TRADABILITY AND MARKET EQUILIBRIUM FOR U.S.-MEXICO FRESH TOMATOES

Tomato trade between the U.S. and Mexico has grown significantly during the past decade. This increased trade, together with major structural changes in US produce marketing channels, has increased the complexity of conducting analysis of market integration and equilibrium. This study implements an Extended Parity Bounds Model (EPBM), following the work of Barrett and Li, to examine fresh tomato trade relationships between major shipping points and terminal markets for Mexican imported and Florida and California tomatoes. Findings suggest that, although markets seem relatively integrated and efficient, there exist some potential for claims of inefficient or overly competitive behavior. As is expected, the more complex the marketing channels between producer and wholesaler (distance or international boundaries), the more likely that markets operate suboptimally.International Relations/Trade,

An Empirical Analysis of Market Integration and Efficiency for U.S. Fresh Tomato Markets

Fresh tomato trade between the United States and Mexico grew significantly during the 1990s. Moreover, major structural changes in U.S. produce marketing channels increase the complexity of conducting analyses to delineate the impact of liberalized trade. Following the work of Barrett, Li, and Bailey, this study implements a mixed distribution to examine spatial-price relationships between major shipping points and terminal markets for Mexican imported, and Florida and California tomatoes. Although markets are often efficiently integrated, results suggest strategic pricing and product shipments may exist and vary among terminal markets in Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.market integration, North American tomato trade, spatial analysis, tomato markets, Industrial Organization,

Excessive thoracic computed tomographic scanning in sarcoidosis

Background: The clinical value of computed tomographic (CT) scanning of the chest in the initial assessment of sarcoidosis was investigated. Methods: One hundred consecutive patients referred to the sarcoidosis outpatient services of the Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York from 1990 to 1992 with a presumptive diagnosis of sarcoidosis were studied. The diagnosis was subsequently confirmed in all by a positive tissue biopsy sample or the Kveim-Siltzbach test. Clinical and laboratory data of each patient were reviewed. Chest radiographs were classified according to the classical stages of sarcoidosis. Thirty five of the 100 patients had a CT scan of the chest performed before presentation. The CT scans were compared with the presenting clinical data and standard chest radiographs in order to determine if they yielded useful additional information regarding diagnosis or treatment. Results: The chest CT scan revealed no additional clinically relevant information compared with conventional chest radiographs in any of the 35 studies performed. In two patients mediastinal adenopathy was detected by CT scan which was not seen on standard radiographs. Two patients thought to exhibit hilar adenopathy and pulmonary infiltrations by standard radiography had no parenchymal disease on the CT scan. Bilateral parenchymal infiltrates were seen in one patient which were interpreted as unilateral infiltrates by standard radiographs. The variance between conventional radiographs and CT scans in these five patients was not clinically valuable. Conclusions: CT scans of the chest do not add clinically useful information to the standard chest radiographs in the initial assessment of sarcoidosis in patients presenting with the typical standard radiological patterns. CT scanning of the thorax is indicated in patients with proven or suspected sarcoidosis when the standard chest radiographs are normal or not typical of sarcoidosis, when signs or symptoms of upper airway obstruction are present, when the patient has haemoptysis, if there is a suspicion of a complicating second intrathoracic disease, or the patient is a candidate for lung transplantation

Bone morphogenetic protein 4 signaling regulates development of the anterior visceral endoderm in the mouse embryo

The extraembryonic ectoderm (ExE) of the mouse conceptus is known to play a role in embryo patterning by signaling to the underlying epiblast and surrounding visceral endoderm. Bmp4 is one of the key ExE signaling molecules and has been recently implicated to participate in regulating development and migration of the anterior visceral endoderm (AVE). However, it remains unclear when exactly BMP4 signaling starts to regulate AVE positioning. To examine this, we have chosen to affect BMP4 function at two different time points, at embryonic day 5.25 (E5.25), thus before AVE migration, and E5.75, just after AVE migration. To this end, an RNAi technique was used, which consisted of the injection of Bmp4 dsRNA into the proamniotic cavity of the egg cylinder followed by its targeted electroporation into the ExE. This resulted in specific knockdown of Bmp4. It was found that Bmp4 RNAi at E5.25, but not at E5.75, led to an abnormal pattern of expression of the AVE marker Cerberus‐like. Thus, BMP4 signaling appears to affect the expression of Cer1 at a specific time window. This RNAi approach provides a convenient means to study spatial and temporal function of genes shortly after embryo implantation

Health care resource utilization in patients with spondyloarthritis: A single setting analysis in Colombia

The aim of this study was to estimate the health care resource utilization in patients with spondylitis from a rheumatology care center located in Bogotá, D.C. Colombi

Functional studies of signaling pathways in peri-implantation development of the mouse embryo by RNAi.

BACKGROUND: Studies of gene function in the mouse have relied mainly on gene targeting via homologous recombination. However, this approach is difficult to apply in specific windows of time, and to simultaneously knock-down multiple genes. Here we report an efficient method for dsRNA-mediated gene silencing in late cleavage-stage mouse embryos that permits examination of phenotypes at post-implantation stages. RESULTS: We show that introduction of Bmp4 dsRNA into intact blastocysts by electroporation recapitulates the genetic Bmp4 null phenotype at gastrulation. It also reveals a novel role for Bmp4 in the regulation the anterior visceral endoderm specific gene expression and its positioning. We also show that RNAi can be used to simultaneously target several genes. When applied to the three murine isoforms of Dishevelled, it leads to earlier defects than previously observed in double knock-outs. These include severe delays in post-implantation development and defects in the anterior midline and neural folds at headfold stages. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that the BMP4 signalling pathway contributes to the development of the anterior visceral endoderm, and reveal an early functional redundancy between the products of the murine Dishevelled genes. The proposed approach constitutes a powerful tool to screen the functions of genes that govern the development of the mouse embryo.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Pirfenidone safety and adverse event management in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Pirfenidone is one of two approved therapies for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). Randomised controlled clinical trials an

Dental anomaly detection using intraoral photos via deep learning

Children with orofacial clefting (OFC) present with a wide range of dental anomalies. Identifying these anomalies is vital to understand their etiology and to discern the complex phenotypic spectrum of OFC. Such anomalies are currently identified using intra-oral exams by dentists, a costly and time-consuming process. We claim that automating the process of anomaly detection using deep neural networks (DNNs) could increase efficiency and provide reliable anomaly detection while potentially increasing the speed of research discovery. This study characterizes the use of` DNNs to identify dental anomalies by training a DNN model using intraoral photographs from the largest international cohort to date of children with nonsyndromic OFC and controls (OFC1). In this project, the intraoral images were submitted to a Convolutional Neural Network model to perform multi-label multi-class classification of 10 dental anomalies. The network predicts whether an individual exhibits any of the 10 anomalies and can do so significantly faster than a human rater can. For all but three anomalies, F1 scores suggest that our model performs competitively at anomaly detection when compared to a dentist with 8 years of clinical experience. In addition, we use saliency maps to provide a post-hoc interpretation for our model’s predictions. This enables dentists to examine and verify our model’s predictions.Fil: Ragodos, Ronilo. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Wang, Tong. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Padilla, Carmencita. University of the Philippines; FilipinasFil: Hecht, Jacqueline T.. University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston; Estados UnidosFil: Poletta, Fernando Adrián. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. CEMIC-CONICET. Centro de Educaciones Médicas e Investigaciones Clínicas "Norberto Quirno". CEMIC-CONICET; ArgentinaFil: Orioli, Ieda Maria. Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; BrasilFil: Buxó, Carmen J.. Universidad de Puerto Rico; Puerto RicoFil: Butali, Azeez. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Valencia Ramirez, Consuelo. Fundación Clínica Noel; ColombiaFil: Restrepo Muñeton, Claudia. Fundación Clínica Noel; ColombiaFil: Wehby, George. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Weinberg, Seth M.. University of Pittsburgh; Estados Unidos. University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown; Estados UnidosFil: Marazita, Mary L.. University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown; Estados Unidos. University of Pittsburgh; Estados UnidosFil: Moreno Uribe, Lina M.. University of Iowa; Estados UnidosFil: Howe, Brian J.. University of Iowa; Estados Unido