573 research outputs found
Role of K(ATP)(+) channels in regulation of systemic, pulmonary, and coronary vasomotor tone in exercising swine
The role of ATP-sensitive K(+) (K(ATP)(+)) channels in vasomotor tone
regulation during metabolic stimulation is incompletely understood.
Consequently, we studied the contribution of K(ATP)(+) channels to
vasomotor tone regulation in the systemic, pulmonary, and coronary
vascular bed in nine treadmill-exercising swine. Exercise up to 85% of
maximum heart rat
Identification of Amino Acid Sequences with Good Folding Properties in an Off-Lattice Model
Folding properties of a two-dimensional toy protein model containing only two
amino-acid types, hydrophobic and hydrophilic, respectively, are analyzed. An
efficient Monte Carlo procedure is employed to ensure that the ground states
are found. The thermodynamic properties are found to be strongly sequence
dependent in contrast to the kinetic ones. Hence, criteria for good folders are
defined entirely in terms of thermodynamic fluctuations. With these criteria
sequence patterns that fold well are isolated. For 300 chains with 20 randomly
chosen binary residues approximately 10% meet these criteria. Also, an analysis
is performed by means of statistical and artificial neural network methods from
which it is concluded that the folding properties can be predicted to a certain
degree given the binary numbers characterizing the sequences.Comment: 15 pages, 8 Postscript figures. Minor change
Critical properties of loop percolation models with optimization constraints
We study loop percolation models in two and in three space dimensions, in
which configurations of occupied bonds are forced to form closed loop. We show
that the uncorrelated occupation of elementary plaquettes of the square and the
simple cubic lattice by elementary loops leads to a percolation transition that
is in the same universality class as the conventional bond percolation. In
contrast to this an optimization constraint for the loop configurations, which
then have to minimize a particular generic energy function, leads to a
percolation transition that constitutes a new universality class, for which we
report the critical exponents. Implication for the physics of solid-on-solid
and vortex glass models are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure
Learning Disentangled Representations with Semi-Supervised Deep Generative Models
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) learn representations of data by jointly
training a probabilistic encoder and decoder network. Typically these models
encode all features of the data into a single variable. Here we are interested
in learning disentangled representations that encode distinct aspects of the
data into separate variables. We propose to learn such representations using
model architectures that generalise from standard VAEs, employing a general
graphical model structure in the encoder and decoder. This allows us to train
partially-specified models that make relatively strong assumptions about a
subset of interpretable variables and rely on the flexibility of neural
networks to learn representations for the remaining variables. We further
define a general objective for semi-supervised learning in this model class,
which can be approximated using an importance sampling procedure. We evaluate
our framework's ability to learn disentangled representations, both by
qualitative exploration of its generative capacity, and quantitative evaluation
of its discriminative ability on a variety of models and datasets.Comment: Accepted for publication at NIPS 201
Single electron magneto-conductivity of a nondegenerate 2D electron system in a quantizing magnetic field
We study transport properties of a non-degenerate two-dimensional system of
non-interacting electrons in the presence of a quantizing magnetic field and a
short-range disorder potential. We show that the low-frequency
magnetoconductivity displays a strongly asymmetric peak at a nonzero frequency.
The shape of the peak is restored from the calculated 14 spectral moments, the
asymptotic form of its high-frequency tail, and the scaling behavior of the
conductivity for omega -> 0. We also calculate 10 spectral moments of the
cyclotron resonance absorption peak and restore the corresponding
(non-singular) frequency dependence using the continuous fraction expansion.
Both expansions converge rapidly with increasing number of included moments,
and give numerically accurate results throughout the region of interest. We
discuss the possibility of experimental observation of the predicted effects
for electrons on helium.Comment: RevTeX 3.0, 14 pages, 8 eps figures included with eps
Influence of tumour size on the efficacy of targeted alpha therapy with 213Bi-[DOTA0,Tyr3]-octreotate
BACKGROUND: Targeted alpha therapy has been postulated to have great potential for the treatment of small clusters of tumour cells as well as small metastases. (213)Bismuth, an α-emitter with a half-life of 46 min, has shown to be effective in preclinical as well as in clinical applications. In this study, we evaluated whether (213)Bi-[DOTA(0), Tyr(3)]-octreotate ((213)Bi-DOTATATE), a (213)Bi-labelled somatostatin analogue with high affinity for somatostatin receptor subtype 2 (SSTR(2)), is suitable for the treatment of larger neuroendocrine tumours overexpressing SSTR(2) in comparison to its effectiveness for smaller tumours. We performed a preclinical targeted radionuclide therapy study with (213)Bi-DOTATATE in animals bearing tumours of different sizes (50 and 200 mm(3)) using two tumour models: H69 (human small cell lung carcinoma) and CA20948 (rat pancreatic tumour). METHODS: Pharmacokinetics was determined for calculation of dosimetry in organs and tumours. H69- or CA20948-xenografted mice with tumour volumes of approximately 120 mm(3) were euthanized at 10, 30, 60 and 120 min post injection of a single dose of (213)Bi-DOTATATE (1.5–4.8 MBq). To investigate the therapeutic efficacy of (213)Bi-DOTATATE, xenografted H69 and CA20948 tumour-bearing mice with tumour sizes of 50 and 200 mm(3) were administered daily with a therapeutic dose of (213)Bi-DOTATATE (0.3 nmol, 2–4 MBq) for three consecutive days. The animals were followed for 90 days after treatment. At day 90, mice were injected with 25 MBq (99m)Tc-DMSA and imaged by SPECT/CT to investigate possible renal dysfunction due to (213)Bi-DOTATATE treatment. RESULTS: Higher tumour uptakes were found in CA20948 tumour-bearing animals compared to those in H69 tumour-bearing mice with the highest tumour uptake of 19.6 ± 6.6 %IA/g in CA20948 tumour-bearing animals, while for H69 tumour-bearing mice, the highest tumour uptake was found to be 9.8 ± 2.4 %IA/g. Nevertheless, as the anti-tumour effect was more pronounced in H69 tumour-bearing mice, the survival rate was higher. Furthermore, in the small tumour groups, no regrowth of tumour was found in two H69 tumour-bearing mice and in one of the CA20948 tumour-bearing mice. No renal dysfunction was observed in (213)Bi-DOTATATE-treated mice after the doses were applied. CONCLUSIONS: (213)Bi-DOTATATE demonstrated a great therapeutic effect in both small and larger tumour lesions. Higher probability for stable disease was found in animals with small tumours. (213)Bi-DOTATATE was effective in different neuroendocrine (H69 and CA20948) tumour models with overexpression of SSTR(2) in mice. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13550-016-0162-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users
Neutron structure function and inclusive DIS from H-3 and He-3 at large Bjorken-x
A detailed study of inclusive deep inelastic scattering (DIS) from mirror A =
3 nuclei at large values of the Bjorken variable x is presented. The main
purpose is to estimate the theoretical uncertainties on the extraction of the
neutron DIS structure function from such nuclear measurements. On one hand,
within models in which no modification of the bound nucleon structure functions
is taken into account, we have investigated the possible uncertainties arising
from: i) charge symmetry breaking terms in the nucleon-nucleon interaction, ii)
finite Q**2 effects neglected in the Bjorken limit, iii) the role of different
prescriptions for the nucleon Spectral Function normalization providing baryon
number conservation, and iv) the differences between the virtual nucleon and
light cone formalisms. Although these effects have been not yet considered in
existing analyses, our conclusion is that all these effects cancel at the level
of ~ 1% for x < 0.75 in overall agreement with previous findings. On the other
hand we have considered several models in which the modification of the bound
nucleon structure functions is accounted for to describe the EMC effect in DIS
scattering from nuclei. It turns out that within these models the cancellation
of nuclear effects is expected to occur only at a level of ~ 3%, leading to an
accuracy of ~ 12 % in the extraction of the neutron to proton structure
function ratio at x ~ 0.7 -0.8$. Another consequence of considering a broad
range of models of the EMC effect is that the previously suggested iteration
procedure does not improve the accuracy of the extraction of the neutron to
proton structure function ratio.Comment: revised version to appear in Phys. Rev. C; main modifications in
Section 4; no change in the conclusion
Shrinking a large dataset to identify variables associated with increased risk of Plasmodium falciparum infection in Western Kenya
Large datasets are often not amenable to analysis using traditional single-step approaches. Here, our general objective was to apply imputation techniques, principal component analysis (PCA), elastic net and generalized linear models to a large dataset in a systematic approach to extract the most meaningful predictors for a health outcome. We extracted predictors for Plasmodium falciparum infection, from a large covariate dataset while facing limited numbers of observations, using data from the People, Animals, and their Zoonoses (PAZ) project to demonstrate these techniques: data collected from 415 homesteads in western Kenya, contained over 1500 variables that describe the health, environment, and social factors of the humans, livestock, and the homesteads in which they reside. The wide, sparse dataset was simplified to 42 predictors of P. falciparum malaria infection and wealth rankings were produced for all homesteads. The 42 predictors make biological sense and are supported by previous studies. This systematic data-mining approach we used would make many large datasets more manageable and informative for decision-making processes and health policy prioritization
Global Search for New Physics with 2.0/fb at CDF
Data collected in Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron are searched for
indications of new electroweak-scale physics. Rather than focusing on
particular new physics scenarios, CDF data are analyzed for discrepancies with
the standard model prediction. A model-independent approach (Vista) considers
gross features of the data, and is sensitive to new large cross-section
physics. Further sensitivity to new physics is provided by two additional
algorithms: a Bump Hunter searches invariant mass distributions for "bumps"
that could indicate resonant production of new particles; and the Sleuth
procedure scans for data excesses at large summed transverse momentum. This
combined global search for new physics in 2.0/fb of ppbar collisions at
sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV reveals no indication of physics beyond the standard model.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Final version which appeared in Physical Review D
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