28,389 research outputs found
The colon as a target for vaccination: quantification of lymphoid tissue in mouse colon prior to vaccination
Currently, most vaccines are given by injection. However, due to the inherent problems associated with injections, other routes of drug delivery are being researched, among them, the oral route. So far, research into oral vaccination has not differentiated between vaccine uptake by the different parts of the gastro-intestinal tract, such as the small and large intestine. It is likely that following oral vaccine administration, the vaccine is mostly taken up by the lymphoid tissue of the small intestine
On pairwise distances and median score of three genomes under DCJ
In comparative genomics, the rearrangement distance between two genomes
(equal the minimal number of genome rearrangements required to transform them
into a single genome) is often used for measuring their evolutionary
remoteness. Generalization of this measure to three genomes is known as the
median score (while a resulting genome is called median genome). In contrast to
the rearrangement distance between two genomes which can be computed in linear
time, computing the median score for three genomes is NP-hard. This inspires a
quest for simpler and faster approximations for the median score, the most
natural of which appears to be the halved sum of pairwise distances which in
fact represents a lower bound for the median score.
In this work, we study relationship and interplay of pairwise distances
between three genomes and their median score under the model of
Double-Cut-and-Join (DCJ) rearrangements. Most remarkably we show that while a
rearrangement may change the sum of pairwise distances by at most 2 (and thus
change the lower bound by at most 1), even the most "powerful" rearrangements
in this respect that increase the lower bound by 1 (by moving one genome
farther away from each of the other two genomes), which we call strong, do not
necessarily affect the median score. This observation implies that the two
measures are not as well-correlated as one's intuition may suggest.
We further prove that the median score attains the lower bound exactly on the
triples of genomes that can be obtained from a single genome with strong
rearrangements. While the sum of pairwise distances with the factor 2/3
represents an upper bound for the median score, its tightness remains unclear.
Nonetheless, we show that the difference of the median score and its lower
bound is not bounded by a constant.Comment: Proceedings of the 10-th Annual RECOMB Satellite Workshop on
Comparative Genomics (RECOMB-CG), 2012. (to appear
A systematic review of ICD complications in randomised controlled trials versus registries: is our 'real-world' data an underestimation?
Implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) implantation carries a significant risk of complications, however published estimates appear inconsistent. We aimed to present a contemporary systematic review using meta-analysis methods of ICD complications in randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and compare it to recent data from the largest international ICD registry, the US National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR). PubMed was searched for any RCTs involving ICD implantation published 1999-2013; 18 were identified for analysis including 6433 patients, mean follow-up 3 months-5.6 years. Exclusion criteria were studies of children, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, congenital heart disease, resynchronisation therapy and generator changes. Total pooled complication rate from the RCTs (excluding inappropriate shocks) was 9.1%, including displacement 3.1%, pneumothorax 1.1% and haematoma 1.2%. Infection rate was 1.5%.There were no predictors of complications but longer follow-up showed a trend to higher complication rates (p=0.07). In contrast, data from the NCDR ICD, reporting on 356 515 implants (2006-2010) showed a statistically significant threefold lower total major complication rate of 3.08% with lead displacement 1.02%, haematoma 0.86% and pneumothorax 0.44%. The overall ICD complication rate in our meta-analysis is 9.1% over 16 months. The ICD complication reported in the NCDR ICD registry is significantly lower despite a similar population. This may reflect under-reporting of complications in registries. Reporting of ICD complications in RCTs and registries is very variable and there is a need to standardise classification of complications internationally
Brain Differently Changes Its Algorithms in Parallel Processing of Visual Information
Feedback from the visual cortex (Vl) to the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) in macaque monkey increase contrast gain of LGN neurons for black and white (B&W) and for color (C) stimuli. LGN parvocellular cells responses to B&W gratings are enhanced by feedback multiplicatively and in contrast independent manner. However, in magnocellular neurons corticofugal pathways enhance cells responses in a contrast~dependent non-linear manner. For C stimuli cortical feedback enhances parvocellular neurons responses in a very strong contrast-dependent manner. Based on these results [13] we propose a model which includes excitatory and inhibitory effects on cells activity (shunting equations) in retina and LGN while taking into account the anatomy of cortical feedback connections. The main mechanisms related to different algorithms of the data processing in the visual brain are differences in feedback properties from Vl to parvocellular (PC) and to magnocellular (MC) neurons. Descending pathways from Vl change differently receptive field (RF) structure of PC and MC cells. For B&W stimuli, in PC cells feedback changes gain similarly in the RF center and in the RF surround, leaving PC RF structure invariant. However, feedback influence MC cells in two ways: directly and through LGN interneurons, which together changes gain and sizes of their RF center differently than gain and size of the RF surround. For C stimuli PC cells operate like MC cells for B&W. The first mechanism extracts from the stimulus an important features in a independent way from other stimulus parameters, whereas the second channel changes its tuning properties as a function of other stimulus attributes like contrast and/or spatial extension. The model suggests novel idea about the possible functional role of PC and MC pathways
JA-trie: Entropy-based packet classification
Any improvement in packet classification performance is crucial to ensure Internet functions continue to track the ever-increasing link capacities. Packet classification is the foundation of many Internet functions: from fundamental packet-forwarding to advanced features such as Quality of Service en-forcement, monitoring and security functions. This work proposes a novel trie-based classification algorithm, named Jump-Ahead Trie (JA-trie), utilizing an entropy-based pre-processing phase and a novel approach to wildcard matching. Through extensive experimental tests, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm is able to outperform a range of state-of-the-art classification algorithms.This work was jointly supported by the EPSRC INTERNET
Project EP/H040536/1, by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. CNS-0855268, and by the MIUR project
GreenNet (FIRB 2010).This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6900878
Field theories of paramagnetic Mott insulators
This is a summary of a central argument in recent review articles by the
author (cond-mat/0109419, cond-mat/0211005, and cond-mat/0211027). An effective
field theory is derived for the low energy spin singlet excitations in a
paramagnetic Mott insulator with collinear spin correlations.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of the International Conference on
Theoretical Physics, Paris, UNESCO, July 200
Quadratic Word Equations with Length Constraints, Counter Systems, and Presburger Arithmetic with Divisibility
Word equations are a crucial element in the theoretical foundation of
constraint solving over strings, which have received a lot of attention in
recent years. A word equation relates two words over string variables and
constants. Its solution amounts to a function mapping variables to constant
strings that equate the left and right hand sides of the equation. While the
problem of solving word equations is decidable, the decidability of the problem
of solving a word equation with a length constraint (i.e., a constraint
relating the lengths of words in the word equation) has remained a
long-standing open problem. In this paper, we focus on the subclass of
quadratic word equations, i.e., in which each variable occurs at most twice. We
first show that the length abstractions of solutions to quadratic word
equations are in general not Presburger-definable. We then describe a class of
counter systems with Presburger transition relations which capture the length
abstraction of a quadratic word equation with regular constraints. We provide
an encoding of the effect of a simple loop of the counter systems in the theory
of existential Presburger Arithmetic with divisibility (PAD). Since PAD is
decidable, we get a decision procedure for quadratic words equations with
length constraints for which the associated counter system is \emph{flat}
(i.e., all nodes belong to at most one cycle). We show a decidability result
(in fact, also an NP algorithm with a PAD oracle) for a recently proposed
NP-complete fragment of word equations called regular-oriented word equations,
together with length constraints. Decidability holds when the constraints are
additionally extended with regular constraints with a 1-weak control structure.Comment: 18 page
Information-Theoretic Active Learning for Content-Based Image Retrieval
We propose Information-Theoretic Active Learning (ITAL), a novel batch-mode
active learning method for binary classification, and apply it for acquiring
meaningful user feedback in the context of content-based image retrieval.
Instead of combining different heuristics such as uncertainty, diversity, or
density, our method is based on maximizing the mutual information between the
predicted relevance of the images and the expected user feedback regarding the
selected batch. We propose suitable approximations to this computationally
demanding problem and also integrate an explicit model of user behavior that
accounts for possible incorrect labels and unnameable instances. Furthermore,
our approach does not only take the structure of the data but also the expected
model output change caused by the user feedback into account. In contrast to
other methods, ITAL turns out to be highly flexible and provides
state-of-the-art performance across various datasets, such as MIRFLICKR and
ImageNet.Comment: GCPR 2018 paper (14 pages text + 2 pages references + 6 pages
appendix
Quantum Bootstrap Aggregation
We set out a strategy for quantizing attribute bootstrap aggregation to enable variance-resilient quantum machine learning. To do so, we utilise the linear decomposability of decision boundary parameters in the Rebentrost et al. Support Vector Machine to guarantee that stochastic measurement of the output quantum state will give rise to an ensemble decision without destroying the superposition over projective feature subsets induced within the chosen SVM implementation. We achieve a linear performance advantage, O(d), in addition to the existing O(log(n)) advantages of quantization as applied to Support Vector Machines. The approach extends to any form of quantum learning giving rise to linear decision boundaries
Quark propagator, instantons and gluon propagator
The Schwinger-Dyson formalism is used to check the consistency of instanton
model solutions for the quark propagator with recent models of confining gluon
propagators. We find that the models are not consistent. A major discrepancy is
the absence of a vector condensate in the instanton model that is present in
the solutions with nonperturbative confining gluons.Comment: Latex file, no figure
- …