Hemosuccus Pancreaticus as a Rare Complication of Bariatric Surgery.

Hemosuccus pancreaticus is a rare cause of gastrointestinal bleeding from the duct of Wirsung into the duodenum via the ampulla of Vater. Hemosuccus pancreaticus is difficult to diagnose because the bleeding is usually intermittent, and the clinical findings are often discordant. Patients present with pain, either left upper quadrant or epigastric, and bleeding, which may present as melena, bright red blood per rectum, or even shock, if the hemorrhage is severe. Hemosuccus pancreaticus is usually caused by rupture of a pseudoaneurysm of a peri-pancreatic artery, often the splenic artery, in the setting of pancreatitis; other causes are very rare. In this report, for the first time to our knowledge, we present a case of hemosuccus pancreaticus that occurred as a complication of bariatric surgery

Intensity-Dependent Enhancement of Saturable Absorption in PbS-Au4 Nanohybrid Composites: Evidence for Resonant Energy Transfer by Auger Recombination

Intensity-dependent enhancement of saturable absorption in a film of PbS-Au4 nanohybrid composites has been observed by femtosecond time-resolved transient absorption measurement at 780 nm. The nonlinear absorption coefficient of saturable absorption in PbS-Au4 nanohybrid composites is found to be dependent on excitation irradiance and it is determined to be -2.9 cm/GW at 78 GW/cm2, an enhancement of nearly fourfold in comparison with that of pure PbS quantum dots (QDs). The enhancement is attributed to excitation of surface plasmon by resonant energy transfer between PbS QDs and Au nanoparticles through Auger recombination.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Accepted in Appl. Phys. Lett. (2008

A Side-by-side Comparison of Transformers for English Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Though discourse parsing can help multiple NLP fields, there has been no wide language model search done on implicit discourse relation classification. This hinders researchers from fully utilizing public-available models in discourse analysis. This work is a straightforward, fine-tuned discourse performance comparison of seven pre-trained language models. We use PDTB-3, a popular discourse relation annotated dataset. Through our model search, we raise SOTA to 0.671 ACC and obtain novel observations. Some are contrary to what has been reported before (Shi and Demberg, 2019b), that sentence-level pre-training objectives (NSP, SBO, SOP) generally fail to produce the best performing model for implicit discourse relation classification. Counterintuitively, similar-sized PLMs with MLM and full attention led to better performance.Comment: TrustNLP @ ACL 202

Towards A Background Independent Quantum Gravity

We recapitulate the scheme of emergent gravity to highlight how a background independent quantum gravity can be defined by quantizing spacetime itself.Comment: 25 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of 7th International Conference "Quantum Theory and Symmetries" (QTS-7) in Prague, Czech Republic, August, 201

Cell-type specific potent Wnt signaling blockade by bispecific antibody.

Cell signaling pathways are often shared between normal and diseased cells. How to achieve cell type-specific, potent inhibition of signaling pathways is a major challenge with implications for therapeutic development. Using the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway as a model system, we report here a novel and generally applicable method to achieve cell type-selective signaling blockade. We constructed a bispecific antibody targeting the Wnt co-receptor LRP6 (the effector antigen) and a cell type-associated antigen (the guide antigen) that provides the targeting specificity. We found that the bispecific antibody inhibits Wnt-induced reporter activities with over one hundred-fold enhancement in potency, and in a cell type-selective manner. Potency enhancement is dependent on the expression level of the guide antigen on the target cell surface and the apparent affinity of the anti-guide antibody. Both internalizing and non-internalizing guide antigens can be used, with internalizing bispecific antibody being able to block signaling by all ligands binding to the target receptor due to its removal from the cell surface. It is thus feasible to develop bispecific-based therapeutic strategies that potently and selectively inhibit signaling pathways in a cell type-selective manner, creating opportunity for therapeutic targeting

Structural and Electronic Properties of Amorphous and Polycrystalline In2Se3 Films

Structural and electronic properties of amorphous and single-phase polycrystalline films of gamma- and kappa-In2Se3 have been measured. The stable gamma phase nucleates homogeneously in the film bulk and has a high resistivity, while the metastable kappa phase nucleates at the film surface and has a moderate resistivity. The microstructures of hot-deposited and post-annealed cold-deposited gamma films are quite different but the electronic properties are similar. The increase in the resistivity of amorphous In2Se3 films upon annealing is interpreted in terms of the replacement of In-In bonds with In-Se bonds during crystallization. Great care must be taken in the preparation of In2Se3 films for electrical measurements as the presence of excess chalcogen or surface oxidation may greatly affect the film properties.Comment: 23 pages and 12 figure

Molecular Diagnosis for Paediatric Genetic Disorders Using Whole Exome Sequencing of the Next Generation Sequencing Technology

Oral PresentationMolecular diagnosis for paediatric genetic diseases is important for targeted or tailored treatment, more informative genetic counselling and guiding the families for prenatal or pre-implantation diagnosis. Traditionally, linkage analysis using large multiplex families or multiple families with the same molecular cause is essential and the process could take years before a diagnosis can be reached. Candidate gene screening is usually the only method available for clinical laboratories for genetic diseases in Hong Kong. Next generation sequencing technology has virtually revolutionised the way genetic studies are conducted and provides opportunities for molecular diagnosis for genetic disorders that were never available before. With the possibility of sequencing the whole genome or almost all the coding exons of the genome, the method does not require the availability of large, multiple affected families and prior knowledge of candidate causal genes. It can be applied to a single patient or, as a usual practice, whole genome or whole exome sequencing for the patient plus parents. For whole exome sequencing (WES), it usually produces up to 100 million short sequencing reads of usually 100bp long. These short reads were firstly compared with sequences of a reference human genome and mapped to genomic regions from which they were generated. Each position (base pair) of a coding exon is usually covered with dozens to hundreds of sequencing reads. Analysing the sequences of these reads allows for identification of mutations that are different from the reference sequences. For WES for a single individual, up to 100,000 variants can be identified, with some of which are common variants in a population and some of which rare or private. The population frequencies of these variants are looked up in public databases such as those from the 1000 Genome Project or ESP6500, a project that sequenced 6500 individuals in the US. An internal database is also established with WES data from 200 samples from the local population. For rare, severe genetic disorders that are likely to be caused by mutations from a single gene, we can safely rule out the common (>1% in a population) variants and only focus on the rare or private variants. The nature of the mutations, such as with or without amino acid changes, changes in the open reading frame of the protein, the nature of the amino acid changes (similarity of the amino acid changed to), the conservation of this amino acid in different species, and the function of the gene in relationship to the disease phenotype, are considered to help pinpoint the causal mutations. We will present examples on using WES for molecular diagnosis for paediatric genetic disorders in our Department. These include detection of de novo mutations (mutations that are not detected in parents), somatic mutations and compound heterozygous mutations, and mutations missed by traditional laboratory testing, which demonstrated the power of this new technology in providing accurate molecular diagnosis.published_or_final_versio