3,544 research outputs found
Does the clinical profile of Gujarati patients with Takayasuâs aortoarteritis differ from other Indians?
Takayasuâs aortoarteritis is a well-known yet rare form of large vesselvasculitis. It is a chronic inflammatory diseas, which has remained an enigma since it was first described a century ago. The present study was done to document the demographic profile, clinical course, complications and survival of 30 consecutive patients with aortoarteritis in the Gujarati population of western India. The study used non-invasive (color doppler, CT and MR angiography) and invasive techniques (conventional angiography) to document the vessels involved. The study showed almost equal incidence of disease in males and females in the Gujarati population unlike in other studied populations. Incidence of type-III aortoarteritis was the most common and left renal involvement was found to be significantly more common than right renal involvement in the present study. There was no mortality during the study period.KEY WORDS: Vasculitis; Takayasuâs aortoarteritis; Clinical profile; Gujaratipopulatio
Parameter Efficient Local Implicit Image Function Network for Face Segmentation
Face parsing is defined as the per-pixel labeling of images containing human
faces. The labels are defined to identify key facial regions like eyes, lips,
nose, hair, etc. In this work, we make use of the structural consistency of the
human face to propose a lightweight face-parsing method using a Local Implicit
Function network, FP-LIIF. We propose a simple architecture having a
convolutional encoder and a pixel MLP decoder that uses 1/26th number of
parameters compared to the state-of-the-art models and yet matches or
outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple datasets, like CelebAMask-HQ
and LaPa. We do not use any pretraining, and compared to other works, our
network can also generate segmentation at different resolutions without any
changes in the input resolution. This work enables the use of facial
segmentation on low-compute or low-bandwidth devices because of its higher FPS
and smaller model size.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 202
Supersymmetric Chern-Simons Theories with Vector Matter
In this paper we discuss SU(N) Chern-Simons theories at level k with both
fermionic and bosonic vector matter. In particular we present an exact
calculation of the free energy of the N=2 supersymmetric model (with one chiral
field) for all values of the 't Hooft coupling in the large N limit. This is
done by using a generalization of the standard Hubbard-Stratanovich method
because the SUSY model contains higher order polynomial interactions.Comment: 46 pages, 24 figures, v2: comments and references added, v3: a
footnote in Section 3.5 adde
Biodistribution and pharmacokinetics of a telodendrimer micellar paclitaxel nanoformulation in a mouse xenograft model of ovarian cancer
Wenwu Xiao1, Juntao Luo2, Teesta Jain3, John Riggs3, Harry P Tseng1, Paul T Henderson3, Simon R Cherry4, Douglas Rowland4, Kit S Lam1,31Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine, UC Davis Cancer Center, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA; 2Department of Pharmacology, SUNY Upstate Cancer Research Institute, SUNY Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY; 3Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Hematology and Oncology, 4Department of Biomedical Engineering, UC Davis Cancer Center, University of California Davis, Davis, CABackground: A multifunctional telodendrimer-based micelle system was characterized for delivery of imaging and chemotherapy agents to mouse tumor xenografts. Previous optical imaging studies demonstrated qualitatively that these classes of nanoparticles, called nanomicelles, preferentially accumulate at tumor sites in mice. The research reported herein describes the detailed quantitative imaging and biodistribution profiling of nanomicelles loaded with a cargo of paclitaxel.Methods: The telodendrimer was covalently labeled with 125I and the nanomicelles were loaded with 14C-paclitaxel, which allowed measurement of pharmacokinetics and biodistribution in the mice using microSPECT/CT imaging and liquid scintillation counting, respectively.Results: The radio imaging data showed preferential accumulation of nanomicelles at the tumor site along with a slower clearance rate than paclitaxel formulated in Cremophor EL (Taxol®). Liquid scintillation counting confirmed that 14C-labeled paclitaxel sequestered in nanomicelles had increased uptake by tumor tissue and slower pharmacokinetics than Taxol.Conclusion: Overall, the results indicate that nanomicelle-formulated paclitaxel is a potentially superior formulation compared with Taxol in terms of water solubility, pharmacokinetics, and tumor accumulation, and may be clinically useful for both tumor imaging and improved chemotherapy applications.Keywords: telodendrimer, nanomicelle, paclitaxel, microSPECT/CT, imaging guided drug deliver
Effective Lagrangian approach to vector mesons, their structure and decays
An improved update of the structure and decays of , and
mesons based on a chiral SU(3) Lagrangian, including anomaly terms is
presented. We demonstrate that a consistent and quantitatively successful
description of both pion and kaon electromagnetic form factors can be achieved.
We also discuss the cross section, the Dalitz
decay and aspects of and mixing. Relations to previous versions of the Vector Meson Dominance
model will be examined.Comment: 35 pages, TeX, 14 ps figures, submitted to Z.Phys.
Composite Fermion Metals from Dyon Black Holes and S-Duality
We propose that string theory in the background of dyon black holes in
four-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime is holographic dual to conformally
invariant composite Dirac fermion metal. By utilizing S-duality map, we show
that thermodynamic and transport properties of the black hole match with those
of composite fermion metal, exhibiting Fermi liquid-like. Built upon
Dirac-Schwinger-Zwanziger quantization condition, we argue that turning on
magnetic charges to electric black hole along the orbit of Gamma(2) subgroup of
SL(2,Z) is equivalent to attaching even unit of statistical flux quanta to
constituent fermions. Being at metallic point, the statistical magnetic flux is
interlocked to the background magnetic field. We find supporting evidences for
proposed holographic duality from study of internal energy of black hole and
probe bulk fermion motion in black hole background. They show good agreement
with ground-state energy of composite fermion metal in Thomas-Fermi
approximation and cyclotron motion of a constituent or composite fermion
excitation near Fermi-point.Comment: 30 pages, v2. 1 figure added, minor typos corrected; v3. revised
version to be published in JHE
PRIVATE CLOUD INITIATIVES USING BIOINFORMATICS RESOURCES AND APPLICATIONS FACILITY (BRAF)
ABSTRACT The bioinformatics research community has a demand of enormous compute resources to run bioinformatics tools. Next generation sequencing technologies have further increased the overall demand for computational analysis. The traditional Cluster and Grid computing are having their own complexities to program and use while there is a silver-line in cloud for on-demand high-performance infrastructures with the advent of cloud computing era and its advantages. We have adopted the technology so that it can prove its mandate with more benefits to the community. We are able to bring out a private cloud using BRAF which is a high end cluster facility dedicated for bioinformatics. Open source equivalents to prominent commercially available solutions are used as the cloud middle-ware stack. In this paper we will summarize our implementation of a virtualized private cloud environment using Eucalyptus
The Schrdinger-Poisson equations as the large-N limit of the Newtonian N-body system: applications to the large scale dark matter dynamics
In this paper it is argued how the dynamics of the classical Newtonian N-body
system can be described in terms of the Schrdinger-Poisson equations
in the large limit. This result is based on the stochastic quantization
introduced by Nelson, and on the Calogero conjecture. According to the Calogero
conjecture, the emerging effective Planck constant is computed in terms of the
parameters of the N-body system as , where is the gravitational constant, and are the
number and the mass of the bodies, and is their average density. The
relevance of this result in the context of large scale structure formation is
discussed. In particular, this finding gives a further argument in support of
the validity of the Schrdinger method as numerical double of the
N-body simulations of dark matter dynamics at large cosmological scales.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Euro. Phys. J.
Machine-Part cell formation through visual decipherable clustering of Self Organizing Map
Machine-part cell formation is used in cellular manufacturing in order to
process a large variety, quality, lower work in process levels, reducing
manufacturing lead-time and customer response time while retaining flexibility
for new products. This paper presents a new and novel approach for obtaining
machine cells and part families. In the cellular manufacturing the fundamental
problem is the formation of part families and machine cells. The present paper
deals with the Self Organising Map (SOM) method an unsupervised learning
algorithm in Artificial Intelligence, and has been used as a visually
decipherable clustering tool of machine-part cell formation. The objective of
the paper is to cluster the binary machine-part matrix through visually
decipherable cluster of SOM color-coding and labelling via the SOM map nodes in
such a way that the part families are processed in that machine cells. The
Umatrix, component plane, principal component projection, scatter plot and
histogram of SOM have been reported in the present work for the successful
visualization of the machine-part cell formation. Computational result with the
proposed algorithm on a set of group technology problems available in the
literature is also presented. The proposed SOM approach produced solutions with
a grouping efficacy that is at least as good as any results earlier reported in
the literature and improved the grouping efficacy for 70% of the problems and
found immensely useful to both industry practitioners and researchers.Comment: 18 pages,3 table, 4 figure
Imaging in population science: cardiovascular magnetic resonance in 100,000 participants of UK Biobank - rationale, challenges and approaches
PMCID: PMC3668194SEP was directly funded by the National Institute for Health Research
Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit at Barts. SN acknowledges support
from the Oxford NIHR Biomedical Research Centre and from the Oxford
British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence. SP and PL are
funded by a BHF Senior Clinical Research fellowship. RC is supported by a
BHF Research Chair and acknowledges the support of the Oxford BHF Centre
for Research Excellence and the MRC and Wellcome Trust. PMM gratefully
acknowledges training fellowships supporting his laboratory from the
Wellcome Trust, GlaxoSmithKline and the Medical Research Council
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