensionality taking into account the low number of human command and feedback signals imposed by haptic devices. We evaluate the suitability of wearable haptic fingertip devices for multi-contact teleoperation in a user study. The results show that the proposed control approach is appropriate for human-robot team interaction and that the wearable haptic fingertip devices provide suitable assistance in cooperative manipulation tasks