Over-expression of β-catenin is associated with high grade of prostatic cancer in Libyan patients

Objectives: At present, sufficient prognostic markers for prostate cancer (PCa) progression are still lacking, in spite of thorough investigation. The aim of this study was to evaluate abnormalities of β-catenin protein expression, subcellular localization and determine its relation to different clinicopathological features anddisease free survival in prostate cancer patients.Patients and methods: Forty prostate cancer specimens, obtained from patients with different stages of prostate cancer (83% stage IV) who underwent a radical prostatectomy or TURP flanked by 2006 and 2011, β-catenin was determined by immuno-histochemistry (IHC). The membranous expression was semi- quantitatively evaluated in four scores (0, 1+, 2+, 3+). Clinical records of these patients were studied for follow up data.Results: β-Catenin immune staining results show over-expression of β-catenin in PCa Libyan patients. There was no statistically significant difference in β-catenin immune expression as regards histopathological type, perineural invasion, tumor stage, biological recurrence. However, β-catenin over-expression showed significant correlation with old age (p < 0.014).Conclusions: We concluded that changes in expression and cell distribution of β-catenin correlated with the progression degree of prostate adenocarcinoma, signifying a role of this molecule as a marker of progression and prognosis. Further investigations, on a larger and more heterogeneous population, should be carried out to validate and extend our results.Keywords: Prostate cancer; β-Catenin expression; Immuno-histochemistry; Gleason score; Prognosi

A Unified Model of Internet Scale Alerting Services

In the last years, alerting systems have gained strengthened attention. Several systems have been implemented. For the evaluation and cooperation of these systems, the following problems arise: The systems and their models are not compatible, and existing models are only appropriate for a subset of conceivable application domains. Due to modeling differences, a simple integration of different alerting systems is impossible. What is needed, is a unified model that covers the whole variety of alerting service applications. This paper provides a unified model for alerting services that captures the special constraints of most application areas. The model can serve as a basis for an evaluation of alerting service implementations. In addition to the unified model, we define a general profile structure by which clients can specify their interest. This structure is independent of underlying profile definition languages. To eliminate drawbacks of the existing non-cooperating solitary services we introduce a new technique, the Mediating Alerting Service (MediAS). It establishes the cooperation of alerting services in an hierarchical and parallel way

Prov-Trust : towards a trustworthy SGX-based data provenance system

Data provenance refers to records of the inputs, entities, systems, and processes that influence data of interest, providing a historical record of the data and its origins. Secure data provenance is vital to ensure accountability, forensics investigation of security attacks and privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose Prov-Trust, a decentralized and auditable SGX-based data provenance system relying on highly distributed ledgers. This consensually shared and synchronized database allows anchored data to have public witness, providing tamper-proof provenance data, enabling the transparency of data accountability, and enhancing the secrecy and availability of the provenance data. Prov-Trust relies on Intel SGX enclave to ensure a trusted execution of the provenance kernel to collect, store and query provenance records. The use of SGX enclave protects data provenance and users’ credentials against malicious hosting and processing parties. Prov-Trust does not rely on a trusted third party to store provenance data while performing their verification using smart contracts and voting process. The storage of the provenance data in Prov-Trust is done using either the log events of Smart Contracts or blockchain’s transactions depending on the provenance change event, which enables low storage costs. Finally, Prov-Trust ensures an accurate privacy-preserving auditing process based on blockchain traces and achieved thanks to events’ logs that are signed by SGX enclaves, transactions being registered after each vote session, and sealing the linking information using encryption schemes

Cache coherence requirements for interprocess rendezvous

Multiprocessors in which a shared bus is used by the processor to communicate with common memory are an emerging class of machines where there is a need to support parallel programming languages. A language construct that is found in a number of parallel programming languages to support synchronization and communication in the interprocess rendezvous. Shared-bus multiprocessor require a protocol to keep the date in their caches coherent. There are two major categories of these protocols: invalidation and write-boadcast. This paper examines the requirements for cache coherence protocols to support efficient interprocessor rendezvous. The approach taken is to examine the memory referencing patterns to the run-time data structures during rendezvous execution. The appropriate coherence protocol is shown to be a function of the processor scheduling strategy used by the run-time system at synchronzation points during the rendezvous. When processes migrate freely as a result of the scheduling strategy, invalidation protocols are found to be more efficient. When migration is restricted by the scheduler, write-broadcast protocols are more efficient.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/44571/1/10766_2005_Article_BF01407863.pd

Clinical characteristics and role of early cardiac magnetic resonance imaging in patients with suspected ST-elevation myocardial infarction and normal coronary arteries

A variety of conditions other than acute myocardial infarction may cause ST-elevation. Our objective was to evaluate the impact of cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) on differential diagnosis from a prospective series of patients with suspected ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) and completely normal coronary arteries. Among 1,145 patients with suspected STEMI, 49 patients had completely normal coronary arteries and entered a prospective registry. CMR was done within 24 h, if possible, and included function analyses, T2-weighted imaging (T2 ratio), T1-weighted imaging before and after gadolineum administration (global relative enhancement; gRE), and late gadolineum enhancement (LGE). All patients were asked for a follow-up CMR after approximately 3 months. The incidence of patients with suspected STEMI and normal coronary arteries was 4.3% and mean age was 45 ± 14 years (STEMI group 64 ± 13 years; P < 0.001). 55% had a recent history of infection. Cardiac biomarkers showed a moderate elevation on admission. There was a significant change from baseline to follow-up for LV end-diastolic volumes (EDV) (P < 0.001), LV mass (P < 0.05), mean T2 ratio (P < 0.05), and LGE volume (P < 0.05). Major diagnostic groups were myocarditis (29%), pericarditis (27%), and takotsubo cardiomyopathy (10%). 18% were regarded as non-diagnostic. The study showed an incidence of 4.3% of patients with suspected STEMI and completely normal coronary arteries. Early CMR was valuable in the evaluation of the differential diagnoses and to exclude myocardial abnormalities in patients with uncertain aetiology. Further studies are needed for the assessment of long-term outcome

Adding Robustness in Dynamic Preemptive Scheduling

In this paper we introduce a robust earliest deadline scheduling algorithm for deal ing with hard aperiodic tasks under overloads in a dynamic realtime environment The algorithm synergistically combines many features including dynamic guarantees graceful degradation in overloads deadline tolerance resource reclaiming and dy namic reguarantees A necessary and sucient schedulability test is presented and an ecient On guarantee algorithm is proposed The new algorithm is evaluated via simulation and compared to several baseline algorithms The experimental results show excellent performance of the new algorithm in normal and overload conditions Static realtime systems are designed for worst case situations Assuming that all the assumptions made in the design and analysis are correct we can say that the level of guarantee for these systems is absolute and all tasks will make their deadlines Unfortunately static systems are not always possible becaus

Detection of hCG Responsive Expression of the Steroidogenic Acute Regulatory Protein in Mouse Leydig Cells

The steroidogenic acute regulatory (StAR) protein, a novel mitochondrial protein, is involved in the regulation of steroid hormone biosynthesis through its mediation of the intramitochondrial transport of the steroid substrate, cholesterol, to the cytochrome P450 cholesterol side chain cleavage (P450scc) enzyme. The expression of StAR protein is regulated by cAMP-dependent signaling in steroidogenic cells. During the course of our studies in mouse Leydig cells, we employ several methods for studying the regulation of StAR protein expression by human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). A sensitive quantitative reverse transcription and polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was utilized for determining StAR mRNA expression. Stimulation of mLTC-1 mouse Leydig tumor cells with hCG resulted in the coordinate regulation of StAR mRNA expression and progesterone accumulation in a time-response manner. The validity and accuracy of quantitative RT-PCR results in mLTC-1 cells were verified by a competitive PCR approach and were further confirmed in primary cultures of isolated mouse Leydig cells. Immunoblotting studies demonstrated an increase in the levels of the StAR protein in a concentration dependent manner following hCG stimulation in mLTC-1 cells. Northern hybridization analysis revealed three StAR transcripts, all of which were of sufficient size to encode functional StAR protein, and which were coordinately expressed in response to hCG. Collectively, the experimental approaches utilized in the present investigation allow for the demonstration and characterization of hCG mediated regulation of StAR mRNA and StAR protein expression in mouse Leydig cells