Discovering High-Utility Itemsets at Multiple Abstraction Levels

High-Utility Itemset Mining (HUIM) is a relevant data mining task. The goal is to discover recurrent combinations of items characterized by high prot from transactional datasets. HUIM has a wide range of applications among which market basket analysis and service proling. Based on the observation that items can be clustered into domain-specic categories, a parallel research issue is generalized itemset mining. It entails generating correlations among data items at multiple abstraction levels. The extraction of multiple-level patterns affords new insights into the analyzed data from dierent viewpoints. This paper aims at discovering a novel pattern that combines the expressiveness of generalized and High-Utility itemsets. According to a user-defined taxonomy items are rst aggregated into semantically related categories. Then, a new type of pattern,namely the Generalized High-utility Itemset (GHUI), is extracted. It represents a combinations of items at different granularity levels characterized by high prot (utility). While protable combinations of item categories provide interesting high-level information, GHUIs at lower abstraction levels represent more specic correlationsamong protable items. A single-phase algorithm is proposed to efficiently discover utility itemsets at multiple abstraction levels. The experiments, which were performed on both real and synthetic data, demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach

Mitochondrial Uptake of Thiamin Pyrophosphate: Physiological and Cell Biological Aspects (vol 8, e73503, 2013)

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0073503.]

Reference intervals for urinary renal injury biomarkers KIM-1 and NGAL in healthy children

Aim: The aim of this study was to establish reference intervals in healthy children for two novel urinary biomarkers of acute kidney injury, kidney injury molecule-1 (KIM-1) and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL). Materials & Methods: Urinary biomarkers were determined in samples from children in the UK (n = 120) and the USA (n = 171) using both Meso Scale Discovery (MSD) and Luminex-based analytical approaches. Results: 95% reference intervals for each biomarker in each cohort are presented and stratified by sex or ethnicity where necessary, and age-related variability is explored using quantile regression. We identified consistently higher NGAL concentrations in females than males (p < 0.0001), and lower KIM-1 concentrations in African–Americans than Caucasians (p = 0.02). KIM-1 demonstrated diurnal variation, with higher concentrations in the morning (p < 0.001). Conclusion: This is the first report of reference intervals for KIM-1 and NGAL using two analytical methods in a healthy pediatric population in both UK and US-based populations

Two-dimensional amine and hydroxy functionalized fused aromatic covalent organic framework

Ordered two-dimensional covalent organic frameworks (COFs) have generally been synthesized using reversible reactions. It has been difficult to synthesize a similar degree of ordered COFs using irreversible reactions. Developing COFs with a fused aromatic ring system via an irreversible reaction is highly desirable but has remained a significant challenge. Here we demonstrate a COF that can be synthesized from organic building blocks via irreversible condensation (aromatization). The as-synthesized robust fused aromatic COF (F-COF) exhibits high crystallinity. Its lattice structure is characterized by scanning tunneling microscopy and X-ray diffraction pattern. Because of its fused aromatic ring system, the F-COF structure possesses high physiochemical stability, due to the absence of hydrolysable weak covalent bonds

Cellular mechanosensing of the biophysical microenvironment: A review of mathematical models of biophysical regulation of cell responses.

Cells in vivo reside within complex microenvironments composed of both biochemical and biophysical cues. The dynamic feedback between cells and their microenvironments hinges upon biophysical cues that regulate critical cellular behaviors. Understanding this regulation from sensing to reaction to feedback is therefore critical, and a large effort is afoot to identify and mathematically model the fundamental mechanobiological mechanisms underlying this regulation. This review provides a critical perspective on recent progress in mathematical models for the responses of cells to the biophysical cues in their microenvironments, including dynamic strain, osmotic shock, fluid shear stress, mechanical force, matrix rigidity, porosity, and matrix shape. The review highlights key successes and failings of existing models, and discusses future opportunities and challenges in the field.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11372243, 11522219, 11532009, 11402192), the Chinese Ministry of Education through a Changjiang Scholar award to GMG, the National Institutes of Health through grants U01EB016422 and R01HL109505, and the NSF Science and Technology Center for Engineering Mechanobiology, grant CMMI 1548571

Characterisation of feline renal cortical fibroblast cultures and their transcriptional response to transforming growth factor beta 1

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is common in geriatric cats, and the most prevalent pathology is chronic tubulointerstitial inflammation and fibrosis. The cell type predominantly responsible for the production of extra-cellular matrix in renal fibrosis is the myofibroblast, and fibroblast to myofibroblast differentiation is probably a crucial event. The cytokine TGF-β1 is reportedly the most important regulator of myofibroblastic differentiation in other species. The aim of this study was to isolate and characterise renal fibroblasts from cadaverous kidney tissue of cats with and without CKD, and to investigate the transcriptional response to TGF-β1

SELECTIVE MEASUREMENT OF α SMOOTH MUSCLE ACTIN: WHY β-ACTIN CAN NOT BE USED AS A HOUSEKEEPING GENE WHEN TISSUE FIBROSIS OCCURS

Abstract Background Prevalence of fibroproliferative diseases, including chronic kidney disease is rapidly increasing and has become a major public health problem worldwide. Fibroproliferative diseases are characterized by increased expression of α smooth muscle actin (α-SMA) that belongs to the family of the six conserved actin isoforms showing high degree homology. The aim of the present study was to develop real-time PCRs that clearly discriminate α-SMA and ß-actin from other actin isoforms. Results Real-time PCRs using self-designed mouse, human and rat specific α-SMA or ß-actin primer pairs resulted in the specific amplification of the artificial DNA templates corresponding to mouse, human or rat α-SMA or ß-actin, however ß-actin showed cross-reaction with the housekeeping γ-cyto-actin. We have shown that the use of improperly designed literary primer pairs significantly affects the results of PCRs measuring mRNA expression of α-SMA or ß-actin in the kidney of mice underwent UUO. Conclusion We developed a set of carefully designed primer pairs and PCR conditions to selectively determine the expression of mouse, human or rat α-SMA and ß-actin isoforms. We demonstrated the importance of primer specificity in experiments where the results are normalized to the expression of ß-actin especially when fibrosis and thus increased expression of α-SMA is occur

Automated Detection of Malarial Retinopathy in Digital Fundus Images for Improved Diagnosis in Malawian Children with Clinically Defined Cerebral Malaria

Cerebral malaria (CM), a complication of malaria infection, is the cause of the majority of malaria-associated deaths in African children. The standard clinical case definition for CM misclassifies ~25% of patients, but when malarial retinopathy (MR) is added to the clinical case definition, the specificity improves from 61% to 95%. Ocular fundoscopy requires expensive equipment and technical expertise not often available in malaria endemic settings, so we developed an automated software system to analyze retinal color images for MR lesions: retinal whitening, vessel discoloration, and white-centered hemorrhages. The individual lesion detection algorithms were combined using a partial least square classifier to determine the presence or absence of MR. We used a retrospective retinal image dataset of 86 pediatric patients with clinically defined CM (70 with MR and 16 without) to evaluate the algorithm performance. Our goal was to reduce the false positive rate of CM diagnosis, and so the algorithms were tuned at high specificity. This yielded sensitivity/specificity of 95%/100% for the detection of MR overall, and 65%/94% for retinal whitening, 62%/100% for vessel discoloration, and 73%/96% for hemorrhages. This automated system for detecting MR using retinal color images has the potential to improve the accuracy of CM diagnosis

Planetary population synthesis

In stellar astrophysics, the technique of population synthesis has been successfully used for several decades. For planets, it is in contrast still a young method which only became important in recent years because of the rapid increase of the number of known extrasolar planets, and the associated growth of statistical observational constraints. With planetary population synthesis, the theory of planet formation and evolution can be put to the test against these constraints. In this review of planetary population synthesis, we first briefly list key observational constraints. Then, the work flow in the method and its two main components are presented, namely global end-to-end models that predict planetary system properties directly from protoplanetary disk properties and probability distributions for these initial conditions. An overview of various population synthesis models in the literature is given. The sub-models for the physical processes considered in global models are described: the evolution of the protoplanetary disk, the planets' accretion of solids and gas, orbital migration, and N-body interactions among concurrently growing protoplanets. Next, typical population synthesis results are illustrated in the form of new syntheses obtained with the latest generation of the Bern model. Planetary formation tracks, the distribution of planets in the mass-distance and radius-distance plane, the planetary mass function, and the distributions of planetary radii, semimajor axes, and luminosities are shown, linked to underlying physical processes, and compared with their observational counterparts. We finish by highlighting the most important predictions made by population synthesis models and discuss the lessons learned from these predictions - both those later observationally confirmed and those rejected.Comment: 47 pages, 12 figures. Invited review accepted for publication in the 'Handbook of Exoplanets', planet formation section, section editor: Ralph Pudritz, Springer reference works, Juan Antonio Belmonte and Hans Deeg, Ed