Automated quantification of mitral valve anatomy using anatomical intelligence in three-dimensional echocardiography

postprin

Molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the evolution of form and function in the amniote jaw.

The amniote jaw complex is a remarkable amalgamation of derivatives from distinct embryonic cell lineages. During development, the cells in these lineages experience concerted movements, migrations, and signaling interactions that take them from their initial origins to their final destinations and imbue their derivatives with aspects of form including their axial orientation, anatomical identity, size, and shape. Perturbations along the way can produce defects and disease, but also generate the variation necessary for jaw evolution and adaptation. We focus on molecular and cellular mechanisms that regulate form in the amniote jaw complex, and that enable structural and functional integration. Special emphasis is placed on the role of cranial neural crest mesenchyme (NCM) during the species-specific patterning of bone, cartilage, tendon, muscle, and other jaw tissues. We also address the effects of biomechanical forces during jaw development and discuss ways in which certain molecular and cellular responses add adaptive and evolutionary plasticity to jaw morphology. Overall, we highlight how variation in molecular and cellular programs can promote the phenomenal diversity and functional morphology achieved during amniote jaw evolution or lead to the range of jaw defects and disease that affect the human condition

LNCS

A controller is a device that interacts with a plant. At each time point,it reads the plant’s state and issues commands with the goal that the plant oper-ates optimally. Constructing optimal controllers is a fundamental and challengingproblem. Machine learning techniques have recently been successfully applied totrain controllers, yet they have limitations. Learned controllers are monolithic andhard to reason about. In particular, it is difficult to add features without retraining,to guarantee any level of performance, and to achieve acceptable performancewhen encountering untrained scenarios. These limitations can be addressed bydeploying quantitative run-timeshieldsthat serve as a proxy for the controller.At each time point, the shield reads the command issued by the controller andmay choose to alter it before passing it on to the plant. We show how optimalshields that interfere as little as possible while guaranteeing a desired level ofcontroller performance, can be generated systematically and automatically usingreactive synthesis. First, we abstract the plant by building a stochastic model.Second, we consider the learned controller to be a black box. Third, we mea-surecontroller performanceandshield interferenceby two quantitative run-timemeasures that are formally defined using weighted automata. Then, the problemof constructing a shield that guarantees maximal performance with minimal inter-ference is the problem of finding an optimal strategy in a stochastic2-player game“controller versus shield” played on the abstract state space of the plant with aquantitative objective obtained from combining the performance and interferencemeasures. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by automatically con-structing lightweight shields for learned traffic-light controllers in various roadnetworks. The shields we generate avoid liveness bugs, improve controller per-formance in untrained and changing traffic situations, and add features to learnedcontrollers, such as giving priority to emergency vehicles

Automatic term identification for bibliometric mapping

A term map is a map that visualizes the structure of a scientific field by showing the relations between important terms in the field. The terms shown in a term map are usually selected manually with the help of domain experts. Manual term selection has the disadvantages of being subjective and labor-intensive. To overcome these disadvantages, we propose a methodology for automatic term identification and we use this methodology to select the terms to be included in a term map. To evaluate the proposed methodology, we use it to construct a term map of the field of operations research. The quality of the map is assessed by a number of operations research experts. It turns out that in general the proposed methodology performs quite well

Imitators of exercise-induced bronchoconstriction

Exercise-induced bronchoconstriction (EIB) is described by transient narrowing of the airways after exercise. It occurs in approximately 10% of the general population, while athletes may show a higher prevalence, especially in cold weather and ice rink athletes. Diagnosis of EIB is often made on the basis of self-reported symptoms without objective lung function tests, however, the presence of EIB can not be accurately determined on the basis of symptoms and may be under-, over-, or misdiagnosed. The goal of this review is to describe other clinical entities that mimic asthma or EIB symptoms and can be confused with EIB

Routine pattern discovery and anomaly detection in individual travel behavior

Discovering patterns and detecting anomalies in individual travel behavior is a crucial problem in both research and practice. In this paper, we address this problem by building a probabilistic framework to model individual spatiotemporal travel behavior data (e.g., trip records and trajectory data). We develop a two-dimensional latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model to characterize the generative mechanism of spatiotemporal trip records of each traveler. This model introduces two separate factor matrices for the spatial dimension and the temporal dimension, respectively, and use a two-dimensional core structure at the individual level to effectively model the joint interactions and complex dependencies. This model can efficiently summarize travel behavior patterns on both spatial and temporal dimensions from very sparse trip sequences in an unsupervised way. In this way, complex travel behavior can be modeled as a mixture of representative and interpretable spatiotemporal patterns. By applying the trained model on future/unseen spatiotemporal records of a traveler, we can detect her behavior anomalies by scoring those observations using perplexity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling framework on a real-world license plate recognition (LPR) data set. The results confirm the advantage of statistical learning methods in modeling sparse individual travel behavior data. This type of pattern discovery and anomaly detection applications can provide useful insights for traffic monitoring, law enforcement, and individual travel behavior profiling

A coordinated DNA damage response promotes adult quiescent neural stem cell activation

Stem and differentiated cells frequently differ in their response to DNA damage, which can determine tissue sensitivity. By exploiting insight into the spatial arrangement of subdomains within the adult neural subventricular zone (SVZ) in vivo, we show distinct responses to ionising radiation (IR) between neural stem and progenitor cells. Further, we reveal different DNA damage responses between neonatal and adult neural stem cells (NSCs). Neural progenitors (transit amplifying cells and neuroblasts) but not NSCs (quiescent and activated) undergo apoptosis after 2 Gy IR. This response is cell type- rather than proliferationdependent and does not appear to be driven by distinctions in DNA damage induction or repair capacity. Moreover, exposure to 2 Gy IR promotes proliferation arrest and differentiation in the adult SVZ. These 3 responses are ataxia telangiectasia mutated (ATM)- dependent and promote quiescent NSC (qNSC) activation, which does not occur in the subdomains that lack progenitors. Neuroblasts arising post-IR derive from activated qNSCs rather than irradiated progenitors, minimising damage compounded by replication or mitosis. We propose that rather than conferring sensitive cell death, apoptosis is a form of rapid cell death that serves to remove damaged progenitors and promote qNSC activation. Significantly, analysis of the neonatal (P5) SVZ reveals that although progenitors remain sensitive to apoptosis, they fail to efficiently arrest proliferation. Consequently, their repopulation occurs rapidly from irradiated progenitors rather than via qNSC activation