Monocytes and macrophages in pregnancy and pre-eclampsia

Preeclampsia is an important complication in pregnancy, characterized byhypertension and proteinuria in the second half of pregnancy. Generalizedactivation of the inflammatory response is thought to play a role in thepathogenesis of preeclampsia. Monocytes may play a central role in thisinflammatory response. Monocytes are short lived cells, that mature in thecirculation and invade into tissues upon an inflammatory stimulus anddevelop into macrophages. Macrophages are abundantly present in theendometrium and play a role in implantation and placentation in normalpregnancy. In preeclampsia, these macrophages appear to be present in largernumbers and are also activated. In the present review we focused on the roleof monocytes and macrophages in the pathophysiology of preeclampsia

Tile based panoramic streaming using shifted IDR representations

Panoramic streaming enables users to interactively navigate through high-spatial resolution videos and create an immersive and personalized user experience. Since transmission of high-resolution videos in desirable quality is not feasible given the limited throughput of access and home network links, our work is based on tile-based streaming, where only a spatial subset of the video is transmitted. In this paper, we propose a highly responsive DASH client algorithm that allows users to rapidly change the set of downloaded tiles. The high responsiveness is achieved by using small buffers, which are usually very sensitive to variations of throughput and instantaneous media bitrate and are therefore prone to playback interruptions. The proposed rate adaptation algorithm for DASH, in combination with a peak bitrate reducing RAP configuration referred to as shifted IDRs, outperforms the state of the art rate adaptation algorithms. Experiments report a decreased number of playback interruptions and quality changes while maintaining the average video quality

Quantitative-evaluation of melanoma cell invasion in 3-dimensional confrontation cultures in vitro using automated image-analysis

Tumor invasion is a crucial feature of tumor growth in vivo. Confrontation cultures of multicellular melanoma spheroids and embryonic chick heart fragments provide a model for invasive growth in vitro. We have developed an image analysis method, which facilitates the objective measurement of tumor cell invasion in this model. Cryostat sections of confrontation cultures were immunohistochemically stained with an antiserum directed against the stromal component for automated recognition of the stroma tissue. The slides were automatically processed by a grey level based computerized image analysis system. On Spearman's rank correlation test, 25 out of 39 parameters correlated with the reference value of invasion, which was derived from the subjective evaluation of five independent observers. Two parameters combining the stroma margin and the total amount of stroma tissue completely reproduced the judgement of the morphologists in our test set. The quantitative evaluation of tumor invasion in vitro by automated image analysis may be helpful in pharmacologic and pathogenetic studies of tumor growth