A Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

dentification of sequence variants robustly associated with predisposition to diabetic kidney disease (DKD) has the potential to provide insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms responsible. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DKD in type 2 diabetes (T2D) using eight complementary dichotomous and quantitative DKD phenotypes: the principal dichotomous analysis involved 5,717 T2D subjects, 3,345 with DKD. Promising association signals were evaluated in up to 26,827 subjects with T2D (12,710 with DKD). A combined T1D+T2D GWAS was performed using complementary data available for subjects with T1D, which, with replication samples, involved up to 40,340 subjects with diabetes (18,582 with DKD). Analysis of specific DKD phenotypes identified a novel signal near GABRR1 (rs9942471, P = 4.5 x 10(-8)) associated with microalbuminuria in European T2D case subjects. However, no replication of this signal was observed in Asian subjects with T2D or in the equivalent T1D analysis. There was only limited support, in this substantially enlarged analysis, for association at previously reported DKD signals, except for those at UMOD and PRKAG2, both associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate. We conclude that, despite challenges in addressing phenotypic heterogeneity, access to increased sample sizes will continue to provide more robust inference regarding risk variant discovery for DKD.Peer reviewe

Surface roughness detection of arteries via texture analysis of ultrasound images for early diagnosis of atherosclerosis

There is a strong research interest in identifying the surface roughness of the carotid arterial inner wall via texture analysis for early diagnosis of atherosclerosis. The purpose of this study is to assess the efficacy of texture analysis methods for identifying arterial roughness in the early stage of atherosclerosis. Ultrasound images of common carotid arteries of 15 normal mice fed a normal diet and 28 apoE−/− mice fed a high-fat diet were recorded by a high-frequency ultrasound system (Vevo 2100, frequency: 40 MHz). Six different texture feature sets were extracted based on the following methods: first-order statistics, fractal dimension texture analysis, spatial gray level dependence matrix, gray level difference statistics, the neighborhood gray tone difference matrix, and the statistical feature matrix. Statistical analysis indicates that 11 of 19 texture features can be used to distinguish between normal and abnormal groups (p<0.05). When the 11 optimal features were used as inputs to a support vector machine classifier, we achieved over 89% accuracy, 87% sensitivity and 93% specificity. The accuracy, sensitivity and specificity for the k-nearest neighbor classifier were 73%, 75% and 70%, respectively. The results show that it is feasible to identify arterial surface roughness based on texture features extracted from ultrasound images of the carotid arterial wall. This method is shown to be useful for early detection and diagnosis of atherosclerosis.Lili Niu, Ming Qian, Wei Yang, Long Meng, Yang Xiao, Kelvin K. L. Wong, Derek Abbott, Xin Liu, Hairong Zhen

Kyrkobyggnader 1760-1860. D. 3, Övre Norrland, Finland 1760-1809

Serien Sveriges kyrkor är utgiven av Riksantikvarieämbetet och Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademie

Kyrkobyggnader 1760-1860. D. 4, Härjedalen, Jämtland, Medelpad och Ångermanland

Serien Sveriges kyrkor är utgiven av Riksantikvarieämbetet och Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademie

An automatic method for measurements of arterial intima-media thickness using ultrasonic B-mode data

We have previously developed algorithms that use B-mode cineloops for simultaneous measurements of arterial diameter change and longitudinal movement of the arterial wall. In this study the lumen diameter algorithm was extended to also measure arterial intima-media thickness of the far wall. To optimize the algorithm the influence of the lateral width of the region-of-interest (1 pixel, 0.1 mm, 0.5 mm, 1 mm, 2.5 mm and 5 mm) was evaluated. The algorithm estimated intima-media thickness at diastole automatically by measuring the distance between the two positions where the laterally averaged B-mode intensity envelope crosses a threshold value relative to the maximum amplitudes of the intimal and adventitial echoes, respectively. The sub-pixel resolution is achieved by solving the equation of a straight line between the two samples on either side of the threshold value. The measurements were performed on 20 healthy normotensive volunteers (age 25–57 years) on the common carotid artery 2–3 cm proximal to the bifurcation. For the 2.5-mm width, which was considered the best, the intima-media thickness was mean 646 μm (SD 66) for men and 613 μm (SD 68) for women. The systematic difference was −5 μm and the random difference was 31 μm. The CV was 4.9%. The study indicates that the reproducibility is sufficient for in vivo studies when the width of the region-of-interest is 1.0 mm or wider

Kyrkobyggnader 1760-1860. D. 4, Härjedalen, Jämtland, Medelpad och Ångermanland

Serien Sveriges kyrkor är utgiven av Riksantikvarieämbetet och Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademie

Kyrkobyggnader 1760-1860. D. 3, Övre Norrland, Finland 1760-1809

Serien Sveriges kyrkor är utgiven av Riksantikvarieämbetet och Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademie

Tracking Performance of Several Combinations of Common Evaluation Metrics and Sub-pixel Methods

Motion estimation in a series of consecutive images is used in a variety of areas, e.g. video compression and investigation of tissue characteristics and organ function in medical images. Several methods exist both for estimating motions on a pixel level, e.g. block-matching in which two blocks in consecutive images are compared by an evaluation metric, and on a sub-pixel level. In this paper, we have evaluated the tracking performance of all combinations between three evaluation metrics and eight sub-pixel estimation methods. The tracking performance of a sub-pixel method varies depending on the evaluation metric used. This indicates that a reported tracking performance for a sub-pixel estimation method can be significantly different when combined with another evaluation metric. Also there is a large variation in the time needed for the motion estimations depending primarily on the sub-pixel method used but also on the evaluation metric