Hamatum osteoblastoma

SummaryWe report the case of an osteoblastoma of the hamate bone that was successfully treated by curettage. This tumor is very rare in a carpal bone and only nine cases have been reported in the literature. Pathological examination is mandatory before treatment due to the lack of distinctive clinical and radiological features. Osteoblastomas are benign, but potentially aggressive bone tumors. Treatment of the lesion may either be a conservative “intralesional resection” or radical “wide en bloc resection”. The latter option, which has non-negligible functional consequences in the wrist, should be reserved for recurrence after curettage but may also be considered a primary immediate alternative for aggressive forms

Splitting Arabic Texts into Elementary Discourse Units

International audienceIn this article, we propose the first work that investigates the feasibility of Arabic discourse segmentation into elementary discourse units within the segmented discourse representation theory framework. We first describe our annotation scheme that defines a set of principles to guide the segmentation process. Two corpora have been annotated according to this scheme: elementary school textbooks and newspaper documents extracted from the syntactically annotated Arabic Treebank. Then, we propose a multiclass supervised learning approach that predicts nested units. Our approach uses a combination of punctuation, morphological, lexical, and shallow syntactic features. We investigate how each feature contributes to the learning process. We show that an extensive morphological analysis is crucial to achieve good results in both corpora. In addition, we show that adding chunks does not boost the performance of our system

Immune Activation Reduces Sperm Quality in the Great Tit

Mounting an immune response against pathogens incurs costs to organisms by its effects on important life-history traits, such as reproductive investment and survival. As shown recently, immune activation produces large amounts of reactive species and is suggested to induce oxidative stress. Sperm are highly susceptible to oxidative stress, which can negatively impact sperm function and ultimately male fertilizing efficiency. Here we address the question as to whether mounting an immune response affects sperm quality through the damaging effects of oxidative stress. It has been demonstrated recently in birds that carotenoid-based ornaments can be reliable signals of a male's ability to protect sperm from oxidative damage. In a full-factorial design, we immune-challenged great tit males while simultaneously increasing their vitamin E availability, and assessed the effect on sperm quality and oxidative damage. We conducted this experiment in a natural population and tested the males' response to the experimental treatment in relation to their carotenoid-based breast coloration, a condition-dependent trait. Immune activation induced a steeper decline in sperm swimming velocity, thus highlighting the potential costs of an induced immune response on sperm competitive ability and fertilizing efficiency. We found sperm oxidative damage to be negatively correlated with sperm swimming velocity. However, blood resistance to a free-radical attack (a measure of somatic antioxidant capacity) as well as plasma and sperm levels of oxidative damage (lipid peroxidation) remained unaffected, thus suggesting that the observed effect did not arise through oxidative stress. Towards the end of their breeding cycle, swimming velocity of sperm of more intensely colored males was higher, which has important implications for the evolution of mate choice and multiple mating in females because females may accrue both direct and indirect benefits by mating with males having better quality sperm

Quality-of-Service Data Warehouse for the selection of cloud services : a recent trend

Cloud Computing presents an efficient, on-demand and scalable way to integrate computational resources. However, existing Cloud paradigm is increasingly transforming the information technology landscape, and organizations and businesses are exhibiting strong interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. This enables application service providers to lease data centre capabilities for deploying applications depending on quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, it still remains a challenging task to provide QoS assured services to serve customers with best quality, while also guaranteeing the maximization of the business objectives to service provider and infrastructure provider within certain constraints. To address these issues, this chapter proposes building a data warehouse of QoS to achieve better service matching and enhance dynamic service composition. The proposed QoS data warehouse (QoSDW) model supports the following: ensures a deep analysis of the service’s interior structure and properties through online database analysis; facilitates reasoning about complex service weakness points; supports visual representation of analysis results; and introduces a new QoS factor for study

Osteoinduction and antiosteoporotic performance of hybrid biomaterial chitosan-bioactive glass graft: effects on bone remodeling

International audienceOsteoinductive and antiosteroporotic phenomena could be created by using synthetic biomaterials for applications in bone surgery. In the present study, CH-based bioactive glass (BG-CH) with 17 wt% chitosan was elaborated by a freeze-drying process. BG-CH was implanted in the muscle and in the femoral condyles of ovariectomized rats. Grafted tissues were carefully removed for physico-chem. and histol. anal. Several physic-chem. techniques (XRD, FT-IR, MEB, ICP-OES and NMR) were employed to highlight the effects of chitosan on the glass matrix before and after implantation. The results of the study show that despite the non-addnl. osteogenic cells or agents, BG-CH is endowed with an osteoinductive property. After 8 wk, 13C NMR spectra showed the characteristic signals of γ-carbons of the hydroxyproline (71 ppm) abundant in collagen. γ-carboxyglutamate (55 ppm), which occurs in several other bone proteins like osteocalcin, indicating the BG-CH degrdn. and the dominance of the bone tissue formation. Moreover, this study showed a rise in Ca and P ion concns. in the implanted microenvironment, leading to the formation/deposition of Ca-P phases. Trace elements such as Zn and Fe were detected in the newly-formed bone and involved in the bone healing. The study highlights the suitability and the extensive applications of BG-CH composites and the clin. useful therapy in regenerative medicine

Genotoxicity effect, antioxidant and biomechanical correlation: Experimental study of agarose-chitosan bone graft substitute in New Zealand white rabbit model

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Is there hypersensibility of beta-adrenergic receptors in patients with vasovagal syncope?

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

A Fault Data Capture Method for Water Quality Monitoring Equipment Based on Structural Pattern Recognition

International audienceTo capture equipment fault in real time and automate fault diagnosis, a pattern recognition method, based on data eigenvector and TCP transport protocol, was proposed to capture Water Quality Monitoring equipment’s fault information. Fault data eigenvector was designed after analyzing the equipment fault feature and capture strategy, structural pattern recognition strategy was confirmed and specific data frame was designed in response to the fault data eigenvector, by integrating the data frame design into the equipment’s communication protocol, data related to different fault compiled into fault data frames by transmitters or communication module of equipment’s different components, the remote sever captures equipment fault on transport via fault data frames according to the structural pattern recognition strategy. With 7 months of practical application in Taihu aquaculture project and research center of agricultural information technology, combining with historical fault data and contrast with artificial recognition result, the simulate experiment shows this method has higher response rate and process rate with a nice accurate