Nasal fibrosis: long-term follow up of four cases of eosinophilic angiocentric fibrosis

Eosinophilic angiocentric fibrosis is a rare, benign cause of submucosal thickening and fibrosis within the upper respiratory tract. It predominantly affects the nose although cases have been reported in the subglottis. We describe four cases of the disease centred around the nasal cavity, with widespread infiltration of the facial soft tissues and orbit in three of the four patients. Each underwent long term follow up. Multiple surgical resections were required with two of our patients and, to date, medical therapy has been of limited help. The disease process, with its clinical and characteristic histopathological findings, is described. We also discuss the management of the disease following a comprehensive review of, and comparison with, the few prior reported cases

Type 2 Innate Lymphoid Cells in Allergic Disease.

Type II innate lymphoid cells (ILC2) are a novel population of lineage-negative cells that produce high levels of Th2 cytokines IL-5 and IL-13. ILC2 are found in human respiratory and gastrointestinal tissue as well as in skin. Studies from mouse models of asthma and atopic dermatitis suggest a role for ILC2 in promoting allergic inflammation. The epithelial cytokines IL-25, IL-33, and TSLP, as well as the lipid mediator leukotriene D4, have been shown to potently activate ILC2 under specific conditions and supporting the notion that many separate pathways in allergic disease may result in stimulation of ILC2. Ongoing investigations are required to better characterize the relative contribution of ILC2 in allergic inflammation as well as mechanisms by which other cell types including conventional T cells regulate ILC2 survival, proliferation, and cytokine production. Importantly, therapeutic strategies to target ILC2 may reduce allergic inflammation in afflicted individuals. This review summarizes the development, surface marker profile, cytokine production, and upstream regulation of ILC2, and focuses on the role of ILC2 in common allergic diseases

Quantum Sampling Problems, BosonSampling and Quantum Supremacy

There is a large body of evidence for the potential of greater computational power using information carriers that are quantum mechanical over those governed by the laws of classical mechanics. But the question of the exact nature of the power contributed by quantum mechanics remains only partially answered. Furthermore, there exists doubt over the practicality of achieving a large enough quantum computation that definitively demonstrates quantum supremacy. Recently the study of computational problems that produce samples from probability distributions has added to both our understanding of the power of quantum algorithms and lowered the requirements for demonstration of fast quantum algorithms. The proposed quantum sampling problems do not require a quantum computer capable of universal operations and also permit physically realistic errors in their operation. This is an encouraging step towards an experimental demonstration of quantum algorithmic supremacy. In this paper, we will review sampling problems and the arguments that have been used to deduce when sampling problems are hard for classical computers to simulate. Two classes of quantum sampling problems that demonstrate the supremacy of quantum algorithms are BosonSampling and IQP Sampling. We will present the details of these classes and recent experimental progress towards demonstrating quantum supremacy in BosonSampling.Comment: Survey paper first submitted for publication in October 2016. 10 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl

Adaptive Phase Measurements in Linear Optical Quantum Computation

Photon counting induces an effective nonlinear optical phase shift on certain states derived by linear optics from single photons. Although this no nlinearity is nondeterministic, it is sufficient in principle to allow scalable linear optics quantum computation (LOQC). The most obvious way to encode a qubit optically is as a superposition of the vacuum and a single photon in one mode -- so-called "single-rail" logic. Until now this approach was thought to be prohibitively expensive (in resources) compared to "dual-rail" logic where a qubit is stored by a photon across two modes. Here we attack this problem with real-time feedback control, which can realize a quantum-limited phase measurement on a single mode, as has been recently demonstrated experimentally. We show that with this added measurement resource, the resource requirements for single-rail LOQC are not substantially different from those of dual-rail LOQC. In particular, with adaptive phase measurements an arbitrary qubit state $\alpha \ket{0} + \beta\ket{1}$ can be prepared deterministically

Exact Boson Sampling using Gaussian continuous variable measurements

BosonSampling is a quantum mechanical task involving Fock basis state preparation and detection and evolution using only linear interactions. A classical algorithm for producing samples from this quantum task cannot be efficient unless the polynomial hierarchy of complexity classes collapses, a situation believe to be highly implausible. We present method for constructing a device which uses Fock state preparations, linear interactions and Gaussian continuous-variable measurements for which one can show exact sampling would be hard for a classical algorithm in the same way as Boson Sampling. The detection events used from this arrangement does not allow a similar conclusion for the classical hardness of approximate sampling to be drawn. We discuss the details of this result outlining some specific properties that approximate sampling hardness requires